Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cycles X

code.blender.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 151 posts

Re: Cycles X

#41

Post by actinium226 »

dagmx wrote: post #39
ravenstine wrote: post #3

I've kept an eye on Blender for the last 15 years and tried it again recently after having almost exclusively used Maya. It's continually improved in just about every way, is relatively easy to use with just a trackpad, and it performs really well. In contrast, Maya is has more features overall but is... a piece of shit in many ways. It doesn't matter what hardware I've used; it's a rule that Maya has to crash random…

Blender has a lot of things lacking however: * It too is crash happy just in different ways. However Maya scales better with large scenes than Blender does and that's key * Blenders licensing is a deterrent. Very few people want to deal with GPL. * Blender is not good for extensibility if you're looking for performance. The API is unstable and exposed only via Python. Studios need to extend the DCCs and Blender doesn…

> * Blenders licensing is a deterrent. Very few people want to deal with GPL.

Why would a studio care about this? A tech firm would certainly care, but the entertainment industry? They probably don't know what GPL is and would probably just associate it with "free"

Re: Cycles X

#42

Post by mroche »

actinium226 wrote: post #41
dagmx wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blender has a lot of things lacking however: * It too is crash happy just in different ways. However Maya scales better with large scenes than Blender does and that's key * Blenders licensing is a deterrent. Very few people want to deal with GPL. * Blender is not good for extensibility if you're looking for performance. The API is unstable and exposed only via Python. Studios need to extend the DCCs and Blender doesn…

> * Blenders licensing is a deterrent. Very few people want to deal with GPL. Why would a studio care about this? A tech firm would certainly care, but the entertainment industry? They probably don't know what GPL is and would probably just associate it with "free"

I can assure you that legal teams in studios are just as aware as those in the tech field, even with the (for the most part) distinct lack of apparent software distribution.

Even if it's just for internal consumption, legal likes to know what's going on and where it might impact them later.

However, the GPL and other copyleft software will not for the most part have much of an effect on studios unless they sharing some of their IP they've created with the broader community, partners, and/or proprietary software vendors.

Re: Cycles X

#43

Post by MattGaiser »

actinium226 wrote: post #41
dagmx wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blender has a lot of things lacking however: * It too is crash happy just in different ways. However Maya scales better with large scenes than Blender does and that's key * Blenders licensing is a deterrent. Very few people want to deal with GPL. * Blender is not good for extensibility if you're looking for performance. The API is unstable and exposed only via Python. Studios need to extend the DCCs and Blender doesn…

> * Blenders licensing is a deterrent. Very few people want to deal with GPL. Why would a studio care about this? A tech firm would certainly care, but the entertainment industry? They probably don't know what GPL is and would probably just associate it with "free"

GPL may as well mean radioactive as far as legal is concerned.

A friend worked at a company where they banned GIMP as they feared that editing logos and other trademarks in it could invalidate them.

Even working for a tech company, I don't think I would suggest using anything GPL as it would cause a fuss.

Re: Cycles X

#44

Post by dagmx »

actinium226 wrote: post #41
dagmx wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blender has a lot of things lacking however: * It too is crash happy just in different ways. However Maya scales better with large scenes than Blender does and that's key * Blenders licensing is a deterrent. Very few people want to deal with GPL. * Blender is not good for extensibility if you're looking for performance. The API is unstable and exposed only via Python. Studios need to extend the DCCs and Blender doesn…

> * Blenders licensing is a deterrent. Very few people want to deal with GPL. Why would a studio care about this? A tech firm would certainly care, but the entertainment industry? They probably don't know what GPL is and would probably just associate it with "free"

Studios are very much tech firms themselves.

Quite a few have released commercial software, share proprietary software with partner/vendor companies , or contribute to OSS.

As with any tech company, the GPL is a very unwelcome license for fear of how far reaching it can be.

Re: Cycles X

#45

Post by raverbashing »

gmueckl wrote: post #16
ravenstine wrote: post #3

I've kept an eye on Blender for the last 15 years and tried it again recently after having almost exclusively used Maya. It's continually improved in just about every way, is relatively easy to use with just a trackpad, and it performs really well. In contrast, Maya is has more features overall but is... a piece of shit in many ways. It doesn't matter what hardware I've used; it's a rule that Maya has to crash random…

Maya was an amazing piece of software once. It is falling behind only because Autodesk seems to be content to just let it slowly rot. The funny thing is that there are litanies of complaints about many core Autodesk products that echo the same chorus: the software is poorly maintained, bugfixes are promised "for the next released" (paid upgrade, of course) and yet, they never appear. Customer feature requests are com…

Well the cash cow keeps making them money and the Studios are happy to keep giving them money so why bother

It's the same with Sports games, "corporate software" etc etc

Re: Cycles X

#46

Post by semi-extrinsic »

dagmx wrote: post #39
ravenstine wrote: post #3

I've kept an eye on Blender for the last 15 years and tried it again recently after having almost exclusively used Maya. It's continually improved in just about every way, is relatively easy to use with just a trackpad, and it performs really well. In contrast, Maya is has more features overall but is... a piece of shit in many ways. It doesn't matter what hardware I've used; it's a rule that Maya has to crash random…

Blender has a lot of things lacking however: * It too is crash happy just in different ways. However Maya scales better with large scenes than Blender does and that's key * Blenders licensing is a deterrent. Very few people want to deal with GPL. * Blender is not good for extensibility if you're looking for performance. The API is unstable and exposed only via Python. Studios need to extend the DCCs and Blender doesn…

Just as a counterpoint: in computational fluid dynamics there are many large commercial companies that use GPL softwares, and there are also commercial companies that offer paid support contracts for those GPL tools. Once it catches on in the community that these tools are good quality, there is no legal risk, and there is good support if you want to pay for that, they tend to spread rapidly.

Re: Cycles X

#47

Post by dogma1138 »

raphlinus wrote: post #31
birktj wrote: post #23

> Deprecation > OpenCL rendering kernels. The combination of the limited Cycles split kernel implementation, driver bugs, and stalled OpenCL standard has made maintenance too difficult. I am not really up to date on the GPGPU world, but is OpenCL in such a bad shape that it is not really usable? If so that is very sad. Are there any alternative open hardware agnostic GPGPU apis or has CUDA eaten the entire market?

My perspective is that OpenCL is indeed in that bad shape, though it does have defenders. Both AMD (ROCm) and Intel (oneAPI) have ways to run workloads originally written to run on CUDA, but they're nowhere near the level of polish as CUDA. I believe an open stack can and will emerge, but it will take time and effort on all levels of the stack. It's possible to do pretty amazing things with Vulkan compute shaders, bu…

ROCm is a total mess, and is Linux only.

OneAPI is in a rather good state considering it’s barely a release candidate now I’ll put my money on Blender support Intel GPUs sooner than AMD ones with Cycles X unless AMD will adopt OneAPI.

Re: Cycles X

#48

Post by dogma1138 »

monkmartinez wrote: post #2

Awesome!!! Those initial test results are darn impressive. Good to see they are working directly with Intel, AMD and Nvidia.

For GPU rendering anything but NVIDIA wasn’t even a second class citizen on Cycles for a long long time.

Cycles X will likely be OptiX only and then OptiX first for quite a while until a true cross vendor cross platform stack appears.

Re: Cycles X

#49

Post by knolan »

brundolf wrote: post #19
valine wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried using Eevee for shader adjustments? A pretty common workflow is get your lighting setup working with Eevee and then switch to Cycles for the final render.

Certain shader nodes only work in Cycles. In particular I use the Bevel node a lot for an "edges" effect: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/shader_node... You can get the difference between the surface normal and the bevel normal and use that as a "sharpness" value to mask things like wear on the corners of objects

One other suggestion is to use a render border.

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/2.79/editors/3dview/navig...

Re: Cycles X

#50

Post by ziftface »

MattGaiser wrote: post #43
actinium226 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * Blenders licensing is a deterrent. Very few people want to deal with GPL. Why would a studio care about this? A tech firm would certainly care, but the entertainment industry? They probably don't know what GPL is and would probably just associate it with "free"

GPL may as well mean radioactive as far as legal is concerned. A friend worked at a company where they banned GIMP as they feared that editing logos and other trademarks in it could invalidate them. Even working for a tech company, I don't think I would suggest using anything GPL as it would cause a fuss.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty certain that's not how the GPL works. It has no effect on the content you create using the tool. It places restrictions on redistribution of the code itself. I don't think there are any limits on what you do with gimp or blender, unless you are modifying its code and redistributing it.
Post reply on HN