Love Blender's interface. I wish MS Excel was built like this. Dragging the border to create new viewports, customizable views, ease of binding keyboard shortcuts to functions.. FA-BU-LO-SO
Blender 4.3
31–40 of 113 posts
Re: Blender 4.3
#32It's really puzzling (but extremely welcome) that Blender continues to be such an open source success story. Seems rare for such complex pieces of software in a niche space to get that level of development. I wonder what the secret is.
What really kickstarted their development... was the introduction of the Blender Development Fund -- https://fund.blender.org/ They made tiers, made it simple and easy, and promoted it. Before the fund really was pushed... they were getting about 5,000 USD per month to develop it... Now it is sitting at 215,000 USD per month. More money = More developers. More Developers = Better product. Yes it didnt happen overnigh…
And apparently only 2% percent (according to their ad) donates. I wish people would be more in the “giving back” spirit. If you can afford a designer coffee, throw that money to the Blender Fund!
I donate yearly, and its worth it.
Re: Blender 4.3
#33Blender, in my view, is one of the best arguments to develop native desktop applications over web view wrappers like Electron. Everything is responsive and instant, you can open new 3D view windows by just sliding them open at 60 frames a second, performance is stable even with multiple windows open and the download size is a reasonable 334MB.
>Blender, in my view, is one of the best arguments to develop native desktop applications over web view wrappers like Electron.
Different class of products.
For Electron apps, often it's the choice of having a desktop app or not having one at all.
Re: Blender 4.3
#34Love Blender's interface. I wish MS Excel was built like this. Dragging the border to create new viewports, customizable views, ease of binding keyboard shortcuts to functions.. FA-BU-LO-SO
Your statement is remarkable insofar as I can remember that Blender was famous for having an absolutely terrible UX (IIRC 2.8 was the version where it really started to improve).
Re: Blender 4.3
#35What's the best way to get started with Blender these days? I'm mostly interested in making art and possibly even 3d printing some stuff (do these skills overlap at all?).
Best way is to steal somebody else's model and improve it to your taste. That is the main use of Blender in 3D-printing, because parametric modelling is not the best property in Blender. Although it is almost feasible to define OpenSCAD model and ask AI to redefine in blender-python. Hey ChatGPT, how you define an empty box in Blender Python? import bpy empty = bpy.data.objects.new("Empty_Box", None) empty.empty_disp…
It seems to be "empty" in name only. Lets try again.
ChatGPT: The OpenSCAD statement difference(){ cube(11); cube(10); } creates a shape by subtracting a smaller cube (10x10x10) from a larger cube (11x11x11). Here's how you can create the same effect in Blender using its Python API:
import bpy
import bmesh
# Create the larger cube
bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_cube_add(size=11, location=(0, 0, 0))
cube1 = bpy.context.object
# Create the smaller cube
bpy.ops.mesh.primitive_cube_add(size=10, location=(0, 0, 0))
cube2 = bpy.context.object
# Add a Boolean modifier to subtract the smaller cube from the larger cube
mod_bool = cube1.modifiers.new(name="Boolean", type='BOOLEAN')
mod_bool.operation = 'DIFFERENCE'
mod_bool.object = cube2
# Apply the Boolean modifier
bpy.context.view_layer.objects.active = cube1
bpy.ops.object.modifier_apply(modifier=mod_bool.name)
# Remove the smaller cube from the scene
bpy.data.objects.remove(cube2)Re: Blender 4.3
#36It's really puzzling (but extremely welcome) that Blender continues to be such an open source success story. Seems rare for such complex pieces of software in a niche space to get that level of development. I wonder what the secret is.
At the same time, I'd expect it should have its Linux-moment by now and eat the world, but it doesn't seem to be the case for high profile productions.
Not sure what you mean with Linux-moment exactly, but Blender is sitting rather in a niche need compared to Linux which sit just above the hardware. So in that sense, Blender can’t have a Linux moment: it won’t be deployed in most servers, it won’t be embedded in a mission to Mars…
Re: Blender 4.3
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
What really kickstarted their development... was the introduction of the Blender Development Fund -- https://fund.blender.org/ They made tiers, made it simple and easy, and promoted it. Before the fund really was pushed... they were getting about 5,000 USD per month to develop it... Now it is sitting at 215,000 USD per month. More money = More developers. More Developers = Better product. Yes it didnt happen overnigh…
And apparently only 2% percent (according to their ad) donates. I wish people would be more in the “giving back” spirit. If you can afford a designer coffee, throw that money to the Blender Fund! I donate yearly, and its worth it.
I guess one very important part is that there are now pretty big companies which depend on Blender and have an interest in Blender's continued development.
Re: Blender 4.3
#38Blender, in my view, is one of the best arguments to develop native desktop applications over web view wrappers like Electron. Everything is responsive and instant, you can open new 3D view windows by just sliding them open at 60 frames a second, performance is stable even with multiple windows open and the download size is a reasonable 334MB.
Of course there are still categories of app that should be native. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for things like Tauri and Electron too.
Re: Blender 4.3
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the same time, I'd expect it should have its Linux-moment by now and eat the world, but it doesn't seem to be the case for high profile productions.
Not sure what you mean with Linux-moment exactly, but Blender is sitting rather in a niche need compared to Linux which sit just above the hardware. So in that sense, Blender can’t have a Linux moment: it won’t be deployed in most servers, it won’t be embedded in a mission to Mars…
I guess 'Linux moment' as in 'first they ignore you, then they laugh at you...'. Both Linux and Blender have been going through those stages.
Re: Blender 4.3
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
It notably doesn't use any 'standard' UI framework though, which is frowned upon by some people just as much as using Electron (but for different reasons - usually missing accessibility features and not looking consistent with 'system applications').
Should be separated out and reused by many Electron apps in my opinion
To bear clear, Blender is not an Electron app (reading my comment again it could be read as such I guess). Blender is a native application sitting directly on the operating system's 3D API and window system (with the UI being rendered through the 3D API, not through operating system widgets).