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Blender 5.0

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Re: Blender 5.0

#331

Post by sinker »

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…

FreeCAD is still in active development and there was a major release (1.0) recently. There will be a feature freeze soon where the devs will focus primarily on stability and eliminating bugs.

That said, I use FC as my main CAD driver and, not only tolerate it, but enjoy using it. I had to watch several hours of introductory videos to get the hang of things initially, but now I'm quite fast and proficient.

The initial pains and common complaints about UI and such, are basically non-issues for me now and when I model, my cognitive energy is basically devoted to the design problem itself rather than issues with UI or the behavior of the software.

It's necessary to put the time into learning it, but it's worth it.

Re: Blender 5.0

#332

Post by sinker »

bombela wrote: post #173
Cadthrowaway wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>FreeCAD isn't even in the rear view mirror of Solidworks. I think FreeCAD might be on a distant hilltop in their rearview these days, check it out again.

I have been using freecad extensively. Almost daily. It's an absolute utter mess. It barely works. But it's essentially the only open source CAD. So I keep trucking. The most important improvement is the toponaming heuristic solver spearheaded by Realthunder. Since that was merged into mainline, it seems that the devs keep breaking the UX and shortcuts without rythme nor reason, while the fundamentals are broken beyo…

As an opposing viewpoint, I also use FC extensively for designing moderately complex parts (fully parametrically constrained assemblies, dozens of parts per assembly, mechanical components involving motion).

I've also extended the functionality with python, and have heavily customized the theme and shortcuts to fit my personal taste.

I not only tolerate the software, but enjoy using it, and am quite proficient at it.

I would recommend FreeCAD to others, but with some caveats. The most important being that they need to be willing to tolerate a few hours of introductory material, and second that they are serious about using the software long-term.

Otherwise, I'd probably just recommend Onshape. But, for many others, FC is fully viable.

Re: Blender 5.0

#333

Post by mixmastamyk »

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.

Likely you can script something with Python.

Re: Blender 5.0

#334

Post by wlesieutre »

jsheard wrote: post #127
wlesieutre wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure "major project" is a subjective label, but Flow made headlines earlier this year with an Academy Award (Best Animated Feature) and Golden Globe (Best Animated Feature Film) https://flow.movie/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgZccxuj2RY https://www.blender.org/user-stories/making-flow-an-intervie...

Flow is good filmmaking expressed through low-tech production, which is totally valid, but it doing a lot with a little isn't going to stop Disney from one-upping themselves with the next Zootopia movie so Blender needs to handle that angle too if it's going to become a catch-all solution for all kinds of production.

For sure, it was made by a small team and rendered on a single computer using the Eevee renderer (the fast partially-rasterization one). It's a major project, just not an enormously huge bleeding edge major project. Here's hoping Blender can keep on rolling toward those types of capabilities.

Re: Blender 5.0

#335

Post by philipallstar »

usrusr wrote: post #321
philipallstar wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

That's a strange definition of rogue, though.

Re: Blender 5.0

#336

Post by underscoremark »

mroche wrote: post #223
underscoremark wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> constantly changing API that doesn’t allow for the extensibility You pick a (stable) version, and use that API. It doesn't change if you don't. If it truly is a _major_ project, then constantly "upgrading" to the latest release is a big no-no (or should be)! And these "most people" who are scared of a Python API? Weak! It should have been a low level C API! ;-)

> And these "most people" who are scared of a Python API? Weak! It should have been a low level C API! ;-) I wouldn't frame it as "scared". The issue is that at a certain scene scale Python becomes the performance bottleneck if that's all you can use. > You pick a (stable) version, and use that API. It doesn't change if you don't. If it truly is a _major_ project, then constantly "upgrading" to the latest release is…

If you had multiple shows in production, I would expect that standards be set to use the same platforms and versions across the board.

If the company is more than a boutique shop, I would expect them to have a somewhat competent CTO to manage this kind of problem - one that isn't specific to Blender, even!

Also, if the company is more than a boutique shop, I would hope it would be at a level and budget that the Python performance bottlenecks would be well addressed with competent internal pipeline and production engineering teams.

But then again, if the company is more than a boutique shop, they would just pay for the Maya licensing. :-)

Small timers, boutique shops, and humble folks like me just try to get by with the tools we can afford.

On a related note, though: I built a Blender plugin with version 2.93 and recently learned it still works fine on Blender 4. The "constantly changing API" isn't the beast some claim it is.

Re: Blender 5.0

#337

Post by underscoremark »

oblio wrote: post #227
underscoremark wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blender is the go-to for struggling artists/developers, and industry outsiders, like me. I'm stuck at Blender 2.93.18 because I don't have the budget for better hardware, let alone a Maya license! However, even that version of Blender still gets it done for me. And also, how can you say Blender is not battle-proven? I mean, the big studios use Maya like fortune 500 companies use Microsoft Windows - doesn't mean Linux…

> I mean, the big studios use Maya like fortune 500 companies use Microsoft Windows - doesn't mean Linux isn't battle proven. Those are different niches. Not even Apple has managed to budge Window out of corporate environments, though it is a lot more present than 20 years ago. I imagine it's similar with Blender and Maya: do they fill the exact same space? Or is Blender adopted by different types of companies (proba…

I think the questions you ask demonstrate that you already understand the issue completely.

Re: Blender 5.0

#338

Post by thenobsta »

throwup238 wrote: post #309
loftsy wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is there any canonical literature on this? I've been interested in what's inside the brep kernels recently.

Re: Blender 5.0

#339

Post by oblio »

underscoremark wrote: post #337
oblio wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, the big studios use Maya like fortune 500 companies use Microsoft Windows - doesn't mean Linux isn't battle proven. Those are different niches. Not even Apple has managed to budge Window out of corporate environments, though it is a lot more present than 20 years ago. I imagine it's similar with Blender and Maya: do they fill the exact same space? Or is Blender adopted by different types of companies (proba…

I think the questions you ask demonstrate that you already understand the issue completely.

I'm just a noob asking questions and I'm having a very hard time detecting sarcasm on the internet these days - can you elaborate a bit, please? :-)

Re: Blender 5.0

#340

Post by jiggawatts »

WillAdams wrote: post #292
jiggawatts wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't heard of fornjot, but that's not a surprise because I haven't been involved in the CAD field for a very long time (decades). My thinking is to approach the problem from a fundamentally different angle. There's already constructive solid geometry (CSG) kernels, triangle mesh kernels, and NURBS-based kernels. Their mathematical foundations are very different, which results in wildly different behaviour and ca…

I've been working on a quite simplistic tool which currently just supports writing out DXFs and moving tools in lines and arcs for a 3D preview in OpenPythonSCAD --- I _think_ I can envision what you are describing, and it sounds very interesting, and might be an approach I'd want to look into for 4th and 5th axis work --- do you have any texts/references which you could share/point to?

Here's a demo of tangents being calculated in real-time for complicated curved surfaces: https://enkimute.github.io/ganja.js/examples/coffeeshop.html...

In general, GA and its variants like PGA are good at calculating tangents and offsets for points, lines, planes, spheres, and other parametric surfaces. The key benefit is that the exact same algorithm will work in 2D, 3D, 4D, or any higher number of dimensions. This could in principle allow very elegant formulas for tasks such as "find the biggest thing that won't hit this other thing at any point in time" or the same thing but with a 0.1 mm gap. Similarly, it's possible to reuse the same code and "human intuition" in very high dimensional spaces, such phase space used in more complex motion planning or engineering simulation scenarios.

Even just the pictures on the cover might give you an idea: https://www.amazon.com.au/Projective-Geometric-Algebra-Illum...

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