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Blender 2.90

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Re: Blender 2.90

#41

Post by mkaic »

checker659 wrote: post #6

I wish there was support for Metal on macOS for EEVE.

As a long-time Mac and Blender user, I used to be in the same camp. After looking into it though, I found out implementing Metal support would take thousands of developer hours, and knowing that I think I would rather just trust the Foundation to put those hours towards other development that would benefit more than just Max users.

Re: Blender 2.90

#42

Post by phkahler »

ur-whale wrote: post #30
polskibus wrote: post #21

I'd love to see blender expand into precise modeling area more (CAD).

Strongly agree, and I'd also wish they took a shot at the Architecture market (god knows Autodesk and Archicad sorely deserves the competition) but it's not easy to build a product that fits all possible uses cases, especially when the initial focus of the app was SFX and animation. Specifically, for CAD, blender lacks IMO two fundamental things: - a strong NURBS engine, complete with filleting, trimmed NURBS, CSG, f…

After spending a lot of time working on the code for SolveSpace, I can say NURBS are hard. Conceptually not bad, but in practice there are a lot of complex or tricky things to do well. My hope is to one day write a new NURBS kernel in Rust. But first I need to find good solutions to those tricky problems.

Re: Blender 2.90

#43

Post by buovjaga »

Recently on HN someone mentioned the core UV tools were lacking. Now the release notes highlight several improvements in that department :)

Re: Blender 2.90

#44

Post by mkaic »

agumonkey wrote: post #14

seriously impressive, we're on an exponential

It’s so exciting watching that dev fund number climb faster and faster. I mean just in the past year donations grew by about 20%, and seeing so many new corporate sponsors join up too...

It’s just inspiring.

Re: Blender 2.90

#45

Post by hellking4u »

alok99 wrote: post #23
hellking4u wrote: post #15

This is great, but I have to say, I'm a bit concerned about multiple Intel tools (Embree, OpenImageDenoise) that are now integrated into Blender. The tools seem to depend on Intel MKL, which has famously been crippled on non Intel CPUs. The big concern, for me, is the wide usage of Blender in common CPU benchmarks, which potentially could give Intel an unfair advantage in those.

Neither Embree nor OpenImageDenoise use MKL. OpenImageDenoise does use a fork of mkl-dnn, now called one-dnn, but it has nothing to do with MKL.

From the oneDNN documentation[1]: > The library is optimized for Intel Architecture Processors, Intel Processor Graphics and Xe architecture-based Graphics.

Now, whether "optimized" means tuned for Intel architecture, or crippled for other architecture, is something to be figured out. Given the precedent set by MKL, I wouldn't trust it to be the 'tuned' option. Someone who speaks C++ may be able to better discern if such concerns exist with one-dnn.

[1] https://github.com/oneapi-src/oneDNN

Re: Blender 2.90

#46

Post by Wistar »

mkaic wrote: post #36
mekster wrote: post #22

How is blender compared to competitors? Are people starting to use it as a professional tool?

I work exclusively using Blender doing professional product visualization. It’s really an incredible triumph of open-source software. EDIT: I actually haven’t tried Max or Maya, but then again, I haven’t needed to. Blender’s feature set has been perfectly capable for my needs and use cases.

I think that Blender has pushed Autodesk and Side-Effects to recently offer vastly-reduced price "indie" licenses for Maya, Max and Houdini. There are some limitations, of course, particularly a maximum revenue limit of $100K/yr, the licenses can't be used in the same pipeline as full-license seats, etc.

Re: Blender 2.90

#47

Post by Wistar »

whateveracct wrote: post #18
bitbang wrote: post #3

Well that was fast considering how long the 2.8 lts release series took...

One exciting thing is two long-standing reworks (GreasePencil for 2D art, and new Sculpt mode) landed in 2.8x and now are being iterated on.

Grease pencil is a feature that needs re-naming as it is now so much more than it was at the time it was originally named.

Re: Blender 2.90

#48

Post by wlesieutre »

ur-whale wrote: post #30
polskibus wrote: post #21

I'd love to see blender expand into precise modeling area more (CAD).

Strongly agree, and I'd also wish they took a shot at the Architecture market (god knows Autodesk and Archicad sorely deserves the competition) but it's not easy to build a product that fits all possible uses cases, especially when the initial focus of the app was SFX and animation. Specifically, for CAD, blender lacks IMO two fundamental things: - a strong NURBS engine, complete with filleting, trimmed NURBS, CSG, f…

I’ve recently been picking up Fusion 360 for use with a 3D printer and I’d love to be able to model this precisely with blender. I don’t love having my projects live in someone’s cloud service (for non commercial use) where they could vanish at a moment’s notice. Tried FreeCAD which is in the same vein of parametric mechanical modeling, but had a lot of trouble getting anywhere productive.

Re: Blender 2.90

#49

Post by racnid »

polskibus wrote: post #21

I'd love to see blender expand into precise modeling area more (CAD).

I know this is a thread about Blender but FreeCAD has been making good progress in that area. Parametric sketching is still different from some of the commercial packages but reasonably functional.

Re: Blender 2.90

#50

Post by nineteen999 »

mkaic wrote: post #33
arduinomancer wrote: post #28

After trying blender for the first time the other day I was amazed at how good the interface is for an open source program, it feels really modern. I'm used to open source programs usually having pretty janky/outdated interfaces.

You’re lucky enough to have started in the post 2.8 era :) Things used to be a lot less user friendly interface-wise. It was a major weakness of the program until 2.8 launched and magically fixed everything. The Blender Foundation is REALLY good about interacting with and gauging the needs of the community!

Honestly, as a long term user, 2.8 is not that different to 2.6. From 2.4 to 2.6 was a much bigger jump in terms of UI improvements.
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