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Blender Is GPL
BartV writes with a low-key snippet from the new blender.org: ""Today, Sunday oct 13, 2002, we've launched the Blender sources as GNU GPL to the Internet. Blender has become Free Software forever!" This should be a case study for other companies with software no longer profitable as payware; read some of our previous postings about Blender to follow the story from idea to release.
I was reading through some of the previous articles b/c as we all know, the server is /.'ed.
I found a lot of complaints about the UI of the program (see one here)
Any of the hardcore Blender users planning on actually doing some development on the UI (and some features which other programs have, ie default lighting?)
I am really interested in doing some of my own editing soon and I would love to see an easy to use program that isn't referred to as " the vi of 3D modelling "
Just some thoughts until we can see the actual article.
While I was poking around on www.blender3d.com yesterday, I clicked through one of the Links/Sponsors and found some fairly cool things.
The site is http://www.quelsolaar.com/ with 2 projects based on blender (I think, but they might not be) at http://www.quelsolaar.com/loqairou/screens.html and http://www.quelsolaar.com/quelsolaar/screens.html (a 3rd project lacks screenshots, but is a new experimental interface for blender, it says)
Some really cool stuff, coming real soon.
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"Actually since this is such an anticipated release, I think the site was hammered before the article was finished submitting."
It was. I checked it this morning. Imagine, being slashdotted without assistance from slashdot.org ! The horrors! What [other] force in the universe is capable of such obliterative power?
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Bite your tongue! Those who would trade a little freedom for a program that works deserve neither freedom nor a program that works.
...is some open source drink recipies!
Heh, that's very funny. I remember I tried an iMac once. I can't do absolutely anything useful with it, and I've been using computers and Windows for years. I see lots of people talking about how intuitive is $GUI. That's a plain lie. Any GUI requires getting used to it. If a really intuitive one is ever made it will work by reading your mind.
"any GUI that needs people to "get used to it" is bad design"
Not if it lets people who KNOW HOW TO USE IT do what they need in a signifantly more efficient manner. As far as I care, all GUI's should be more difficult to use, people are too stupid as it is.
Just so you know, any GUI that needs people to "get used to it" is bad design and doesn't take into consideration human factors and usability.
Not really. It's only bad design if your goal is to make the program as easy to learn as possible. In the case of Blender, it means that it's a UI optimized so that those who know it can work as fast as possible. Those optimizations may be inconsistent with optimizations that allow somebody to learn it as fast as possible.
The ideal UI would do both. Given where Blender comes from, the "skilled user efficiency" optimizations were far more important. I suspect there will be a lot of resistance to decreasing the efficiency of the UI to skilled users in the name of improving it for newcomers. If the latter can be done without sacrificing the former, then that will be welcome.
-Rob
Then how do you explain the ui of every in house 3d tool in the industry?
They have been designed with only one goal in mind. Workflow speed.
Its better to design the ui of an app you use all day to be as fast as possible and then not to care about the learning curve.
This is becouse the time it takes you to learn the app is made up for in a matter of days when you actually use the app.
You cannot claim that people must understand the app when its about 3d software. This is becouse they are in themselfs very hard apps to use. So the people using them havto be very tech friendly. They should not have any problem learning the ui nomatter how hard it is.
The people that complain about the ui eather havent spent enough time learning it or quite simply doesnt have any buisness learning it in the first place.
If you are just using a 3d app to play with and create some cool graphics you might aswell use poser or bryce.
Blender is a tool designed for fast workflow, to be used in a team environment within a company.
Was it "worth it"? I don't know the first thing about blender or very much about this buy-out. Was the source available prior to the buy-out so that it could be inspectad/evaluated?
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Just so you know, any GUI that needs people to "get used to it" is bad design and doesn't take into consideration human factors and usability.
Tell that to car manufacturers. I don't know about you, but I wasn't born knowing how to drive a car.
Can you run complex real systems without any training? Could you drive a car intuitively? Play a saxophone intuitively?
Everything else in the world requires patience, practice and knowledge to operate. Why is it that people think extremely complex machines (computers) should/can be easy enough for any retard to use?
That being said I still hate the blender GUI. I tried in earnest for 3 or 4 hours to use it, didnt make any headway and said "Fuck this, im going back to rhino"
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Huh? It's fast, it's efficient and it's easy on your fingers. How is that a bad thing? Just because you don't like it doesn't mean everyone has to agree.
"Steep learning curve" does not make the UI fast. It makes it slow.
It means the interface takes some time to learn. Of course, if you haven't learned it yet and have to check the docs everytime you want to do something it will be slow. If you use the program often enough that you don't forget everything between every usage, spending some time to learn the interface properly is a great investment.
If you only edit text files once or twice a week, MS notepad is all you need. If you spend hours every day editing text, you'll want something more powerful and won't mind spending some time to use it properly. Of course, it would be great if the interface was "intuitive" enough so you wouldn't need to learn it. But as we all know, the only intuitive interface is the nipple; after that it's all learned.
So, vi and Blender suck for the casual user but are perfect for anyone who uses them a lot.
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
Make a 90% transparent glass object. Make it cast a shadow on a surface. Notice the shadow is as dark as it would have been if the object was 100% opaque.
With a ray tracer, on the other hand, the shadow's darkness would depend on the transparency of the object casting the shadow (as in real life).
Another solution, of course, would be to have Blender export POV-Ray scenes.
Other than this, I'd say Blender *rocks*, the interface is great, once you get the hang of it.. just a couple of evenings playing around, and it should pretty much feel fine. Remember, just because the interface is different, it doesn't have to be crap (yes, steeper learning curve blah blah).
w00t!
:-)
o ur ce-2.25b.tar.gz
Blessed are the sourcemakers.
ftp://dl.xs4all.nl/pub/mirror/blender/blender-s
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Blender is an absolutely frosty 3D modeling/animation/rendering package.
Okay, that's about as much I can describe with words, and I'm not a poet so I can't describe it that way, either. It is slightly puzzling on the surface, but surprisingly amazing when you look at the renderings it spews out, and the time spent doing the picture.
I've been using Blender since 1.5 or something (can't remember) and it's become one of my Graphics Packages of Choice. (Linux may be slightly behind Windows on audio and video side, but on graphics side, The GIMP, ImageMagick and Blender clearly prove it isn't behind on that area. =)
It occurs to me, what with all the debate going on concerning the validity of open source as a business model, that we are missing the bigger lesson from the blender story.
While I know that those 100 k Euros probably did not really cover all the assets of NaN, all the same, it showed it is possible.
What would people say to programming teams picking up desired projects, and then 'holding them ransom' and waiting for some form of corporate sponsorship, perhaps?
Or just doing it the way blender did it, and accepting private donations? That way, the projects that people really deem worthy would be the ones that made it into the open source community. Survival of the most valuable?
Good idea? Bad idea? Comments?
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
If I had a buck everytime some ignorant, stuckup, self described digerati exhorting someone that they should be using a "real database" or "real programming language" or "real operating system" than I would be typing this from a wireless laptop on the beach on my own private island.
What makes you so sure that MySQL was the source of the problem? You know I have seen error messages from "real" databases before, Oracle, DB2, etc. The problem could be from bad programming, hardware failure, network loss, etc.
I know it is always easier to just sit back and wait for others to do things. In this case make donations. I do not use Blender, I probably will not use it in the foreseeable future, but I might end up using free software that uses Blender. Anyways, thank you folks for the donations. Every one and all of them counted :-)
People who find the UI difficult to use remind me of people who can't read sheet music bitching about how hard it is to play the violin. Perhaps the reason you find blender difficult is you lack a foundation in 3d to base your knowledge upon.
The other camp that complains about the UI is the Lightwave and Max crowd who are comparing this relatively small program to a full featured suite.
Blender is a good tool. It is about to get better. I dig the fact that it will be part of Linux distros from now on.
I believe in Blender so much I gave my fifty and became a member. And yes, I'm very happy right now.
It's only bad design if your goal is to make the program as easy to learn as possible. In the case of Blender, it means that it's a UI optimized so that those who know it can work as fast as possible. Those optimizations may be inconsistent with optimizations that allow somebody to learn it as fast as possible.
I am not a heavy Blender user (yet), but I have not seen any operation that is significantly improved by being "odd". Can you point out one, by chance?
Further, the design assumes a middle mouse button, and middle mouse buttons are falling out of favor (because there are already 101 buttons on the keyboard, so why add yet more to the mouse). The keyboard equivs for the 3rd mouse button are horrendus if you don't have a middle button.
Besides, if the UI scares away newbies, then there will be less users and thus less people willing to support and improve it and make add-ons.
Table-ized A.I.
Your statement is true only if your primary concern is making the app easy for new users.
There is always a clear tradeoff between new users and experienced ones. Others have said below something along the lines of: "Just look at all the 3D apps out there now, each one of them focuses on the experienced user..." They are right. Once you understand the workflow, things are generally fast --which is the way all of these users want things to be anyway longer term.
Interestingly, the MCAD market (for Engineers, not entertaiment or styling) is making this mistake. All the major apps are converting their custom U.I. to one that works for new users. Each and every one of them loses their productivity as a result. Each of them are fighting with their user base. Blender will have the same problem.
One solution is to make *good* documentation with lots of use cases. The Blender folks have done a fair job of this.
The bottom line here is that complex tasks are complex. The software can only go so far to make performing the task easier. Any 3D app that has a very easy UI, also suffers from the inability to do the little complex things that make the app worth using anyway.
Why spend time building the perfect UI, when new feature creep from the fast evolving 3D market will slowly erode your interface anyway.
Personally, I feel the Blender UI is a little out there. It could be a little more standard, but that effort is probably not worth the time. Adding good things to Blender will likely motivate new users to make use of the package given its price and capability.
Blogging because I can...
What is so horrendous about ALT+LMB????
Because there are combinations that involve the middle one.
For example, if you have a middle button (MMB), then the command may be Shift+MMB. Translated through the translation you get:
Shift+Alt+LMB
Two meta-keys at the same time is BAD DESIGN, except for something rare, like rebooting (well, it should be rare in a decent OS).
Table-ized A.I.
From an engineering standpoint, it isn't bullshit at all. It's the same as processor power and power consumption. While you could in -theory- create a processor that was both fast and low power, that doesn't make it bullshit when you decide to optimize for one or the other. Interface design is engineering just the same, and you almost always have to make tradeoffs.
The enemies of Democracy are
As I understood it, the code can be used in two forms: 1) Use it under the terms of GPL, in which case if you distribute a modified version, code must be included, or 2) negotiate the license to distribute only the binaries with the Foundation, and pay them to fund the development (and I expect this payment is not that light!).
I fail to see how this "stifles a major part of the GPL". The Blender Foundation releases all of their code under this dual license - People donate them money to do their job and release code under these terms. This license does allow others to take this code and modify it, and choose to either pay up, or be a nice citizen and contribute the code.
And yes, this dual license thing was mentioned a couple of times in past. Loudly. Were you not listening?
Because it does rule. The open-source world doesn't really have had any good 3D modeler (and only a handful of even remotely tolerable renderers - no, PoV-Ray isn't open source, yet).
(And, people who say it's not intuitive and the interface sucks just don't get it. Trust me, it is a wonderful program to work with once you get hang of it. =)
(Okay, this paragraph is probably going out of hand, but within realms of argument...) What do you get if you buy something that's compatible with some obscure, undocumented Windows software? Uh, a server that is tailored to work together nicely with some proprietary API that was never meant to see the light of the day. This, as opposed to funding development of some standard server. Why pay for Exchange compatible calendar/mail server? Why not pay for development of vCalendar / SMTP server? Why not tell your boss that using a standard server would probably mean higher security and increased reliability? </offtopic>
Of course, the same argument could be said of Blender: it only took some open formats as input, processed a proprietary format, and spewed out a (somewhere) standardized file in one form or other. But it could also be argued that there are still not that good standards on this field (swapping a model file from one modeler to another is always a nice way to spend a weekend), and that Blender does support a few of currently known "open" formats (or at least provide some way of converting).
Here's the timeline:
January 1 - Microsoft announces that they will open source Windows 3.1 and DOS 6.22 for the paltry sum of $50,000. Apparently, this is to make up for the money Bill Gates lost when he ran his wallet through the laundry.
February 12 - "The Freedows Project" (sounds like "Fritos") obtains the required $50,000 through generous donations by individuals and random muggings.
February 13 - Microsoft turns over the source code.
February 14 - The Freedows project sues Microsoft for violating the GPL by deliberately obscuring their code. Microsoft counters by explaining that, no, that's the code they really were using. They enter as evidence fifty pages of source code for IE 7.
March 22 - Freedows announces that they've overcome the first project hurdle: Separating out the integrated Solitare code from the rest of the OS.
March 25 - Freedows is forked, and a new project called XFreedows emerges.
March 27 - Freedows forks again after an SMP patch is rejected. The new project is called "Lindows."
March 28 - Lindows is sued by Lindows.
April 1 - Freedows announces that Freedows OS is now running on top of the Linux kernel. Nobody believes them.
April 2, 3, 4, and 5 - Freedows resends the press releases, publishes all sorts of screenshots and demos, bribes CmdrTaco to publish a, "No it wasn't an April Fools Joke" story. Freedows is slashdotted, detonating three servers and killing five. The project is set back a month.
May 15 - A seven day flame war erupts when someone on the Freedows mailing list suggests changing the UI to require "triple clicking" for some functions.
June 1 - XFreedows is integrated back into the Freedows main branch, adding native NVIDIA support, an OpenGL-based 3D GUI, 16-way SMP support, the XFAT file system (a relational database filesystem which supports file sizes up to 300 petabytes and transparent compression), full 32 bit, 64 bit, and 128 bit support, and DRM support that can be disabled with a couple of IFDEFs.
July 15 - IBM "donates" ten million dollars to the Freedows project in what can only be described as a corporate mugging.
August 5 - Solitare is re-integrated into the OS, improving performance 300-fold.
August 7 - Thanks to IBM's generous donation, Freedows can move its CVS server onto a ludicrously powerful server running the Freedows OS.
August 29th - 2:14 a.m. Freedows becomes self-aware.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Yes, if you are allowed to make mistakes in the process without dying (such as a holidek).
:)
Great. So a UI is "intuitive" in your opinion if you only need technology from a sci-fi program set 400 years in the future in order to make the cost of attempting to use the interface without substantial training bearable.
But you're right, the car has a fairly intuitive interface. The reas for that is that, really, the car is a simple device. It turns, it goes, it stops, and correspondingly there are 3 knobs or levers you have to manipulate. Some cars have a 4th thing you can do (change gears), and you'll notice that is the one most people started to get confused about, and they had to get rid of. That's where the boundary lies between "difficult technology" and "simple appliance". Three things. So if your device has to do much more than go, stop, and turn left or right, it's going to be tough designing a truly intuitive interface.
And seeing how people around here drive, I'm inclined to think that three things is a bit too much.
That's why it's going to be tough to find an interface that doesn't "take a while to get used to to" for something like Blender. Which isn't to say the interface is good. I'm just saying the threshold of good should be lower than making it intuitive.
The enemies of Democracy are
Further, the design assumes a middle mouse button, and middle mouse buttons are falling out of favor (because there are already 101 buttons on the keyboard, so why add yet more to the mouse). The keyboard equivs for the 3rd mouse button are horrendus if you don't have a middle button.
Most mice sold today have at least 3 mouse buttons. Mine has 4 + mouse wheel. Given that most of *nix assumes a 3rd mouse button, I fail to see the problem here. It's not like Blender is designed to run on Macs.
Besides, if the UI scares away newbies, then there will be less users and thus less people willing to support and improve it and make add-ons.
How many 3d and CAD packages have you used? Very few are newbie-friendly, and very few people learn to use them without a book or extensive tutorials. That being said, there's certainly room in most 3d software for improvement in the interface. However, something like the 3rd mouse button should be considered far less of a factor in improvement than making it configurable enough for those without a 3rd button to be able to use it (and while we're on it, using 4th and 5th mouse buttons would be a good thing too). When you're using a mouse-intensive application, the only keys that matter are those on the left side of the keyboard, and every mouse button you can add helps.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
> Why is everyone making such a big deal about
> Blender?
Everyone isn't (I'm not, for example). Only those who care are. There just happen to be a lot of them, and they care enough to actually do something.
> And going so far as to buy it as a community to
> GPL it?
The community that bought it is the community of those who care. It's their business how they spend their money.
> Why the hell doesn't the community get organized
> and purchase [Bynari's Insight server]?
Why the hell don't you get off your ass and organize it to do so?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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Actually, I've never seen a 3D modeling program that didn't expect a three-button mouse (I'm an engineer, not an artist BTW, although many 3D programs use the same engines). I don't think making some "shortcut" functions (zoom, rotate, pan, etc) work with the middle mouse button is bad design, it works very well for me; but even that were the case it's still an industry standard.
"Besides, if the UI scares away newbies, then there will be less users and thus less people willing to support and improve it and make add-ons."
I've not got this version of Blender up and running yet so I'm not making a specific comment. However, as we've got onto generalities: newbies don't support and improve projects, they suck support-time from those who could be improving software.
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
- Classical music alternates frequently between very long notes (sometimes held across eight or nine measures) and very quick notes (sixteenths very frequently, occasionally thirty-seconds or faster). Representing both of those notes in a human-readable form, without changing your scale every measure and thereby negating the whole point, would be very difficult. If you try to avoid that by defining the standard measure width by the most cramped measure, you're still in trouble because you'll end up with such long measures that you cannot easily guage the distance of your notes and therefore also negate the value of the system. In other words, you'll have to add other notations to your staff until you negate the benefit which you are proposing.
- Your solution works great for computer, but I want you to try to tell musicians who notate pieces (which would be any professional musician anywhere and any half-decent music student as well) that they should bring a ruler to practice to ensure their notes are the proper width. There is a major value to our current system, which is I can do it with an unsteady hand and a pencil on sheet music propped in front of me at 45 degrees. With your system I'd have to lay it flat, take out a ruler, figure out how wide the measures were, divide that width by the width of the note I wanted to draw, line that note up with the end of the previous note, and then draw the right length. I fail to see this catching on.
There are other problems with your system too--for example, what happened to rests?--but quite frankly I think the above two complaints are sufficient enough.They're designed for fast workflow, relative to the way that house works.
Incidentally, most current in-house tools are packages built on top of a commercial system like Maya or Houdini. The key here is that you can customise such a tool to suit your own workflow. Any system which does not support this runs the risk of being a toy.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Ton spoke with RMS about this addition to the GPL and Stallman gave it his OK.
Blender foundation has alwys had as one of it's goals to become a viable business again. I imagine that there will be a commercial blender fork someday.
Maya is definitely easier to use than Blender. At least with Maya, previous experience with other GUI applications will help you, whereas with Blender it's almost like learning a whole new GUI system.
I agree. In no way, shape, or form, is the "vi" interface a good one.
Huh? It's fast, it's efficient and it's easy on your fingers. How is that a bad thing? Just because you don't like it doesn't mean everyone has to agree.
Hear hear!
Back when I got my first unix box (FAR enough back that, when then entire list of email-connected sites fit on three pages, mine was there), I wanted to build and try emacs. But there was this little problem - the machine had only 2 megabytes and no demand paging. Emacs (even back then) wouldn't fit. (A tongue-in-cheek claim was circulating that the name was an acronym: Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping. B-) )
So I learned to use vi.
And then I was VERY active on a bulletin board for several years - using vi. And I got very fast with it.
Some time later I had access to a bigger machine and a colleague pointed out that emacs had a vi emulation mode - so I could ease in without having to learn new navigation keys right off the bat. I looked into it - and it had TWO distinct vi emulation modes. Oops. With one I might have tried it. But I didn't have time to find the better of the two. So I dropped it.
A little later a Netnews posting demoed a potential attack on those who used emacs as a news reader or mail reader. Seems that emacs had a little-know feature: You could include a snippet of lisp code in the comments in a program file, and emacs would run it. This was intended to set up tab stops, language editing modes, and the like. But this also worked in mail and netnews reading modes. The demo's lisp code would pop up a "See, I got you!" window and delete itself from the display of the item itself. But in principle it could do anything you could do from emacs - which is anything you can do from any shell, with a lisp interpreter handy to do complicated stuff. No clicking on attachments - just LOOK at the letter or news item and you're owned.
Windows macro virus vulnerability? Emacs had it first, and BETTER! B-) Imagine a lisp worm in netnews forging postings in your name, both replicating itself on "nice" groups and faking love letters on alt.binaries.pictures.child-molestation. Or dumping the contents of any "src" directory you can read to an alt.binaries group. (And heaven help you if you read news or mail when logged in as root...)
Of course this "feature" was on by default in the standard distribution. In those days, or days not too much earlier, RMS' approach to security was rumored to be having a blank password on root in his personal machine and letting this be known - in the belief that if there was no skill needed to break in, and thus no reputation to be gained, nobody would bother. (Apparently that worked with MIT students. But don't try it with the general population net-connected.)
Well, I had spent years doing classified research, which made me itch about security holes. So I decided to stick to vi for a while longer - along with the plethora of unix utilities that do essentially anything I need done that's beyond vi's power.
Since then I've occasionally seen an emacs-ism that has tempted me - like colored displays of comments vs. declarations vs. code. But every time I'm tempted I watch a colleague doing simple text editing with emacs, and count the keystrokes he has to use to do the simple stuff that constitutes the bulk of my editing work. And it always seems to take him a lot more strokes with emacs than it takes me with vi. So I'm generally not tempted for long.
Vi was designed for a very different world - the world of dumb character-based computer terminals in the days before ANSI standardized their behavior. There were literally HUNDREDS of different terminal designs, with a boggling array of differences in display geometry, control-character to cursor-motion mapping, and other odities. Vi (actually the "visual" mode of the "ex" editor) encapsulated these idiosyncrasies in a "termcap" (terminal-capability) definition file, thus letting the user do full-screen WYSIWYG editing on ANY of them using a common set of keystrokes - and letting the sysadmin add definitions for new terminals as they came out. This brought the user out of the dim world of command-line-only editors (such as "ed" and "teco") into the instant feedback of a screen display - halfway to the window systems that weren't available yet.
And - much to the surprise of its author - it did it very well. So well that people like me (who now have the vi commands "hard-wired" into our nervous systems from long use) still use it when we have serious text hacking to do.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way