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Blender 4.5 LTS

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Re: Blender 4.5 LTS

#61

Post by egeres »

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.

Even if genAI were to kill the cinema/animation back-end industry, I still think 3D software would be needed to continue videogame development, and godot is far behind in modelling/animation capabilities compared to blender. Hopefully they can latch on this in the long term if it happens that AI keeps eating artists lunch.

Re: Blender 4.5 LTS

#62

Post by const_cast »

MrScruff wrote: post #52
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maya hasn't changed much in a decade, and that is a wise choice for training/documentation. They focused on the content part which is its value proposition. Blender has always had the perpetual Beta problem, as many boring core design issues were never really given priority. Fine for developers, but a liability in commercial settings. Houdini is interesting, but with Blender Geometry-nodes now working it is unclear h…

I've only dabbled with Blender but from what I saw of geometry nodes it's quite a long way away from competing in the same space as Houdini. Houdini's biggest single feature and the thing that allows film studios to use it at complexity and scale is the HDA system and there's no real competition for that.

I think the main difference between OSS like Blender and the competition is it seems like OSS only gets better. Each version is a little bit better, so projects that were once not competitive catch up. Blender is an obvious example, but also look at Krita, or the entire KDE project. These pieces of software age like fine wine: they get more features, they get faster, and they get more stable.

Closed-source software seems to get... stuck. In the best case. Often, they regress: becoming buggier from version to version with less features. I think of Windows and the entire Microsoft suite of applications.

I think one exception is Gnome. Gnome loves removing features more than they love not implementing popular Wayland protocols.

Re: Blender 4.5 LTS

#63

Post by babypuncher »

Zambyte wrote: post #51
babypuncher wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Counter-counter-point: I like running free models on my computer that were trained on freely accessible data.

We all want free stuff, but somebody still has to pay for that stuff

Re: Blender 4.5 LTS

#64

Post by Joel_Mckay »

const_cast wrote: post #62
MrScruff wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've only dabbled with Blender but from what I saw of geometry nodes it's quite a long way away from competing in the same space as Houdini. Houdini's biggest single feature and the thing that allows film studios to use it at complexity and scale is the HDA system and there's no real competition for that.

I think the main difference between OSS like Blender and the competition is it seems like OSS only gets better. Each version is a little bit better, so projects that were once not competitive catch up. Blender is an obvious example, but also look at Krita, or the entire KDE project. These pieces of software age like fine wine: they get more features, they get faster, and they get more stable. Closed-source software s…

With OSS, unless every add-on is part of the build tree or package repo testing... it quickly becomes broken as the ecosystem constantly evolves.

i.e. of the $3k of community Blender plugins/add-ons we evaluated last year, only around 60% are still functional in stable blender releases. Additionally, many built-in core features like Fracture became broken in 4.x due to API permutations, and getting split into its own module.

In a production environment one must version lock Blender for the project. =3

Re: Blender 4.5 LTS

#65

Post by lvl155 »

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 :)

This is the only project I support year in year out. What they did is amazing. Simply amazing.

Re: Blender 4.5 LTS

#66

Post by Joel_Mckay »

MrScruff wrote: post #53
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…

The significant majority of the film and animation industry uses Linux.

Linux RTX CUDA drivers are getting better, but really depends on the use-case. For a Flamenco render farm it makes sense for sure.

Creatives on wacom tablets and Adobe products etc. will exclude the Linux Desktop option. =3

Re: Blender 4.5 LTS

#67

Post by MrScruff »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #66
MrScruff wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The significant majority of the film and animation industry uses Linux.

Linux RTX CUDA drivers are getting better, but really depends on the use-case. For a Flamenco render farm it makes sense for sure. Creatives on wacom tablets and Adobe products etc. will exclude the Linux Desktop option. =3

Not just for the farm, the large majority of the movie and tv vfx and animation you see is done by artists using Linux workstations.

Re: Blender 4.5 LTS

#68

Post by MrScruff »

const_cast wrote: post #62
MrScruff wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've only dabbled with Blender but from what I saw of geometry nodes it's quite a long way away from competing in the same space as Houdini. Houdini's biggest single feature and the thing that allows film studios to use it at complexity and scale is the HDA system and there's no real competition for that.

I think the main difference between OSS like Blender and the competition is it seems like OSS only gets better. Each version is a little bit better, so projects that were once not competitive catch up. Blender is an obvious example, but also look at Krita, or the entire KDE project. These pieces of software age like fine wine: they get more features, they get faster, and they get more stable. Closed-source software s…

Blender is definitely getting better compared to things like Maya but I don't think this argument holds for Houdini & Sidefx.

Re: Blender 4.5 LTS

#69

Post by const_cast »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #64
const_cast wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main difference between OSS like Blender and the competition is it seems like OSS only gets better. Each version is a little bit better, so projects that were once not competitive catch up. Blender is an obvious example, but also look at Krita, or the entire KDE project. These pieces of software age like fine wine: they get more features, they get faster, and they get more stable. Closed-source software s…

With OSS, unless every add-on is part of the build tree or package repo testing... it quickly becomes broken as the ecosystem constantly evolves. i.e. of the $3k of community Blender plugins/add-ons we evaluated last year, only around 60% are still functional in stable blender releases. Additionally, many built-in core features like Fracture became broken in 4.x due to API permutations, and getting split into its own…

IMO it's always a good idea to vendor software. But yes, OSS typically moves fast. It's a tradeoff.

Re: Blender 4.5 LTS

#70

Post by dragontamer »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #47
dragontamer wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Oh yeah, I was agreeing with you. Just providing context for others if they didn't understand what was going on.
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