Blender Conference Closes, Version 2.3 Released

Qbertino writes "The 3-day Blender Conference 2003 has closed as of last Sunday. It was a successful one, with the front line of open source 3D people attending, such as Eskil Steenberg introducing his Verse Virtual Collaboration Server and giving talks and insights into the low-level details of Verse and programs accompanying it, such as his high-end full-range color-correction tool Nil, Loq Airou, the 3D Sketchpad and Connector, a Server monitor/server-app-debugger for Verse. All with over the top OpenGL-accelerated user interfaces. An impressive set of avant garde software engineering indeed. GPLd, of course. Almost one and a half hours of exceptional blender artwork and animations were presented, along with the nominated Suzanne Awards 2003 entries. Results can be seen here." Read on for some more details from the conference.

Qbertino continues: "The cool stuff and cool people I've met are so numerous I get dizzy even trying to sum them up. Notable for all should be the conference release of Blender, Version 2.3. A major release with, among other improvements and updates, a serious redo on essential parts of the interface. At last: No more cliff-wall learning 'curve.' Blender n00bs rejoice! An interesting piece of conference buzz was the entire development team of Newtek/Lightwave defecting and founding their own company with a flagship 3D Subsurf modeler called 'modo'. It sports an interface arguably influenced by Blender and advertised as the hottest GUI-thing since sliced bread. Talk about ripping of the OSS community and not giving credit where credit due ... We were ranting about this, but Ton Roosendahl of Blender fame himself was pleased to see his baby inspiring the industry. We'll beat them all with 3.0 anyway. :-) Get the new original here. And go easy on those servers ... err ... forget it."

Comments

Re:Finally.

[t0qer]

I use truespace, I hear a lot of people say that has a "unneccesarily obtuse and convoluted interface." For some reason it just sat right with me.

Same thing when it came to blender. After understanding the keyboard shortcuts I was able to create objects, animate them, and add in particle effects.

UI design is wholy dependant on the programmers abilities and their knowledge of UI design. I don't think 3D manipulation and rendering of objects in realtime has any real "defined" widget set yet. Because there is no "Law" for designing UI for the 3D we usually end up with all these whacky interfaces. You just have to hope your userbase's minds can hum along with it.

Blender is an incredible piece of software.

[nuance9]

I know I was initially over-whelmed by the interface when I first checked it out too. The trick that makes it all come together, and incredibly fast to work in to boot, is hotkeys. Keep one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse.

If you haven't checked out Blender in a while, now is the time to do so. It has changed alot, and is advancing QUICKLY.

You got to be kidding...

[dmouritsendk]

An interesting piece of conference buzz was the entire development team of Newtek/Lightwave defecting and founding their own company with a flagship 3D Subsurf modeler called 'modo'. It sports an interface arguably influenced by Blender and advertised as the hottest GUI-thing since sliced bread

Influenced by Blender?? Influenced by blender??(Love , apperntly, really DO make people blind :)

Seriously, You got to be kidding me. The layouts on those screenshots are ALL ligtwave inspired baby(with different icons to mimic lightwave, Max and Maya looks if im not mistaken). The fact that blender TRIES to be ligthwave'ish in its design might have been the point of confusion here. But even though Blender tries to mimic LW, its still not 10^-3 the 3D app lightwave is.

Main differences? Lightwave have allways been created to be as simple/intuitive as possible, because they target artist. Not techtypes.
I think the blender teams definition of a artist is pretty is pretty clear if you look over the the Blender confrence schedule, especially this one stands out:


15:00-17:30
Python scripting for artists

I know a few professional artists, primarily from a job i had at Denmarks national TV channel DR(Who had a bunch of hardcore Pixelwizards, to make special effect etc). I think its safe to say that none of them have scriptet a darn thing in their life, heck.. the most talented FX guy there had his SGI workstation start Softimage automatically because he is so afraid of the desktop. To us geeks this is hard to understand, but the guy was a artist. Not a computer buff, he saw the computer as a tool to assist him in producing art. And there was'nt really anything he could'nt draw/model/create with a computer (or with a simple pencil for that matter), but belive me, he wound'nt be able(nor interested) to script ANYTHING.

I've tried lobbying Blender to a few of these guys and lets just say, i haven't gotten all that positive feedback. One described it as "a dated lightwave with a post-apocalypse interface". I actually found that pretty funny :D