This is great, but they should give more. I would love to see million dollar donations from every major tech company. It's nothing to them, and Blender is fundamentally changing the way we make digital media.
Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron
91–100 of 116 posts
Re: Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron
#92I 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.
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…
I think the blender secret sauce is their artistic projects.
Put a bunch of artists in the same room as the developers and have them produce a work.
It ferments this amazing combination of aggressive QA testing(the artists) and top tier technical support(the developers) while focusing on real problems(the work) that really brings out the best possible product. The GIMP project would probably be better off if they invested in a couple of rounds of this.
I think blender always had an amazing, ahead of it's time interface. It did lean overly hard on knowing the hot keys, probably a product of it being an in house tool but the opensource versions have worn a lot of those rough edges off(menus to provide clues) while keeping that same super smooth workflow core.
Re: Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 leav…
It's not that hard though to make a drastic improvement over that. Basic CSS isn't complicated. Sure, there's quirky things, but it's still possible. As "over the weekend" type of projects, I have taken websites/apps with UIs that I've thought were interesting and recreated them with HTML/CSS. You learn a lot very quickly, and then your UIs start to suck a lot less. It's still coding as far as writing in and IDE and testing/fixing bugs. You just get to skip the compiling part of it!
Re: Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron
#94Earlier 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.
Instructions unclear. I've kidnapped the GIMP and Inkscape teams and forced them to blend their work into one product.
It now has an ellipse tool, but finding it among the toolbars and menus is left as an exercise for the reader
Re: Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron
#95Earlier 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.
>it's unclear what is being compared to with these tired claims.
Relatively good UX. Because Microsoft, Salesforce, etc. Have full time teams of designers in tow. For historical reasons it's harder to get said designers to work on FLOSS.
Re: Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
These are all products the ux direction of which is likely influenced more by corporate power dynamics. Sure, uxers are involved, the real power they have is a different question. Everyone’s got their preferences, quality of ux is by definition subjective. That is what makes these discussions hard. Naming any examples will always have ”nah i don’t like that product” as counterpoint. An equally weird trope us UX pract…
>As soon as developers actively hang out with real users in real life and genuinely observe them without intervening, i’m all for oss projects without uxers.
Game dev here. Play tests are excruciatingly painful. Spend some time showing off a game and you can see why so much ux these days are "boring" and samey. Deviating off the beaten road takes so much extra polish compared to seeing how competition controls work and copying that.
Re: Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron
#97Earlier 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…
I think the blender secret sauce is their artistic projects. Put a bunch of artists in the same room as the developers and have them produce a work. It ferments this amazing combination of aggressive QA testing(the artists) and top tier technical support(the developers) while focusing on real problems(the work) that really brings out the best possible product. The GIMP project would probably be better off if they inv…
>It ferments this amazing combination of aggressive QA testing(the artists) and top tier technical support(the developers) while focusing on real problems(the work) that really brings out the best possible product.
Devs stil run the show, and it can be a huge effort to convince them to change course on something. People were complaining about the mouse controls for years and it took until 2.8 to finally convince the org otherwise to adapt a more typical workflow.
It's a rough balance because the other extreme is artists making unrealistic demands based on how the system is architected (or worse, the deceptively simole: https://xkcd.com/1425/). So I don't really have a solution.
Re: Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Simply they don't bother taking down the advertisement once hired. It's the lowest priority of job for the hiring team and the role is normally forgotten about once the hire has been onboarded. I worked for an animation studio and they didn't take down roles.
Companies don't take down listings for many reasons: make it look like they have more money to expand than they actually have, slow down the job seeker so their competition moves just slightly slower, there's no benefit in taking it down, if someone is actually reading the applications maybe an exceptional applicant will come that fits for another role in the company, drive up costs for the competition (hey boss ever…
This sounds likely so thanks. However some of my best matched positions I've found on the site after a day or two after posting, as I check it regularly.
Re: Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron
#99I 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.
Not disagreeing but it's crazy 2.8 was going on 7 years ago. That's 1 less year than from the release of HTML to 9/11.
It'd be like saying "Man the internet has been on such an upwards trajectory since HTML" in 2000 ;D
Re: Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron
#100Earlier 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 was bad, so they rebuilt it and somehow made it worse. Then they decided to do the same with other apps, like Notepad. I switched to Ubuntu on my computer this week. Linux administration is not something I want to spend time on, but LLMs are able to help me debug why my password manager can't talk to my browser and write shell scripts to fix it... I'm able to focus on work and be done with the Microslop.