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Blender 5.0

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Re: Blender 5.0

#321

Post by usrusr »

philipallstar wrote: post #286
shirro wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably requires something that is almost there then a sponsor(s) to throw in developers or funding to get the rest of the way. On the EDA side CERN did a lot to lift Kicad to the point of being a credible alternative that could breakthrough like Blender. Both those projects are over 30 years old and for a lot of that time were dismissed as too difficult to use or lacking in features. FreeCAD is only 23 years old. I…

> It must be difficult when so much management is short sighted and focused on delivering short term profits for shareholders. Even academia is run like a business now. Management just reacts to environments created by governments. When ZIRP was around money was very easy to get hold of - too easy. Now it's really hard because businesses have to beat government bond interest rates, which are guaranteed, to get debt/i…

Valve is rogue as in it does whatever its founder-owner wants it to do. It's neither beholden to what public shareholders want nor to what private investors want. Founder-CEOs are laughably powerless in comparison. When the company is publicly traded, even founder-CEOs who are still majority owners are powerless in comparison, because when their minority co-owners want out their net worth goes down considerably and they tend to really not want that.

Re: Blender 5.0

#322

Post by mastax »

crote wrote: post #118
porphyra wrote: post #85

Blender 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…

> I wonder what will be the next category of open source to pull ahead? KiCad, for PCB design. They have been making massive improvements over the last few years, and with proprietary solutions shutting down (Eagle) or being unaffordable (Altium) Kicad is now by far the best option for both hobbyists and small companies. With the release of KiCad 5 in 2018 it went from being "a pain to use to, but technically suffici…

Yeah, KiCad has improved immensely in the past 5 years. It still has a long way to go to really compete with Altium et. al. though. The thing is: Altium is basically finished software. They keep trying to add features to it but I'm certain if you polled the users the only thing they really want is fewer crashes and bugs. Every year KiCad gets closer and closer.

Re: Blender 5.0

#323

Post by autoexec »

bko wrote: post #138
porphyra wrote: post #85

Blender 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…

How does GIMP compare to Photopea. On occasion I open a file in GIMP by accident and end up waiting 20m for it to load and am almost always disappointed. Meanwhile Photopea always just works super fast and supports a lot more. What the hell is it doing? https://www.photopea.com/

The load time of GIMP is one of my biggest complaints. It's fine once it finally opens, but that start up time is punishing. The last version of photoshop I used wasn't all that much better though. photopea is a browser app so it's not really a valid comparison. I much prefer open source local applications that leave my web browser out of it.

Re: Blender 5.0

#324

Post by presbyterian »

fletchowns wrote: post #113
Aerolfos wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video editing? Adobe has set themselves up for failure there, everyone wants an alternative Davinci Resolve is probably competitive with Premiere, but while free it's not actually open source. But either a viable competitor catching up or Davinci publishing the code could change that fast

Kdenlive is awesome. I am only a hobbyist but I cancelled my subscription to Premiere when I found it.

Does Kdenlive still lack GPU playback and rendering? It did when I last used it, and that'll be a non-starter for most professionals

Re: Blender 5.0

#325

Post by h14h »

gehsty wrote: post #26

I’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…

I did a lot of parametric 3D CAD work in college as a MechE student, and switched to webdev after graduating. Recently, I had a hobby project that would have involved dusting off my CAD skills, and was bummed to find that there wasn't any software readily available that allowed me to lean on muscle memory I had built up using Inventor/Creo/SolidWorks/Unigraphics.

A viable OSS alternative, particularly one that prioritizes simplicity and being a gentle on-ramp for hobbyists, would be fantastic.

It wouldn't need (and I would argue shouldn't attempt) to compete with the big for-profit outfits to be useful either. Offering a simplified UX for the most-used features of the pro software would have a ton of utility, while also being a great place to build the foundational skills you need in order to master the more complex stuff.

Furthermore, a project with the mission of complementing the pro tools rather than replacing them would probably be far more likely to succeed, IMO. As long as projects could be exported to variety of formats and brought into some other software when a specific use-case arises, you'd have all your bases covered.

Re: Blender 5.0

#326

Post by Etherlord87 »

andybak wrote: post #256
mkaic wrote: post #196

I think some of the coolest changes in this release are on the nodes side of things — they added Closures (kinda like lambdas!), Bundles (tuples/structs, I guess?), and Repeat (loops!) (already was in Geo Nodes, now it's in Shader Nodes too). Blender nodes have come a long way over the past decade and it's incredibly satisfying to see the care with which they have been developed. Blender's node editor is my personal…

I just wish there was a nice text based representation. I hate dragging boxes around the screen.

Plus if you could use WASM modules as opposed to node systems, you would have a more powerful programming environment - for example, the mentioned "repeat" zone doesn't have "break" functionality, so you need to use a huge number of iterations and do an equivalent of "continue" once you're done, but even if you perfectly estimate the number of iterations you will need, the implementation is very slow. There are other problems like limited scope access, or in general slow node evaluation which make sequential algorithms (not reliant on parallelized work done by loops internal to many nodes) problematic.

Re: Blender 5.0

#327

Post by Etherlord87 »

bodge5000 wrote: post #301

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...

If the volume was defined by a manifold mesh, it was already trivial to scatter points, then remove points that when raycasted down on that manifold mesh "volume" hit a normal.z < 0, hardly a node spaghetti as the article says.

Re: Blender 5.0

#328

Post by sinker »

foofoo12 wrote: post #61
Workaccount2 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FreeCAD is probably the single most frustrating and unintuitive pieces of software I have ever used. I almost drafted hate mail to the devs after 15 minutes of crash coursing fusion360 got me further than 2 days of trying to use FreeCAD. It seems like it has lots of capability but still "punch your monitor" levels of difficulty just trying to do the most basic stuff.

I use FreeCAD and it's pretty good. But I think it's impossible to learn by trial and error. MangoJelly has done an amazing job in churning out high quality tutorials for FreeCAD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_yh_S31R9g&list=PLWuyJLVUNt... (this is just one playlist, there's a lot more on his channel).

Productive FreeCAD user chiming in here. I understand the frustration. It has a moderate learning curve, but the editing model forms an intuitive picture once you learn the basics and start using it.

Also second the MangoJelly tutorials. You will have a much better time if you walk through a few lessons first as opposed to just winging it and expecting to understand how everything works immediately.

Re: Blender 5.0

#329

Post by sinker »

VerifiedReports wrote: post #60
Workaccount2 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FreeCAD is probably the single most frustrating and unintuitive pieces of software I have ever used. I almost drafted hate mail to the devs after 15 minutes of crash coursing fusion360 got me further than 2 days of trying to use FreeCAD. It seems like it has lots of capability but still "punch your monitor" levels of difficulty just trying to do the most basic stuff.

It suffers from too many "workbenches," some of which appear to be redundant or dated. You never know whether structures created by one are "compatible" with the M.O. of another (like "Part" vs. "Part Design"). And it presents nonsensical problems, like offering to create a sketch on the face of an object and then complaining that the sketch doesn't belong to any object. So you have to manually drag it under the obje…

Some of the basics aren't immediately obvious or even hinted at very well for new users, but the "problems" that come up are consistent with its own editing model.

> complaining that the sketch doesn't belong to any object

The sketch is by default attached to the "active body". Active Body is a simple, but important concept to understand. Any operation you do, including adding a sketch, is applied to what is designated as the active body. You designate the active body by right-clicking on the desired body in the object pane.

> It suffers from too many "workbenches"

Another understandably common source of confusion. There's the ever-confusing Part and Part Design workbenches.

I think it's best to just ignore Part and use Part Design whenever possible. Part lets you do operations at a more granular level, but Part Design provides a lot more QOL enhancements and is more intuitive. For the vast majority of things, Part Design is more than capable. I would only use Part workbench when absolutely necessary.

You probably understand all of this already. It's directed more towards the reader. I feel the need to defend FC when certain accusations are brought up. It's immensely powerful, capable, and usable. In my case, I can work very rapidly with it - though it's taken some time to arrive here. The project deserves more than just aspersions.

Re: Blender 5.0

#330

Post by sinker »

al_borland wrote: post #69
1220512064 wrote: post #31

Earlier 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.

Sorry about the bad experience. If you decide to give it another try, it's worth spending a few hours on some intro tutorials first. I recommend MangoJelly on youtube.

FC is not a program you can just open and start using, especially if you have zero experience with parametric modeling.

If you're serious about design, modeling, engineering, etc., and want to own your own data, it's worth investing the hours to learn it starting from the very basics.

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