Slashdot Mirror
Blender 2.46 Released
The Penguin Man writes to mention the latest release of Blender, the popular open-source 3D graphics suite was officially launched today. You can download it from Blender.org. The culmination of half a year's work has resulted in many new features including a new particle system, approximate AO, the new cloth simulation system, and much more!
Will it blend?
firstpost!
Looking at the screencaps I'd say they've done a lot to improve the interface. For my amateur work I started with Blender about 2 years ago and quickly switched to Maya. If these improvements are as significant as they look, I may consider installing Blender on all of my lab machines.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
From Groklaw (http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080511115151164): "Microsoft has just approached the Blender guys, and I would assume have or will approach other FOSS projects since we learn that Microsoft has assigned a guy to work with Open Source projects, with a request for information on how to make Blender run better on Windows." I hope all Blender developers read the rest.
One thing that always amazed me about Blender is how freakin fast it is. The load time for the interface is almost nonexistent. It's not exactly easy to use but you sure don't have to wait on it.
I have a new slogan for it
Blender: Once you get to know how it works, it's super intuitive!
Only 8 minutes sooner and you would have been modded funny, bolstering your self confidence, getting you that new job that lead to a fabulous career, a beautiful wife and being selected for the first L5 station in space 20 years from now as someone recognized your screen name and remembered laughing at your post years ago....
Only... 8... minutes..
Instead, Anonymous got it this time. And now anonymous will get all the glory.. again.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Subject says it all.
1...2...3...Go!
Complaints about the interface shall commence.
Again...
The UI is still an utter disaster. At least it looks like they finally improved the documentation for the mac platform - I once spent an hour trying to find out which modifier keys corresponded to which blender meta-keys, and how to get various buttons on a dual-button system. The Blender team, unfortunately, is driven exclusively by the concerns of users who are experts in the field, not beginners. If I didn't know better, I would attribute the reluctance to even CONSIDER modernizing the UI (which looks straight out of 1980's autocad, for fuck's sakes) to two words: "job security." It's a shame, as there are a lot of folks who would love to fool around with it and learn it...but when it took me two hours just to figure out how to render a JPG of a box on a damn checkerboard floor, no thanks.
Please help metamoderate.
I wish this program development would slow down. I've had the Essential Blender Guidebook since it has been released (about five months ago) and it feels like half the book is outdated due to the programs additions and rewrites.
Please consider picking up a copy of the Big Buck Bunny DVD it supported a lot of the development that was done for this release. You can see the trailer here.
Or consider preordering Apricot the game that is currently in development that is based on the Big Buck Bunny movie. You can see the development reports here.
Or you can donate here.
Thanks for your support and we hope you enjoy the latest release,
LetterRip
Maybe it already exists, but Blender would be sweet with an interface into a rendering engine that runs on gpu's via cuda or a ps3 cell BE. I think rendering / raytracing is a good candidate for cheaply available massive parallelism.
Maybe, I dunno.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
It's awesome being me.
I prefer "blitmyshinymetalass". I'm not sure why you missed one E, but here the omission is intended.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
When Blender gets someone whose hate for new users doesn't surpass the burning fires of a thousand suns to design the user interface, I'll buy a copy, in the meantime it's sitting back there with early versions of the Gimp in the "this hurts to use" pile.
Since I rarely share these complaints, I would like to ask: is it because you guys are instinctively comparing it to what you are familiar with? Photoshop-GIMP, Maya-Blender, etc.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
And try doing the same jpg of a box on a checkerboard floor in any other 3D app without prior knowledge.
Well, I bought Sculpt 3d on the Amiga back in 198-something, and it was pretty easy to work with. It took hours to render, but only a few minutes to set up.
And Bryce II was funky but well designed.
Wings 3d is really primitive, and fairly unpleasant, but still much easier than Blender.
In fact, I can't think of any 3d app that wasn't much easier to learn than Blender.
No, it doesn't suck, like any complex dedicated app, it takes a different mindset and some learning.
Now that that is over, we have yet another batch of great features! Go Ton and crew!
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Learning Blender can be slow; so I took notes along the way and wrote them up here:
http://www.davidjarvis.ca/blender/
An animated short using Blender:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvQbYXPmqiA
Your timing.
My 0.02 cents
I'd vote for "yesitdoes".
lol: You see no door there!
have evidently never tried Maya either.
I mean, at least I found tutorials on blender and in 2 minutes I was navigating the screen with easy. Once I learned that it was frustrating as hell to do the equivalent with Maya, at which point I got up and did something else.
Yes, that's obviously why it's one of the most successful open-source projects out there with so many people defending it against trolls like you.
Mystery
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
Why do so many 3D tools use custom controls and weird windowing that often doesn't match at all the look and feel of the operating system they run on? So many 3D tools can't even feature normal buttons, for some reason they feel the need to have their own widget components, which makes the usability of already complex tools ... well ... more complex.
...
I always thought this had to with the history of some of these tools in X-windows and the lack of standard widget toolkits, and maybe also because this makes porting the tools to other platforms? I'm curious why this is so prevalent in so many of these tools
- sigs are for wimps.
There are two camps:
1. People who want 3DS MAX/Maya/Lighwave for FREE and Blender happens to be the closest thing... so take that an MAKE IT MAYA.
2. People who have been using Blender for many, many years and have come to either appreciate or at least get used to the speed that the interface allows... ONCE YOU KNOW IT!
Given that the interface HASNT changed much in all this time... perhaps its time for the GIVE ME MAYA FOR FREE crowd to go and write their own FOSS 3D app.
PS. For all those Blenderheads out there who haven't already seen it... check out www.indigorenderer.com for photorealism.
Unfortunately, very few, if any, of those people defending it are professionals in the field. And there's a reason for that.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
If any?
Oh please, do some research before you say crap like that.
Blender is being used by plenty of freelance professionals and inside studios. There is at least one small studio I read about a while back that based its entire operations around open-source programs such as Blender.
Not to mention if you're going to talk about big time studios centred around hollywood and such then they use more in-house tools than anything else.
I'll also add that nobody in their right professional mind will use only one application to do everything. Some applications do certain tasks better than others and Blender has its place among useful tools like any other.
Being a Blender user since 2003, I've also seen the community grow tremendously over the years which can only lead me to belief Blender's popularity is growing at an incredible rate with each new release.
Show me some evidence proving your own feeble case and I may change my mind, until then you only make yourself look like a fool.
Mystery
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
The interface is quirky. No doubt makes sense once you warp your mind around it, but it's certainly unlike the for-pay (i.e. not used by kids) software I've used. And it's not clear that its way of doing things provides any benefit.
I was referring mostly to those who post here (in the past, I haven't really seen any professionals defending Blender here) But okay, so maybe I was exaggerating a bit, but the truth is, Blender is not widely used in the industry.
And yes, very few companies rely on just one application. I myself use modo, Maya, Silo, Mudbox, among others. Of all the people I've worked with, no one has used Blender.
Of all the people I talk with regularly, sites I visit, etc, it's the same thing. Blender is rarely used in the industry, and it's ridiculed more often than it's praised.
Research? I may not have specifically looked up numbers (neither have you), but my experience over the years backs up my claims. How about you show me evidence to the contrary? Of course, if you want to continue looking like the typical FOSS fool who can't accept that the software isn't in the same league as other professional applications, that's fine by me.
Surely Blender.org's testimonials page would be filled of examples of high quality, professional work if it were as widely adopted as you would have us believe? Kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel if you have to resort to using: http://www.creationanimation.com/ as an example of how your product is being used. (Although yes, I do see that it was used in creating some animatics for Spiderman 2.)
As for studios using custom software, it is true. However, you won't find any relying solely on custom software.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
I never said it was widely used, I only said you exaggerated how little use it had.
I know Blender isn't as popular right now but that's only because its development was slower than other packages, clearly because proprietary software has money backing up its development.
That said with the past few updates Blender has acquired enough features to rival proprietary software and I see its popularity growing faster and faster with each update. If the Peach project is any indication, Blender has been quite capable for a lot of professional work, and is only becoming more capable by the minute.
Also the only ridicule I have heard of about Blender was regarding its interface and as I've already stated those comments are so over exaggerated that I can't help but believe that those people don't know what they're talking about in the least.
Mystery
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
Well, I won't claim to be a professional. But I've been using 3dsmax and Maya in various iterations for the last 6 years, and I do find Blender's UI to be absolutely horrible. The developers have made an effort to be different, and in this case, different is not better.
Sure, its open source, and free, but that doesn't make up for the fact that the UI just flat out sucks.
I prefer Blender's UI to 3DsMax, and I'm not alone.
Unless you have anything more constructive to say than "UI just flat out sucks" I'm going to throw you in the same boat as the other people that can't form arguments or model cubes.
Mystery
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
The blender menubar is bizarre. You also can't navigate it with the keyboard (the top menu choices), using the keyboard for the actual menus seems kind of random, basic stuff. And nothing in the menu really screams for the need of a specialized one.
The about dialog is a disaster in the latest version, it appears for about a second. Not giving you enough time to note the build/version!
Even worse, if you move your mouse 1 pixel, the window disappears!
Resizing the window makes it go black, sometimes even moving it does this (if a portion was obscured).
The resize behaviour of the buttons at the bottom is hard to figure out. Sometimes they "shrink" (to the point of almost being unusable). Then even if they shrink, the panel gets cut off when you resize the window. C'mon guys, make up your mind, either you rearrange or you resize, but both?
The whole thing is really a usability nightmare. But I don't think it is because it's an open source product, again for some reason these 3D interfaces are designed by sadists.
- sigs are for wimps.