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Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron

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Re: Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron

#81

Post by duffmancd »

wincy wrote: post #64
panarchy wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with (3D) CAD I've heard is that the Open CASCADE CAD kernel is a huge mess. So as much as they update and fix FreeCAD (and they've made a lot of good progress, but it's still very rough around the edges) they're always going to be hampered by that. And making a new CAD kernel is a massive undertaking.

Question for someone who is very far away from this kind of development - why does CAD software need a kernel that’s wholly separate from the UI? Why aren’t they the same thing? I just don’t understand the abstraction that necessitates writing the software this way.

It is much like a game might use a physics engine, or a new language might use the LLVM backend. To overly simplify, a CAD kernel will keep a list of operations (make a cube of this size here, drill a hole of this depth here, round these edges but not those). And combine that into a final volume. These responsibilities only get more and more complex as a part gets more complex - so using a pre-built engine allows CAD software to focus on tools and workflows to translate human instructions into lower-layer kernel geometry: the UI/UX. It also crosses into compatibility, if you use the same Kernel as another CAD it is much simpler to export/import from them. Otherwise you would have to reimplement their kernel (or enough of it), or be stuck exporting triangulated versions of the final volume - sort of like converting an image from vector to raster.

Re: Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron

#82

Post by crote »

Kye wrote: post #60
BadBadJellyBean wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have to keep in mind though that many open source projects started as something that someone wanted and then made. It probably worked just like that person wanted and then it grew. Maybe it is because they weren't too versed in UI/UX design. Another thing is that many classic open source projects don't have a "I want to grow my user base" mindset. Why would they. It's not like they get paid. Big overhauls also alw…

There always seems to be an incompatibility between the people who made it, the people who use it, and the people who want to contribute. The latter two often try, but the former isn't interested in the help or has a very specific vision for the project and doesn't allow any input that isn't in line with that even if it's not in conflict. It's hard to fault anyone in that triad 100%. Open source has a way of becoming…

> the former isn't interested in the help or has a very specific vision for the project and doesn't allow any input that isn't in line with that

I've come to call this "fenceware": technically open source due to its licensing, but community-wise it is as if the developers just throw a ball of code over the fence every few months. Sure, they let you play with it for a bit, but it is not yours to co-own.

Re: Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron

#83

Post by wizzwizz4 »

TheBicPen wrote: post #66
savolai wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gimp may be a bitnof a bad example nowadays? Of course depends on your habits and standards.

The best way to draw a circle in gimp is still the awkward select -> foreground fill workflow. At this point this example is beating a dead horse, but the horse shall continue to be beaten until a proper ellipse tool is added.

I select, delete, flood fill. Three steps, but afaik it's quicker.

Re: Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron

#84

Post by brailsafe »

Jedd wrote: post #19
crote wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a self-reinforcing loop. Once a FLOSS tool becomes good enough , it'll start to attract professional users, who are willing to invest in it, which makes it even better. And it is quite hard for commercial players to compete with free. But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who like writing new flashy features, but are awful at UX, and making sure all the small kinks are worked out. So most FLOSS softwa…

> but are awful at UX This is such a weird trope. For those of us who've used microsoft teams, jira, servicenow, salesforce, or basically any insanely popular (in the commercial if not upvote sense) products, it's unclear what is being compared to with these tired claims.

> microsoft teams, jira, servicenow, salesforce

Nobody wants to use those products either; they just exist because their default at a certain scale, or they're effectively free because they're included in your existing MS license.

For GIMP the comparison would be either Adobe stuff or what used to be Affinity products. Libreoffice is now competing maybe with MS Word but probably more often Google Docs or Markdown editors.

Old blender used to have a very technical UI; a cacophony of dropdowns and small text that functioned but was quite overwhelming. Meanwhile things like SketchUp became popular because they weren't as powerful necessarily, but were very welcoming, and that's hard to do with a complex offering.

Re: Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron

#85

Post by crote »

jandrese wrote: post #18
BadBadJellyBean wrote: post #3

I think especially since the UI overhaul in Blender 2.8 the project has been on a steep upwards trajectory. The software was always amazing, especially since it was free and open source, but the new UI and all subsequent improvements really put Blender on the map as a serious tool and not just an alternative for when you don't have money for the big players.

To be fair animated 3D modeling is a complex task so the UI can only get so simple. Even commercial tools require training and have challenging interfaces. Another example is Gimp. People like to bag on it for having a terrible interface, but when they say Photoshop is so much better I have to wonder what magical version they are using. For me the differences between the two are marginal, but that may be because I le…

Some complexity is of course an inherent part of the domain, and you can never truly get around it. At best you can stick to sensible defaults for the basic user and initially hide the most complicated parts until they are needed.

On the other hand: there is no reason whatsoever something as trivial as drawing a circle has to be as complicated as launching a rocket in GIMP. It certainly doesn't lack the technological scaffolding, and UX-wise people would already be ecstatic if they just cloned how 30-year-old version of Microsoft Paint did it. So why doesn't it have a Circle Tool yet, despite the massive amount of requests for it? The only possible explanation left seems to be an active disdain towards basic non-technical people: the UI is hard to use because they want it to be hard to use.

Re: Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron

#86

Post by crote »

lynndotpy wrote: post #37
BadBadJellyBean wrote: post #3

I think especially since the UI overhaul in Blender 2.8 the project has been on a steep upwards trajectory. The software was always amazing, especially since it was free and open source, but the new UI and all subsequent improvements really put Blender on the map as a serious tool and not just an alternative for when you don't have money for the big players.

This is my perspective as well. I've been a big FOSS junkie and, in ~2015 or so, Blender had a repute similar to GIMP. (A free, worse version of proprietary tools). By the time I picked Blender up in 2016 (before 2.8!) it felt pretty mature, but I used it (still) because it was the one that was free and which worked on Linux. The time and energy I put into learning Blender feels like an investment that has paid off a…

It's the same with KiCad!

Version 5 was kinda-sorta usable - but buggy and painful. In practice everyone would tell you to just download the nightly build of version 6 instead, as the UX improvements were massive. It became a genuine joy to use, and with the death of EAGLE the no-brainer choice for every hobbyist.

Since then development has raced ahead, with regularly scheduled released chock-full of both small quality-of-life improvements and new features focused on professional use. It's still a tier behind the likes of Altium, but these days KiCad is a very solid choice for everything but the most high-end PCBs.

It is definitely good enough to build your small consumer business electronics business around, which means there are suddenly a lot of potential users willing to throw a few bucks at it to solve the remaining small papercuts and missing features they run into.

Re: Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron

#87

Post by crote »

presbyterian wrote: post #53
dylan604 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are all of the open source UI/UX peeps? Why do they not exist? Why are so many devs accepting of the open source concept and yet apparently no UI types are by comparison? The number of open source UI peeps rounds to zero. What is it about design/artsy types that makes working on open source anathema where coders will do it just for the lulz?

It's not that UI/UX people don't want to contribute, it's that the coders have to be convinced that UI/UX matters enough to start including designers' contributions. The type of people making FOSS stuff also tend to be the people who prioritize code, make "good enough" interfaces, and see UI/UX work as fluff. This is thankfully less true today than it was in the past, but it's always been part of my experience around…

I'm definitely one of those strictly-programming people.

Sure, I can probably hack together a sorta-kinda technically-usable UI, but I know I'm awful at it. In my professional life I quite early on realized any attempt on my side is just a waste of time and effort, so these days as a mostly-backend developer I don't go beyond sticking bare unstyled HTML elements on a page to demonstrate basic functionality. I'll leave all the design stuff to the people who are actually good at it!

Re: Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron

#89

Post by dylan604 »

crote wrote: post #78
dylan604 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people that use Maya have been using Maya since the days of it being the only thing available. When you have students as young as junior high school getting active in computers and graphics, they have no money. Using myself as an example, I was a frequent user of newsgroups like a.b.m.a. to find the software to learn how to use. Now that I'm a "professional" by earning money with software I "borrowed" while learn…

For the same reason Maya & friends offer heavily discounted (or even free) educational licenses: people tend to stick with what they initially learned. That approach works great when someone's first experience is in a traditional education system, but these days any interested kid will start to explore the options way before that - and all those self-taught hobbyist Youtube teachers haven't been offered free licenses…

> The second Blender started to get industry adoption it was basically over for Maya. They could've saved it by turning it into a freemium product which hobbyists can download and install as easy as Blender, but it's probably too late for that now.

I was with you up until this part. I was a DVD programmer for years on the de facto standard software which was very expensive and cumbersome for some people to use. Then Apple released DVD Studio Pro which did a lot of abstraction layer simplification for people, but also meant that something could not be done in that software that could be on the big boy package. I know it's an apple/orange situation, but there are times where there's a reason for the cheaper/free price tag. I haven't paid attention to the capabilities of Maya/Blender for nearly a decade, but I'm guessing there are still things that can be done in Maya that cannot be done in Blender.

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