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I am generally annoyed with gratuitous icon changes - but in this case it seems like they (mostly) maintained recognizability, while improving legibility, which should be especially nice for those who choose to use smaller icon sizes. Can't tell you how annoyed I get about projects that go for the monochrome icon b.s. - icons are important functional components that must be easy to recognize, and they remove one of the most dramatic differentiating features for an arguable improvement in aesthetics?

You can say that again. Prime example of the moment being Blender, a massive, popular open source graphics app with hundreds of icons, no less. They are re-designing their icons in black and white designs for their major new version that is expected to make a big splash on this market segment, and it's caused pretty big arguments...

https://blenderartists.org/t/n...

Hollywood is a long way from "standardized" on Linux. The reality is nobody gives a shit about Linux

Ahem.

You mean a one-line post from one person asking that question completely unsubstantiated by anything at all is enough to convince you that Hollywood has standardized on Linux despite the fact that a huge amount of the software packages used in films don't even run on Linux?

Hollywood is a long way from "standardized" on Linux. The reality is nobody gives a shit about Linux

Ahem.

The important question is - how does it perform for the Cycles (Blenders render engine) benchmarks :)

http://blenderartists.org/foru...

https://www.blender.org/downlo...

for 3d Prinitng go with Blender or 3dsmax. For your CNC machinery, use solidworks. Unfortuantley they are 2 different kettles of fish that probably require 2 different softwares to get the most benefit out of it.

Blender or 3dsmax will allow more free-form modelling techniques and diversity, and theres plenty of tutorials you can learn. Output to a 3d printer is easy. no CNC data though, these programs arent a solid modelling engine.

Solidworks is more mechanical design if you need to create CNC data for you mill which solidworks provides because of its solid modelling engine. You might be able to also output to STL from solidworks to 3d printer also, however you are then limited with a mechanical engineering application rather than a product designed 3d package if you want more organic models.

I agree with you here. Blender is getting _very_ good these days. And with the more recent changes like Cycles (for previewing "realistic" materials) and Dyntopo for sculpting, I think that blender is an amazing tool.

For real world proof, here is a ring that was made in blender (with some zbrush) and 3d printed:

    http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?278857-The-Ring-of-the-Monkey-Pirate-King

I would imagine that he could have used blender dyntopo, but if you already have a nice toolset, you might as well use it. If you frequent the blenderartists forums, you will start to learn that even blender users tend to use a variety of tools.

I think the best way to learn Blender is to follow along with one of the thousands of free video tutorials found on Vimeo, YouTube, or some of my favorites:

• Blender Cookie
• The Blender 3D Course
• Blender Artists has a bunch of tutorials posted in their forums

Have fun!

Here's a typical bit of Open Source design suckage.

I just installed the latest version of Blender, over an existing installation. The installer can't find the exact version of Python it wants (which, incidentally, is not a currently supported version.) The program itself can, it's just the installer that's broken. Typical.

Now I want to draw a spiral spring. Naturally, that's not built-in; I'll need a third-party plug-in. So I find the Blender Plug-In Repository using Google. That says "The main page for Blender python scripts is now: here. That gets "If you are not redirected within 5 seconds, click here", which then redirects to a dead link.

OK, let's try Blender's main site and search for "plugins". That leads to documentation on how to code a plugin. Another search result returns "Plugin functionalities varies so much that it is not possible to describe them here. Differently than Texture Plugins Sequence Plugins do not have a Buttons in any Button Window, but their parameters are usually accessed via NKEY." Really.

OK, let's just try "blender spiral" in Google. This gets a script for drawing spirals. That's nice. But it's a ".rar" file. That's not something Blender-specific. It's a proprietary Russian archiving format. The RAR site promotes something called "RegistryBooster", which is a strong indication of involvement with hostile code. So I probably don't want to buy the WinRAR product so I can decompress something which is a few lines of Python. This

Typical.

See http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=157085 for an immersive 3D system activity visualization built using Python.

Blender vs the other guys? I dont know, I tried blender for about 30 seconds before giving up and playing around with the student editions of the big-boys stuff.

Wow, you tried Blender for a whole 30 seconds? That's certainly an appropriate amount of time to get a handle on things and I commend you for your seriousness in giving it a chance.

Seriously, what a douche statement.

Aside from the distros themselves Blender is my favorite OSS application. I used to work in an animation department as a student and they wouldn't give the students licenses for Lightwave3d so we instead used Blender. This was back in 2004 and I can't even begin to explain the leaps and bounds that Blender has made. It is fast becoming one of the "big-boy" applications.

Perhaps you should make a visit over at the Blender Artist Forums and take a look at some of the finished projects.

Don't bother 'trying' something if you aren't even planning on giving it a fair chance.

The quote is referring to Quake 4. So they already can raytrace a semi-modern game at 90 FPS, and they have a graph that very clearly shows raytracing at a performance advantage as complexity increases. Just look at the damn graph (page three),

I don't have to look at the damn graph to tell you that what people are going to want is this

And what they are going to get is this

And, they should just be happy with this (which, is pretty awesome)

My point is that real time photorealistic rendering will never catch up with what people expect from their games. It will always be behind. If all you want is mirrors, then find a faster way to implement them at the expense of a bit of quality.

Try these video tutorials: they'll show you how Blender looks at the same time: Blender Underground tutorials: http://blenderunderground.com/category/video-tutorials/ Blender.org videos http://www.blender.org/tutorials-help/video-tutorials/getting-started/ And this thread on our forums: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=106503 May I add that I'm happy with the Blender UI, even though I'm a beginner. I find it quite easy to understand in fact. I can't say I see what the fuss is about really.

I think that this image is appropriate... I do not own this image... It belongs to Sacha Goedegebure of BlenderArtists.org

If you're interested in some more resources for Blender (or info on the movie), try checking these places out:

Blendernation

Blendernation article about Elephants Dream

Blender Artists Forums

Collection of WikiBooks

Elephants Dream on Wikipedia (in case you don't know anything about it, considering the main website is down and the original poster didn't say much of anything about the short itself)

Blender on Wikipedia

Seriously, though, considering how much has been happening with this project, and what a significant milestone it is for those who use OSS and/or CC, I find it almost sad that this is the first story on Slashdot in almost exactly a year. And that it took Slashdot editors well over a day since the first story submissions (some with links directly to the torrents to avoid killing the Elephants Dream homepage immediately) to get this up. Maybe I'm biased (I pre-ordered the DVD 9 months ago), but I just think that stories about people doing amazing things within and beyond the community deserves precedence over the latest reports about what the PS3 might cost. Not to anger anyone, just to toss that up for discussion.

Here's a nice write-up written by somebody very much in cahoots with the Orange team and the heads of the Blender project:

http://www.blendernation.com/2006/05/18/the-worlds -first-open-movie-released/

You can get Blender here:

http://blender.org/cms/Blender.31.0.html

and learn how to use it here:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_P ro

and get community help here:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/
IRC: irc.freenode.net/ #blender #blenderchat #blenderqa

spiderworm