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Blender 4.5 LTS

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Re: Blender 4.5 LTS

#41

Post by dragontamer »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #15
weregiraffe wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh boy. Giving Blender instructions in English, on every level of detail, could be quite a workflow. Like, have it generate a range of chairs, pick the mesh you like, then start asking it to tweak parts of it until you are satisfied. Add finishing touches manually.

In general, model re-topology almost always requires a manual editing process post sculpting and texturing. There have been countless attempts to automate the process, but it usually requires working through an obscure book about rigging with secondary transforms etc. Could check out https://extensions.blender.org/add-ons/mpfb/ for low-poly character mesh generation tools. =3

Why is this being down voted?

If you are pushing vertices around to make a model, you eventually have to think of topology issues if you ever want to make a good animation.

And then when you have a good topology... Then You need to rework the UV Maps, Normals and other such data so that it's all consistent.

LLMs are not the right tool for this. I'm sure some AI retopology tool can come around but there is a HUGE difference between a model designed for stills, a model designed for animation and finally, a model designed for close up facial animations.

The topology differences alone are insane.

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Now maybe in the future an Ubermesh (like the Uber shader / principled shader) can be made to make these processes consistent. And then tooling can be made over the hypothetical Ubermesh. But today it's a lot of manual retopology that requires deep thinking about animation details.

Ex: an anime style mouth doesn't usually move the jawline (Think Sonics mouth: its basically a moving hole that jumps around his face). Meanwhile, western 3D animation (Baldurs Gate and the like) obviously have fully made lip sync including phhfff, eeee and ahhh sounds.

The 'Kind' of animation you want leads to different mesh topologies. It's just the nature of this work.

And people get ANGRY when you ex: animate Sonic with traditional teeth and jawline (see 'Ugly Sonic'). You can't just willy nilly pick one style randomly. You need purposeful decisions.

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I guess if you are a pure sculptor / stills then you don't have to worry about this. But many 3d projects are animated, if not most of them. The retopology steps are well known.

LowPoly look will almost certainly require manual effort (these topology problems tend to disappear with more triangles).

Re: Blender 4.5 LTS

#42

Post by babypuncher »

dheera wrote: post #30
unshavedyak wrote: post #9

If you get value out of Blender they could use your support: https://fund.blender.org/ Even just a coffee a month will help immensely. Please consider supporting :)

[flagged]

Counter-point: Stop subsidizing AI companies by giving them free training data.

Re: Blender 4.5 LTS

#44

Post by noddingham »

dheera wrote: post #30
unshavedyak wrote: post #9

If you get value out of Blender they could use your support: https://fund.blender.org/ Even just a coffee a month will help immensely. Please consider supporting :)

[flagged]

This isn't reddit your opinion isn't necessary. Donate or don't but your pithy commentary isn't adding to the conversation.

Re: Blender 4.5 LTS

#45

Post by Joel_Mckay »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #32
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is most commercial software and users are on Windows machines. It is fundamentally a Blender interoperability, and 3rd party platform license compatibility issue. We all wish it wasn't so, as many artists find the Windows file systems and color-calibration concepts bewildering. Making a feature platform specific to a negligible fraction of the users is inefficient, as many applications will never be porte…

I agree with you, but I think this limitation is for much simpler reasons, like "the contributor only knew how to make this feature in Linux, and only in Wayland". cross compatibility for stuff a base as color grading can be a thorny issue. If nothing else, it's better to have some implementation to reference for future platforms than none.

We've all seen too many plugins become version specific or indeterminately broken

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFZUB1eJb34

Someone needs to write a Blender color calibration solution next vacation =3

Re: Blender 4.5 LTS

#46

Post by encom »

dheera wrote: post #30
unshavedyak wrote: post #9

If you get value out of Blender they could use your support: https://fund.blender.org/ Even just a coffee a month will help immensely. Please consider supporting :)

[flagged]

Getting a lot of undeserved pushback, but I sympathise. I have severe CAPTCHA fatigue. Any time I encounter one, unless it's something I need to use and must access, I back out. Even the proof-of-work ones. Fuck 'em. 10 seconds wasted many times a day adds up, and since I use a "strange" OS (Debian or Gentoo Linux) and a "weird" browser (maxed out uBlock and Cookie-Autodelete), ClownFlare hates me and I hate them right back in return.

Re: Blender 4.5 LTS

#47

Post by Joel_Mckay »

dragontamer wrote: post #41
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general, model re-topology almost always requires a manual editing process post sculpting and texturing. There have been countless attempts to automate the process, but it usually requires working through an obscure book about rigging with secondary transforms etc. Could check out https://extensions.blender.org/add-ons/mpfb/ for low-poly character mesh generation tools. =3

Why is this being down voted? If you are pushing vertices around to make a model, you eventually have to think of topology issues if you ever want to make a good animation. And then when you have a good topology... Then You need to rework the UV Maps, Normals and other such data so that it's all consistent. LLMs are not the right tool for this. I'm sure some AI retopology tool can come around but there is a HUGE diff…

Blender is often used to project the high-granularity sculpted detail onto a low-poly (rigged and clean topo) Normal map. i.e. you can get great looking assets that won't hit your poly budget as hard. When it works its great...

People have feelings, and sometimes may misinterpret others intent. I am happy we've met if we both learned something. =3

Re: Blender 4.5 LTS

#48

Post by bee_rider »

mrandish wrote: post #27
raincole wrote: post #13

It does feel like Blender is eating the world of 3D content creation.* I know the industry standard of animation is still Maya, and geometry node isn't as powerful as Houdini, but Blender has made such great progress so far... I wonder if there any hobbyist/student who learns 3Dsmax or 3DCoat as their first DCC anymore? *: Assuming genAI won't deliver and make that world disappear entirely, ofc.

> Assuming genAI won't deliver and make that world disappear entirely, ofc. I get the concern and the reasoning behind it but having spent most my adult life and career in digital content creative tooling (2D, 3D and video), I believe AI will be short-term disruptive but also a long-term net positive. It should make skilled pros faster and more productive while helping non-pros achieve more of their creative vision o…

I don’t see much risk to creatives and workers (hold the number of workers constant and have them all get more productive, and the world is a better place).

But, I do wonder about smaller teams accomplishing more, which the unit of work-doing-people can be much smaller. The org tree can shrink, probably knock out some levels. Maybe a team of 4 that does the work previously done by 10 finds it easier to just have someone directly interface with the customer, rather than needing a layer of project managers and customer service to receive customers messages and distribute them.

I’d be worried if I was… anywhere above an IC really.

Re: Blender 4.5 LTS

#49

Post by StableAlkyne »

unshavedyak wrote: post #9

If you get value out of Blender they could use your support: https://fund.blender.org/ Even just a coffee a month will help immensely. Please consider supporting :)

Especially software like Blender.

It's easily one of the most well-made FOSS projects out there!

Re: Blender 4.5 LTS

#50

Post by spookie »

raincole wrote: post #13

It does feel like Blender is eating the world of 3D content creation.* I know the industry standard of animation is still Maya, and geometry node isn't as powerful as Houdini, but Blender has made such great progress so far... I wonder if there any hobbyist/student who learns 3Dsmax or 3DCoat as their first DCC anymore? *: Assuming genAI won't deliver and make that world disappear entirely, ofc.

> *: Assuming genAI won't deliver and make that world disappear entirely, ofc.

The current state of things leaves a lot to be desired. I have yet to see a model, or technique that actually tackles real 3D content creation problems, aside from animation of course.

Most solutions are trying to solve things completely orthogonal to what you really need in the real world. They produce bad meshes, if meshes at all, have bad topology or inconsistent point sampling, and are extremely prone to parroting their training data.

It's kind of incredible how far we have come but seriously, to understand a problem space you need to try to use the existing tools. Only then, do new, and useful ideas pop up that solve real issues. But man, nobody in the space seems to have a clue.

Believe me, 3D modelling software is REALLY good at what it does, it is really hard to try and dethrone human and machine working together in these really well thought out pieces of software.

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