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Blender Goes Open Source
Christoffer Green writes "
This morning, the NaN shareholders have reached an agreement on the conditions for a new future for Blender.
In general it means that the Blender Foundation can execute it plans, to continue developement as an open source project." Perhaps some ambitious
soul will bolt a reasonable interface onto the 3D app.
This is pretty good news for me. I started a tutorial for blender a while back. The interface at first looks daunting, but after using it for a few hours you realize that everything makes a lot of sense. It's probably as opposite as you can get to something like Bryce in terms of the interface. Not pretty, but powerful. Though there are many rt apps for Linux, none of the friendliest ones are open.
The press release and proposal are both lcated here.
Congratulations Ton and everyone. This will be a great addition to the OSS community. Once the 95k USD is scrapped together.
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I know there is going to be alot of cracks about it's goofy interface.
But to be honest, it is not all that bad. I went and bought the official blender book to learn how to do everything, and it was pretty straight forward. I was doing some things I never thought I would be able to do in a matter of hours. I still use Blender to do some artwork when I'm kinda bored. More of a part-time hobby then anything else, so Blender being free software was nice.
The Official Blender Guide was a really well written book. Lots of great looking shots showing off what blender can do, and putting alot of what I've seen people do in Maya to shame. I'd reccomend the book to anyone really interested in doing something with Blender. Also has a CD with updated versions of Blender, and all the pictures and animations done in the examples.
Just my two cents, I'm just happy to see that Blender isn't dead quite yet.
I think that once learned it is easy, yes. I think there are still points wrong with the interface such as incredibly small widgets (the sliders) and unexplained button coloring.
Also object creation is debatable - I much prefer MAX's method to blender/truespace's create then scale approach.
One of the great things about blender's UI is how small it makes the binary. I highly doubt blender would be so small if native widgets had been used. Then again a native file selector would be far easier and more powerful than Blender's 80sesque implementation.
Taco's done some 3D stuff like Duckpins and Hamster Havoc. Who's to say he's not qualified to comment and you are. I tried to go to your website and see if maybe you put something out there for us to see, but alas, your server doesn't even work. So what have YOU done that make you any more of an expert?
Perhaps, but what I think the original author meant was "easy to use" not "intuitive." This makes much more sense, since "easy to use" and "hard to learn" are definitely not mutually exclusive, and often go hand-in-hand.
(To prove this to yourself, consider MS Windows Notepad. Very easy to learn, right? Try to use it for something serious: development, complex text transformations, etc. Very hard to use. Consider now vim or emacs. Pretty steep learning curve, but once you're there, it's really easy to do almost anything.)
Now, a case could be made for "intuitive" too, since once you know what you're doing and have some decent familiarity, figuring out how to do something else could be very intuitive. I tend to think this isn't what the original author meant, but a case could be made anyway.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
I hate to split hairs...but a full version of Lightwave 7.5 (the newest version) is only $1,595 and NOT $5,000.
That being said, I own and use Lightwave and I agree, the interface takes some getting used to.
"...Beer..."
I agree that the interface at first glance appears to be convuluted. But once you learn it, you'll realize it's one of the most well thought-out gui's out there, period. I'm sure many blender users out there would atest to that.
Don't just download blender and expect to learn the GUI by fiddling around. Chances are you'll only get fustrated after a while. Buy the tutorial, it is *well* worth the ~$35 if you're serious about learning this 3D app. The Official Blender 2.0 Guide.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
99% of blenders problems are because there is no undo function ...
Because.