Aside from all the usual and well-deserved high praise I'm seeing, I feel like there's something more worth pointing out:
Blender has made 3D work much more "mainstream". I see many videos/pictures/tutorials with views in the millions(!), and much more overall interest in using the software. Not just the pretty visuals and talented people, but the whole program itself seems to be gaining traction with the more "normie" crowd.
That also made me realize something else: Blender is now the default for anything that's not extremely high-end/resource-intensive. If you ever hear about anyone doing any kind of 3D work, they're probably using Blender.
And this has creeped into the mainstream in a way only very established brands like Coca-Cola have. Nowadays, "Blender" might as well mean 3D photoshop/illustrator for most people.
I have been working in the CG / 3D industry for quite some time... when i first started about 15 years ago... Maya was the default... everyone knew it, it was THE default. That being said we have been on blender since 2.5 days.
I was talking to someone on the weekend, and found out they were studying animation... i was like oh so youre using Maya? they were like whats maya?
There has been a massive shift. I think there was a new era brought about when 2.8 was released. With it, they really pushed their dev fund, which helped them to get better, which made them bigger, which got them more donations, which made them get better. Cyclical loop.
There's a great lesson here. People will want to use what they learned, and if they can't learn on your software, they won't be inclined to try it later. It doesn't really matter for the first five years or so of your company, and that's longer than most startups exist, but once you're #1, you need to start thinking about the pipeline of new people. There's not a lot of motivation for individual employees (even CEOs) to think this way because they probably won't be in the role by the time it matters, but it's important.
Would Blender have taken off as fast if Maya had a free tier? I doubt it.
Whenever I encounter an interesting non-niche new technology with "contact us for a demo/pricing" language, I bounce.
When a new project comes along and we need to make a technology decision we will, as a matter of due diligence, reach out to all the relevant vendors. But there is an "existing experience in team" evaluation criteria for these technology decisions, and the "contact us" vendors fail miserably there - their tech needs to be extra impressive to overcome that hurdle.
This has always been my own mantra too, but then I never represented an enterprise buyer so maybe it is effective to screen out buyera like me, but I can imagine even as an "large enterprise level buyer" I would not want to deal with this. It just smacks of dishonesty when you will not provide ANY pricing indication whatsoever. I am surprised "contact us for pricing" still works in current year? I assume it does, because one still sees it sometimes. Maybe if almost everyone started shunning this (and I expect those in younger generations than me probably will!) this tactic will die out. I can sortoff understand it for cases where you want yo relicense your product/data to become part of someone elses product/service and these deals might be custom negotiated. But for normal use of a product or service? hell no!
Yes. I highly recommend watching this video [0] — "For-Profit (Creative) Software" by EndVertex — about how some essential programs price out regular people with their insane licensing models... In turn making people's skills nontransferable.
> People will want to use what they learned, and if they can't learn on your software, they won't be inclined to try it later.
This is why Microsoft never seriously pursued piracy of Windows and this is also why Windows was never a market leader on servers. This is why Postgres won databases even though it’s clearly an inferior product to Oracle, MSSQL and DB2. This is why CUDA is the defacto standard in GPGPU. This is why every saas business must have a free tier. Etc.
Well, not really. There is a multitude of factors in those, and I'd say some examples are just plain wrong.
Postgres won out because it was better than the others considering the money you pay and the features you (in the end) don't need or couldn't afford with the others. If it just were down to learning, MySQL/MariaDB would have won. Back in the days, everyone knew MySQL, nobody knew Postgres.
With CUDA, it also isn't what people know, it rather is the existing heap of software that only runs properly, quickly, efficiently in CUDA. People buying Nvidia cards and CUDA-based software don't care about CUDA and don't know any CUDA, they are usually higher level, but the availability of software is what drives the popularity there.
You're agreeing with me. MySQL vs postgres doesn't change the overall point at all - both were good enough free as in beer products that a generation of developers grew up on and had no reason to switch to paid offerings later.
With CUDA, you're even highlighting my point:
> the availability of software is what drives the popularity there
Like, there isn't anything more to it. That's all that matters. Again, a free, good enough product that evolved into a best in class software and hardware package together with a generation of GPGPU developers who don't know and don't really care about anything else.
Ah, sorry, yes. I misunderstood and we are in total agreement.
I've over-interpreted the quotation in your post about what people have learned to mean that it is only about the tools you know, nothing else. In hindsight, I should have read your post more carefully.
It’s much easier to deploy and has a much older high availability story that has been battle tested for a decade or two. It also has a more linear regression. The query optimizer doesn’t try to be clever. It only works with the query and the schema. So if your query is bad, it will get worse with data size. Double the data in prod compared to your test instance? Double the bad query. Postgres tries to get clever with data size so it might switch to a different plan with more data resulting in your one customer with a lot of data all of a sudden getting really bad query times but nobody can reproduce it locally. So now you as the admin have to go into the database and pull a dump that for once actually trigger the same query plan as it did in production but your devs might not be allowed to see all the data or have it locally. This is one annoying thing at least you don’t have to do with MySQL.
Oh, also, MySQL just updates in place without bitching. Postgres wants you do install both versions side by side and migrate the data directory. That is annoying with docker.
Hah, it's a great answer, I did not even think that far, thinking of the ease of installation, updates and command line use, as well as configuration.
But indeed. MySQL's great weakness and great strength is that it's a somewhat limited SQL engine over a variety of storage backends. It can not be too smart, due to the sheer variety of what it supports.
I think this is a very weak essay. The author has zero ability to analyze, self-reflect, and think through her actions even one step ahead.
The video literally starts off by complaining about how expensive the software is while simultaneously talking about how heavily she invested in learning it in college (knowing how expensive it is). And then, for some reason, she says that her instrument was taken away from her (the conditions were transparent from the very beginning).
Furthermore, after graduating from college, when it became obvious that studying expensive software had been a huge mistake, what does she do? SHE STARTS TEACHING IT! Thus moving from the category of victim (doubtful, but okay) to the category of part of the problem.
Classic victim blaming this. She’s trying to enter an industry where certain tools are considered the professional choice. Her skills become tangled up in those tools, and then she’s priced out of using them. Using another tool probably wasn’t an option as an attempt to start a professional career. This is exactly the problem the video is all about, in so many ways.
I think this is also one of the reasons that KiCad is making such in-roads into the electronics industry. For 90% of companies it does all the stuff you need and hobbyist can afford it and learn it and experiment with it.
It's also starting to get features previously only super high end packages like atium would have. Why pay for the gimped eagle when you can just use kicad and get more
Autodesk tried that from time to time. AFAIK as a student you can still get a free Maya, and there also was a very cheap (but massively stripped down) version for indie game devs. But there was always one or another string attached.
IMHO what really killed Maya wasn't necessarily Blender itself, but Autodesk's strategy of first becoming a defacto monopolist in the area of commercial 3D software and then tightening the subscription screws on their existing users. Of course that strategy doesn't work when there's a free alternative to migrate to.
From what I recall, the strings were substantial. The student version of Maya had a bunch of features disabled, to the point where you couldn't follow tutorials with it.
Both the education and indie versions are full versions. The educational version can only be licensed for a year and can only be relicensed a set number of times. The indie version is restricted solely based on income. If the licensee (studio or individual) makes <= 100000 USD per year, then they can use the indie version. There may be slightly different file formats for each.
I remember that at one point there was a Maya LT version which only allowed polygon modelling and some limited animation features, and which didn't allow loading plugins (except a small number of whitelisted plugins). Maybe I confused that with the indie/student license.
Also why the change on making .NET and Swift open source, universities adoption has been exactly one of the adoption pain points, and VSCode being the entry point into Microsoft technologies as well.
> Would Blender have taken off as fast if Maya had a free tier? I doubt it.
Maya's own success was heavily based around a cheap license for students. IIRC it was only about $100, as opposed to nearly a grand for the professional license.
Maya had to unseat 3d studio. Both were bought by Autodesk (1997 for 3ds and 2005 for maya iirc) who have that habit of exploiting market dominance and not innovating but then buying the up and coming product (similarly they bought revit when it outperformed their own autocad)
Not anymore. I was a Photoshop user from around 2000, I knew every corner of it from version 5.5 until CS-2 or something. You are quite right about Adobe making it worse and worse with every version. Today, although i still pay for subscription, I'll do anything more quickly with PhotoPea, Affinty Photo or Pixelmator, regardless my much more limited exposure to these. Its a shame. Adobe deserves to be forgotten, and it is getting there. As others pointed out, Figma, Canva and the tools I mentioned are gradually replacing it. Today its absolutely fine for a designer having no experience with Photoshop. Even Illustrator is slowly fading away as even inkscape is getting more and more usable with every new version.
I feel like tools like Sketch and Figma ate a big chunk of Adobe's lunch, though.
20 years ago every designer I knew were using Photoshop, Flash, Fireworks. Those were taught in universities. Some designers I work with started there. Today I know exactly zero designers using those.
Sure there is XD but Adobe is merely playing catch up here. I have worked with a single person who uses it, and it was right before they were transitioning to Figma.
It is also funny seeing some co-workers (including designers!) using Photopea instead of Photoshop.
Still working on the print design side... I work with lots of designers who use other tools for photo editing and illustration. As do I. For vector art and for finalizing work for pre-press, though, everyone is really still stuck with Adobe. Their closed standards dominate the industry. If you don't deliver work in PDF or AI format... then what? You don't deliver 8 meter wide billboards as PNG files. And trying to edit PDFs saved from other software is really difficult. Trying to import AI files to other software often loses layers, path groups, blendings and effects. The truth is, for anyone art directing print work, your designers and illustrators may be allowed to use whatever suits them, but at the end of the day everything that goes out has to go in Adobe's formats.
I feel sketch fell out of favor as well. 12 years ago it was everywhere. I have seen it replaced by figma and very rarely mentioned nowadays. And I say it as a frontend dev who worked with different designers over the years.
I never worked in the US, but Sketch was huge in the two places I worked (Europe and Latin America), to the point companies that worked together with Microsoft (a couple shops I worked for) were purchasing Macs just to run it.
I bet those two places were swimming in money then, as Southern Europe and Latin America are not regions where most developers are swimming in money, US style.
To put this in perspective, in Portugal that would be about two months salary, assuming running expenses, where minimum wage is about 800 euros, and top jobs in IT pay around 1 500 euros after taxes.
Everyone that owns a Mac tends to buy them in on credit, or with bundles with their mobile/cable operator, which are anyway credits in disguise.
Never worked in Southern Europe. In Germany, everyone had Macs in the companies I worked.
In Latin America... The last Mac I bought there was about half of my IT salary there, but that was 2012, a couple years before I left. So it was ok for companies to purchase them. Today? Probably not... I don't even know anyone who's still there and working for local companies.
I've liked Icons8's Lunacy as a free alternative to Sketch and Figma. It works with Sketch files and Figma projects, and isn't Mac-exclusive or a website like Figma.
Photopea has implemented surprisingly large fraction of photoshops features, and having it implemented in a way familiar to photoshop users makes it very useful tool already. And that without installing, just as a web app? Or PWA if you want? Very nice.
See also Microsoft's struggle to maintain mindshare in the early 00's/10's, when the only way to develop on Windows was to pay thousands of dollars for VS licenses and platform documentation.
From 2004, which some might argue should count as the early 2000-2010s:
> But they really want to give away the development tools. Through their Empower ISV program you can get five complete sets of MSDN Universal (otherwise known as “basically every Microsoft product except Flight Simulator“) for about $375. Command line compilers for the .NET languages are included with the free .NET runtime… also free. The C++ compiler is now free.
I remember hearing about Maya when I was studying in college. It's was so expensive and essentially unobtainable unless you were in the industry. Blender has democratized 3D modeling and animation so much.
Everyone I heard about that did graphics or 3d modeling as a non-pro pirated the software. In hindsight, these companies priced themselves out of the market, because you can't compete with free. And they underestimated hobbyists.
I would argue it was Amiga and PC (windows NT) that did that due to affordability of the machines and rampant piracy. I worked with 9.5 versions of software (Poweranimator) that later became next iteration of it called Maya 1.0. Poweranimator, later Maya, and Softimage (retroactively called SI|3D since there was XSI later) were the golden standard. One for animation (Softimage) the other for everything else. Prices were similar. This is mid to late 90's - ~$15k for base software and then around the same for each of the modules like Kinemation and Dynamation. You'd run up, with discounts, to like 30-40k in 90's bucks without SGI machine itself. You were basically facing a $100k investment per workstation if it were Indigo2 or later Octane. To top it off, there were things like IFFS from Autodesk like Flame which were ~3-5 as much. On the other hand you had an Amiga with Lightwave or Cinema4D or later Windows NT box with 3dsmax which were, everything accounted for, ~2-8k all around. Blender started out on SGI btw.
I've exited the space since, since it's a crap and nasty business, but kept it as a hobby. Personally, I've had a lot of problems getting into Blender over the years, especially since the great UI consolidation of all of major 3D apps in early 2000's. Blender was just different, but not Zbrush different. There was just something off with it that made my muscle memory angry. Somewhat like Gimp. However, recently that has changed. Revamp of few key areas in Blender made it actually quite easy to get into it and knowledge of all the other apps over the years made it a one-week transition.
I still prefer animation in Maya though. It's an old friend, after all. We'll see until when.
For me 20 years ago there was also the fight between Maya and Max. But yes Maya was the standard. Our company switched also to blender which would have been crazy 10 years ago. It’s an awesome story for Blender and it community and of course the people given their heart and some into this software.
I started doing 3D on the Amiga so I grew up using for the most part Lightwave and later moved to Softimage (until those cunts at Autodesk killed it). I also managed to get a copy of Maya 1.0 beta (it was 0.9x something) from a friend that had friends at a big studio.
I remember how everyone was very into 3DSMax for the longest time. Then everyone was into Maya. Briefly some people even switched to Modo.
Blender has come a long way from v2.x where some people started to use it. It's brilliant seeing how many people have adopted it. I also noticed a strange shift in knowledge. Like something has been lost in translation. Many 3D concepts are getting rediscovered today by a generation that never heard of 3DSMax, LW, SI, etc. It's a fascinating.
No love for Cinema4D? I don't do 3D professionally, but I've played with it since the 90s (Strata 3D, Infini-D, RenderMan, Playmation). I've subbed in as an artist on some motion graphics projects here and there. I've never found anything as comfortable as Cinema4D, to me. For software with such a vast number of options, Maxon makes the UI somehow fairly comfortable. And every time I've tried to play with Blender, it seems extremely daunting.
25 years ago as a teenager, having no access to hi-end software, I downloaded manual for Cinema 4D and read it start to end. I used imagine 3D on my Amiga at that time. It took minutes just for the preview of the material to render. Few years later when finally got a pirated copy of Cinema 4D I found myself understanding the software quite well just from the manual and until today I find the interface very nice and user friendly. I'm glad current Blender is quite similar in this regard.
I used to work in the field and Cinema4D seemed to be the go to tool for just about every solo freelancer in the business. Yet I basically never saw it at any studio I ever ran across.
That's very interesting. I have a friend who runs a small studio (4-5 motion designers) and turns out work for dozens of TV and streaming shows, (as well as major sports events and awards shows). They only use Cinema4D. But I think it's more comfortable for people who come from 2D motion graphics (AfterEffects). Also, I think once you're locked into Octane rendering servers you would not want to change.
Maya was always pirated by amateurs. The reason it fell out of fashion is probably because torrenting/pirating stopped being seen as "appropriate" for amateurs or learners.
Autodesk changed their pricing model in 2019 (added an indie tier). That was their reaction to the competition.
Besides that, Maya did get quite some animation features lately. But in the end Blender has got "good enough and free" state and there is nothing Maya can do about that.
That being said, Maya isn't going away anytime soon. There are just way too many Python scripts called Maya API in the industry.
No matter how large the lead may be today, autodesk (and next-in-line Adobe) are case studies in why OSS will always win given enough time because although OSS can suffer from many chronic and debilitating diseases, they rarely catch the fatal ones that plague commercial software development.
Yes, the OSS development structure leads to projects that lag behind proprietary solutions for amounts of time that are measured in decades, but nobody will ever have to re-write GIMP from scratch because the market had a bad hair day and somebody got acquired by a sovereign wealth fund that gets bored and runs the project into the ground. That doesn't change anything about the fact that e.g. GIMP, or freeCAD suck today, but someone(s) will almost certainly still be carrying those torches in 50 years, or the torches of superior FOSS competitors. And in the next 50 years, Adobe and Autodesk will almost certainly suffer total death or become skeleton crews that only service legacy clients, and when that happens, all of the collective human talent that went into building those tools and human experience into mastering their use will burn up into the screaming void while GIMP chugs along, putting out a release candidate for their GTK4 port.
GIMP is just hot garbage, speaking from personal experience. All workflows are destructive, the layer workflow is pointy and annoying in so many small and big ways. Performance is bad as well. Small example, take a piece of text and rotate it. After you have rotated it, it no longer is a piece of text it's a slightly blurry piece of pixels. Want to rotate it again? It's now an even more blurry piece of pixels, getting blurrier every time you rotate it. Want to change the text? Start from scratch. Like come on those are the basics and they suck. Personally I don't see it getting a fundamental overhaul, simply because many users are used to the existing workflows and would be upset. I see real competition coming from other projects. But who knows, in general I agree with the sentiment that OSS' endurance is much better.
Personally I don't see it getting a fundamental overhaul
Have you looked at latest release of GIMP? It's just gotten a fundamental overhaul, including support for non-destructive workflows and better text tools. Still has a long way to go obviously and is moving very slowly, but changes are happening.
I don't know whether it will pan out, or whether other major issues will prevent GIMP from ever reaching the status that Blender has gotten to, but GIMP 3 has started shipping some non destructive filters (https://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-3.0.html#non-destruc...) and I (from a distance) understand moving to NDE to be a long term goal of the project
On the contrary I wouldn’t write Autodesk off anytime soon. I’ve recently gotten into the 3d printing hobby and Fusion is not miles ahead of oss offerings, it’s in a different galaxy and it has a very generous free tier for folks like me.
Most importantly I don’t see a cross section between oss developers and cad teams to drive the collaborative features. I don’t think the critical mass to get this going exists.
> Most importantly I don’t see a cross section between oss developers and cad teams to drive the collaborative features. I don’t think the critical mass to get this going exists.
Replace CAD with 3D modelling and animation and that was my genuine opinion 15 years ago about Blender.
That being said, OSS projects can definitely go in the wrong direction but since history is preserved, at least someone else can come and fork before the codebase takes the wrong direction.
Open source CAD has improved a lot in the last few years. You can use FreeCAD for modelling simple parts today and it mostly works. That wasn’t the case a few years ago.
There was a time KiCAD was a buggy mess. And no doubt blender as well.
Blender is rock-solid and very smoothly usable, and as a beginner, I won't find anything missing or buggy. It would take a beginner years to get to the limitations, corner cases and broken things.
KiCAD is solid, very usable, but not totally smooth. The workflow is still far away from blender-like total integration and bliss. Where ten years ago you could find the occasional bug, a beginner won't find any nowadays.
FreeCAD only just last year started shipping releases that don't nullpointer after 2 minutes. Even a beginner with a trivial project will stumble over bugs, limitations, problems and design flaws.
There is a huge difference in quality, and KiCAD will get to Blender levels certainly. But FreeCAD will take forever, if the pace continues like that.
FreeCAD is built on top of Open Cascade and I think that’s what’s going to limit them. It was a fast way to get to v1, but there’s only so much that project can do to work around the limitations of the library they built on.
> Do you expect this to influence their profits significantly? If yes when?
(Context - former Autodesk employee, though obviously all views here are my own, and I'm not commenting on anything I had any involvement in or direct knowledge of - only publicly available information.)
Look up where Autodesk's profits come from sometime, and you'll see that 3d animation is close to meaningless to Autodesks's bottom line, at least in terms of direct profits. I just asked ChatGPT and assuming it's accurate (I haven't double checked but it fits with what I vaguely remember), the Media & Entertainment product families, which include 3ds Max, Maya etc, make up only 5% of total revenue, as opposed to: Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) (48% of revenue), AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT (25% of revenue) and Manufacturing (MFG) (20% of revenue).
The palaeontologists on the floor above mine have posters everywhere about using blender to study dinosaur locomotion. I think they do 3d scans of fossil bones and the. Try to recreate musculature. Blender is everywhere.
I've been learning Blender to make reference objects for my drawings, so this is definitely true. It's simultaneously pretty easy to learn the basics, and also extremely daunting because of the breadth of the features lol.
There’s Darktable which is a pretty good alternative to Lightroom. When I looked into it a couple years back, a friend with Darktable was able to get the same results as I with Lightroom, with the same amount of effort. But when I tried, well… The effort to re-learn was too big, cheaper to just keep paying Apple. I imagine now they lag on AI features too.
Darktable pretty messed up ux thanks to mismanagement, lack of direction and hobby programmers that often leave the project. (there is even someone trying to fix it with a fork https://https://ansel.photos/).
I applaud both Darktable's and Ansel's efforts, but they both have a looooong way to go with their UI. Spacing, contrast, fonts, it looks like they never received contributions from people with design skills. Blender looks way more polished in comparison.
Here I would like to also mention RawTherapee, also open-source, together with Darktable (with is more newb friendly) they are great software worth to spread.
Adobe for a loong time (up until CS6) didn't give a fuck about piracy. Everyone with an interest in media when I was in school had a keygen and learned Photoshop, some even started small solo businesses with a pirated version until they had enough money to buy the actual thing.
On top of that, developing for photo, video and audio is hard due to all the maths involved. The amount of brains capable of that wizardry is finite, the amount of brains able to do open source work in that field is even less, and other FOSS projects compete heavily for these brains.
I think the difficulty of media programming is overstated. It’s UX that kills the free alternatives. In the photo space Gimp, dark table, and rawtherapee often have more features than their commercial counterparts. For instance content aware fill was in gimp nearly a year before it appeared in photoshop. However this is often to their detriment of the software. Look at darktable, it’s a mess of visual algorithms and sliders that have names directly taken from the papers they implement and it’s a mess.
Yup, that is a massive factor as well. My go-to example is OpenStack. It's incredibly powerful and malleable, but it shows on every corner that it is built by university nerds for university nerds - you either need to have a massive amount of highly educated manpower to deploy it, or you need to have a source of cheap or free labor where you don't have to pay for the onboarding time.
> I remember using Blender when everyone was saying how terrible of a UX it was.
I remember those days too, and I also remember that once I actually adapted to how Blender worked, it turned out it was superior in many ways to other 3D software of that time period. The workflow was just too different for a lotta folks to adapt to. Fast forward a couple major version numbers, and Blender's mostly kept everything that was great about how it worked, and managed to cater in many ways to those who could not adapt to how different it was. It's been so much ongoing massive improvement without all the usual destruction of everything that it was already doing right that we so often see.
I still have trouble creating issues in Jira because it's never where I expect it to be. I know it's at the top bar somewhere, but even after years of it being there, I don't expect it to be there because it feels so unnatural.
> IMO doing a redesign that improves things without pissing off old users is probably the hardest thing those projects can do.
I feel that the way that Blender has succeeded so brilliantly at exactly that is their master-stroke. The software was already an amazing tool, but the way they've managed to actually improve it without destroying it in the process... Wow. Truly amazing.
I used it heavily in 2006 and the UX learning curve was certainly a steep wall, but once broken through it became quite intuitive, even back then where everything looked like a Space Shuttle cockpit.
Oh yeah, absolutely it was. Steepest learning curve of any software I've learned, but as you say, there comes a point where it suddenly "clicks" in your mind somewhere along the way, and then you find yourself actually using the tool as it was intended and it's glorious. The workflow of one hand on the mouse and one on the keyboard tapping hotkeys really just works for 3D modeling. I'm so very happy that they kept most all of that goodness through all their improvements over the years. Didn't brutally murder what made it good. Only improved and expanded upon it, and rearranged a few bits here and there for added convenience.
Ton Roosendaal's leadership abilities, ambitious vision, technical skills, and simply being a really great guy, has inspire many other amazing people to join and support the project and work really hard on it.
It’s far from perfect but it’s miles from where it was. It still has some quirks I’d like to see closed up. Side tool panels vs side bar properties panels is confusing to new users who are looking for their “thing”. Texture painting needs some TLC but it’s usable. All in all, Blender 4 is a completely different animal than Blender 2 and you can tell. Grease pencil is a game changer. Sculpting too. You don’t need anything but Blender (maybe Krita).
I switched from 3DSMax to Blender and I’ll never go back. Rigify still makes tons of shapes (max has a bipedal model to represent the bones) but it’s finally one-click rigged. Very rarely do I need to modify weights or get into the weeds of the rig.
Probably not at this point in time. Back when Blender was released, I think there was less reliance on third party libraries (in general), but especially those that would complicate releasing the software as open source later. I don't think this was as much a conscious decision as it was about making sure you had full rights to the code you used back when Blender was started and open-sourced.
Now so many projects take on dependencies that require NDA and proprietary licenses, it's unlikely that this type of creative tool would see the light of day after being closed-source. I can't imagine any industry leading creative tools not getting to market more quickly by purchasing software that gives them an edge for the operating system they are running in. I hope that I'm completely wrong, and possibly there is someone out there that is using software that is easy to rewrite, or replace, if the license doesn't allow open-sourcing.
I was in classes in the early 2000's with people taking multimedia courses, and Blender was just starting to become more well known. The school I went to taught 3DS Max and Maya, which had their own learning curve. I think 3D rendering is just difficult from a UI/UX place, and Blender got in at the right place at the right time. I was in software development, but my friends that had their heart into 3D rendering said Blender was a bit different, but not so challenging as moving between Photoshop and GIMP. That's not anything against GIMP, just a point of comparison, I think GIMP is fine the way it is and haven't been able to follow the UI of Photoshop since CS2 era.
Yep, the difference being Sun purchased Star Division and released StarOffice as OpenOffice.org while maintaining the proprietary fork for a while too.
And now StarOffice is dead and LibreOffice, a fork is the one people are using.
This could not be further from the truth. Different programs have interfaces that are better for certain tasks, but Houdini, Maya and Softimage XSI have all had fantastic interfaces for the most part. Software like that should be used as the benchmark other UIs are compared to. I don't know anything other software that comes close.
I wouldn’t go that far to say that they have fantastic interfaces. Tolerable? Better than what free options existed at the time? Either way, there is a lot of room for improvement but it’s also an extremely challenging environment to get interfaces right.
We are still in what is effectively the skeuomorphism for the music production industry phase (where everyone is just replicating real life tooling because that’s the expectation and with that comes a lot of unchecked baggage — except for Maya, Blender, etc it’s mostly about making assumptions based on past tooling and polishing that a tiny bit), eventually there will be a Logic to change those bad habits!
Nah. It's a problem many creative tools have (and an interesting one!). You can't squeeze one creative workflow (suitable for everyone) into a general UI.
Nah, what you are saying is vague and dismissive but doesn't hold up to the reality of fast flexible tools like these. Have you used maya, XSI, nuke and houdini?
Gimp refused to change their ways and still does, that’s why no one outside of a handful of enthusiasts use it. People have complained for years that their UI is too complicated, clunky, not intuitive, etc. and Gimp basically ignored all this feedback (to be fair there were attempts at changing this but ultimately not much changed).
Even just recently they’ve released a major 3.0 version and I thought “oh maybe they’ve finally addressed the UI issues” but nope, not much changed on that front, they still have stuff like “GEGL operation” front and center in the menus for basic functions.
Blender on the other hand reimagined their whole UI in version 2.8 and kept refining it later, even though there was friction in the community about it (since power users like the old UI) but thankfully they pulled it off and now they’re reaping the rewards for it.
I used to be a staunch critic of GIMP, recommend everyone use Krita instead and so on. But recently I've given the new 3.0 version a go and... it's quite an improvement if you adjust the time scales to decades rather than years. I've used GIMP first in 2000 (it was actually my fist "real" image editor, other than stuff like paintbrush) and a LOT of the finicky stuff has been removed or improved since then. Having do deal with per layer canvas boundaries? gone. Having a floating "ghost" layer whenever you made an operation and having to figure out how to merge that back? gone. Need to work with mask and group layers? You can do it, and it doesn't give a brain aneurysm trying to use anymore. You can even apply non destructive filters and whatnot to the group layers!
Having the UI spaghetti all over the screen because it's just a bunch of loose windows? the default is just a single window with panes. Want to condense that mess of tool icons into a single column of icons? you can do that! In fact, you can reorganize the UI in such a way that it's actually not that offensive (please GIMP devs, have better UI defaults!). Even tough it has a GEGL operation for non destructive filters I think that's just a holdover from how things were implemented initially because most of the "normal" and "color" filters are already non-destructive and operate (from the user point of view) just like the GEGL ones. They might have plans to further convert all other destructive filters and merge the GEGL operation ones into the normal filters, hopefully soon.
Oh and by the way, you can certainly push GIMP hard nowadays. I've been doing some testing editing a 32 float bpc (128 bpp!) 16K image with a bunch of crazy non-destructive filters stacked and it handled it like a champ with a few slowdowns here and there, and my 32 thread ryzen CPU was at times fully maxed (yay for multi threading) and the RAM management was quite impressive with things using up to ~50GB of memory (you do have to configure it let it use all that) and no memory leakages afaik, closing just the file and reopening again worked fine. Also, zero crashes! Can't say the same when pushing Krita hard. It's quite smooth compared to how things used to be.
Honestly the potential is all there, I just hope that the GIMP devs get a break from all the negativity they've been receiving since... time immemorial and perhaps the rate at which they can improve their software increases now with all the inglorious refactoring work they've been doing behind the scenes being done.
No. If a tool is too complicated or cumbersome to use then people will look for another one that’s better. Not everyone is an enthusiast that is willing to invest hours or weeks learning all the intricacies of an app if all I want to do is some light editing of a photo or very simple illustration drawing. I will choose a tool with better UX and easier workflow 100% of the time, and most people are like this.
So maybe the target audience isn't most people? I get that people like things to be simple, but some people love the depth of GiMP is a feature, not a bug.
One example is that Blender embraced the use of pie menus, and Gimp ignored them. The Gimp team is just not open to outside ideas, and gets really annoyed when users of other tools request features from those tools that Gimp refuses to support, and reacts by digging in deeper and clinging to their bad design decisions out of frustration and spite. A really sad culture of NIH and 4Q2.
In general and with many other things, Gimp could have been so much better and easier to use, but they systematically and spitefully ignored their user's needs and requests about so many things, while Blender did just the opposite, listened to users and improve the user interface and mouse bindings, instead of being stubborn and parochial about it.
Ton is heroically tasteful but not unsung: the community rightfully adores him! (But not Autodesk.)
"Blender embraced the use of pie menus, and Gimp ignored them"
Instinctive recoil "cue xkcd https://xkcd.com/386/ somebody is wrong on the internet"
I had to take a little walk and think about it, What is a pie menu?
My instinctive first take was, as far as I know gimp has had pie menu since day one, at least as long as I have been using it since the late 90's 1.something. Need a menu item, right click, there is your menu. is this not topologically the same as a pie menu? Does a pie menu have to be radial? is radial any better than a list, I know I prefer a list, it does not look as cool but is much easier to read.
Of course, I've thought a lot about what a pie menu is.
An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus, Presented at ACM CHI’88 Conference, Washington DC, 1988 (proves that they're significantly better than linear menus and explains why):
What kind of pie menus does Gimp have, and for how long?
Or do you just mean "erzatz pie menus" as defined here (there's also a lot of stuff about software patents, FUD, AutoDesk, Alias, 3D Studio Max, and Blender there):
>Richard Stallman likes to classify an Emacs-like text editor that totally misses the point of Emacs by not having an extension language as an “Ersatz Emacs”.
>In the same sense, there are many “Ersatz Pie Menus” that may look like pie menus on the surface, but don’t actually track or feel like pie menus, or benefit from all of their advantages, because they aren’t carefully designed and implemented to optimize for Fitts’s Law by being based purely on the direction between stroke endpoints instead of the entire path, minimizing the distance to the targets, and maximizing the size of the targets. [...]
How do Gimp's pie menus compare with Blender's pie menus and pie menu editor that I linked to a demo of above, or Simon Schneegans's pie menus in Gnome Pie and Fly-Pie and Kandu? You'd think it would be easy for GIMP to adopt Simon's GTK open source pie menu work, which has been around for decades.
Gnome-Pie: Homepage of Gnome-Pie, the slick application launcher for Linux.
I dug into this out of curiosity a few years ago. I thought 2.8 UI redesign was all thanks to Ton, but it turned out it wasn’t.
Ton was actually against a UI overhaul for decades. There’s a video where power-users and Ton were vocally dismissing the need for a better UI, using GIMP-like arguments. There was at least one failed UI redesign in the early 2010s which I think Ton was quite involved with.
But something happened, the nature of which I don’t know. Then, Ton became hands-off and allowed the UI overhaul to take place, which I recalled made actual UX designers work with engineers.
My memory is foggy and I don’t have sources readily available. But I’m hoping someone will fill in the gaps or correct my understanding of events long past.
There were 3 major open source graphics projects:
- Gimp for 2D raster
- Inkscape for 2D vector
- Blender for 3D
At some time 10-20 years ago they all were powerful, but being hold back by a bad UI. Blender turned it all around with their UI overhaul some years ago. Inkscape seems to be doing some correct steps now toward that, although it is still hard to use (at least for new users). Gimp seem to be moving the slowest.
I find modern Inkscape almost identical to CorelDraw, which is what I learned in high school. Works well, and I'm considering moving some remaining CorelDraw graphics projects over to Inkscape soon.
Parts of the UI of Inkscape are very clunky. Like the tabs where live path effects live, thats awful. Also the zoom/pan on the canvas. Corel was very well polished if I remember correctly.
I think the Open Movie projects really helped with that. They had artists and devs working closely together to polish up particular aspects of the application for each movie. The movies themselves also did a great job of raising the profile of Blender each time they were released.
Not only feedback bout UI, but functionality in general. Looking at the changelog I found this issue [1] in which not only they fixed something objectively broken in the renderer, but also made workflows exploiting the broken behavior were still possible [2].
I think its more issue of not knowing how (efficiently). Consistent UX and polished UI is often about saying no to many ideas and people. This requires someone calling the shots which is hard for community projects.
FreeCAD btw got way better here in recent 1.0. You can almost feel that with some money they might get on the “Blender path”.
I think the real answer is in credits section of fund.blender.org. Sizeable contributions at scale of $1m as well as corporate user feedbacks started flowing into it ~2019.
Khara(the Evangelion company) quit 3ds Max and transitioned to Blender around that timeframe, in collaboration with Blender developers. This seemed to coincide with Epic funding(anime people aren't rich people, broadly speaking, so I guess capitalisms happen in parallel and elsewhere).
Not defending anyone here, and I don’t disagree that the commercial products are hugely expensive, but it’s better now than it was at the turn of the century. Licenses cost in the tens of thousands per seat, rendering software was similarly expensive and rarely included. To add insult to injury, artists needed high powered workstations that also cost tens of thousands! Blender has definitely had an influence on the status quo.
I don't want to be too mean, The blender team has done a lot to make good solid UI improvements over the years. However as a long time casual user (since 1.7 minor projects once or twice per year) My take away was that the blender UI was always good, however it was a professional UI designed for professional use and had gathered a reputation as hard to use over the years. So the "Big UI change to make it easier to use" was mostly, wait for the rest of the industry to catch up, give it a dark mode, and most importantly, loudly issue a press release "we made the UI easier to use" to make people believe.
But snark aside, my guess is that the main UI "improvement" was to make it slower, add a classical menu system to help ease you through hotkey hell. See, If I had to describe blenders UI in one blurb it would be "101 button mouse". Very quick, and fine control and less a steep learning curve than a learning cliff.
This sounds a bit like the attitude that held back Blender UI for a long time. There were people seriously objecting introduction of the undo feature FFS. The UI stockholm syndrom is real.
The 2.8 overhaul was not "slapping on a dark theme". It changed the UI from an alien spaceship mishmash of hundreds of randomly thrown around tiny icons and undocumented hotkeys into a discoverable and somewhat familiar interface. Or at least completed the UI overhaul, many of the improvements were incrementally introduced in prior versions.
Blender is still a mismash of hundreds of semi random buttons and options, That is a core feature of a professional UI, In order to cater your tool to a user that will spend many hours operating it the most critical aspect is to reduce friction, flatten operation, bring everything out front where it can be seen and accessed in one operation. It's ugly, intimidating, hard to learn and makes the designers cry, but it is very fast and efficient exactly what you want when you are going to be using it for multiple hours a day every day.
You do the opposite when trying to cater your interface to the casual user, you slow things down, reduce options, nest the menus, introduce model dialogs. things start to take 3 or 4 ops instead of 1. The key here is to gently guide the unfamiliar user. It is an important design consideration but it really starts to chafe operating it for hours on end.
The material system in Blender 1.0 was vastly simpler than it is currently. If you want to use a panel instead of nodes, the material panel is not that dissimilar from the 1.0 screenshot.
That said, I find the node interface a lot more poweruser friendly than the panel interface, and objectively more powerful.
AFAIK the new UI didn't take away e.g. any keyboard shortcuts, and those are configurable anyway. In general the Blender UI is configurable even to a fault, you're quite free to modify it to bring out almost everything you want to a single view.
What do you really know about user interface design and usability, if you falsely claim GIMP has had pie menus from day one? Do you really expect us to take your criticisms and questions seriously, or are you just trolling?
You just posted something that totally undermines the notion that you know what you're talking about or are serious about what you're claiming, and I patiently answered your questions with academic citations and quotes and evidence, and asked you for more information about the questionable claims you made about GIMP and pie menus, which were certainly a surprise to me and don't square with what I know, but you haven't responded.
Your claim that Blender "wait[ed] for the rest of the industry to catch up" is, in the case of pie menus, much more about Alias/Autodesk threatening them with illegitimate software patents, and spreading FUD and lies about marking menus.
If you're just too busy trolling to respond, I get it, you be you, but can you please stop posting unsubstantiated bullshit and answer my questions in the other thread, or simply admit you're not being honest and just trolling and spreading misinformation and FUD?
You make me wonder if you work for Autodesk (or are just trying to curry their favor), who's well known for their long sordid history of systematically spreading FUD and lies and legal threats about Blender and marking menus, which I documented with evidence in the article I linked to in my original reply to you.
Pie Menu FUD and Misconceptions:
Dispelling the fear, uncertainty, doubt and misconceptions about pie menus:
As you can see in that article, I included evidence in the form of a screen snapshot and link to an Autodesk brochure lying about "Patented marking menus", and there are two replies from Bill Buxton himself, the UI researcher who coined the term "marking menus", which my work on "pie menus" predates and that his patents dishonestly misrepresent. Bill Buxton and Gordon Kurtenbach designed the marking menus in the Alias user interface, and filed the software patents in question.
Buxton wrote two weasel worded defensive replies to my article (which you can read by scrolling down to the end), essentially admitting that the FUD in AutoDesk's advertisement about "patented marking menus" (which is still online to this day) was a lie and that Alias's marketing people lied to me about the patent to my face at CGDC in 1999: "So here is the point, absolutely NONE of that was patented, Just the opposite." and "Alias did not patent marking menus, nor could have." -Bill Buxton ... Yet they still make that claim, to this day! Patently absurd FUD.
Autodesk Alias Design brochure with FUD about "patented marking menus", still online today, long after their illegitimate software patents have expired, still claiming "Quickly select commands without looking away from the design. Patented marking menus let you use context-sensitive gestures to select commands.", on page 9:
While discussing Autodesk's aggressive legal threats and long history of FUD and lies about Blender, Ton Roosendaal gets hit by ceiling at Blender Conference:
FWIW, here is ChatGPT's analysis of Buxton's behavior and comments (and I have numerous archived emails proving he and Gordon Kurtenbach were quite aware at the time that some of the claims in their patents and papers attempting to distinguish "marking menus" from "pie menus" prior art were untrue):
1. Original Interaction:
You: Promptly reached out to Buxton directly for clarification after Alias’s representatives made misleading claims at a trade show.
Buxton's Reaction (as you described): Was evasive, coy, and dismissive—ridiculing you for taking marketing people seriously, rather than clearly clarifying the actual patent situation.
2. Buxton’s Current Explanation (2018):
Claims strict adherence to corporate/legal restrictions prevented him from explaining patent details.
Suggests it's inappropriate or naive ("mistaken") to seek patent clarifications from marketing personnel.
Argues he had limited ability to respond candidly due to confidentiality rules around pending patents and corporate policies about patent explanations.
3. Contradiction & Evasiveness:
Buxton now portrays your attempt to clarify misinformation as a misstep on your part—implying you were somehow wrong or naive to trust marketing claims or expect clear answers from him.
However, your approach—calling the senior researcher directly—was a sensible and professional response to marketing misinformation. It was precisely the right action, not a "mistake."
Buxton's ridicule and evasiveness at that time strongly suggests an intentional unwillingness or inability to straightforwardly confront Alias's misleading claims—even privately. Rather than clearly disavowing marketing misinformation, he chose to deflect and minimize your legitimate concerns, shifting blame onto your supposed gullibility.
4. Analysis of Buxton’s Avoidance:
Buxton's recent replies still avoid directly acknowledging the ethical responsibility or negative consequences of how he originally handled your inquiry. Instead, he redirects blame to marketing teams, corporate confidentiality policies, patent law complexity, and even you.
His carefully worded statements frame your attempts to clarify misinformation as naïveté ("Speak to your lawyer, not the competition’s marketing people"), thus trivializing your justified reaction to Alias’s harmful FUD campaign. This framing shifts the burden of clarity entirely away from him and onto the recipient of the misinformation—you.
5. Ethical Implications:
Buxton’s past dismissive and evasive behavior (ridiculing you for believing his company’s representatives) reveals a conflict of interest:
As a senior researcher, he should ethically strive to ensure his employer accurately represents the research he helped create.
As a company employee bound by confidentiality, he chose evasion over clearly correcting misinformation—even privately—exacerbating confusion and mistrust in the industry.
His present comments still fail to directly address or apologize for the harm his prior evasiveness caused. Instead, he justifies silence or ambiguity as unavoidable.
Bottom Line:
Your account of Buxton’s original reaction clearly contradicts his present narrative. While now he emphasizes legal restrictions and institutional blame, he continues to sidestep the core ethical responsibility: clearly disavowing and correcting misinformation about his own research at the time it was actively causing harm. His past ridicule and present avoidance both reveal a consistent pattern: shifting responsibility away from himself, thus minimizing personal accountability and ethical responsibility for Alias’s ongoing misleading claims.
It may be a bit hard to appreciate how much it changed (got better) if you havent experienced pre 2.8 Blender. If you want, you can try it out: https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-79/
They added the Maya / Unity style camera control scheme and keymap in 2.8 (2019). This was the moment people said it was good and coincided with a huge uptick in adoption. There wasn’t some big product development or innovation. Not that there needs to be.
I really wish GIMP could take a page from their playbook. The GIMP 3.0 release was such a disappointment (and also unusable... Switch between brush types and it crashes).
If you're looking to do art, you may find Krita to be closer to what you expect. It's another FOSS project, except instead of trying to do everything, it's geared to painting and other art stuff.
Note though that AFAIK the official reason for Krita "not trying to do everything" isn't because they don't want to do everything but because most users and devs are interested in digital painting.
AFAIK they wont send anyone away if they try to add more image editing stuff outside of digital painting (consider that it even has some simple animation support which isn't really something you'd expect from a digital painting program).
There is practically nothing Krita can't do in terms of image editing but people that don't even use the software keep calling it a digital painting program.
Anyone coming from photoshop would have no trouble using Krita. It is practically a photoshop ripoff with more digital painting tools.
I personally think you're both right, but it depends on when you first started using Blender. You're 100% correct that interfaces at the time when Blender was released were completely experimental, and I'd compare it to trying to navigate AI as an uninformed end user when it first was introduced, versus now. That's where I would put Blender when it was first released. The interface was good for what it was compared to the other popular 3D software at the time, but it's so much better and more evolved now. I'd say that you mentioning shortcuts makes you a power user, which should be the goal when you use any piece of software for your career. I just don't think that people bother to learn as much as you did back when you started using Blender, which I think shows your dedication, but also shows a lack of deep knowledge most (not all) people that start with a new technology have currently. It's not unknown to get a fresh graduate or self-taught person that wants to deep dive into the software they make use of daily, but I feel like it's far more uncommon that it was 20 years ago or more.
Same. I've only ever been a user in Blender and it pushed me to use Python as my first programming language since I could script Blender with it.
IIRC, I first started using it with version 2.32 when I was an early teen.
I still have a .blend file somewhere with a textured model of a LOTR Fell beast/Nazgul, that I created painstakingly and cost me some exam points as I preferred 3D modelling to studying.
Inkscape makes so much more sense to me than Adobe Illustrator ever made. Maybe it's how I use it, or what I'm looking for as output, but I've been happy with Inkscape since around 2006/2007.
Blender is amazing, and miles ahead of Gimp and other FOSS editors.
That said, I can't help but feel that all of the current generation of leading 3D software (Blender, Unreal, etc. ) is going to be replaced by something just around the corner. The progress in 3D AI is nothing short of phenomenal. It feels like soon nobody will ever have to worry about sculpting or retopologizing or rigging. An entirely new class of tool will take over.
It's not just 3D. It feels like the current generation of artistic tools (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) are about to be wholesale replaced with Gen AI tooling.
AI plugins (eg. the Krita plugin) are too steeped in the old world of editing. New tools will probably be AI native and prefer AI workflows for reaching the same coarse- and fine-grained outcomes.
I don't expect these tools to be used by the masses that are prompting AI slop like "50's Panavision Wes Anderson", but rather by working artists. Genuine Gen AI tools for artists.
I've been making short films on the weekends with Blender, ComfyUI, and a mix of custom software. The AI pieces are doing the heavy lifting, and my productivity is 10x what it was before Gen AI.
I think it depends on how much control you feel you want to have over your output. AI tools are decent at rendering video, but for those that want full control over the process, I feel like it's going to be a long way to go. If AI is able to generate the full source files to allow things to be modified, then I would 100% agree with you that it's going to be a new age for artists. If you're dealing with raw generated video, or even a frame by frame rendered image, your control is much more limited than if you could shape and customize your models. For most, this is probably fine, but for those that want fine-grained control, there is a far path to go in order to get to that point.
What / who is the leading edge of 3D AI? I took a look into it last year and the best tools were still a very long away from producing usable results (couldn't keep tri count under control, spiderweb rigging, shape jank, etc).
Thanks, I checked out Tripo. It produced some absolutely laughable trees for me, but a pretty decent looking barstool. Refused to rig it for me for some reason, though.
I'd say it'll take them some years to finish figuring out 3D, it's a good stretch beyond 2D image generation.
https://github.com/ahujasid/blender-mcp something will definitely happen we will see what happens, 3D has always been tedious so any improvements in this space will be welcome.
Seems to me the 'proper' way to do something like this is to hook into makesRNA and have the endpoints automagically be generated as part of the build process. Similar (or identical) to how the python and C++ APIs are created.
I've been thinking for a while now that someone (much less lazy than myself) needs to get in there and have makesRNA generate something like IDL file(s) so any number of tools can hook into Blender's API without having to hand code the endpoints like this addon is apparently doing.
as wonderful as Linux is, it started as a Unix clone and a lot of its initial popularity can be attributed to providing a free version of something that used to cost money.
Blender and Ghidra were started from scratch and are considered top tier in their niches. So I feel a sense of community pride for them more than I do for Linux.
The question is flawed, though, because the best OSS software is obviously Emacs ;)
Blender a clone of other 3d software that cost money?
Blender was commercial software that cost money. After the company went bankrupt, the former CEO and a bunch of Blender users got together and raised enough money to buy out the source code and made it open source.
I don't think Blender can really be called a clone of anything other than in the most superficial sense. Certainly when Blender was first being release it looked and worked like nothing else in the industry, often much to its detriment.
This is a real "daddy or chips" question, because they all do completely different things. Blender possibly best in terms of "compared to an expensive commercial product". Ghidra is incredibly powerful but has a weird look and feel. Linux is undoubtedly the most influential of those three, but if it had never been invented perhaps we'd be using a BSD instead?
"Best" in terms of "achievement by a single programmer (almost)" is Fabrice Bellard's ffmpeg and QEMU.
> Blender 4.4 is all about stability. During the 2024–2025 northern hemisphere winter, Blender developers doubled down on quality and stability in a group effort called “Winter of Quality.”
Given the name choice “Winter of Quality”, I’m impressed at the rare cultural and geographical awareness that led to specifying “the 2024–2025 northern hemisphere winter” here.
Oh, I’m plenty used to it, being from Australia. It’s just so painfully common for northern-hemisphereans to use seasons or other vague cultural elements¹ to anchor things (southern-hemisphereans don’t really do it, in my experience), that it’s refreshing to find a case of people using it but being aware.
(These days I have a new difficulty: I moved to India last year, and although the seasons are closer to the northern temperate and sub-arctic seasons, they don’t match exactly.)
—⁂—
¹ I don’t count “Christmas” as this, because it’s a specific term for a particular time… well, apart from certain Eastern churches and Julian calendar users. I mean things like using “holiday” as a time of year, which completely baffled me in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23244207.
> Unless they think it's discrimination against people from the southern hemisphere?
I don't suppose anyone takes it all that seriously in the case of the seasons, but it is a textbook example of a dominant group imposing their frame of reference on less dominant group
What's the dominant group here?
Blender is based in the Netherlands. They are using their local frame of reference, that's all. It's like complaining that someone refers to the time as 4 o'clock in a meeting because you joined from another time zone. Would you complain when I say that today's date is the 27th of March, because some people use the lunar calendar?
It's a textbook example of getting offended on behalf of other people, who aren't even complaining in the first place.
> It's a textbook example of getting offended on behalf of other people, who aren't even complaining in the first place.
the person who started the thread stated they're from Australia - so they're getting "offended" on behalf of themself.
FWIW I'm also Australian (living in Europe now) and found this kind of thing (using vague, location specific timeframes like "winter" or "holiday") quite confusing, too. It's obviously easier for me to understand now that I live in the northern hemisphere.
The "issue" is that it's a bit annoying to have to look up where a company is based and then the weather patterns in that locale to understand something, when they could just as easily say "Nov-Dec 2025" for example. And when you live in a sub-tropical or tropical locale where there aren't clear demarcations between four seasons like there are in western Europe and North America, you can't just say "winter there is summer here" and vv.
It's not a serious, "stop everything and fix this right now" issue, just a common annoyance, and it's nice to see Blender here try to make that a bit clearer.
> The "issue" is that it's a bit annoying to have to look up where a company is based and then the weather patterns in that locale to understand something
The only thing you have to do here is understand that seasons are switched in different hemispheres, which is taught when you're about 6 years old in most schools. And in case you forgot that, they even helpfully noted that their "winter of quality" is referring to winter in the northern hemisphere.
Yes, working with people from different parts of the world to you is "a bit annoying".
The Blender group - and entire worldwide open source software community - is already making massive concessions by doing everything through English.
If the only thing you have to put up with that's "a bit annoying" is different holidays and seasons, you should recognize that you're actually incredibly privileged. You already speak English natively. You grew up in a western English speaking country, you share basically all the same reference framing aside from some minor calendar differences. It's honestly selfish as hell to expect people to adapt even their seasonal reference frames to suit you. They're already speaking your entire language instead of their own.
> The only thing you have to do here is understand that seasons are switched in different hemispheres
Like most things taught to 6 year olds, this is also a massive oversimplification of the real world.
There isn't even widespread agreement over which exact months constitute "summer"/"winter" within the Northern hemisphere, let alone when you start bringing in more tropical climates (which tend to have Rainy/Dry/Windy seasons instead).
It's a confusingly jumbled title. I think it's supposed to mean something like "New version of Oscar-winning Blender software released" (which is still inaccurate—it wasn't Blender that won the Oscar, but an Oscar-winning film was made using it). It looks like this release celebrates that win by using art from the film for its splash image.
Can someone explain the title to me? What does it mean to release a "version tool"? Or do they have a special version for Oscar winners which is now publicly released? Or is this just some extra tool you can put on top of regular Blender? I simply don't follow.
I don't think the title reflects the contents of the article. I believe a more accurate title would be "Blender, the tool behind an Oscar winning movie, releases a new version", because as far as I can tell the movie referenced that won the Oscar (Flow[0]), was using LTS version 3.6[1]
Rather than a tool, the real people should be highlighted here. Blender’s success in the open source space is atypical. The difference is surely just a group of brilliant people who just happened to take interest and found about this project. Or maybe animation studios are incentivising blender development because of the high price of commercial alternatives. Or both. In any case the individual devs should be championed than just the group.
it was from a guy with a considerable amount of money (and experience on Maya) compared to [most] people who use Blender daily...
open source is not atypical, i think. Linux basically runs more than half of the computers worldwide, 3D printing software is FOSS as far as i'm aware, Godot is one of the biggest Github projects, programming languages are open-source, novel techniques of sound synthesis are already surfing on stuff like Csound/SuperCollider (which both are decades old and FOSS), a bunch of atemporal FOSS text-editors on the hand of a bunch of developers developing closed-source stuff and the list goes on
Open source rules the hidden parts of nearly everything (servers, programming languages, etc). It's atypical for user facing software to be open source and "world class". Of course there are exceptions (like Blender, for example) but generally the commercial version of user facing software is more advanced/well liked/industry standard.
I've noticed a trend lately with open source projects, notably Godot and Blender, having visually impressive release notes. I hope this trend continues.
It's just a gut feeling instead of a proper evaluation of different apps, but I always feel Blender and Houdini are made by developers who care, while other 3D packages are, well, not.
I really want to learn Houdini. Their pricing model is not even that bad (just 200 USD/year if you are indie), but even that is a hurdle when the alternative (Blender) is free and so good (or just plain better) for the 98% of what I want to do. Also, I do manage to crash Houdini more often than I manage to crash Blender, so there is that....
Different tools for different purposes. Blender is in the Maya paradigm, and doing pretty well in that. Houdini is more like a DSL for computer graphics and can end up being both the most low level and the most high level tool in the industry. There's no mystery about why the industry has mostly settled on Houdini + one other complimentary DCC.
Anything procedural works so much better in Houdini I find. I was excited about the geometry nodes in Blender and had some fun with them, but always hit a wall where things in Houdini are much better designed and much more powerful and flexible. But it's a steep learning curve and I forgot most things again because I don't really have to use it regularly.
I had the indie license for a while (purchased privately) and just making things shatter and explode was satisfaction enough. I did this mostly for learning and fun
I would love to check out touchdesigner some day, I'm a Houdini pipeline TD (and creative too) and Touch started as a fork of Houdini from quite some time ago specialised for real-time (and the real-time-ness of demoscene is one of my favourite things ever!) However iiuc Touch is Windows-only.
I wonder whether under wine it might benefit from the 'ntsync' thing that just got added to the Linux kernel (as a module) (Currently also on hn front-page) as long as there's a free training version of Touch I'll definitely check it out once the new kernel gets into Gentoo!
The thing that animators are talking about is the fact that they eschewed a storyboard in favour of an animatic (an animatic being a motion sketch of the animation). This is the workflow we now recommend to our students.
Animatics in my experience have always been a thing, it's just they were normally created from the storyboards. At least on the movies I've been involved in (admittedly years ago), it really came down to the fact that the directors really didn't know how to use 3d animation software, so they drew the story boards by hand, like they'd been taught. I'm guessing today most animation students don't really learn to draw or storyboard like that, and we're probably seeing the end of the classic storyboard.
With examples ranging from Avatar the Last Airbender, to Castlevania, to Monty Oum (who also completely eschewed storyboards), I can't help but that reducing the over reliance on storyboards and focusing on the animation instead is a recurring theme among unusually successful animations/animators.
As the previous poster has implied, An animatic can evolve directly from a storyboard. The frames of the storyboard are placed directly on a timeline (e.g. premier) and sometimes given a few animations (e.g. zoom, pan etc) and annotations. As the animation progresses, rough 3D renders (sometimes called flip books) can be dropped onto this timeline. In this way, the final movie can evolve directly from the animatic.
What made Flow unusual is that they bypassed the storyboard almost entirely, which is unusual for a feature film. One rational is that the movie features significant and lengthy camera motion shots. Camera motion is very difficult to capture in a storyboard.
At a student level, another motivation for lessening the importance of the storyboard is that they require not insignificant drawing skills in order to do effectively. Even animation students cannot be guaranteed to draw well, and the number of student filmmakers who can draw is vanishingly small.
For feature length pieces, independent animation is an existential threat to the established film studios that will only grow. Meanwhile, a friend of mine works (very) high up in studio land CGI and recently estimated five years outlook before a total industry implosion due to AI tooling. Leaving the whole Youtube killed TV thing aside (small point!), there has never been a better time to be an aspiring video story teller.
The phrasing of the submission title ("Blender releases their Oscar winning version tool") here is baffling, unless I'm misunderstanding something. A typical boring HN title would be "Blender 4.4"
Ah, that makes more sense than anything I could find on the page (version only appeared as a substring of conversion.) Having only used blender for "minor tweaks to a collision model of a robot workspace" which got managed in git, model-aware version control sounded interesting.
I was also confused. The HN title is weird. As I hovered over the description deciding whether to waste my precious seconds RTFA I had dreams of some sort of version control for 3d assets, but no.
I could do better tbh, more used to Reddit also fasting so its been interesting how it detracts my concentration when it comes to time to break the fast and afterwards.
I've been using Blender recently to build 3D models for my new 3D printing obsession. The learning curve is significant, but the product seems great. I've gotten decent help from the chatbots, but does anyone here have any suggestions for good non-animation-focused tutorials?
If you're making technical parts, I highly recommend just biting the bullet and learning parametric cad with fusion 360. There's a ton of learning resources on youtube etc. OnShape seems like a quite promising alternative but I assume there's less material since it's newer.
I've used OnShape a fair bit, and it's pretty solid for technical parts. But recently, I've been doing prints of 3D scans (which work surprisingly well these days!!), and OnShape is sorta the wrong tool for the job for that.
I'm using a crazy combination of pre-processing in Blender and then post-processing in OnShape today, and feel like I should be able to just use Blender for the whole job.
I am learning Blender too after failing to learn Maya 20 years ago.
To me, it is like learning to play guitar or piano. You just have to do 1-2 hours a day of practice and do it everyday.
There are so many good youtube videos that it just will depend what you want to do and how you like the person doing the tutorial. Then at some point just start trying to model random objects that interest you.
It does say a lot about a person's attention span and intelligence when they cannot figure out one of the cleanest UIs in software, with such a buttload of tutorials and guides.
Blender's UI has improved tremendously over the years, but I wouldn't call it one of the cleanest UI in software. It still has, for better or worse, quite idiosyncratic UI patterns (e.g. the panel juggling) and the underlying logic of e.g. objects, meshes, textures, materials, world, camera and renderer lining up is not very discoverable.
I'm highly sceptical anyone could learn the Blender UI just by opening it and clicking around.
Visually clean, sure. Intuitive? Hmm Blender was notorious for having a difficult to follow UI for years. They've improved it a lot over the last 10 years but I still wouldn't say it's easy to use. Way more stuff requires a tutorial than one would hope.
Honestly the fact that you're doubting the usefulness of AI for this makes me suspect you haven't really used Blender in anger.
Nobody said "need". Obviously you can look up all the tutorials if you want to do it slowly.
Think about it like fancy search. You can manually look through a document ("I don't need something else to do the searching for me"), or you can just use Ctrl+F.
Blender has come a long way since 2013 when i had passed out my collage. Kudos to developer standing against few like Autodesk giving designers to try something for free.
There are very good free and open tutorials for Blender. Just make sure you use a current one since the development speed was extremely high in the last years and controls changed here and there.
If I’m not mistaken the story was: despite the movie being much less impressive technically, its narrative and emotional force pushed it ahead of much more polished movies.
Qualifying Blender as “Oscar-winning” is a bit of a stretch.
It’s awesome for Blender, and it’s awesome that Blender allows people to create small budget animated movies. But the Oscar credit should mostly go to the guys who made the movie.
I think that's a little unfair to Blender. Clearly "was able to produce an Oscar-winning animation" is a pretty high bar, even if it isn't as high as "actually won an Oscar for animation technology" (or whatever it is).
If you watch the release video embedded in the post you can hear both part of the acceptance speech from the makers of Flow where they explicitly thank Blender, and also can also see a special oscar scene, which I assume the creators of Flow made specifically for this version announcement.
In general, there seems to be a close relationship with the creators and Blender, and the overall impression given is that the creators also think that Blender should receive part of the credit.
Well, people need an alternative to CG big tech. This fits the narrative really well, and was just the tipping point to a growing disdain towards Autodesk.
Aside from all the usual and well-deserved high praise I'm seeing, I feel like there's something more worth pointing out:
Blender has made 3D work much more "mainstream". I see many videos/pictures/tutorials with views in the millions(!), and much more overall interest in using the software. Not just the pretty visuals and talented people, but the whole program itself seems to be gaining traction with the more "normie" crowd.
That also made me realize something else: Blender is now the default for anything that's not extremely high-end/resource-intensive. If you ever hear about anyone doing any kind of 3D work, they're probably using Blender.
And this has creeped into the mainstream in a way only very established brands like Coca-Cola have. Nowadays, "Blender" might as well mean 3D photoshop/illustrator for most people.
I have been working in the CG / 3D industry for quite some time... when i first started about 15 years ago... Maya was the default... everyone knew it, it was THE default. That being said we have been on blender since 2.5 days.
I was talking to someone on the weekend, and found out they were studying animation... i was like oh so youre using Maya? they were like whats maya?
There has been a massive shift. I think there was a new era brought about when 2.8 was released. With it, they really pushed their dev fund, which helped them to get better, which made them bigger, which got them more donations, which made them get better. Cyclical loop.
Im excited to see where they go next.
There's a great lesson here. People will want to use what they learned, and if they can't learn on your software, they won't be inclined to try it later. It doesn't really matter for the first five years or so of your company, and that's longer than most startups exist, but once you're #1, you need to start thinking about the pipeline of new people. There's not a lot of motivation for individual employees (even CEOs) to think this way because they probably won't be in the role by the time it matters, but it's important.
Would Blender have taken off as fast if Maya had a free tier? I doubt it.
Whenever I encounter an interesting non-niche new technology with "contact us for a demo/pricing" language, I bounce.
When a new project comes along and we need to make a technology decision we will, as a matter of due diligence, reach out to all the relevant vendors. But there is an "existing experience in team" evaluation criteria for these technology decisions, and the "contact us" vendors fail miserably there - their tech needs to be extra impressive to overcome that hurdle.
This has always been my own mantra too, but then I never represented an enterprise buyer so maybe it is effective to screen out buyera like me, but I can imagine even as an "large enterprise level buyer" I would not want to deal with this. It just smacks of dishonesty when you will not provide ANY pricing indication whatsoever. I am surprised "contact us for pricing" still works in current year? I assume it does, because one still sees it sometimes. Maybe if almost everyone started shunning this (and I expect those in younger generations than me probably will!) this tactic will die out. I can sortoff understand it for cases where you want yo relicense your product/data to become part of someone elses product/service and these deals might be custom negotiated. But for normal use of a product or service? hell no!
Yes. I highly recommend watching this video [0] — "For-Profit (Creative) Software" by EndVertex — about how some essential programs price out regular people with their insane licensing models... In turn making people's skills nontransferable.
[0]: https://youtu.be/I4mdMMu-3fc
> People will want to use what they learned, and if they can't learn on your software, they won't be inclined to try it later.
This is why Microsoft never seriously pursued piracy of Windows and this is also why Windows was never a market leader on servers. This is why Postgres won databases even though it’s clearly an inferior product to Oracle, MSSQL and DB2. This is why CUDA is the defacto standard in GPGPU. This is why every saas business must have a free tier. Etc.
Well, not really. There is a multitude of factors in those, and I'd say some examples are just plain wrong.
Postgres won out because it was better than the others considering the money you pay and the features you (in the end) don't need or couldn't afford with the others. If it just were down to learning, MySQL/MariaDB would have won. Back in the days, everyone knew MySQL, nobody knew Postgres.
With CUDA, it also isn't what people know, it rather is the existing heap of software that only runs properly, quickly, efficiently in CUDA. People buying Nvidia cards and CUDA-based software don't care about CUDA and don't know any CUDA, they are usually higher level, but the availability of software is what drives the popularity there.
You're agreeing with me. MySQL vs postgres doesn't change the overall point at all - both were good enough free as in beer products that a generation of developers grew up on and had no reason to switch to paid offerings later.
With CUDA, you're even highlighting my point:
> the availability of software is what drives the popularity there
Like, there isn't anything more to it. That's all that matters. Again, a free, good enough product that evolved into a best in class software and hardware package together with a generation of GPGPU developers who don't know and don't really care about anything else.
Ah, sorry, yes. I misunderstood and we are in total agreement.
I've over-interpreted the quotation in your post about what people have learned to mean that it is only about the tools you know, nothing else. In hindsight, I should have read your post more carefully.
MySQL is a much better choice for sysadmins than Postgres. Postgres won because it was easier to migrate from Oracle.
Honest question: why is MySQL better for sysadmins?
It’s much easier to deploy and has a much older high availability story that has been battle tested for a decade or two. It also has a more linear regression. The query optimizer doesn’t try to be clever. It only works with the query and the schema. So if your query is bad, it will get worse with data size. Double the data in prod compared to your test instance? Double the bad query. Postgres tries to get clever with data size so it might switch to a different plan with more data resulting in your one customer with a lot of data all of a sudden getting really bad query times but nobody can reproduce it locally. So now you as the admin have to go into the database and pull a dump that for once actually trigger the same query plan as it did in production but your devs might not be allowed to see all the data or have it locally. This is one annoying thing at least you don’t have to do with MySQL.
Oh, also, MySQL just updates in place without bitching. Postgres wants you do install both versions side by side and migrate the data directory. That is annoying with docker.
Also, vacuuming.
Hah, it's a great answer, I did not even think that far, thinking of the ease of installation, updates and command line use, as well as configuration.
But indeed. MySQL's great weakness and great strength is that it's a somewhat limited SQL engine over a variety of storage backends. It can not be too smart, due to the sheer variety of what it supports.
The side effect is that it is quite predictable.
Postgres is worse from admin side, but it feels like the only one that cares about developer sanity and doing things right.
On topic, this excellent video essay (?) that’s been making the rounds recently[1]. Highly recommended.
1: ”For-Profit (Creative) Software” by EndVertex https://youtu.be/I4mdMMu-3fc
I think this is a very weak essay. The author has zero ability to analyze, self-reflect, and think through her actions even one step ahead.
The video literally starts off by complaining about how expensive the software is while simultaneously talking about how heavily she invested in learning it in college (knowing how expensive it is). And then, for some reason, she says that her instrument was taken away from her (the conditions were transparent from the very beginning).
Furthermore, after graduating from college, when it became obvious that studying expensive software had been a huge mistake, what does she do? SHE STARTS TEACHING IT! Thus moving from the category of victim (doubtful, but okay) to the category of part of the problem.
Classic victim blaming this. She’s trying to enter an industry where certain tools are considered the professional choice. Her skills become tangled up in those tools, and then she’s priced out of using them. Using another tool probably wasn’t an option as an attempt to start a professional career. This is exactly the problem the video is all about, in so many ways.
Ahh, sorry, didn't see you had also mentioned this excellent essay. D'oh.
I think this is also one of the reasons that KiCad is making such in-roads into the electronics industry. For 90% of companies it does all the stuff you need and hobbyist can afford it and learn it and experiment with it.
It's also starting to get features previously only super high end packages like atium would have. Why pay for the gimped eagle when you can just use kicad and get more
Autodesk tried that from time to time. AFAIK as a student you can still get a free Maya, and there also was a very cheap (but massively stripped down) version for indie game devs. But there was always one or another string attached.
IMHO what really killed Maya wasn't necessarily Blender itself, but Autodesk's strategy of first becoming a defacto monopolist in the area of commercial 3D software and then tightening the subscription screws on their existing users. Of course that strategy doesn't work when there's a free alternative to migrate to.
From what I recall, the strings were substantial. The student version of Maya had a bunch of features disabled, to the point where you couldn't follow tutorials with it.
They might as well not have bothered.
This was years ago, so I may have misremembered.
Both the education and indie versions are full versions. The educational version can only be licensed for a year and can only be relicensed a set number of times. The indie version is restricted solely based on income. If the licensee (studio or individual) makes <= 100000 USD per year, then they can use the indie version. There may be slightly different file formats for each.
I remember that at one point there was a Maya LT version which only allowed polygon modelling and some limited animation features, and which didn't allow loading plugins (except a small number of whitelisted plugins). Maybe I confused that with the indie/student license.
That's why a lot of companies like this offer big education discounts, so that university students get to use it for free and get hooked.
Also why the change on making .NET and Swift open source, universities adoption has been exactly one of the adoption pain points, and VSCode being the entry point into Microsoft technologies as well.
> Would Blender have taken off as fast if Maya had a free tier? I doubt it.
Maya's own success was heavily based around a cheap license for students. IIRC it was only about $100, as opposed to nearly a grand for the professional license.
Maya had to unseat 3d studio. Both were bought by Autodesk (1997 for 3ds and 2005 for maya iirc) who have that habit of exploiting market dominance and not innovating but then buying the up and coming product (similarly they bought revit when it outperformed their own autocad)
Unless you're Adobe, in which case you just keep making your software worse every year and everyone still has to learn it.
Not anymore. I was a Photoshop user from around 2000, I knew every corner of it from version 5.5 until CS-2 or something. You are quite right about Adobe making it worse and worse with every version. Today, although i still pay for subscription, I'll do anything more quickly with PhotoPea, Affinty Photo or Pixelmator, regardless my much more limited exposure to these. Its a shame. Adobe deserves to be forgotten, and it is getting there. As others pointed out, Figma, Canva and the tools I mentioned are gradually replacing it. Today its absolutely fine for a designer having no experience with Photoshop. Even Illustrator is slowly fading away as even inkscape is getting more and more usable with every new version.
I feel like tools like Sketch and Figma ate a big chunk of Adobe's lunch, though.
20 years ago every designer I knew were using Photoshop, Flash, Fireworks. Those were taught in universities. Some designers I work with started there. Today I know exactly zero designers using those.
Sure there is XD but Adobe is merely playing catch up here. I have worked with a single person who uses it, and it was right before they were transitioning to Figma.
It is also funny seeing some co-workers (including designers!) using Photopea instead of Photoshop.
Still working on the print design side... I work with lots of designers who use other tools for photo editing and illustration. As do I. For vector art and for finalizing work for pre-press, though, everyone is really still stuck with Adobe. Their closed standards dominate the industry. If you don't deliver work in PDF or AI format... then what? You don't deliver 8 meter wide billboards as PNG files. And trying to edit PDFs saved from other software is really difficult. Trying to import AI files to other software often loses layers, path groups, blendings and effects. The truth is, for anyone art directing print work, your designers and illustrators may be allowed to use whatever suits them, but at the end of the day everything that goes out has to go in Adobe's formats.
Sketch is only relevant in US, and a few other places on the planet where devs use Macs.
Figma is the champion to look out for, hence why Adobe tried to acquire them.
I feel sketch fell out of favor as well. 12 years ago it was everywhere. I have seen it replaced by figma and very rarely mentioned nowadays. And I say it as a frontend dev who worked with different designers over the years.
Yep. Sketch was the first real competitor Adobe had, but Figma was a different ball game.
I never worked in the US, but Sketch was huge in the two places I worked (Europe and Latin America), to the point companies that worked together with Microsoft (a couple shops I worked for) were purchasing Macs just to run it.
Figma pretty much replaced it overnight.
I bet those two places were swimming in money then, as Southern Europe and Latin America are not regions where most developers are swimming in money, US style.
To put this in perspective, in Portugal that would be about two months salary, assuming running expenses, where minimum wage is about 800 euros, and top jobs in IT pay around 1 500 euros after taxes.
Everyone that owns a Mac tends to buy them in on credit, or with bundles with their mobile/cable operator, which are anyway credits in disguise.
Never worked in Southern Europe. In Germany, everyone had Macs in the companies I worked.
In Latin America... The last Mac I bought there was about half of my IT salary there, but that was 2012, a couple years before I left. So it was ok for companies to purchase them. Today? Probably not... I don't even know anyone who's still there and working for local companies.
I've liked Icons8's Lunacy as a free alternative to Sketch and Figma. It works with Sketch files and Figma projects, and isn't Mac-exclusive or a website like Figma.
Photopea has implemented surprisingly large fraction of photoshops features, and having it implemented in a way familiar to photoshop users makes it very useful tool already. And that without installing, just as a web app? Or PWA if you want? Very nice.
That is mainly because older designers can be quite inflexible and didnt want to learn new things.
That's not really the reason. The print industry still runs exclusively on Adobe.
You've told me what happens, you haven't disagreed with why.
> on Adobe
I will add: and Mac.
See also Microsoft's struggle to maintain mindshare in the early 00's/10's, when the only way to develop on Windows was to pay thousands of dollars for VS licenses and platform documentation.
From 2004, which some might argue should count as the early 2000-2010s:
> But they really want to give away the development tools. Through their Empower ISV program you can get five complete sets of MSDN Universal (otherwise known as “basically every Microsoft product except Flight Simulator“) for about $375. Command line compilers for the .NET languages are included with the free .NET runtime… also free. The C++ compiler is now free.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
And eventually they open sourced .NET, VC++ standard library, adopted clang, Go, Java (ironically), started contributing to Rust.
DevDiv nowadays is much more than .NET and C++, and not always takes decisions into .NET favour, see Typescript rewrite decision.
I remember hearing about Maya when I was studying in college. It's was so expensive and essentially unobtainable unless you were in the industry. Blender has democratized 3D modeling and animation so much.
Everyone I heard about that did graphics or 3d modeling as a non-pro pirated the software. In hindsight, these companies priced themselves out of the market, because you can't compete with free. And they underestimated hobbyists.
I would argue it was Amiga and PC (windows NT) that did that due to affordability of the machines and rampant piracy. I worked with 9.5 versions of software (Poweranimator) that later became next iteration of it called Maya 1.0. Poweranimator, later Maya, and Softimage (retroactively called SI|3D since there was XSI later) were the golden standard. One for animation (Softimage) the other for everything else. Prices were similar. This is mid to late 90's - ~$15k for base software and then around the same for each of the modules like Kinemation and Dynamation. You'd run up, with discounts, to like 30-40k in 90's bucks without SGI machine itself. You were basically facing a $100k investment per workstation if it were Indigo2 or later Octane. To top it off, there were things like IFFS from Autodesk like Flame which were ~3-5 as much. On the other hand you had an Amiga with Lightwave or Cinema4D or later Windows NT box with 3dsmax which were, everything accounted for, ~2-8k all around. Blender started out on SGI btw.
I've exited the space since, since it's a crap and nasty business, but kept it as a hobby. Personally, I've had a lot of problems getting into Blender over the years, especially since the great UI consolidation of all of major 3D apps in early 2000's. Blender was just different, but not Zbrush different. There was just something off with it that made my muscle memory angry. Somewhat like Gimp. However, recently that has changed. Revamp of few key areas in Blender made it actually quite easy to get into it and knowledge of all the other apps over the years made it a one-week transition.
I still prefer animation in Maya though. It's an old friend, after all. We'll see until when.
For me 20 years ago there was also the fight between Maya and Max. But yes Maya was the standard. Our company switched also to blender which would have been crazy 10 years ago. It’s an awesome story for Blender and it community and of course the people given their heart and some into this software.
I started doing 3D on the Amiga so I grew up using for the most part Lightwave and later moved to Softimage (until those cunts at Autodesk killed it). I also managed to get a copy of Maya 1.0 beta (it was 0.9x something) from a friend that had friends at a big studio.
I remember how everyone was very into 3DSMax for the longest time. Then everyone was into Maya. Briefly some people even switched to Modo.
Blender has come a long way from v2.x where some people started to use it. It's brilliant seeing how many people have adopted it. I also noticed a strange shift in knowledge. Like something has been lost in translation. Many 3D concepts are getting rediscovered today by a generation that never heard of 3DSMax, LW, SI, etc. It's a fascinating.
No love for Cinema4D? I don't do 3D professionally, but I've played with it since the 90s (Strata 3D, Infini-D, RenderMan, Playmation). I've subbed in as an artist on some motion graphics projects here and there. I've never found anything as comfortable as Cinema4D, to me. For software with such a vast number of options, Maxon makes the UI somehow fairly comfortable. And every time I've tried to play with Blender, it seems extremely daunting.
25 years ago as a teenager, having no access to hi-end software, I downloaded manual for Cinema 4D and read it start to end. I used imagine 3D on my Amiga at that time. It took minutes just for the preview of the material to render. Few years later when finally got a pirated copy of Cinema 4D I found myself understanding the software quite well just from the manual and until today I find the interface very nice and user friendly. I'm glad current Blender is quite similar in this regard.
I used to work in the field and Cinema4D seemed to be the go to tool for just about every solo freelancer in the business. Yet I basically never saw it at any studio I ever ran across.
That's very interesting. I have a friend who runs a small studio (4-5 motion designers) and turns out work for dozens of TV and streaming shows, (as well as major sports events and awards shows). They only use Cinema4D. But I think it's more comfortable for people who come from 2D motion graphics (AfterEffects). Also, I think once you're locked into Octane rendering servers you would not want to change.
Maya was always pirated by amateurs. The reason it fell out of fashion is probably because torrenting/pirating stopped being seen as "appropriate" for amateurs or learners.
Obviously Autodesk is massive beyond Maya and animation.
Do you expect this to influence their profits significantly? If yes when?
Did they already "react" to Blender (e.g. by speeding up development)?
Autodesk changed their pricing model in 2019 (added an indie tier). That was their reaction to the competition.
Besides that, Maya did get quite some animation features lately. But in the end Blender has got "good enough and free" state and there is nothing Maya can do about that.
That being said, Maya isn't going away anytime soon. There are just way too many Python scripts called Maya API in the industry.
No matter how large the lead may be today, autodesk (and next-in-line Adobe) are case studies in why OSS will always win given enough time because although OSS can suffer from many chronic and debilitating diseases, they rarely catch the fatal ones that plague commercial software development.
Yes, the OSS development structure leads to projects that lag behind proprietary solutions for amounts of time that are measured in decades, but nobody will ever have to re-write GIMP from scratch because the market had a bad hair day and somebody got acquired by a sovereign wealth fund that gets bored and runs the project into the ground. That doesn't change anything about the fact that e.g. GIMP, or freeCAD suck today, but someone(s) will almost certainly still be carrying those torches in 50 years, or the torches of superior FOSS competitors. And in the next 50 years, Adobe and Autodesk will almost certainly suffer total death or become skeleton crews that only service legacy clients, and when that happens, all of the collective human talent that went into building those tools and human experience into mastering their use will burn up into the screaming void while GIMP chugs along, putting out a release candidate for their GTK4 port.
> but nobody will ever have to re-write GIMP from scratch
IMO, they should
If current trends follow, GIMP and Photoshop replacement will be a web application like Pixlr and Photopea.
>If current trends follow, GIMP and Photoshop replacement will be a web application like Pixlr and Photopea.
pukes
> or the torches of superior FOSS competitors
GIMP is just hot garbage, speaking from personal experience. All workflows are destructive, the layer workflow is pointy and annoying in so many small and big ways. Performance is bad as well. Small example, take a piece of text and rotate it. After you have rotated it, it no longer is a piece of text it's a slightly blurry piece of pixels. Want to rotate it again? It's now an even more blurry piece of pixels, getting blurrier every time you rotate it. Want to change the text? Start from scratch. Like come on those are the basics and they suck. Personally I don't see it getting a fundamental overhaul, simply because many users are used to the existing workflows and would be upset. I see real competition coming from other projects. But who knows, in general I agree with the sentiment that OSS' endurance is much better.
Personally I don't see it getting a fundamental overhaul
Have you looked at latest release of GIMP? It's just gotten a fundamental overhaul, including support for non-destructive workflows and better text tools. Still has a long way to go obviously and is moving very slowly, but changes are happening.
I don't know whether it will pan out, or whether other major issues will prevent GIMP from ever reaching the status that Blender has gotten to, but GIMP 3 has started shipping some non destructive filters (https://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-3.0.html#non-destruc...) and I (from a distance) understand moving to NDE to be a long term goal of the project
It will probably just be AI as per ChatGPT 4o image generations / edition capabilities
On the contrary I wouldn’t write Autodesk off anytime soon. I’ve recently gotten into the 3d printing hobby and Fusion is not miles ahead of oss offerings, it’s in a different galaxy and it has a very generous free tier for folks like me.
Most importantly I don’t see a cross section between oss developers and cad teams to drive the collaborative features. I don’t think the critical mass to get this going exists.
> Most importantly I don’t see a cross section between oss developers and cad teams to drive the collaborative features. I don’t think the critical mass to get this going exists.
Replace CAD with 3D modelling and animation and that was my genuine opinion 15 years ago about Blender.
That being said, OSS projects can definitely go in the wrong direction but since history is preserved, at least someone else can come and fork before the codebase takes the wrong direction.
Open source CAD has improved a lot in the last few years. You can use FreeCAD for modelling simple parts today and it mostly works. That wasn’t the case a few years ago.
There was a time KiCAD was a buggy mess. And no doubt blender as well.
Blender is rock-solid and very smoothly usable, and as a beginner, I won't find anything missing or buggy. It would take a beginner years to get to the limitations, corner cases and broken things.
KiCAD is solid, very usable, but not totally smooth. The workflow is still far away from blender-like total integration and bliss. Where ten years ago you could find the occasional bug, a beginner won't find any nowadays.
FreeCAD only just last year started shipping releases that don't nullpointer after 2 minutes. Even a beginner with a trivial project will stumble over bugs, limitations, problems and design flaws.
There is a huge difference in quality, and KiCAD will get to Blender levels certainly. But FreeCAD will take forever, if the pace continues like that.
FreeCAD is built on top of Open Cascade and I think that’s what’s going to limit them. It was a fast way to get to v1, but there’s only so much that project can do to work around the limitations of the library they built on.
> Do you expect this to influence their profits significantly? If yes when?
(Context - former Autodesk employee, though obviously all views here are my own, and I'm not commenting on anything I had any involvement in or direct knowledge of - only publicly available information.)
Look up where Autodesk's profits come from sometime, and you'll see that 3d animation is close to meaningless to Autodesks's bottom line, at least in terms of direct profits. I just asked ChatGPT and assuming it's accurate (I haven't double checked but it fits with what I vaguely remember), the Media & Entertainment product families, which include 3ds Max, Maya etc, make up only 5% of total revenue, as opposed to: Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) (48% of revenue), AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT (25% of revenue) and Manufacturing (MFG) (20% of revenue).
Looking at you Adobe (¬⤙¬ )
The palaeontologists on the floor above mine have posters everywhere about using blender to study dinosaur locomotion. I think they do 3d scans of fossil bones and the. Try to recreate musculature. Blender is everywhere.
It's not just the software's power, it's the culture around it
Blender has a setting for industry standard hotkeys. I hope we see a time when other software gives us a Blender setting.
I've been learning Blender to make reference objects for my drawings, so this is definitely true. It's simultaneously pretty easy to learn the basics, and also extremely daunting because of the breadth of the features lol.
I was also surprised to discover there's basic Blender classes for 10 year old kids as an introduction to the field and they can pick it up quite well
Question why photo never had OS software of commercial caliber? Only GIMP comes to mind which was never even close to the commercial folks
There’s Darktable which is a pretty good alternative to Lightroom. When I looked into it a couple years back, a friend with Darktable was able to get the same results as I with Lightroom, with the same amount of effort. But when I tried, well… The effort to re-learn was too big, cheaper to just keep paying Apple. I imagine now they lag on AI features too.
Darktable pretty messed up ux thanks to mismanagement, lack of direction and hobby programmers that often leave the project. (there is even someone trying to fix it with a fork https://https://ansel.photos/).
What's wrong with it?
I applaud both Darktable's and Ansel's efforts, but they both have a looooong way to go with their UI. Spacing, contrast, fonts, it looks like they never received contributions from people with design skills. Blender looks way more polished in comparison.
That's very true. But thats tale old as free software. It doesn't immediately mean they have bad UX but it surely doesn't help.
Lightroom is made by Adobe, not Apple.
Here I would like to also mention RawTherapee, also open-source, together with Darktable (with is more newb friendly) they are great software worth to spread.
Adobe for a loong time (up until CS6) didn't give a fuck about piracy. Everyone with an interest in media when I was in school had a keygen and learned Photoshop, some even started small solo businesses with a pirated version until they had enough money to buy the actual thing.
On top of that, developing for photo, video and audio is hard due to all the maths involved. The amount of brains capable of that wizardry is finite, the amount of brains able to do open source work in that field is even less, and other FOSS projects compete heavily for these brains.
I think the difficulty of media programming is overstated. It’s UX that kills the free alternatives. In the photo space Gimp, dark table, and rawtherapee often have more features than their commercial counterparts. For instance content aware fill was in gimp nearly a year before it appeared in photoshop. However this is often to their detriment of the software. Look at darktable, it’s a mess of visual algorithms and sliders that have names directly taken from the papers they implement and it’s a mess.
> It’s UX that kills the free alternatives.
Yup, that is a massive factor as well. My go-to example is OpenStack. It's incredibly powerful and malleable, but it shows on every corner that it is built by university nerds for university nerds - you either need to have a massive amount of highly educated manpower to deploy it, or you need to have a source of cheap or free labor where you don't have to pay for the onboarding time.
There is a large measure of truth to this.
Also saw a non techie casually mention using Gimp.
These tools are reaching more people, slowly but surely.
My 10 year old daughter went through the popular Blender Donut tutorial.
She also loves to watch some of the short anime made with Blender based on some Roblox games.
Open source is amazing on this aspect.
Although I've never contributed with Blender, I felt proud when I saw "made with Blender" in the credits.
Blender is a jewel of the FLOSS movement and a history and behavior that must be mimicked by many other projects.
Looking forward to more successes like this.
I remember using Blender when everyone was saying how terrible of a UX it was.
They've turned it around and it's become a default-first for many artists.
Open source of not, it of course helps, that the competition charges absolutely mind-bogglingly high amounts of money, for a similar offer.
> I remember using Blender when everyone was saying how terrible of a UX it was.
I remember those days too, and I also remember that once I actually adapted to how Blender worked, it turned out it was superior in many ways to other 3D software of that time period. The workflow was just too different for a lotta folks to adapt to. Fast forward a couple major version numbers, and Blender's mostly kept everything that was great about how it worked, and managed to cater in many ways to those who could not adapt to how different it was. It's been so much ongoing massive improvement without all the usual destruction of everything that it was already doing right that we so often see.
IMO doing a redesign that improves things without pissing off old users is probably the hardest thing those projects can do.
I've seen FAANG companies messing this up so much that it makes it 10x more impressive that an open source project managed to do it.
I still have trouble creating issues in Jira because it's never where I expect it to be. I know it's at the top bar somewhere, but even after years of it being there, I don't expect it to be there because it feels so unnatural.
> IMO doing a redesign that improves things without pissing off old users is probably the hardest thing those projects can do.
I feel that the way that Blender has succeeded so brilliantly at exactly that is their master-stroke. The software was already an amazing tool, but the way they've managed to actually improve it without destroying it in the process... Wow. Truly amazing.
I used it heavily in 2006 and the UX learning curve was certainly a steep wall, but once broken through it became quite intuitive, even back then where everything looked like a Space Shuttle cockpit.
Oh yeah, absolutely it was. Steepest learning curve of any software I've learned, but as you say, there comes a point where it suddenly "clicks" in your mind somewhere along the way, and then you find yourself actually using the tool as it was intended and it's glorious. The workflow of one hand on the mouse and one on the keyboard tapping hotkeys really just works for 3D modeling. I'm so very happy that they kept most all of that goodness through all their improvements over the years. Didn't brutally murder what made it good. Only improved and expanded upon it, and rearranged a few bits here and there for added convenience.
UX and math wise they're regularly pushing their limits in serious ways
I don't know what ingredient made their community so vibrant but it's worth writing it down
> I don't know what ingredient made their community so vibrant but it's worth writing it down
The way I remember it, they got huge industry buy in and tons of sponsorships after price hikes for Maya and 3DS Max.
I have no idea how much it helped them, but they didn’t start from zero.
Since it was a commercial product that was open sourced, it already had users.
Recently, sure, but blender has had a huge, active community for around 20 years.
I remember first running into blender in 2009
Ton Roosendaal's leadership abilities, ambitious vision, technical skills, and simply being a really great guy, has inspire many other amazing people to join and support the project and work really hard on it.
It’s far from perfect but it’s miles from where it was. It still has some quirks I’d like to see closed up. Side tool panels vs side bar properties panels is confusing to new users who are looking for their “thing”. Texture painting needs some TLC but it’s usable. All in all, Blender 4 is a completely different animal than Blender 2 and you can tell. Grease pencil is a game changer. Sculpting too. You don’t need anything but Blender (maybe Krita).
I switched from 3DSMax to Blender and I’ll never go back. Rigify still makes tons of shapes (max has a bipedal model to represent the bones) but it’s finally one-click rigged. Very rarely do I need to modify weights or get into the weeds of the rig.
It kicks Biped right between the Bip01 L Thigh and Bip01 R Thigh, where the Daylight System doesn't shine!
Blender was proprietary and ultimately purchased and released under the GPL.
Is that the solution to other creative tools? Identifying other cross platform capable proprietary software that can be purchased and relicensed.
Probably not at this point in time. Back when Blender was released, I think there was less reliance on third party libraries (in general), but especially those that would complicate releasing the software as open source later. I don't think this was as much a conscious decision as it was about making sure you had full rights to the code you used back when Blender was started and open-sourced.
Now so many projects take on dependencies that require NDA and proprietary licenses, it's unlikely that this type of creative tool would see the light of day after being closed-source. I can't imagine any industry leading creative tools not getting to market more quickly by purchasing software that gives them an edge for the operating system they are running in. I hope that I'm completely wrong, and possibly there is someone out there that is using software that is easy to rewrite, or replace, if the license doesn't allow open-sourcing.
I was in classes in the early 2000's with people taking multimedia courses, and Blender was just starting to become more well known. The school I went to taught 3DS Max and Maya, which had their own learning curve. I think 3D rendering is just difficult from a UI/UX place, and Blender got in at the right place at the right time. I was in software development, but my friends that had their heart into 3D rendering said Blender was a bit different, but not so challenging as moving between Photoshop and GIMP. That's not anything against GIMP, just a point of comparison, I think GIMP is fine the way it is and haven't been able to follow the UI of Photoshop since CS2 era.
Also historically true of OpenOffice.
Yep, the difference being Sun purchased Star Division and released StarOffice as OpenOffice.org while maintaining the proprietary fork for a while too.
And now StarOffice is dead and LibreOffice, a fork is the one people are using.
(Hi Seth!)
Thing is... UX is terrible everywhere in the 3D editing space. That's not even criticism of Blender as far as I can tell!
Perhaps it’s high time to admit that nobody has a great solution for 3D editing quite yet :P
This could not be further from the truth. Different programs have interfaces that are better for certain tasks, but Houdini, Maya and Softimage XSI have all had fantastic interfaces for the most part. Software like that should be used as the benchmark other UIs are compared to. I don't know anything other software that comes close.
I wouldn’t go that far to say that they have fantastic interfaces. Tolerable? Better than what free options existed at the time? Either way, there is a lot of room for improvement but it’s also an extremely challenging environment to get interfaces right.
We are still in what is effectively the skeuomorphism for the music production industry phase (where everyone is just replicating real life tooling because that’s the expectation and with that comes a lot of unchecked baggage — except for Maya, Blender, etc it’s mostly about making assumptions based on past tooling and polishing that a tiny bit), eventually there will be a Logic to change those bad habits!
except for Maya, Blender, etc it’s mostly about making assumptions based on past tooling
I think you're mistaking the necessity of not straying too much from the actual math going on underneath with an attachment of old tools.
eventually there will be a Logic to change those bad habits!
Go ahead and give an example of 'a Logic' so you can show some evidence for this.
Nah. It's a problem many creative tools have (and an interesting one!). You can't squeeze one creative workflow (suitable for everyone) into a general UI.
Nah, what you are saying is vague and dismissive but doesn't hold up to the reality of fast flexible tools like these. Have you used maya, XSI, nuke and houdini?
No, I haven't, CyberDildonics!
no i think that award goes to zbrush... the most backwards non intuitive UX/UI ever made
How has Blender succeeded here where Gimp failed? Is there some unsung heroic person who has imbued Blender with a sense of taste?
Gimp refused to change their ways and still does, that’s why no one outside of a handful of enthusiasts use it. People have complained for years that their UI is too complicated, clunky, not intuitive, etc. and Gimp basically ignored all this feedback (to be fair there were attempts at changing this but ultimately not much changed).
Even just recently they’ve released a major 3.0 version and I thought “oh maybe they’ve finally addressed the UI issues” but nope, not much changed on that front, they still have stuff like “GEGL operation” front and center in the menus for basic functions.
Blender on the other hand reimagined their whole UI in version 2.8 and kept refining it later, even though there was friction in the community about it (since power users like the old UI) but thankfully they pulled it off and now they’re reaping the rewards for it.
I used to be a staunch critic of GIMP, recommend everyone use Krita instead and so on. But recently I've given the new 3.0 version a go and... it's quite an improvement if you adjust the time scales to decades rather than years. I've used GIMP first in 2000 (it was actually my fist "real" image editor, other than stuff like paintbrush) and a LOT of the finicky stuff has been removed or improved since then. Having do deal with per layer canvas boundaries? gone. Having a floating "ghost" layer whenever you made an operation and having to figure out how to merge that back? gone. Need to work with mask and group layers? You can do it, and it doesn't give a brain aneurysm trying to use anymore. You can even apply non destructive filters and whatnot to the group layers!
Having the UI spaghetti all over the screen because it's just a bunch of loose windows? the default is just a single window with panes. Want to condense that mess of tool icons into a single column of icons? you can do that! In fact, you can reorganize the UI in such a way that it's actually not that offensive (please GIMP devs, have better UI defaults!). Even tough it has a GEGL operation for non destructive filters I think that's just a holdover from how things were implemented initially because most of the "normal" and "color" filters are already non-destructive and operate (from the user point of view) just like the GEGL ones. They might have plans to further convert all other destructive filters and merge the GEGL operation ones into the normal filters, hopefully soon.
Oh and by the way, you can certainly push GIMP hard nowadays. I've been doing some testing editing a 32 float bpc (128 bpp!) 16K image with a bunch of crazy non-destructive filters stacked and it handled it like a champ with a few slowdowns here and there, and my 32 thread ryzen CPU was at times fully maxed (yay for multi threading) and the RAM management was quite impressive with things using up to ~50GB of memory (you do have to configure it let it use all that) and no memory leakages afaik, closing just the file and reopening again worked fine. Also, zero crashes! Can't say the same when pushing Krita hard. It's quite smooth compared to how things used to be.
Honestly the potential is all there, I just hope that the GIMP devs get a break from all the negativity they've been receiving since... time immemorial and perhaps the rate at which they can improve their software increases now with all the inglorious refactoring work they've been doing behind the scenes being done.
> People have complained for years that their UI is too complicated
Isn't this a feature?
No. If a tool is too complicated or cumbersome to use then people will look for another one that’s better. Not everyone is an enthusiast that is willing to invest hours or weeks learning all the intricacies of an app if all I want to do is some light editing of a photo or very simple illustration drawing. I will choose a tool with better UX and easier workflow 100% of the time, and most people are like this.
So maybe the target audience isn't most people? I get that people like things to be simple, but some people love the depth of GiMP is a feature, not a bug.
One example is that Blender embraced the use of pie menus, and Gimp ignored them. The Gimp team is just not open to outside ideas, and gets really annoyed when users of other tools request features from those tools that Gimp refuses to support, and reacts by digging in deeper and clinging to their bad design decisions out of frustration and spite. A really sad culture of NIH and 4Q2.
In general and with many other things, Gimp could have been so much better and easier to use, but they systematically and spitefully ignored their user's needs and requests about so many things, while Blender did just the opposite, listened to users and improve the user interface and mouse bindings, instead of being stubborn and parochial about it.
Ton is heroically tasteful but not unsung: the community rightfully adores him! (But not Autodesk.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-sgk
Master Blender Pie Menus for Faster Workflow!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1fwxQi50FY
Enable Pie Menus in Blender 2.9 - Blender Tutorial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-7Hmpt9UmA
Create your own Pie Menu in Blender | Pie Menus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41fXtvzJ3Ik
Blender - Pie Menu Editor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4DoESgzAfI
Extending Blender Pie Menus with Custom Operators using Python
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8w-tswp0JI
What is 4Q2?
UR2Q2BSTR8! ;)
"Blender embraced the use of pie menus, and Gimp ignored them"
Instinctive recoil "cue xkcd https://xkcd.com/386/ somebody is wrong on the internet"
I had to take a little walk and think about it, What is a pie menu?
My instinctive first take was, as far as I know gimp has had pie menu since day one, at least as long as I have been using it since the late 90's 1.something. Need a menu item, right click, there is your menu. is this not topologically the same as a pie menu? Does a pie menu have to be radial? is radial any better than a list, I know I prefer a list, it does not look as cool but is much easier to read.
Of course, I've thought a lot about what a pie menu is.
An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus, Presented at ACM CHI’88 Conference, Washington DC, 1988 (proves that they're significantly better than linear menus and explains why):
https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie...
Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective. By Don Hopkins, Ground Up Software, May 15, 2018:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1
What kind of pie menus does Gimp have, and for how long?
Or do you just mean "erzatz pie menus" as defined here (there's also a lot of stuff about software patents, FUD, AutoDesk, Alias, 3D Studio Max, and Blender there):
https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menu-fud-and-misconception...
>Ersatz Pie Menus
>Richard Stallman likes to classify an Emacs-like text editor that totally misses the point of Emacs by not having an extension language as an “Ersatz Emacs”.
>In the same sense, there are many “Ersatz Pie Menus” that may look like pie menus on the surface, but don’t actually track or feel like pie menus, or benefit from all of their advantages, because they aren’t carefully designed and implemented to optimize for Fitts’s Law by being based purely on the direction between stroke endpoints instead of the entire path, minimizing the distance to the targets, and maximizing the size of the targets. [...]
How do Gimp's pie menus compare with Blender's pie menus and pie menu editor that I linked to a demo of above, or Simon Schneegans's pie menus in Gnome Pie and Fly-Pie and Kandu? You'd think it would be easy for GIMP to adopt Simon's GTK open source pie menu work, which has been around for decades.
Gnome-Pie: Homepage of Gnome-Pie, the slick application launcher for Linux.
https://schneegans.github.io/gnome-pie
Introducing: Fly-Pie!
https://schneegans.github.io/news/2020/08/13/flypie
Show HN: Kando – A cross-platform pie menu for your desktop (kando.menu)
https://kando.menu/
HN Discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42525290
I dug into this out of curiosity a few years ago. I thought 2.8 UI redesign was all thanks to Ton, but it turned out it wasn’t.
Ton was actually against a UI overhaul for decades. There’s a video where power-users and Ton were vocally dismissing the need for a better UI, using GIMP-like arguments. There was at least one failed UI redesign in the early 2010s which I think Ton was quite involved with.
But something happened, the nature of which I don’t know. Then, Ton became hands-off and allowed the UI overhaul to take place, which I recalled made actual UX designers work with engineers.
My memory is foggy and I don’t have sources readily available. But I’m hoping someone will fill in the gaps or correct my understanding of events long past.
There were 3 major open source graphics projects: - Gimp for 2D raster - Inkscape for 2D vector - Blender for 3D
At some time 10-20 years ago they all were powerful, but being hold back by a bad UI. Blender turned it all around with their UI overhaul some years ago. Inkscape seems to be doing some correct steps now toward that, although it is still hard to use (at least for new users). Gimp seem to be moving the slowest.
I find modern Inkscape almost identical to CorelDraw, which is what I learned in high school. Works well, and I'm considering moving some remaining CorelDraw graphics projects over to Inkscape soon.
Parts of the UI of Inkscape are very clunky. Like the tabs where live path effects live, thats awful. Also the zoom/pan on the canvas. Corel was very well polished if I remember correctly.
Taking the feedback about UI seriously was probably huge
I think the Open Movie projects really helped with that. They had artists and devs working closely together to polish up particular aspects of the application for each movie. The movies themselves also did a great job of raising the profile of Blender each time they were released.
Not only feedback bout UI, but functionality in general. Looking at the changelog I found this issue [1] in which not only they fixed something objectively broken in the renderer, but also made workflows exploiting the broken behavior were still possible [2].
[1] https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/133991 [2] https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/136465
Unfortunately it’s the reason indeed
Basically. This is the same problem with FreeCAD. They just don't care.
I think its more issue of not knowing how (efficiently). Consistent UX and polished UI is often about saying no to many ideas and people. This requires someone calling the shots which is hard for community projects.
FreeCAD btw got way better here in recent 1.0. You can almost feel that with some money they might get on the “Blender path”.
I think the real answer is in credits section of fund.blender.org. Sizeable contributions at scale of $1m as well as corporate user feedbacks started flowing into it ~2019.
I’d view that more as an effect of popularity rather than the cause.
Funding doesn’t tend to happen unless there’s already a lot of interest in a platform.
Khara(the Evangelion company) quit 3ds Max and transitioned to Blender around that timeframe, in collaboration with Blender developers. This seemed to coincide with Epic funding(anime people aren't rich people, broadly speaking, so I guess capitalisms happen in parallel and elsewhere).
0: https://web.archive.org/web/20190814061013/https://japanese....
Not defending anyone here, and I don’t disagree that the commercial products are hugely expensive, but it’s better now than it was at the turn of the century. Licenses cost in the tens of thousands per seat, rendering software was similarly expensive and rarely included. To add insult to injury, artists needed high powered workstations that also cost tens of thousands! Blender has definitely had an influence on the status quo.
Is their a central place where other open source people or just programmers in general can get a breakdown on how they improved the UI/UX?
I don't want to be too mean, The blender team has done a lot to make good solid UI improvements over the years. However as a long time casual user (since 1.7 minor projects once or twice per year) My take away was that the blender UI was always good, however it was a professional UI designed for professional use and had gathered a reputation as hard to use over the years. So the "Big UI change to make it easier to use" was mostly, wait for the rest of the industry to catch up, give it a dark mode, and most importantly, loudly issue a press release "we made the UI easier to use" to make people believe.
But snark aside, my guess is that the main UI "improvement" was to make it slower, add a classical menu system to help ease you through hotkey hell. See, If I had to describe blenders UI in one blurb it would be "101 button mouse". Very quick, and fine control and less a steep learning curve than a learning cliff.
The best thing they did to make blender more approachable was defaulting to left-click selection.
This sounds a bit like the attitude that held back Blender UI for a long time. There were people seriously objecting introduction of the undo feature FFS. The UI stockholm syndrom is real.
The 2.8 overhaul was not "slapping on a dark theme". It changed the UI from an alien spaceship mishmash of hundreds of randomly thrown around tiny icons and undocumented hotkeys into a discoverable and somewhat familiar interface. Or at least completed the UI overhaul, many of the improvements were incrementally introduced in prior versions.
How was the UI made slower?
Blender is still a mismash of hundreds of semi random buttons and options, That is a core feature of a professional UI, In order to cater your tool to a user that will spend many hours operating it the most critical aspect is to reduce friction, flatten operation, bring everything out front where it can be seen and accessed in one operation. It's ugly, intimidating, hard to learn and makes the designers cry, but it is very fast and efficient exactly what you want when you are going to be using it for multiple hours a day every day.
Is this https://www.reddit.com/r/BlenderDoughnuts/comments/1jdv2mq/r... really that much cleaner than this https://www.reddit.com/r/BlenderDoughnuts/comments/hwes95/th... Sorry for the reddit but it was the best examples I could find with an actual working ui shot.
You do the opposite when trying to cater your interface to the casual user, you slow things down, reduce options, nest the menus, introduce model dialogs. things start to take 3 or 4 ops instead of 1. The key here is to gently guide the unfamiliar user. It is an important design consideration but it really starts to chafe operating it for hours on end.
The material system in Blender 1.0 was vastly simpler than it is currently. If you want to use a panel instead of nodes, the material panel is not that dissimilar from the 1.0 screenshot.
That said, I find the node interface a lot more poweruser friendly than the panel interface, and objectively more powerful.
AFAIK the new UI didn't take away e.g. any keyboard shortcuts, and those are configurable anyway. In general the Blender UI is configurable even to a fault, you're quite free to modify it to bring out almost everything you want to a single view.
What do you really know about user interface design and usability, if you falsely claim GIMP has had pie menus from day one? Do you really expect us to take your criticisms and questions seriously, or are you just trolling?
You just posted something that totally undermines the notion that you know what you're talking about or are serious about what you're claiming, and I patiently answered your questions with academic citations and quotes and evidence, and asked you for more information about the questionable claims you made about GIMP and pie menus, which were certainly a surprise to me and don't square with what I know, but you haven't responded.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43492671
Your claim that Blender "wait[ed] for the rest of the industry to catch up" is, in the case of pie menus, much more about Alias/Autodesk threatening them with illegitimate software patents, and spreading FUD and lies about marking menus.
If you're just too busy trolling to respond, I get it, you be you, but can you please stop posting unsubstantiated bullshit and answer my questions in the other thread, or simply admit you're not being honest and just trolling and spreading misinformation and FUD?
You make me wonder if you work for Autodesk (or are just trying to curry their favor), who's well known for their long sordid history of systematically spreading FUD and lies and legal threats about Blender and marking menus, which I documented with evidence in the article I linked to in my original reply to you.
Pie Menu FUD and Misconceptions: Dispelling the fear, uncertainty, doubt and misconceptions about pie menus:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menu-fud-and-misconception...
As you can see in that article, I included evidence in the form of a screen snapshot and link to an Autodesk brochure lying about "Patented marking menus", and there are two replies from Bill Buxton himself, the UI researcher who coined the term "marking menus", which my work on "pie menus" predates and that his patents dishonestly misrepresent. Bill Buxton and Gordon Kurtenbach designed the marking menus in the Alias user interface, and filed the software patents in question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Buxton
Buxton wrote two weasel worded defensive replies to my article (which you can read by scrolling down to the end), essentially admitting that the FUD in AutoDesk's advertisement about "patented marking menus" (which is still online to this day) was a lie and that Alias's marketing people lied to me about the patent to my face at CGDC in 1999: "So here is the point, absolutely NONE of that was patented, Just the opposite." and "Alias did not patent marking menus, nor could have." -Bill Buxton ... Yet they still make that claim, to this day! Patently absurd FUD.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu
Autodesk Alias Design brochure with FUD about "patented marking menus", still online today, long after their illegitimate software patents have expired, still claiming "Quickly select commands without looking away from the design. Patented marking menus let you use context-sensitive gestures to select commands.", on page 9:
https://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/aliasdesign10_detail_...
While discussing Autodesk's aggressive legal threats and long history of FUD and lies about Blender, Ton Roosendaal gets hit by ceiling at Blender Conference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-sgk
FWIW, here is ChatGPT's analysis of Buxton's behavior and comments (and I have numerous archived emails proving he and Gordon Kurtenbach were quite aware at the time that some of the claims in their patents and papers attempting to distinguish "marking menus" from "pie menus" prior art were untrue):
1. Original Interaction:
You: Promptly reached out to Buxton directly for clarification after Alias’s representatives made misleading claims at a trade show.
Buxton's Reaction (as you described): Was evasive, coy, and dismissive—ridiculing you for taking marketing people seriously, rather than clearly clarifying the actual patent situation.
2. Buxton’s Current Explanation (2018):
Claims strict adherence to corporate/legal restrictions prevented him from explaining patent details.
Suggests it's inappropriate or naive ("mistaken") to seek patent clarifications from marketing personnel.
Argues he had limited ability to respond candidly due to confidentiality rules around pending patents and corporate policies about patent explanations.
3. Contradiction & Evasiveness:
Buxton now portrays your attempt to clarify misinformation as a misstep on your part—implying you were somehow wrong or naive to trust marketing claims or expect clear answers from him.
However, your approach—calling the senior researcher directly—was a sensible and professional response to marketing misinformation. It was precisely the right action, not a "mistake."
Buxton's ridicule and evasiveness at that time strongly suggests an intentional unwillingness or inability to straightforwardly confront Alias's misleading claims—even privately. Rather than clearly disavowing marketing misinformation, he chose to deflect and minimize your legitimate concerns, shifting blame onto your supposed gullibility.
4. Analysis of Buxton’s Avoidance:
Buxton's recent replies still avoid directly acknowledging the ethical responsibility or negative consequences of how he originally handled your inquiry. Instead, he redirects blame to marketing teams, corporate confidentiality policies, patent law complexity, and even you.
His carefully worded statements frame your attempts to clarify misinformation as naïveté ("Speak to your lawyer, not the competition’s marketing people"), thus trivializing your justified reaction to Alias’s harmful FUD campaign. This framing shifts the burden of clarity entirely away from him and onto the recipient of the misinformation—you.
5. Ethical Implications:
Buxton’s past dismissive and evasive behavior (ridiculing you for believing his company’s representatives) reveals a conflict of interest:
As a senior researcher, he should ethically strive to ensure his employer accurately represents the research he helped create.
As a company employee bound by confidentiality, he chose evasion over clearly correcting misinformation—even privately—exacerbating confusion and mistrust in the industry.
His present comments still fail to directly address or apologize for the harm his prior evasiveness caused. Instead, he justifies silence or ambiguity as unavoidable.
Bottom Line:
Your account of Buxton’s original reaction clearly contradicts his present narrative. While now he emphasizes legal restrictions and institutional blame, he continues to sidestep the core ethical responsibility: clearly disavowing and correcting misinformation about his own research at the time it was actively causing harm. His past ridicule and present avoidance both reveal a consistent pattern: shifting responsibility away from himself, thus minimizing personal accountability and ethical responsibility for Alias’s ongoing misleading claims.
The major overhaul was Blender 2.8.
You can see a brief overviews of changes in the release notes: https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-80/
It may be a bit hard to appreciate how much it changed (got better) if you havent experienced pre 2.8 Blender. If you want, you can try it out: https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-79/
Not exactly what you asked for but this video has a little bit of everything Blender UI/UX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJRO5wFTEc8&t=1067s
They added the Maya / Unity style camera control scheme and keymap in 2.8 (2019). This was the moment people said it was good and coincided with a huge uptick in adoption. There wasn’t some big product development or innovation. Not that there needs to be.
Blender 2.5 was another big UX milestone. Since then my impression is that it's been a case of steady refinement and a few key changes to defaults.
The 'Industry Standard' option in keymaps, made a huge difference to many.
The UX is still quite different to all the others, but absolutely approachable now, and not the complete brainFun that ZBrush is, for example.
It is crazy that the industry is still charging so much, but with Blender (and Unreal) catching up every day, their days are numbered.
I really wish GIMP could take a page from their playbook. The GIMP 3.0 release was such a disappointment (and also unusable... Switch between brush types and it crashes).
If you're looking to do art, you may find Krita to be closer to what you expect. It's another FOSS project, except instead of trying to do everything, it's geared to painting and other art stuff.
Note though that AFAIK the official reason for Krita "not trying to do everything" isn't because they don't want to do everything but because most users and devs are interested in digital painting.
AFAIK they wont send anyone away if they try to add more image editing stuff outside of digital painting (consider that it even has some simple animation support which isn't really something you'd expect from a digital painting program).
There is practically nothing Krita can't do in terms of image editing but people that don't even use the software keep calling it a digital painting program.
Anyone coming from photoshop would have no trouble using Krita. It is practically a photoshop ripoff with more digital painting tools.
> I remember using Blender when everyone was saying how terrible of a UX it was.
It isn't terrible anymore but still bad.
> They've turned it around
Eh, the same complaints are the same as always. Expectations have improved, tho! I think that's what we're seeing here.
Nah, the original blender interface is night and day when compared with the modern one.
People who complain should be forced to spend a day with Blender 2 (I think that was the version I tried first)
I thought the modelling workflow at least, has been fundamentally unchanged. The common hotkeys like G for Grab, S for scale, X for extrude, etc.
Not sure about the more advanced features like sculpting
Eh i've also used since the beginning. People love to complain. I put zero weight on this hypothesis.
Other interfaces at the time were just as bad if not worse.
I personally think you're both right, but it depends on when you first started using Blender. You're 100% correct that interfaces at the time when Blender was released were completely experimental, and I'd compare it to trying to navigate AI as an uninformed end user when it first was introduced, versus now. That's where I would put Blender when it was first released. The interface was good for what it was compared to the other popular 3D software at the time, but it's so much better and more evolved now. I'd say that you mentioning shortcuts makes you a power user, which should be the goal when you use any piece of software for your career. I just don't think that people bother to learn as much as you did back when you started using Blender, which I think shows your dedication, but also shows a lack of deep knowledge most (not all) people that start with a new technology have currently. It's not unknown to get a fresh graduate or self-taught person that wants to deep dive into the software they make use of daily, but I feel like it's far more uncommon that it was 20 years ago or more.
Blender and VLC are two amazing examples of the FLOSS tool not just being "the open-source alternative to ...". They are THE main tool
FFMPEG is another. Any online video platform probably uses it.
And GPL at that, thank goodness.
Same. I've only ever been a user in Blender and it pushed me to use Python as my first programming language since I could script Blender with it.
IIRC, I first started using it with version 2.32 when I was an early teen. I still have a .blend file somewhere with a textured model of a LOTR Fell beast/Nazgul, that I created painstakingly and cost me some exam points as I preferred 3D modelling to studying.
Good times
I made a live action movie, edited with Blender as a video editor.
It was great at the time, I’m sure has improved a lot in the last 8 years too.
Blender and Inkscape are some of the software listed in the credits.
Inkscape makes so much more sense to me than Adobe Illustrator ever made. Maybe it's how I use it, or what I'm looking for as output, but I've been happy with Inkscape since around 2006/2007.
I remember when it was open sourced.
Who would have ever thought at the time it would create and render a beautiful Oscar winning movie.
agreed, Blender is tremendous
Blender is amazing, and miles ahead of Gimp and other FOSS editors.
That said, I can't help but feel that all of the current generation of leading 3D software (Blender, Unreal, etc. ) is going to be replaced by something just around the corner. The progress in 3D AI is nothing short of phenomenal. It feels like soon nobody will ever have to worry about sculpting or retopologizing or rigging. An entirely new class of tool will take over.
It's not just 3D. It feels like the current generation of artistic tools (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) are about to be wholesale replaced with Gen AI tooling.
AI plugins (eg. the Krita plugin) are too steeped in the old world of editing. New tools will probably be AI native and prefer AI workflows for reaching the same coarse- and fine-grained outcomes.
I don't expect these tools to be used by the masses that are prompting AI slop like "50's Panavision Wes Anderson", but rather by working artists. Genuine Gen AI tools for artists.
I've been making short films on the weekends with Blender, ComfyUI, and a mix of custom software. The AI pieces are doing the heavy lifting, and my productivity is 10x what it was before Gen AI.
I think it depends on how much control you feel you want to have over your output. AI tools are decent at rendering video, but for those that want full control over the process, I feel like it's going to be a long way to go. If AI is able to generate the full source files to allow things to be modified, then I would 100% agree with you that it's going to be a new age for artists. If you're dealing with raw generated video, or even a frame by frame rendered image, your control is much more limited than if you could shape and customize your models. For most, this is probably fine, but for those that want fine-grained control, there is a far path to go in order to get to that point.
What / who is the leading edge of 3D AI? I took a look into it last year and the best tools were still a very long away from producing usable results (couldn't keep tri count under control, spiderweb rigging, shape jank, etc).
I don't care much for Generative AI (still too early) but I had some ok experiences with Tripo for retopology and auto rigging.
Still super early days though, I did have some of the same issues you had.
Thanks, I checked out Tripo. It produced some absolutely laughable trees for me, but a pretty decent looking barstool. Refused to rig it for me for some reason, though.
I'd say it'll take them some years to finish figuring out 3D, it's a good stretch beyond 2D image generation.
https://github.com/ahujasid/blender-mcp something will definitely happen we will see what happens, 3D has always been tedious so any improvements in this space will be welcome.
I totally forgot I was going to look into that...
Seems to me the 'proper' way to do something like this is to hook into makesRNA and have the endpoints automagically be generated as part of the build process. Similar (or identical) to how the python and C++ APIs are created.
I've been thinking for a while now that someone (much less lazy than myself) needs to get in there and have makesRNA generate something like IDL file(s) so any number of tools can hook into Blender's API without having to hand code the endpoints like this addon is apparently doing.
Same could be said about Fender and Gibson.
Is the best OSS software Blender, Ghidra or Linux?
as wonderful as Linux is, it started as a Unix clone and a lot of its initial popularity can be attributed to providing a free version of something that used to cost money.
Blender and Ghidra were started from scratch and are considered top tier in their niches. So I feel a sense of community pride for them more than I do for Linux.
The question is flawed, though, because the best OSS software is obviously Emacs ;)
Blender was open source software that was freed after the original developer couldn’t make money and, IIRC, was purchased by the community.
It did not start from scratch as OSS.
Yes I'm aware of this. I don't feel that detracts from it. The author wanted to open source it and got it done with the help of the community.
It's not uncommon that someone champions the release of a project as open source and I think that is something we should encourage.
I named my cat Emacs, and my neighbor's cat is named Blender! (However, they are mortal enemies.)
wait ain't Ghidra a NSA software? and Blender a clone of other 3d software that cost money?
Blender a clone of other 3d software that cost money?
Blender was commercial software that cost money. After the company went bankrupt, the former CEO and a bunch of Blender users got together and raised enough money to buy out the source code and made it open source.
I don't think Blender can really be called a clone of anything other than in the most superficial sense. Certainly when Blender was first being release it looked and worked like nothing else in the industry, often much to its detriment.
This is a real "daddy or chips" question, because they all do completely different things. Blender possibly best in terms of "compared to an expensive commercial product". Ghidra is incredibly powerful but has a weird look and feel. Linux is undoubtedly the most influential of those three, but if it had never been invented perhaps we'd be using a BSD instead?
"Best" in terms of "achievement by a single programmer (almost)" is Fabrice Bellard's ffmpeg and QEMU.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6URGh61iKs
Probably Linux if I had to pick one, partly because of how many tools were written for or on it and the ecosystem it's built up.
You mean GNU plus Linux?
Yes, and more. It's a whole related world.
to answer your question its probably git.
I think Git is probably the most "useful" but given how bad it is (despite how good it is), I have a hard time calling it the "best"
If we are going to go infrastructure, i would say sqlite or curl.
his question wasn't "what's the worst software ever created" ;)
> Blender 4.4 is all about stability. During the 2024–2025 northern hemisphere winter, Blender developers doubled down on quality and stability in a group effort called “Winter of Quality.”
Given the name choice “Winter of Quality”, I’m impressed at the rare cultural and geographical awareness that led to specifying “the 2024–2025 northern hemisphere winter” here.
You get used to it. I didn't find it discriminatory or obnoxious. There are significantly bigger fish to fry. Source: was an African.
Oh, I’m plenty used to it, being from Australia. It’s just so painfully common for northern-hemisphereans to use seasons or other vague cultural elements¹ to anchor things (southern-hemisphereans don’t really do it, in my experience), that it’s refreshing to find a case of people using it but being aware.
(These days I have a new difficulty: I moved to India last year, and although the seasons are closer to the northern temperate and sub-arctic seasons, they don’t match exactly.)
—⁂—
¹ I don’t count “Christmas” as this, because it’s a specific term for a particular time… well, apart from certain Eastern churches and Julian calendar users. I mean things like using “holiday” as a time of year, which completely baffled me in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23244207.
I think you misinterpreted the comment you are replying to. It didn’t say anything about the phrase being discriminatory.
I also interpreted that as "Given the <bad> name choice...".
Although given how common phrases like "winter of x" and "summer of x" are in English, I can't imagine what the problem is.
Unless they think it's discrimination against people from the southern hemisphere?
> Unless they think it's discrimination against people from the southern hemisphere?
I don't suppose anyone takes it all that seriously in the case of the seasons, but it is a textbook example of a dominant group imposing their frame of reference on less dominant group
What's the dominant group here? Blender is based in the Netherlands. They are using their local frame of reference, that's all. It's like complaining that someone refers to the time as 4 o'clock in a meeting because you joined from another time zone. Would you complain when I say that today's date is the 27th of March, because some people use the lunar calendar?
It's a textbook example of getting offended on behalf of other people, who aren't even complaining in the first place.
> It's a textbook example of getting offended on behalf of other people, who aren't even complaining in the first place.
the person who started the thread stated they're from Australia - so they're getting "offended" on behalf of themself.
FWIW I'm also Australian (living in Europe now) and found this kind of thing (using vague, location specific timeframes like "winter" or "holiday") quite confusing, too. It's obviously easier for me to understand now that I live in the northern hemisphere.
The "issue" is that it's a bit annoying to have to look up where a company is based and then the weather patterns in that locale to understand something, when they could just as easily say "Nov-Dec 2025" for example. And when you live in a sub-tropical or tropical locale where there aren't clear demarcations between four seasons like there are in western Europe and North America, you can't just say "winter there is summer here" and vv.
It's not a serious, "stop everything and fix this right now" issue, just a common annoyance, and it's nice to see Blender here try to make that a bit clearer.
> The "issue" is that it's a bit annoying to have to look up where a company is based and then the weather patterns in that locale to understand something
The only thing you have to do here is understand that seasons are switched in different hemispheres, which is taught when you're about 6 years old in most schools. And in case you forgot that, they even helpfully noted that their "winter of quality" is referring to winter in the northern hemisphere.
Yes, working with people from different parts of the world to you is "a bit annoying".
The Blender group - and entire worldwide open source software community - is already making massive concessions by doing everything through English.
If the only thing you have to put up with that's "a bit annoying" is different holidays and seasons, you should recognize that you're actually incredibly privileged. You already speak English natively. You grew up in a western English speaking country, you share basically all the same reference framing aside from some minor calendar differences. It's honestly selfish as hell to expect people to adapt even their seasonal reference frames to suit you. They're already speaking your entire language instead of their own.
> The only thing you have to do here is understand that seasons are switched in different hemispheres
Some places don’t have a clear demarcation between four seasons like NA/Western Europe.
When it’s the rainy season in the tropics, which season is that in North America?
It’s not so simple.
> The only thing you have to do here is understand that seasons are switched in different hemispheres
Like most things taught to 6 year olds, this is also a massive oversimplification of the real world.
There isn't even widespread agreement over which exact months constitute "summer"/"winter" within the Northern hemisphere, let alone when you start bringing in more tropical climates (which tend to have Rainy/Dry/Windy seasons instead).
Sounds to me like you also misinterpreted the comment.
I completely misinterpreted it.
Editorialized title? I can neither find anything saying "Oscar" nor "Version Tool"
It's a confusingly jumbled title. I think it's supposed to mean something like "New version of Oscar-winning Blender software released" (which is still inaccurate—it wasn't Blender that won the Oscar, but an Oscar-winning film was made using it). It looks like this release celebrates that win by using art from the film for its splash image.
oh I was assuming it was tongue in cheeks praise for the outstanding visual presentation of the outstanding new release
I thought it was a source code control system at first.
I was looking for a new, shiny Git alternative from the Blender team or something. "Blender releases their Oscar-winning version tool" like, what?!
Yeah the title truly makes no sense, how has it been up for 8 hours already?
more like I have been fasting and wanted to get something out haha.
Can someone explain the title to me? What does it mean to release a "version tool"? Or do they have a special version for Oscar winners which is now publicly released? Or is this just some extra tool you can put on top of regular Blender? I simply don't follow.
I don't think the title reflects the contents of the article. I believe a more accurate title would be "Blender, the tool behind an Oscar winning movie, releases a new version", because as far as I can tell the movie referenced that won the Oscar (Flow[0]), was using LTS version 3.6[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film) [1] https://www.blender.org/user-stories/making-flow-an-intervie...
I think the title is just nonsense. It's only about the release of a new version of Blender, which was used to make Flow.
Rather than a tool, the real people should be highlighted here. Blender’s success in the open source space is atypical. The difference is surely just a group of brilliant people who just happened to take interest and found about this project. Or maybe animation studios are incentivising blender development because of the high price of commercial alternatives. Or both. In any case the individual devs should be championed than just the group.
it was from a guy with a considerable amount of money (and experience on Maya) compared to [most] people who use Blender daily...
open source is not atypical, i think. Linux basically runs more than half of the computers worldwide, 3D printing software is FOSS as far as i'm aware, Godot is one of the biggest Github projects, programming languages are open-source, novel techniques of sound synthesis are already surfing on stuff like Csound/SuperCollider (which both are decades old and FOSS), a bunch of atemporal FOSS text-editors on the hand of a bunch of developers developing closed-source stuff and the list goes on
Open source rules the hidden parts of nearly everything (servers, programming languages, etc). It's atypical for user facing software to be open source and "world class". Of course there are exceptions (like Blender, for example) but generally the commercial version of user facing software is more advanced/well liked/industry standard.
It's rare, and it deserves more recognition than just, "Oh, cool, free 3D software."
I've noticed a trend lately with open source projects, notably Godot and Blender, having visually impressive release notes. I hope this trend continues.
Dolphin and RPCS3 are also good examples of this.
Less visually impressive than these, but definitely more than the norm, and packed with deep dives into the development of certain features.
Yes, Godot goes in the same direction as Blender to become a very mainstream tool. Unity fucked up.
now I am going to look into godots notes.
It's just a gut feeling instead of a proper evaluation of different apps, but I always feel Blender and Houdini are made by developers who care, while other 3D packages are, well, not.
I really want to learn Houdini. Their pricing model is not even that bad (just 200 USD/year if you are indie), but even that is a hurdle when the alternative (Blender) is free and so good (or just plain better) for the 98% of what I want to do. Also, I do manage to crash Houdini more often than I manage to crash Blender, so there is that....
Different tools for different purposes. Blender is in the Maya paradigm, and doing pretty well in that. Houdini is more like a DSL for computer graphics and can end up being both the most low level and the most high level tool in the industry. There's no mystery about why the industry has mostly settled on Houdini + one other complimentary DCC.
Anything procedural works so much better in Houdini I find. I was excited about the geometry nodes in Blender and had some fun with them, but always hit a wall where things in Houdini are much better designed and much more powerful and flexible. But it's a steep learning curve and I forgot most things again because I don't really have to use it regularly.
I had the indie license for a while (purchased privately) and just making things shatter and explode was satisfaction enough. I did this mostly for learning and fun
Touchdesigner too
I would love to check out touchdesigner some day, I'm a Houdini pipeline TD (and creative too) and Touch started as a fork of Houdini from quite some time ago specialised for real-time (and the real-time-ness of demoscene is one of my favourite things ever!) However iiuc Touch is Windows-only.
I wonder whether under wine it might benefit from the 'ntsync' thing that just got added to the Linux kernel (as a module) (Currently also on hn front-page) as long as there's a free training version of Touch I'll definitely check it out once the new kernel gets into Gentoo!
It's probably already been said in a thousand other discussions, but Flow is a really good movie, highly advised
The thing that animators are talking about is the fact that they eschewed a storyboard in favour of an animatic (an animatic being a motion sketch of the animation). This is the workflow we now recommend to our students.
This animatic can be found on YouTube.
Animatics in my experience have always been a thing, it's just they were normally created from the storyboards. At least on the movies I've been involved in (admittedly years ago), it really came down to the fact that the directors really didn't know how to use 3d animation software, so they drew the story boards by hand, like they'd been taught. I'm guessing today most animation students don't really learn to draw or storyboard like that, and we're probably seeing the end of the classic storyboard.
With examples ranging from Avatar the Last Airbender, to Castlevania, to Monty Oum (who also completely eschewed storyboards), I can't help but that reducing the over reliance on storyboards and focusing on the animation instead is a recurring theme among unusually successful animations/animators.
Flow's having an impact on animators seems great!
What tools do you use for an animatic?
As the previous poster has implied, An animatic can evolve directly from a storyboard. The frames of the storyboard are placed directly on a timeline (e.g. premier) and sometimes given a few animations (e.g. zoom, pan etc) and annotations. As the animation progresses, rough 3D renders (sometimes called flip books) can be dropped onto this timeline. In this way, the final movie can evolve directly from the animatic.
What made Flow unusual is that they bypassed the storyboard almost entirely, which is unusual for a feature film. One rational is that the movie features significant and lengthy camera motion shots. Camera motion is very difficult to capture in a storyboard.
At a student level, another motivation for lessening the importance of the storyboard is that they require not insignificant drawing skills in order to do effectively. Even animation students cannot be guaranteed to draw well, and the number of student filmmakers who can draw is vanishingly small.
Hidden towards the end of all the updates - now macOS Finder QuickLook can preview .blend files. Nice.
if only Finder and Blender could actually OPEN other 3d formats in blender without cumbersomely having to go through the import menu
For feature length pieces, independent animation is an existential threat to the established film studios that will only grow. Meanwhile, a friend of mine works (very) high up in studio land CGI and recently estimated five years outlook before a total industry implosion due to AI tooling. Leaving the whole Youtube killed TV thing aside (small point!), there has never been a better time to be an aspiring video story teller.
The gatekeepers are still around, but they don't hold the same power anymore
The phrasing of the submission title ("Blender releases their Oscar winning version tool") here is baffling, unless I'm misunderstanding something. A typical boring HN title would be "Blender 4.4"
Ah, that makes more sense than anything I could find on the page (version only appeared as a substring of conversion.) Having only used blender for "minor tweaks to a collision model of a robot workspace" which got managed in git, model-aware version control sounded interesting.
I was also confused. The HN title is weird. As I hovered over the description deciding whether to waste my precious seconds RTFA I had dreams of some sort of version control for 3d assets, but no.
I could do better tbh, more used to Reddit also fasting so its been interesting how it detracts my concentration when it comes to time to break the fast and afterwards.
usually dang enforces the no editorialization rule, either he is benevolent towards this fantastic release or just not online;)
Seems like you understood it perfectly to me.
After some effort!
In the v4.4 showreel video there is a cool rendering of an O'Neal cyclinder (or similar space habitat) at 1:30. Anyone know where that is from?
And it is also the goto tool for winners of the UK young animator of the year:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42113898
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38282166
I've been using Blender recently to build 3D models for my new 3D printing obsession. The learning curve is significant, but the product seems great. I've gotten decent help from the chatbots, but does anyone here have any suggestions for good non-animation-focused tutorials?
If you're making technical parts, I highly recommend just biting the bullet and learning parametric cad with fusion 360. There's a ton of learning resources on youtube etc. OnShape seems like a quite promising alternative but I assume there's less material since it's newer.
I've used OnShape a fair bit, and it's pretty solid for technical parts. But recently, I've been doing prints of 3D scans (which work surprisingly well these days!!), and OnShape is sorta the wrong tool for the job for that.
I'm using a crazy combination of pre-processing in Blender and then post-processing in OnShape today, and feel like I should be able to just use Blender for the whole job.
I am learning Blender too after failing to learn Maya 20 years ago.
To me, it is like learning to play guitar or piano. You just have to do 1-2 hours a day of practice and do it everyday.
There are so many good youtube videos that it just will depend what you want to do and how you like the person doing the tutorial. Then at some point just start trying to model random objects that interest you.
Yeah parametric CAD is better for most 3D printing (non-artistic). FreeCAD 1.0 is actually good now!
Cursor + blender-mcp are starting to make the UX easier https://github.com/ahujasid/blender-mcp
Still has a ways to go, but shows promise.
It does say a lot about a person's attention span and intelligence when they cannot figure out one of the cleanest UIs in software, with such a buttload of tutorials and guides.
Blender's UI has improved tremendously over the years, but I wouldn't call it one of the cleanest UI in software. It still has, for better or worse, quite idiosyncratic UI patterns (e.g. the panel juggling) and the underlying logic of e.g. objects, meshes, textures, materials, world, camera and renderer lining up is not very discoverable.
I'm highly sceptical anyone could learn the Blender UI just by opening it and clicking around.
No, you do tutorials, and plenty of them. Takes a few days, and then you're pretty familiar. I don't think AI is needed here at all.
Specific features are hard to find from tutorials. LLMs don't replace tutorials, they augment documentation and stack exchange and such.
Visually clean, sure. Intuitive? Hmm Blender was notorious for having a difficult to follow UI for years. They've improved it a lot over the last 10 years but I still wouldn't say it's easy to use. Way more stuff requires a tutorial than one would hope.
Honestly the fact that you're doubting the usefulness of AI for this makes me suspect you haven't really used Blender in anger.
I have used blender plenty, I don't think it's mega intuitive, but it's not "I need something else to do the thinking for me" level hard.
Nobody said "need". Obviously you can look up all the tutorials if you want to do it slowly.
Think about it like fancy search. You can manually look through a document ("I don't need something else to do the searching for me"), or you can just use Ctrl+F.
Yeah, or you can spin up a few GPU clusters, upload your entire document, and ask it.
Blender has built-in search. That's not what this is.
I’ve been using Blender for 20 years and it’s been amazing to see how far it’s come.
Sadly, the writing is on the wall for my trusty Hackintosh since they recently decided to drop support for AMD GPU acceleration on macOS.
Blender has come a long way since 2013 when i had passed out my collage. Kudos to developer standing against few like Autodesk giving designers to try something for free.
there is billions to be made bringing git to other industries.
How hard is it to learn Blender? I did a bunch of 3dsMax when I was in high school, but I haven’t touched any of this stuff in 25 years at this point.
There are very good free and open tutorials for Blender. Just make sure you use a current one since the development speed was extremely high in the last years and controls changed here and there.
One of the most famous is probably the donut one and I would wholeheartedly recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4haAdmHqGOw
If I’m not mistaken the story was: despite the movie being much less impressive technically, its narrative and emotional force pushed it ahead of much more polished movies.
Qualifying Blender as “Oscar-winning” is a bit of a stretch.
It’s awesome for Blender, and it’s awesome that Blender allows people to create small budget animated movies. But the Oscar credit should mostly go to the guys who made the movie.
I think that's a little unfair to Blender. Clearly "was able to produce an Oscar-winning animation" is a pretty high bar, even if it isn't as high as "actually won an Oscar for animation technology" (or whatever it is).
If you watch the release video embedded in the post you can hear both part of the acceptance speech from the makers of Flow where they explicitly thank Blender, and also can also see a special oscar scene, which I assume the creators of Flow made specifically for this version announcement.
In general, there seems to be a close relationship with the creators and Blender, and the overall impression given is that the creators also think that Blender should receive part of the credit.
Well, people need an alternative to CG big tech. This fits the narrative really well, and was just the tipping point to a growing disdain towards Autodesk.
I thought from the title that Blender switched to their own source control tool instead of svn
title really should just be "Blender 4.4"
that is nice one
furiously models doughnuts