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Cycles X

code.blender.org

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Re: Cycles X

#71

Post by crazygringo »

ziftface wrote: post #50
MattGaiser wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is correct, but there are plenty of lawyers who interpret things incredibly overly-conservatively to save their own ass, just in case.

If you're a senior enough manager and have a legitimate business reason then you can often push back enough and get them to give in, but it's really a question of whether it's worth your time and effort internally.

Re: Cycles X

#72

Post by ethbr0 »

ravenstine wrote: post #22
monkmartinez wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just an observation and a point of discussion regarding the big studios. Disclaimer, I am not in this space professionally, but I listen to a LOT of podcasts about VR/AR which spills into all of these topics. Do you see a push away from Maya and 3DS max for a more platform agnostic modeling environment? Blender seems to be mentioned all over the place for beginners. From what I am hearing on podcasts, Unreal Game eng…

I'm not in the field myself, though animation was my original career and I know people who work in feature animation. To answer your question, the field has been sloooowly diversifying in some ways, as you say with Unreal (particularly since Unreal's engine is fast and good for real-time previews), but I don't see a huge push for moving away from does-it-all packages like Maya or 3DS Max. The economic incentive isn't…

> Their content is so profitable that the people in charge don't really give a fuck.

This is usually a general technology smell. Consistent, profitable revenue is the technological equivalent of the resource curse [0].

I haven't figured out if it's because people never get fired (thus new ideas are extremely slow to penetrate and propagate) or because management can afford to be extremely conservative (no pressure, resistance to change).

Put the most charitably, it's because there's no need to be more efficient, and stability & consistency is more valuable than improvement.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

Re: Cycles X

#73

Post by rguetzkow »

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #68
mattnewton wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably this happens because it’s mostly volunteer labour right? Hiring a person to solve those boring old but important-to-your-business issues seems like it could pay off at a certain number of maya licenses. My guess is it mostly doesn’t happen because these shops aren’t in the software business and don’t want to be, so don’t know how to value engineers and don’t want to spend money on engineering they aren’t s…

Blender is mostly developed by paid devs I think.

I think there are quite a lot more developers contributing to the project than those employed by the Foundation or supported by developer grants [0]. However, the complex changes on the roadmap of Blender's development are planned and implemented by the core team.

[0]: https://www.blender.org/about/credits/

Re: Cycles X

#74

Post by packetslave »

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…

I mean, ultimately Autodesk doesn't give a damn about any of their other products as long as the AutoCAD money firehose continues.

Maya continues to be the industry leader because VFX studios have spent 20 years integrating it with their pipelines. Blender could beat Maya feature for feature, and places like ILM and Weta still won't adopt it because of the effort required to fit it into their pipelines.

Re: Cycles X

#75

Post by packetslave »

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 write a LOT of custom code for their pipeline and tools. If you were to go to ILM or Dreamworks or WDAS and watch someone use Maya there, it would look COMPLETELY different from what you see at home.

Given that, I'm not surprised that the (not-always-technical) lawyers are worried about GPL.

Re: Cycles X

#76

Post by packetslave »

127 wrote: post #54
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…

Yes, Blender is an amazing project and great 3D production software for being free. However there are many issues that remain unresolved after years. Viewport performance being one of them. There seems to be at least to an extent a mode of development where fun new things get done but old, boring, more critical issues will not. I give all credit to Blender developers for doing the old, boring and important things. It…

A friend of mine in the industry who is now switching from Maya to Blender for concept art once said: "yeah, Blender is free... if you don't count the $200 in add-ons you need to buy to get anything done."

I wonder what percentage of Blender enthusiasts DON'T have Boxcutter and HardOps installed at a minimum.

Re: Cycles X

#77

Post by zlsa »

brundolf wrote: post #12

Oh man, I am pumped about the viewport improvements. Whenever I'm working on a scene, tweaking lighting or shaders is really arduous because after every tiny adjustment I have to sit and wait at least a few seconds to really see what effect it had. These previews look amazing.

I've found that with complex shaders, it can be more performant to use CPU Cycles rendering because GPU rendering can have a substantial delay after changing parameters. In the same vein, Cycles is sometimes faster than Eevee, because the latter needs to recompile the shader after every change.

Re: Cycles X

#78

Post by zlsa »

dogma1138 wrote: post #48
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.

In the linked article, benchmarks are shown for CUDA as well. Of course that's also nVidia-only like OptiX.

And antecdotally, OptiX is around 1.5-3x faster than CUDA with Cycles rendering.

Re: Cycles X

#79

Post by aikah »

I love Cycles but they need to fix Eevee (still no support for particle input for instance, forced to use animation nodes for that). I never use Cycles in production because it's too slow (by design since it's PBR), unless I can't do otherwise, but in these cases I usually just bake materials in Cycles then render with Eevee.

Re: Cycles X

#80

Post by valine »

aikah wrote: post #79

I love Cycles but they need to fix Eevee (still no support for particle input for instance, forced to use animation nodes for that). I never use Cycles in production because it's too slow (by design since it's PBR), unless I can't do otherwise, but in these cases I usually just bake materials in Cycles then render with Eevee.

Have you tried the new geometry nodes? I've found them to be an excellent alternative to particles for a bunch of use cases.
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