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Blender Demo Reel Released
James Cho writes "The Blender demo reel has been released, showcasing some of the best artwork made with what has become the most powerful open source 3d content creation software. It will be later shown at SIGGRAPH 2004, the premier international computer graphics exhibiton and conference."
.. here
Karma-whoring since 1976
Harald
It's kinda like GIMP/Cinepaint that way. Personally, I think blender's interface sucks for different reasons to most people - I grew up with Imagine and other Amiga raytracers, and blender's interface feels like a bad imitation of them. It's like they got the Amiga spirit of full-screen apps that "fit the UI to the task, not the task to the UI" but they failed to actually finish the UI, stopping once they'd got every function accessible via some button, somewhere, or maybe instead of thinking about where the buttons should be, they decided to shift that burden to the user, then tout that configurability as an advantage while making it _necessary_ rather than optional to reconfigure to do anything useful.
Realsoft 3D, the descendant of Amiga Real3D also has such configurability - but out-of-box, the default layout is okay (at least on windows, the linux version apparently was written by people who think "Unix==Motif" and it therefore sucks in the buggy,slow Motif way.).
I was an avid lightwave 3d user. I have a copy sitting right here in front of me. The dongle and disks have not left their box for almost a year now cince I doscovered blender.
It's faster, easier to use (yes, after the initial learning curve that is there with every single piece of software ever made.) and produces massively better output when coupled with yafray.. Hell I am able to render on a renderfarm of older computers for only the price of hardware!
Blender is going to steal the show. It certianly outshines lightwave already.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Shaders...
Its much easier to create and tweak good looking shaders in almost any commercial 3d app than in blender (for now).
If blender gets this right, and some more modelling tools, it can seriously compete with some $1000+ offerings!
So this is slightly off the topic (but I've seen a lot of blender demo work as rendered scenes already - nice stuff). Anyway, has anyone else used some of these OSS modelling tools for game modding? The biggest problem seems to be the lack of converters to the industry defacto standard of 3DS Max binary format.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
...for me was not so much the graphics as the soundtrack. I followed the link to Magnatune to see what else the artist has produced and I was surprised by how good the other artists were on there too! You can play/download almost all the tracks by the artists (that I've tried) for free, although they also sell the music. I took a loot at the info page, and there's an interesting piece by the site's owner about why he started the site (after his wife went throught the grinder of the music industry).
Overall, I'm impressed, and if anyone else is on the lookout for something new, it could be worth a look (no I don't work for them, or have anything to do with the site!)
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
I don't think the interface is that bad, and they are working on making it better. And also documenting it better -- the new blender guide is a great thing. Besides, aren't you willing to put up with a little quirkiness for a free 3D modleing and animation program? Any 3D program is going to take some serious time to learn well, and the core modeling operations in Blender really are pretty efficent once you get used to them.
But the number one thing that annoys me with the blender UI, which will probably never be fixed, is that, flying in the face of 20 years of WIMP software conventions, they chose to use the LEFT mouse button for selecting things, and the RIGHT mouse button for positioning the cursor. I used it for several weeks and never did get the hang of that. Kept moving the cursor around when I meant to select something. I can't count how many times I carefully placed the cursor exactly where I wanted it only to turn around and carelessly right-click on some object to select it and -- DOH! I just moved the cursor. And there's no undo of cursor repositioning. Very annoying. So you just have to go back and redo your careful cursor placement manually.
Oh, and the lack of global undo is another major annoyance, but that'll probably be fixed someday. Undo has been added for certain sub-modes already. But I think the main Blender developers are too attached to the whole RMB for cursor positioning/LMB for selection thing to ever change that.
Among all you people out there who have worked on a wide variety of 3D graphics packages out there including 3DSMax, Maya, LightWave, Blender, etc...can you guys shed some light on how well Blender stacks up against the competition? Any links to some great tutorials would be really appreciated too, because, since it's free, I'm thinking of setting it up for a poor orphanage here in India that just had some pretty decent computers donated so the kids can start messing around on them.
So, let's say I just install it there on the school computers and kids from 3rd to the 10th grade mess with blender. What chance do you think they have of developing some decent 3D graphics skills that they could use in the real world? Let's take willingness to learn as a given - in fact, it's so much, it's WAY past enthusiasm. The barrier is literacy - therefore, the tutorials will just be there, but the fact that they will be used cannot be taken as a given.
In short, what do you think the chances are that a kid, with very little knowledge of a computer can start using blender and learn it in a few years to the point where the 3D skills developed give him/her a pretty decent chance of an entry level job in the graphics industry? The reason I ask is because I have seen some of the kids there and they are true artists. You should see what they can do with MS Paint.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
I've been using Blender to and from since 1996, when it was only available for Irix. Even looking at this latest release, it's not that much that has changed UI wise, it's still an enormous kludge. It always ends up with me giving up and going back to Maya so I can get things done, with a proper 1 hand on mouse, 1 hand on keyboard UI that works superb.