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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

#61

Post by pasabagi »

thedaemon wrote: post #42
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.

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…

I was a bit worried about some of that missing functionality - just turned it back to RMB - and yeah, you're absolutely right. I thought stuff like alt-click not working was me just losing my mind. I wanted to learn the new stuff just because I don't want to end up bound to a bunch of input conventions that will end up depreciated - and I don't really care that much about LMB and RMB, or indeed any of the old blender UI, but I don't want to start using the tools on the left, since they are, as you say, useless. I'm more a 'select things, do an operation on them' kinda guy, so using a tool in edit mode (with a few exceptions) is kinda neither here nor there.

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

#62

Post by codedokode »

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…

What confuses a novice with Blender is that it has so called "areas" (something like a tiled window manager) and it is very counter-intuitive. For example, when you try to resize an "area" you accidentally create a new one and it is very difficult to remove.

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

#63

Post by p1necone »

babuskov wrote: post #29
chronogram wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love those drawn looking animation videos for games like The Burdens of Shaohao https://g.co/kgs/419Tq1 but are there any video game examples where those tools would be beneficial? My video game knowledge is not wide enough. Blender I can definitely see.

Any 2D game basically, and some assets for 3D games as well. For examples of 2D games with great graphics, take a look at: Mark of The Ninja, Hollow Knight, Limbo, Stardew Valley, Rayman Legends.

Having grown up during the heyday of (good and terrible) flash games I can't stand the kind of vector art style that games like Hollow Knight have - it looks unprofessional to me, to the point where I'd rather play a worse game with pixel art.

I know Hollow Knight is fantastic, but it reminds my brain far too much of amateurish flash games.

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

#64

Post by meruru »

anchpop wrote: post #58
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/

Has GIMP meaningfully improved in the last 5 years? Every time I've had to use it I've been confused by the lack of features and strange UI.

2.10 was a big release that came out last year. So yes: https://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-2.10.html

There's some good stuff on the roadmap for 3.0 and 3.2 as well: https://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Roadmap

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

#65

Post by Miraste »

anchpop wrote: post #58
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/

Has GIMP meaningfully improved in the last 5 years? Every time I've had to use it I've been confused by the lack of features and strange UI.

They recently redid the interface to behave much more like Photoshop by default. It's a lot better.

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

#66

Post by p1necone »

hdfbdtbcdg wrote: post #51
wetpaws wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't they do different things? GIMP is for general image editing. Krita focuses on painting?

Correct - GIMP is (largely) focused on photo editing, while Krita is (largely) focused on digital painting. Although GIMP/Photoshop definitely support a digital painting workflow with custom brushes and the like - it's just not the primary focus.

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

#67

Post by meruru »

hdfbdtbcdg wrote: post #51
wetpaws wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't they do different things? GIMP is for general image editing. Krita focuses on painting?

They have different focus, but both are raster editors. They do compete with each other.

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

#68

Post by wetpaws »

tialaramex wrote: post #56
wetpaws wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not say so. Gimp is (arguably) a very long evolution of an mspaint that copyied many tools and workflow from a Photoshop, Krita is an attempt to re-implement Photoshop from scratch. I wouldn't say Krita is not suitable for general editing, because Photoshop is also dual purpose tool - it is an industry standard both for digital artists and general photo manipulation.

"Arguably" in the sense that you just decided to claim something that has no relation to reality? Like Ghostbusters 2 was "arguably" the highest grossing movie ever made in Albania by a crew of chipmunks? Gimp starts off as an emergency last minute replacement project for two undergrads at Berkeley that does basically the same thing as Photoshop. It wasn't ever anything like Microsoft's Paint.

I am not sure why of all my entire comment you decided to lash at a single word.

My argument still stays, gimp never was and still nowhere is near the Photoshop level. Krita excels both as painting and photo tool.

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

#69

Post by vonmoltke »

bluedino wrote: post #54
Ralfp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ton Roosendaal (Blender creator) estimated in 2018 interview that 3D software market is very small, and pulled up Autodesk's (3DsMax/Maya, etc) business results from that time, which amounted to 25000 - 30000 yearly licenses. He also claimed that Maya has "maybe 20" developers behind with things being similar for other products. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJEWOTZnFeg (jump to 1h mark)

At $1500/yearly subscription, 30,000 licenses is $45 million a year. Don't foreget about everyone who works at Autodesk that isn't a developer but stil involved with the product. And then there are plugin writers (are there commercial plugins for Blender?) and resellers etc

Autodesk does $2.7B/year in revenue. The revenue from 3DsMax and Maya is a rounding error compared to the revenue from their CAD products.

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

#70

Post by dtf »

pasabagi wrote: post #44
pixelbath wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

  - poke faces (Alt-p) doesn't exist
It's in the Face menu, so either select the 'Face' menu dropdown from the viewport header menus, or press Ctrl-F, or press W (context menu) while you have some faces selected.

You can also just right click on the "Poke Faces" menu item, click "Assign Shortcut" and press Alt-P.

  - the selection behaviour (A doesn't seem to deselect any more)
Alt-A clears the selection.

  - shift-G doesn't work
Shift-G does grouped selections, I think this is the same as in 2.79.

  - W doesn't open a menu any more.
The specials menu has gone, replaced by a context-sensitive menu (what a right click might pop up in most apps) So "Poke Faces" is here when faces are selected.

  - Shift-tab doesn't change vertex/face/line selection mode any more.
Ctrl-1, Ctrl-2, Ctrl-3.
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