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

Finally.

[aardvarkjoe]

At last: No more cliff-wall learning 'curve.'

I tried Blender long ago, and was consistently frustrated by the unneccesarily obtuse and convoluted interface. Can't wait to see if they have made some real progress.

Now, since every Blender story had dozens of people who immediately said that "changing Blender's interface will make it useless!" whenever somebody brought up how difficult it was to use: are you sticking with your old version?

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.

Re:Finally.

[t0qer]

Sorry to reply to me own post but just wanted to add.

WADS. I believe that should be a standard widget in any 3D application is scene walkthrough using the WADS keys, which are standard walk keys in most FPS games.

Ok so there's 1 standard everyone should be using.

Re:Finally.

[dasunt]

The parent poster writes
At last: No more cliff-wall learning 'curve.'

I tried Blender long ago, and was consistently frustrated by the unneccesarily obtuse and convoluted interface. Can't wait to see if they have made some real progress.

Now, since every Blender story had dozens of people who immediately said that "changing Blender's interface will make it useless!" whenever somebody brought up how difficult it was to use: are you sticking with your old version?

Nope. In fact, I'm so inspired that Blender made their interface user friendly, that I'm going to fix vi and Emacs, and finally Linux. (Yegads, a command line. How untuitive is that!)

I tell you what I need

[Qweezle]

Someone needs to create some 3d software which is INCREDIBLY simple...I mean, something even I could use(I am a web designer). If I could create quick 3d objects for use in images on the fly, that would be awesome.

So why can't the 3d software development companies create something for a guy like me, who just needs basic features and simplicity? I use a Mac, so I expect simplicity from my software anyway...

Re:I tell you what I need

[hotgazpacho]

Coming from a fellow web designer and former 3D computer graphic art student, the simple answer is that 3D is far more complicated than 2D web pages. That 3rd dimension adds so much more to work with and think about. Add to that the fact that you are working with 3 dimensions (4, if you animate) on a 2 dimensional display, and the situation becomes even more convoluted. It is not like sculpting, where you can hold the object and intuitively work with it.

That said, the simplist 3D package I have found is Bryce. Mostly geared towards landscapes, but you can create simple objects. This would probably be your best bet for an "INCREDIBLY simple" 3D package. However, be forwarned that there is still a bit of a learning curve to 3D in general...

Re:I tell you what I need

[FrenZon]

If you're wanting non-curved shapes (architectural models especially) I do believe sketchup might be what you're after. The interface is even better than they say it is.

Re:About these Suzanne awards...

[zambuka]

Here are a couple of animations
Stuff by EnV
and
Mindfields by @ndy
Would have been real nice if the Blender guys had put links in the news page. Check out the forums at elysiun for the quality of work that some of the Blender artists are producing. Also check out what Landis is doing.

Cheers from a happy but untalented Blenderhead.
Zambuka

Luxology has been around for at least a year now..

[Quarters]

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'.

Alan Hastings and Stuart Ferguson, the two people behind Lightwave (all the way back to when it was called Aegis Animator 3D and ran on the Amiga) founded Luxology in 2002. They've not been a part of NewTek for at least a year now.

Yes, Modo is a new program, but the "defection" you mention isn't anything new. Or, was the buzz at the conference about the people NewTek brought into keep Lightwave going also leaving to go work with Hastings and Ferguson?

Minor update

[shibbydude]

Having used Blender since something like 1.8 I would say that everything past 2.26 has been a minor update, but this is a very good step in the right direction. I love Blender. Open source projects often fail, but Blender will still rule the amature 3d market. The cool thing is, though, that recent Blender work is rivaling the Big Boys (3ds Max, Maya). For some great artwork and examples visit elysiun.com and check out the forums.

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.

Re:Hi, I'm sort of new here

[rzei]

The online documentation was no help, either, namely because there is none.

Did you bother to check out the quickstart part of the blender3d.org? You don't like the tutorials there? Checking out the oldsite tutorials won't harm you either.. I remember learning tons of stuff from the community written ones, this was something like 1.6 version at that time.

By the way, your post sounds a bit too much like troll.. There's no way you couldn't see that bar in the top of the window where you've got "File" etc.. Or then you just stared at it and screamed "fuck this doesn't look like 3dsmax at all!" and killed it through task manager..

Thanks for your time,
-rzei

Verse finaly on slashdot

[[verse]Eskil]

Wow verse finally hit slashdot...

So what is verse?

Verse is a network protocol that is designed to let any apps talk to each other in real-time over a IP network. So if one app changes the data all other apps gets the changes sent to them in real-time. This means that multiple apps, people and developers can collaborate. its all Free BSD and portable.

Verse support can be given both existing and new applications.

It has been around for quite some time. I and i friend was hired to write verse a few years back. (at II) it is one of few apps written from the ground up as open source and the people who wrote it got funded to do it.

Verse used to be on source forge but is now living on at blender.org

Loq Airou, Nil salentinn, and connector are very recently added apps and you can find some screen shots here and here

Ton (head of the blender foundation) wants to base Blender 3 on verse technology.

E

Re:File Formats...

[DetectiveThorn]

If the format spec is available, Blender can do it (If you can find someone to write a script). Import/Export is handled by Python plugins.

The verse link is wrong

[[verse]Eskil]

The link is to a 2 year old verse site. The new releases can be found at: http://www.blender.org/modules/verse/

Re:blender...

[Deusy]

Blender is open source at its best; highly polished, cross-platform.

Yes, it is.

It's a pity that this slashdot news story was not properly verified by the editors as Blender 2.3 is not yet released. The submitter was really referring to the recently released preview of Blender 2.3 which people will be finding it slightly buggy whilst now expecting it to be a final release.

This would be a shame because since Blender was bought by the community and became open source, it's development has accelerated and moved in a direction that, as with all open source software, is highly influenced by the needs of it's community.

One of the main criticisms of Blender was that it's power was masked by an unintuitive interface that was very inconsistent. Most features were designed to be activated by the keyboard, as opposed to through the GUI, and that confused most people new to Blender who were unfamiliar with the keyboard shortcuts.

So the Blender community set about a rethink of the user interface. The proposal is well thought out, well planned, and well documented. And from what I have seen of the 2.3 preview release, the final 2.3 release will be a brilliant piece of software.

Really, the commercial 3d development studio vendors should start getting worried.

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

Re:You got to be kidding...

[ducomputergeek]

Funny, where have you been in the world of CGI arts the last couple years. Scripting in animation programs is becomming a rather big deal. You still have your modellers/texture arts out there, but then when it comes time to add thousands of models into a scene, lets say a large battle, it becomes rather tedious and not very time effiecent to place and animate all the objects.

In starwars Episode I, all the grass on the hills were animated. Sure there were some basic "motions" defined, but then the coders came along and wrote a mathatical model so that the computer could calculate each indivdual blade's movment.

I worked as a systems admin at a local architechture/Graphics design firm and they actually hired a civil engineer that had his BS in Physics along with a newly gradute in mathatics & computer science who wrote some nice AI programs for an undergrad to program scripts for modelling buidling and anaylize stress patterns. They actually chose Blender 2.23 because Python was pretty damn easy to use.

In LOTR: TTT, the battle scence was constructed by using a "learning" computer program that calculated the battle. There were indivudal actions model, then they used a mathmatical script/program to have the computer AI simulate the battle. Each time they ran it, the elven arcahers got more accurate, etc. The one scene where it looks like they used just "store actions" was if you look closely, the last two riders when aragon and Theadon are riding down the path, they are swinging at nothing and doing the same actions as the two in front of them.

Scripting and the use of Computer AI in animation is becomming a large part of the CGI industry. The artist just make things look good for close ups with modelling and texturing. Most of the actual animating is being done with scripts.

The money in CGI is also on the math end. Starting out, our guy with a BS in math & comp sci was making more than the senior GA that had been there 10 years. I learned how to use some of the 3D applications (two were special software they had created that ran on Alpha's). They also had some Lightwave and several 3D studio stations to take their Autocad specs from the architects and have the GA's make cool 3D virtual walk throughs.

When I left to take a job at a consulting company, they were taking a serious look at blender for replacing their Lightwave system. Why? Yes, Blender lacks a raytracing engine, however you go use third party applications if you need to, but modelling buildings and its intergated game engine (on older version) and at least the python scripting language ment that mathmatical programs can quickly be written to simulate various aspects.

And then there is Blender's ablity to read and write .dxf and the fact that blender does do a damn good job for rendering buidlings if you have a good GA with some talent.

Blender was hurt by that year of non development with NAN was in bankruptcy. However, Blender is worth a good look.