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The State of Open Source 3D Modeling
gmueckl writes "Since Blender was released as open source in 2002, it has basically owned the open source 3D modeling scene. Its development has seen a massive push by both the community and supporting organizations. However, the program has been showing its age all along and efforts to improve on it have either been blocked or have failed in the past (note the dates). Authors of new modules are forced to jump through hoops to get their work glued onto the basic core, which still dates from the early 90s and has gone almost unchanged since. There are many other active projects out there like Art of illusion, K-3D, and Moonlight|3D. Each of them offers a modern, much saner, more coherent, and more powerful basic architecture and could match Blender in a couple of months' time with some extra manpower. So how come these projects don't get the level of support they deserve? How come developers are still willing to put up with such an arcane code base?"
As much as people may hate Blender, the main advantage of the program is that it is there, and that most things work. Some parts are even great. Personally I happen to like the poly-workflow, which is very fast. The main problem with blender for most users is that it takes a while to learn, but once it's learnt, it has a very effective workflow.
I think that the OP is very optimistic when he sais that it takes only a few months to port everything (and the kitchensink) to another app, that is just impossible, even with open code.
It's easy to pick on the XML bit (though I don't understand why XML is so awesome it has to be used), but that's a pretty small demerit compared to all the major feature enhancement Blender has attained over the past few years.
l ender-243/
It's earned a fluid simulator. Particle effects have been dramatically improved, yafray integration was a huge improvement for rendering, materials can now be created with a node based system.. the list goes on and on. The feature enhancements that went into the latest point release is worth an essay all on their own:
http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/b
Blender stays afloat because it's seeing active development and is already a mature platform. People are used to the interface (one that newbies hate, but veterans fall in love with), and it runs on all three of the major operating systems.
I don't think an aging codebase is a critical flaw. Too often people think redesigning the wheel is a panacea for repairing a kludgy system, without realizing that all code projects fall prey to this at some point in their life. Sure we could rewrite Blender.. but to what end? It'd take another 5 years to get where we are now.
There have been huge changes to Blender over time. For example, the physics engine in the game engine was replaced with a much better one. The original poster is apparently wound up about some XML import/export thing, which is minor. You can write Blender import/export filters in Python, and many such filters exist.
Blender has some problems, but converting its files to an XML format isn't one of them.
Actually it is the Vi of the 3D Modeling world; it has small footprint and a marginally steep learning curve, but when you get it (in three or so weeks) you will be amazed at what you can accomplish with relatively little effort.
-rd
- Each of them: great, there are three projects offering equivalent functionality, each hoping to supplant the current favorite? And which, pray thee, should an experienced developer contribute to? "Any of them"? --- bzzt, wrong answer. You're asking somebody to contribute when there is a 2 in 3 chance the contribution will be dead code when one of these emerges as a favorite? A born-into-money aristorcrat who doesn't have to make his own living can do that; the rest of us have more limited time and can't. Hint: companies pay product managers quite a bit to keep developers from doing wasted work, partly to avoid overhead but partly because wasting a developer's work is the fastest way to kill any enthusiasm. Picking one option (even if it's wrong) is better than indecisiveness. And if you truly think multiple options are the best, then find a way for them to coexist (pluggable rendering cores) instead of killing each other off.
- modern, much saner, more coherent, and more powerful: all of these are in the eye of the beholder. But here's an opportunity to defend yourself: if these new architectures are that much more powerful, it must be possible to implement the blender architecture with them. Which happens to be a sane migration path, instead of the throw-away-anything-old not-invented-here approach of an entirely new project. Blender is open source: fork it and insert the new architecture, instead of griping about how somebody else should do something better. (I know full well this isn't as simple as I'm making it out to sound. But you know full well these new architectures aren't unambiguously better than the old.)
- could match Blender in a couple of months' time: such a confident development-time prediction! Anyone with predictions that solid should be administrator of a project already! Now that I'm done being sarcastic, "a couple of months" is totally unrealistic. Every additional developer needs ~1 month to get up to speed on a new codebase (and understand what Blender does), another X months to implement the new functionality to match Blender, and 2X months to work the bugs out of the new functionality. Wine has been a few months from being usable for general apps for years; Gnome has been a few months and a few developers from being able to replace Windows for years; Windows has been a few months from being bug-free for a decade.
I don't mean to degrade the whole idea of finding something better than Blender. It's a fantastic goal, advances the state-of-the-art, and all sorts of other good things. I do dispute the misrepresentation of the ease with which it can be done: if it were even a tenth that easy, it would already be done.Developers are willing to put up with the arcane code base because (1) it works, (2) it's Good Enough, which means anything newer has to overcome the training / usability barriers associated with switching, and (3) the newer options are not unambiguously "better". Remember: if app Bar (Blender) is already the standard, app Foo (these alternatives) not only has to be better for someone just starting, but also has to be better for an experienced user of Bar.
A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire
Any modeler/artist worth their salt is using mostly key shortcuts - at least to enable a tool. It's simply too inefficient to use the mouse to perform an action. With there being more and more modeling tools than ever before, it can simply be too cluttered to have everything on screen, which means navigating through various tabs/menus/etc. In modo** and Maya, I'm enabling every tool I use with a click of a key, a mouse gesture, etc. That said, if Blender wants to appeal to more newbie hobbyists, it should have a decent GUI that'll let them get started. (Disclaimer, I haven't used Blender in years, so I'm saying this on what you said about the need to learn keyboard shortcuts)
**I'd like to see a freeware/OSS project take the approach Luxology is taking with modo. First, they baked out the modeler end of the app in the first release. Then in the second major release we got a render engine and texturing/painting tools (and of course refinements and improvements to the modeling end of things). Presumably, in the third major release we'll get animation (and other improvements to modeling and texturing and rendering). I personally like this approach because instead of stretching yourself too thin focusing on everything at once, you start off by getting the basics of each "component" right. This seems to be a result of their Nexus core, which from what I gather is a developmental platform, where they can "bake" out various versions of the program.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
'it started to outgrow itself'
In what manner?
'Blender still suffers from that'
In what way does blender suffer?
'have a solid design which is able to grow'
In what way are the designs solid? What about the design of blender makes it less solid? Specifically what aspect of blender is unable to grow and what is the difference in these other applications that makes them able to grow?
'applications like Maya, Softimage and Houdini have demonstrated that'
In what manner?
'Comparing blender to all of those on a design level makes blender stand out as the toy.'
In what fashion?
Do you have any constructive criticism or is this entire post just a troll? Can you name any specific features, design constructs, or methods that are actually superior in these applications or do you just prefer in the interface in the commercial applications you learned in?
As far as I can tell K3D and Moonlight haven't moved an inch in the last 5 years. They both look like students summer projects to me.
Blender has weedy parts in its codebase, everyone knows that. Any programm this complex and mature has those. But they are being replaced fast and thouroughly by a thriving core team lead by the founder of Blender. Blender runs out of the box on 7 plattforms and has a featureset that closely competes with current topline commercial tools. Try to catch up on that alone 'in a few months' Mr. Smartass. Blender is responisble for the recent price drops in the 3D tool industry alone and when it eventually fully supports Renderman yet some toolmakers are going to have to redo their businessmodel big time.
The usual UI bickering is bogus aswell. Apart from being just as hard to learn as any tool of same capabilities, blenders UI has been comletely OpenGL accelerated from the begining - one of the things it's unique in iirc. Blender's learning curve is steep, as with any high-end 3D tool without a stack of books. But with the amount of material and books available on the web for free nowadays makes this learning curve not nearly as hard as it was 5 years ago. The featureset is breathtaking and has commercial providers such as Newtek struggling to catch up in some areas (notice the recent addition of an improrved node editor to Lightwave 9 - nothing but a response to Blenders node editor). Sidenote: I own a professional licence of LW 8, a commercial licence of Blender (from the NaN days) *and* use Blender since back in the days of 1.8. I haven't updated to LW 9 for the very reason that Blender 2.43, a few little things aside, offers everything professional 3D needs. And then some - an full-blown integrated compositor for instance.
Blender is as mature and developed as any open source project could wish for. As *any* software project could wish for actually. Features and improvement are being added on a regular basis and it's fully backwards compliant with any blender file, and it's professional roots not only show but have become more and more visible.
Bottom line: The submitter of the above article either doesn't know what he is talking about or is a troll. Or both.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
My main three complaints, as a new user, were that:
- Mouse gestures suck and should be disabled by default.
- Mouse gestures suck and there should be a WAY to disable them at all.
- The widgets are crude to the point of crying, and it's hard to manipulate things using them or get a bearing from them.
As far as 3d goes, it's very very powerful. As powerful as the commercial apps in most respects. Certainly, unless you're working for Pixar or Blizzard, it has everything you need, and then some. You tend to specialize in 3d work anyway, learning to model machines or humans, or monsters, or being an excellent animator, or kicking butt at textures and/or lighting. You tend to learn one method of modeling as your main method. And you most definitely get picky about which suite you're using. The point is, few people actually use more than the smallest subset of the suite to do their jobs. You don't really need 98% of what a 3D suite is capable of. And so, even though there are a few things you might not have in Blender that you have in Max or Maya, by the time you get to that point where you actually would feel the lack of them, you'll likely already have them. Blender is, after all, actively developed.Honestly, the primary reason Blender doesn't have a larger following in the industry is momentum. Learning a 3D suite is a task comparable to learning another language. Most people don't have the time or will to do that.
For anyone wanting to learn 3D, brace your shoulders and push past the month or two it will take to feel comfortable with Blender. If you don't have what it takes to learn Blender, you're going nowhere in 3D anyway. And you'll find that, whiz-banginess aside, Blender can do what Max can do. And in my opinion, it's faster.
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