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Ubisoft joins Blender Development Fund to support open-source animation

news.ubisoft.com

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Re: Ubisoft joins Blender Development Fund to support open-source animation

#41

Post by sangnoir »

gmueckl wrote: post #36

Kudos to blender's marketing team. They get a bit of free money from this. But the true motive for Epic and Unisoft is likely an attempt to strong-arm Autodesk into providing better support and maintainance. Dissatisfaction with Autodesk lack of care for their DCC tools has been growing for a very long time now, but studios also have a huge investment into these tools as parts of their proprietary pipelines. Expect A…

Blender is replacing an in-house tool, not software licensed from Autodesk. You might have missed the following section from the article

"We decided to transform a workflow centered on in-house software to a more agile development environment supported by open source and inner source solutions. This way, our research and development and pipeline teams could focus their energy on bringing innovative ideas to the table, while working closely with the creatives.

In that new workflow, Blender is replacing our in-house digital content creation tool."

Re: Ubisoft joins Blender Development Fund to support open-source animation

#42

Post by thedaemon »

pasabagi wrote: post #28
pixelbath wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not dumbed down at all. If you can get over the fact that a bunch of stuff has moved into icons and that a few keybindings have changed, it's still very much the same.

I think more than a few keybindings have changed. My muscle-memory is basically useless. I'm also not really sure about the whole icon thing - I doubt I'll be using them. Still, I'm quite happy to see the changes - despite using old blender enough that I have the muscle memory, I still had to look keyboard shortcuts up all the time, which is in my eyes a sign of bad design.

They broke about 99% of the keybindings, however you can use a 2.79 keybinding set. The new tools on the left are 100% useless to me, but I have been testing 2.8 for about a month or 2 now and have gotten used to it. Yes I still use RMB select. If you swap to LMB select the entire functionality of RMB select isn't copied over to LMB select, it a totally different thing. This is really annoying, but one of the few bad things about 2.8.

Re: Ubisoft joins Blender Development Fund to support open-source animation

#43

Post by valine »

overgard wrote: post #12
jsgo wrote: post #4

Maybe this new UI change to Blender means it is high time I learn how to use it. Tried it before but couldn't get past left click not doing what I expect left clicking to do, but apparently things are more user friendly now. The influx of money/talent from Epic and Ubisoft is great though. Blender was, from what I've seen from the outside, looked on affectionately as being a good tool, but maybe this leads to them be…

I felt the same way and 2.8 has been a HUGE improvement for me. I have a commercial Maya subscription and I have to admit I almost like Blender better at this point. That's less a knock on Maya which is still great, just acknowledging that Blender has come a really long way. My only small beef is I wish they'd use system dialog boxes for save/load, and texture painting still feels a little clunky.

Blender's build in file browser is really nice once you get used to it. The thing I like most is that a lot of shortcuts you use when 3D modeling also work on files. Things like box selection, invert selection with 'ctrl I', and select all/deselect all with 'A' all work as expected.

Re: Ubisoft joins Blender Development Fund to support open-source animation

#44

Post by pasabagi »

pixelbath wrote: post #31
pasabagi wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think more than a few keybindings have changed. My muscle-memory is basically useless. I'm also not really sure about the whole icon thing - I doubt I'll be using them. Still, I'm quite happy to see the changes - despite using old blender enough that I have the muscle memory, I still had to look keyboard shortcuts up all the time, which is in my eyes a sign of bad design.

Maybe you use Blender differently than I do, but all modeling shortcut keys are still mostly the same and work the same way they used to. I don't use the left-side icons either (I'm not really used to that in a Blender workflow), but aside from using F3 to search for commands instead of space bar, I've been using the same modeling shortcuts from 2.79. Left click took about a week to get used to, but the only problem…

Well, I noticed a whole bunch last time I started it up. Granted, I haven't had much time to use blender recently, but:

- The orientation controls

- poke faces (Alt-p) doesn't exist

- the selection behaviour (A doesn't seem to deselect any more) - shift-G doesn't work

- W doesn't open a menu any more.

- Shift-tab doesn't change vertex/face/line selection mode any more.

Enough changed that I ended up clicking around the UI a lot. The orientation controls, and stuff starting with W were things I used to use a lot. I think when I get back into it, I'll spend a bit of time figuring it all out and learning the new conventions. I generally like the pie menu thing, and I like the move towards consistency (even if I think mnemonic keybindings are generally better), and Eevee is amazing for composing scenes (I used to hate trying to do lighting and having to wait for a half hour just to see the effect of moving a light a tiny bit).

Re: Ubisoft joins Blender Development Fund to support open-source animation

#45

Post by panpanna »

Didn't Epic just made a similar announcement?

Anyway, I wish more FOSS projects could copy blenders way of working. They start a very big and ambitious project then update the code to support it. For example Elephants Dream gave them character animation. Big Buck Bunny gave them hair rendering & animation.

https://www.blender.org/about/projects/

Re: Ubisoft joins Blender Development Fund to support open-source animation

#47

Post by laputan_machine »

panpanna wrote: post #45

Didn't Epic just made a similar announcement? Anyway, I wish more FOSS projects could copy blenders way of working. They start a very big and ambitious project then update the code to support it. For example Elephants Dream gave them character animation. Big Buck Bunny gave them hair rendering & animation. https://www.blender.org/about/projects/

I believe this is also the same approach Mozilla have taken with Rust & Servo (although Servo is not quite as production-ready as I was expecting this long down the line, although re-reading the description, perhaps it was always meant to be a cute project, not a browser for the masses)

Re: Ubisoft joins Blender Development Fund to support open-source animation

#49

Post by wetpaws »

xvilka wrote: post #16

Hopefully, Krita[1], GIMP[2], and Inkscape[3] will get a similar amount of support. [1] https://krita.org/en/support-us/donations/ [2] https://www.gimp.org/donating/ [3] https://inkscape.org/support-us/donate/

Krita is amazing, I switched to it from Gimp and it was a breath of a fresh air. Can't really say the same about the Gimp though, it is a bit redundant given how dated its UI is and how mature Krita is already.

Re: Ubisoft joins Blender Development Fund to support open-source animation

#50

Post by knd775 »

sangnoir wrote: post #41
gmueckl wrote: post #36

Kudos to blender's marketing team. They get a bit of free money from this. But the true motive for Epic and Unisoft is likely an attempt to strong-arm Autodesk into providing better support and maintainance. Dissatisfaction with Autodesk lack of care for their DCC tools has been growing for a very long time now, but studios also have a huge investment into these tools as parts of their proprietary pipelines. Expect A…

Blender is replacing an in-house tool, not software licensed from Autodesk. You might have missed the following section from the article "We decided to transform a workflow centered on in-house software to a more agile development environment supported by open source and inner source solutions. This way, our research and development and pipeline teams could focus their energy on bringing innovative ideas to the table…

This still feels like a warning to Autodesk. They are replacing what they already can with Blender, and investing the money required to get it to where it needs to be in order to fit their other workflows.
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