It didn't get much of a mention in the release notes but I'm particularly excited about SDF grids in geometry nodes because of this:
https://passivestar.xyz/posts/instance-scattering-in-blender...
Blender 5.0
301–310 of 377 posts
Re: Blender 5.0
#302Blender is really an amazing case study of open source software. Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche. It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete. Meanwhile, in other niches, Microsoft Office still beats open source office suites like LibreOffice; Photoshop isn't about to give up its crown to GIMP; Light…
> Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche. I can think of a few more: Git obsoleted an entire category of commercial software seemingly almost overnight, VSCode has become by far the most widely used IDE (not entirely open source, though), TeX still dominates mathematical typesetting AFAIK (as it has…
Godot as well, whilst not an existential threat to Unity is certainly a big enough player to be considered in generalist game engines
Re: Blender 5.0
#303I’d really like to see something like blender come for the 3D CAD industry, at the moment it feels like the only people who would lose out are AutoDesk. The amount of money that flows in and out of 3D cad (as subscription and then value created) having a first class open source kernel and tooling, would be giving big industrial players freedom to modify and tailor to their needs as well as smaller / hobbyists get sta…
"first class open source kernel"
Speaking with over a decade of experience as a developer in industrial CAD (but still just one random guys point of view only). The question _isn't_ about the availability of a 3D kernel.
3D kernel is not the "moat".
You can cross that with money.
You can purchase a ACIS or Parasolid and you are off to the races. Or even use OpenCascade if you know what you are doing.
The more interesting question is: Ok hotshot, you have a 3D kernel, 10M of investor money (or equivalent resources).
What's your next move? What industry are you going to conquer? What are the problems you are going to solve better than the current tools do?
What's the value you provide to the users except price?
What are you going to do better than the incumbent softwares in relevant specific design industries?
Which industry is your go-to-market?
Etc etc.
The programmer's view is "I will build a CAD". The industrial user on the other hand does _NOT_ want a "general CAD software".
They want a tool with a specific, trainable workflow for their specific industrial use case.
So "if you build it and they will come" will require speaking to a specific engineering/designer audience.
You can of course build a generic tool (it's all watertight manifolds in the end) but the success in the market depends on the usual story about market forces. What's your go to market/beached. Does it enable you to move to other markets? And the answer usually is - NO. You need to build the market share in _each_ domain separately.
Re: Blender 5.0
#304Re: Blender 5.0
#305Remember to donate to them. They are amazing - free software, great community and they do so much stuff
Re: Blender 5.0
#306Re: Blender 5.0
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
IDK how they compare to professional CAD tools, but I've heard good things about FreeCAD and OpenSCAD. I know that some people use Blender for CAD work, and there are even some extensions to make it easier, but I'm dubious that the representation of meshes that Blender uses are well-suited for CAD applications.
I just tried FreeCAD last week. I uninstalled it after about 10 minutes. The most basic actions to just get started were throwing errors. Maybe it was user error, but it was a very bad first impression.
if you try OnShape you will probably be much better off
Re: Blender 5.0
#308Blender is really an amazing case study of open source software. Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche. It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete. Meanwhile, in other niches, Microsoft Office still beats open source office suites like LibreOffice; Photoshop isn't about to give up its crown to GIMP; Light…
If you ignore the massively easier learning curve, better usability and presentation, purely in terms of raw outcome and capabilities (to an extent), Dark table actually comes ahead of Lightroom. Not saying it will replace it at all though, it's software for power users, while Lightroom is for both novices and pro's who prefer UX over features.
Re: Blender 5.0
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would probably fall somewhere between "substantial architectural overhaul" and "partial rewrite" because it’d require redesigning the topological representation to eliminate seam edges. Some of these issues are long standing and really hard to solve. Someone could probably defend an entire PhD thesis on “redesigning the topological representation to eliminate seam edges” without making much practical progress
How do the other kernels e.g. Parasolid work without seam edges? Without a seam the 2D parametric boundary is not closed.
It’s not about seams in 2d but 3d curved surfaces.
OpenCascade’s kernel forces you to deal with periodicity in topology (the shape structure), while Parasolid handles it in geometry (the math). A cylinder is mathematically continuous because there's no actual "seam" where it starts and ends. But in OpenCascade there’s a seam from 0 to 2π and this seam edge becomes a real topological entity that every algorithm has to deal with.
In Parasolid the cylinder is periodic so when you query a point at U=2.1π, the kernel just knows that's equivalent to U=0.1π. The periodicity is a property of the surface math, not the shape structure. It’s not using polygons/edges/vertexes but a system of equations to calculate the surfaces.
This is why boolean ops fail so often in FreeCAD: it’s asking the kernel to intersect with an artificial edge that shouldn't exist. The seam creates edge cases in intersection calculations, makes filleting near seams a nightmare, and complicates things. Parasolid's implicit handling requires smarter surface evaluation code upfront, but then everything else just works.
Re: Blender 5.0
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maya's API is so much better than Blender's. You pay the fee for the OS that Maya is, but the API is so much better than anything open source. Like Postgres is an OS for databases. Blender is not yet there. IIRC you need to compile entire Blender just to change a node.
Blender gives you two paths for extension: a) fork it and layer your changes directly onto the app, or b) you create a plugin via the Blender Python API. For vendors, the former is obviously a no-go. The latter has the issue of be throttled by Python, so you have to effectively create a shim that communicates with an external library or application that actually performs compute intensive tasks. Most (if not all) ind…
I'm curious as someone who's thinking of making a blender plug-in that will need to use some native-ish (not C++ though) libraries/modules for performance. What are the issues with using a Python interface instead of a dedicated C++ SDK?