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Blender Community Rescues Sources
Christoffer Green writes "Today the Blender funding campaign went through the 100k limit,
sufficient now to pay for the ransom fee needed to make Blender Open
Sourced. The Blender Foundation aims to have the deal signed before
October 1, do a pre-release for donating members only at October 5,
organize a Blender Conference in Amsterdam October 11-12-13, and make
the official CVS release on October 13 for everyone.
This doesn't mean that you should stop donating though. The foundation
still depends on your contributions to cover costs that have been made."
as far as I can see, E100K has actually been paid. Another E8455 is 'pending', so they already should have some funds for their expenses.
Great news!
The company who owns blender burned what, E10mil?, in the last 2 years... on what? I still remember the loudmouth directing the company telling everybody who wanted to hear it that blender would be so profitable... What did he do with all the funds he raised? Will the people who invested in the company be thrilled the source is sold for 100K? I don't think so.
Besides, blender the product, is ok, but the interface is so darn goofy it takes a hell of a lot of time to get used to it, especially when you compare it to the big boys in 3D world: 3DSMax, lightwave and Maya
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Pro music production!
Products like Cubase, Logic and ProTools dominate the professional studio recording arena.
The pro-quality sequencers, samplers, soft-synths and DSP audio processors that exist for Mac/Win don't have any peer in the OSS world AFAIK.
Apple has a slight edge at the moment but I'm sure they are loosing the plot - i.e. with their acquisition of Emagic (Logic) and their arrogant and high-handed decision to cease development of Logic for Windows (leaving many angry pro studio users in the lurch).
Software like Cubase, ProTools etc. is massive and complex. Many hundreds of man years have gone into them. Can the OSS community really offer a viable alternative?
"After the campaign
So, it looks like the source code will be GPL. That's good. However, you won't be able to access the CVS without paying. That's bad. They might let you have access to other services. That's good. But there are no promises, and there are no details. That's bad.
This doesn't look like any open source project I've ever seen. I don't remember ever having to pay to access the linux kernel CVS. Hmmm. Well, I don't really care, anyways. I don't use 3D programs. I'm just trolling.
yes, and in fact the OSS community (in this case, myself and a small handful of others) already do!
ardour is my own contribution to this issue.
3 years of full-time unpaid labor, funded by income from amazon.com, tested in a commercial recording studio, aimed squarely at the high end market with low end costs.
its massive, its complex, its very very very hard for a novice to build, its only available from CVS at this time. do you think it will get better? you'd better believe it! package releases coming up within 6 weeks, v1.0 hopefully within 12 weeks.
Promises are not easily forgotten. Who is the lucky person who gets the T-shirt?
Anyway, given that it hasn't even reached v1.0 at this time, no its not yet ready for general professional use. But it will be. Some studio users are experimenting with it already, however.
Actually Blender is a bit like vi: there's two major modes, toggled with TAB key, the modes for editing objects at large and another to edit the objects themselves. And, of course, a lot of obscure BUT some say logical key combos. It rules. (Though I'm still more like an XEmacs person. Not in Blender's case though.)
A lot of people have been talking about the usability of the Blender interface.
Now obviously I am not the first one to admit that it's not incredibly strait forward. Usually if I have taken some time away from blender, it takes me a while to get back into the groove of things.
However, one thing I have noticed. Once you actually DO get used to the interface, everything starts to feel natural. You stop thinking about how you use its features... you just USE them.
Blender is not your typical mouse interface. To use blender properly you need both hands.
However... is starting to get a bit dated compared to the many of the other 3d modelers out there. But this is why we are getting the source!
I hope a lot of the people who actually DO work with the source, understand just how uniquely useful the interface actually can be.
A good in-program tutorial would probably go a LONG way toward the usability problem. I should be able to say... I wish to perform this task... show me how to do it!
Now someone mentioned the widgets being a little weird... Yes I agree that's true. Take up too much space? They are 3d widgets! Zoom out some. (Although yes, you do waste some space on the sides when you do this... =/)
I actually kind of like how the widgets work. If you need to set an absolute value, shift click and enter the value you really wanted.
Again, I hope that when blender actually does end up being hacked to pieces (think mozilla)... that the developers take into consideration that quite a few of the interface features actually do work... and are fairly comfortable to use.
So yes... Blender is starting to show its age. But think of it this way, right now Blender is kind of like Netscape 4.x. Give the community a year or two with the source, and you might just see some amazing things done with it.
Now... I'm probably not the first one to think that Mozilla was over engineered. Although I hope the same thing won't happen to blender... Mozilla eventually did turn out alright. And who hasn't been accused of over engineering? I know I have =)
Luke
> package releases coming up within 6 weeks, v1.0 hopefully within 12 weeks.
12 weeks? Don't make me laugh! You have been hyping vaporware and putting down others in non-commercial audio software community for *years*. People, consider ardour to be the Diakatana of the Linux audio world. There's even a meme shared inside the Csound community about your last failed project: Quasimodo syndrome!
When you produce something that can be installed by an ordinary musician, that has user documentation, that is easy to use, that supports MIDI and commidity sound-cards (like Soundblaster and chips built into laptops), then please let us know.
People raving about Blenders GUI don't know what they're talking about and usually don't know much about 3D - or professional 3D modelling tools for that matter. They think that tools like 3D Studio are some kind of benchmark. I agree that Blender is more advanced in some ways than lower end tools like 3D Studio, but it is designed to facilitate an archaic approach to modelling that is simply not scalable above quite small and very simple objects.
In fact Blender has a simple low end GUIs. Its workspace management is an area in which it's notably poor, the OO structure using GL for rendering the controls is elegant and fast and the shortcuts are countless but should be easily configurable/personalisable.
It could benifit greatly from breaking the pseudo pallettes up into pallettes that can be easily launched with keystrokes. Loosing pixel space for a pallette that you used three minuites ago is insane, and loosing it in the vertical axis is just stupid. An argument could be made for running a strip vertically in the modelling window instead of horizontally (like the object heirachy). Many systems do this and it works MUCH better. The current system makes it a bit hard to use three or four monitors, but unlike other systems, this cluster of an interface NEEDS a couple of screens on which to sprawl.
I refer you to my earlier statements to explain what I feel blender needs to come up to spec.
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