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Blender 2.90

blender.org

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Re: Blender 2.90

#31

Post by mstade »

matsemann wrote: post #11
zaphar wrote: post #4

Blender is as far as I can tell one the best run and marketed Open Source projects out there. They seem to have a great way to pay for development. They are have a lot of industry invested in their success. They have a great focus on the end power user.

They got $1.2M from Epics megagrant last year, and has lots of people and companies donating. They are slightly above the goal of funding 20 full time employees. I'm happy that an open source software have been so successful. It's come very far since when I first used it, version 2.42 I think. Shoutout to those donating (and how to contribute): https://fund.blender.org/

I started using blender around the 1.6x mark I think, back in the 90s. It was the only 3D software I could afford (you could unlock features with a c-key back in those days, I still don't know what c-key means) that would also run on IRIX. I had an SGI o2 back in those days and no clue about how to use any of it.

Blender was difficult to learn, but it was a lot of fun and thankfully the community was extremely helpful with tutorials and what not. When NaN (the company that developed Blender) went belly up in the early 00's I like many others had absolutely zero confidence that Ton and gang would be able to raise the $100k to buy out the IP from the venture capitalists who'd invested in NaN, only to then give it away for free and open source to boot.

It sounded absolutely mad, and I'm overjoyed that Ton and gang managed to prove doubters like myself wrong. Here's to hopefully many more years of success!

Re: Blender 2.90

#32

Post by hbosch »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #10

I scrolled down a page or two... > Meet Nishita, a physically based texture built-in Cycles. I think the hyphen shouldn't have been added. The sentence doesn't parse with it present.

There are a few spelling and grammatical mistakes on the page. But that's okay, you knew what they meant. "Built-in" was probably just auto-corrected anyway: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/built-in

Re: Blender 2.90

#33

Post by mkaic »

arduinomancer wrote: post #28

After trying blender for the first time the other day I was amazed at how good the interface is for an open source program, it feels really modern. I'm used to open source programs usually having pretty janky/outdated interfaces.

You’re lucky enough to have started in the post 2.8 era :)

Things used to be a lot less user friendly interface-wise. It was a major weakness of the program until 2.8 launched and magically fixed everything. The Blender Foundation is REALLY good about interacting with and gauging the needs of the community!

Re: Blender 2.90

#34

Post by Stevvo »

mekster wrote: post #22

How is blender compared to competitors? Are people starting to use it as a professional tool?

Most people like to stick with what they know, e.g. 3DS-Max is still very popular, despite being a slow, outdated bugfest with a terrible interface.

Re: Blender 2.90

#35

Post by mkaic »

91edec wrote: post #2

Really happy with the direction Blender is going, more polish and better outreach. Just scrolling through and being able to see the before/after for new features is amazing, makes it really easy to share with friends who haven't checked Blender out before.

Right? I also find the accelerating growth of their dev fund really exciting. Somehow this software just keeps getting more promising!

Re: Blender 2.90

#36

Post by mkaic »

mekster wrote: post #22

How is blender compared to competitors? Are people starting to use it as a professional tool?

I work exclusively using Blender doing professional product visualization. It’s really an incredible triumph of open-source software.

EDIT: I actually haven’t tried Max or Maya, but then again, I haven’t needed to. Blender’s feature set has been perfectly capable for my needs and use cases.

Re: Blender 2.90

#37

Post by mrguyorama »

valine wrote: post #26
archgoon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD can contribute their own tooling if they feel it's worth it. They aren't broke.

AMD helped pay for the development of the OpenCL backend for cycles. Before that cycles gpu support was limited to CUDA. They actually hired a developer to work on it full time.

As a user of blender on AMD GPUs, they should probably put a little more effort in. Many of the shaders used to render scenes in cycles from 2.82 onward crash, and therefore make it impossible to use an AMD GPU to run cycles.

I'm surprised they don't push their ProRender renderer into the main release. I can't tell if I like it or not

Re: Blender 2.90

#39

Post by hughes »

polskibus wrote: post #21

I'd love to see blender expand into precise modeling area more (CAD).

Definitely. It's pretty much impossible to do parametric modelling at the moment, unless you're willing to resort to generating entire geometry from python.

Re: Blender 2.90

#40

Post by mkaic »

bitbang wrote: post #3

Well that was fast considering how long the 2.8 lts release series took...

IIRC, they actually announced they’re changing how version numbering works starting with 2.90 :)
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