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Notes on the future of Blender
Luc Stepniewski writes "Ton Roosendaal has posted on the Blender news site
informations of the future of Blender.
If you're interested in 3d software for Linux, this is a good
one to check out FWIW- mind you the interface is a tad on the
odd side. But mainly this article confirms that Blender will
stay free, as well as some new feature stuff.
"
When I first started using blender I was in awe of it. Simple things seemed difficult to do. In fact it was only by chance that I happened across someone talking on IRC about blender. Someone even went to the point of making a joke "use q to quit." I'll admit I was intimidated by blenders interface and the entire 3D design process. Blender however has afforded me the ability to experiment, play, ... learn. This is infact the process we all go through when using a new program. Blender is an amazing program, a program whos direction comes from a very gifted and visionary man. All it demands is a little learning we all in this "community" consider ourselves educated enough not to conform to Microsoft's standards and protocols. Did we achieve this education from learning only one way? Absolutely not! We had to learn to master the tools (programs) we use to develop stunning graphics, webpages and in fact even the very use of a computer is infact learned. Blender is a tool, a tool which after mastered can create amazing animations and stills. These are created with only a partially working blender. When Ton manages to cram all the functionality he has in his own version of blender into the one he is releasing it will most certainly become a favorite among 3D and special effects professionals out there. In fact it already has, once again using only the limited blender. I ask you as a fellow slashdot reader are you really afraid of learning? Quit whining about the interface and start using it. You'll see it is easily the most intuitive use of hotkeys and mouse commands in a 3D program. I also ask you to have faith in Ton his guidance and perserverance are what has made blender the awesome 3D application it is. He will without a doubt deliver one of the most complete 3D applications out there, his work on porting alone has offered blender to a very large portion of the *nix community. It is perhaps an advantage that I learned q to quit some 3 hours into my blending,it forced me to use the program.
PUCKSTOPR (jaysonh@current.nu) #blender3d on EFNET
It's weird, Blender is fairly advanced in some areas, like how you muck with animation keys, or with lattice/mesh manipulations ... but feature-wise it is way behind programs like Maya, 3DS and LightWave. I mean, Blender doesn't even _raytrace_ (although ton will try to convince you that this is a feature =) )
I personally have been using Blender on my Indigo pretty much since it became free, and I love it. Despite its shortcomings, Blender is a unique 3d app in that it can do _so much_ while being very lightweight and _very_ fast. It also sports a ridiculously efficient user interface. And if you tinker with Blender enough, I'm sure you can accomplish a lot of the things that are done in larger 3d apps, but it will take a lot more skill and a little more time.
I mean, a lot of 3D/Animation products just don't work well with the standard GUI paradigms that were invented for 2D oriented objects such as word processing, etc.
I found the GUI in Blender quite refreshing, actually... but then, I always thought the GUI in GIG3DGO was cool too...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
it was his ideas thrown up for our feedback.
there was a lot of disscussion and whats up there
is somewhat far from what is likely to happen.
course its all up to ton...
ftp://ftp.blender.nl/pub/manual_1.02.tar.gzl ender/index.ws
:)
http://goethe.bowtie.nl/cgi-bin/web-ssql/news-b
the first is a snippet from the printed manual that has just enought info to get you started, the second is the Blender news server, where you can ask for little bits of help while your manual ships
those two together should give you enough of a taste of Blender to allow to to decide whether the ~$60 manual is worth it (it is!)
MoNsTeR
How does Blender compare to 3D Studio MAX, Ray Dream Designer, or Lightwave in terms of feature set? I'm not a graphic designer by any stretch of the imagination, but feel free to baffle me with industry-speak, I'll try to grok the context. Mostly I could use something I can quote to a real designer who asks me "Can Linux do X".
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I downloaded it a few days ago. It looks neat. It looks like it can do cool things. But it's completely inaccessible to the graphics novice.
I can understand that they want to raise money by selling the manual, but I'd love to see just enough of the docs so I know I can actually use the program to do something before springing for $60-odd.
Any recommendations? The tutorials I saw seemed a little too specific; what I need is some kind of overview of the program.
Understand that I'm not opposed to giving the developers money, but I want to make sure I actually can use the program first.
D
You are correct, this program definatly isn't for the novice, not even the just graphic realm, but you are going to need some general all around expertise on running computers to figure out what Blender is doing. It took me a while to get it going but partially that is because of a bug with my virtual resolution spreading the graphics around and wreaking havok on it.
But really, if you look at any high-end 3-d graphics or CAD program you arn't going to find usability high on the list. Just try to crank up Form-Z and figure it out in an hour and you'll know what I mean.
I really havn't delved into Blender enough to figure out if it is really going to be that usefull to me or not...But on the surface I don't think it looks robust enough to replace anything.
However I do appreciate its interface and small size. This is something that I wish the commercial venders would learn from the majority of freeware out there. Keep things concise. Try new methods, the old interfaces arn't always the best interfaces.
V
I swear, when I first saw the interface I almost lost it, but it actually make A LOT of sense. It just isn't anything like any STANDARD interfaces that you would expect to see. Plus you can arrange where all the menus and windows are on your own, so it really leaves much of the layout up to you. There's a libc6 version out too now which definitely kicks @$$ for anyone running Debian or Redhat.