>Not only with Autodesk but also with other companies, we keep requesting improvements. However, it takes time for those improvements to make it to proprietary software. We expect faster improvements by using open source software.
That's pretty cool. I wonder what kind of anime-focused features will come to the next version of Blender as a result.
>I wonder what kind of anime-focused features will come to the next version of Blender as a result.
Work is currently being done on the LANPR branch as part of the GSoC. This branch is meant to replace the Freestyle system which is currently used for line rendering. [0]
Otherwise we already have the "Shader to RGB" node which is extremely useful to create NPR shaders.
There's also an add-on which can be used to deform a mesh based on greasepencil strokes, I assume 2D animators would love this. [1]
If you're interested in blender NPR news I highly recommend following the BNPR Show on youtube. [2]
Wow. Thank you so much. Non-photorealistic rendering is now so amazing. Real-time!
I've been long out of the loop and am delighted to see it's come so far. Ages ago, I had the notion for kid friendly games, contingent on NPR. But I didn't have the maths or design chops to implement it.
Now that the NPR heavy lifting is done, perhaps my notion is feasible.
I was the fastest ever to complete the ACAD design challenge (3 - hour test, finished it in 33 minutes)
I was the only person to have ever completed the autocad design interview test at the first architectural firm I worked at.... (8 minutes)
I came is second in the US CAD Olympics (only second because I skimmed the notes and it also required me to draw a bolt and I didnt notice that req in the directions)
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I love autodesk --- but I hate their arrogance. They have lightened up a bit with 360 and such....
But I am rooting for Blender.
The amount of amazing talent around the world that will blow shit up is immense.
We will see some guy from freaking thailand or something just come out with something unbelievable.
I was asked to design a rendering factory in asia for lucas film some years ago... (I was the designer for the Lucas Presidio Complex's Data Center) -- their comment was "US 3D designers are over-paid pre-madonnas and complain too much"
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So, I hope blender kicks some fucking ass and that we see some amazing shit come out from a completely unknown person as of yet.
> In linguistics, an eggcorn is an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker's dialect (sometimes called oronyms). The new phrase introduces a meaning that is different from the original but plausible in the same context, such as "old-timers' disease" for "Alzheimer's disease".[1] An eggcorn can be described as an intra-lingual phono-semantic matching, a matching in which the intended word and substitute are from the same language.
It sounds like a sophisticated real metaphor: Madonna about 40 years ago, before she became famous, whom I imagine as a very interesting character: more or less a prima donna, but without the excuse of being a celebrity.
I sure don't. Buying up the competition and killing it off (see Softimage). I would migrate from a proprietary package to Blender just to make sure Autodesk can't get its paws on it and wreck havoc to my pipeline once again.
Oh holy fuck! I forgot abt softimage being killed by them
I went to mesmer animations labs school for softimage... (all still on SGI machines.
One of the best pieces of software ive used.
I was really good at building bodies on metaclay.
I built the entire human muscular system with meta clay, and was able to animate its movements in natural form. In 1995.
Sadly we had a tape backup system for all our data (these were all done on SGI machines) and after several years i lost that tape which hd all my projects on them.... i cant recall what format the backups were in.
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Also, whatever happened to Poser and Kai's Power Tools -- what are those groups upto these days?
Hmm, but it's actually a spoof of the SGI logo. It's not one continuous line tracing the edges of a cube any more, it's several shapes in the same general arrangement as the original. And the text seems to say something like Animation Graphics or Innovation Graphics or Evangelion Graphics?
Don't blame Autodesk. Blame Avid for selling it to them. Avid never quite understood how to position it in its' lineup, and sold it at 1/10th the price it paid 10 years prior.
Avid are world leaders in buying and ruining software suites. Looking through their lineup you see a sad list of software that either used to be good, or could have been great.
Reading the bit of that thread with the Autodesk CEO, I disagree with your assessment of their position. The CEO's response, in a nutshell, was that they aren't responsible for what people build with their software, but also that they provide free software for and support initiatives by green startups. He even said that Mr. Lemercier's passions was "appropriate and necessary"
What's more, Mr. Lemercier's asked that Autodesk no longer sell their software to dirty companies like the ones they were discussing. "Policing couldn't be easier...Don't accept their money."
Without even getting into the question of what Autodesk should or shouldn't do, I do think it's completely unfair to elide the difference between (declining Mr. Lemercier's idea) and (actively endorsing the environmental destruction found in Autodesk's downstream).
Contrast this with free software (eg blender which is gplv3) where the license grants users the freedom to use the software for any purpose, even purposes that the software authors do not approve of. So it seems silly to say autodesk is evil because of who they allow to use their software in a comment on an article about software which explicitly chooses to make no restrictions on their users.
In a different sense one could say that Autodesk is worse than Blender because its licensing model does allow the authors to make decisions on who might be allowed to use it.
A truly undervalued property of free software is that nobody can exert pressure on you for using it. Users can stay ideologically uncompromised.
360 isn't in response to open source pressure. It's competing with Solidworks/Onshape,etc. but trying to capitalize on the hobbyist market that grew when 3D printing became viable. The only FOSS equivalent is FreeCAD, but that was not good enough when I tried it.
Hm I don’t know these other tools well but if the trend is FOOS is growing in 3D modeling, I don’t see why 360 couldn’t be seen as heading off that threat
The best open source 3d modeling tool is blender but its not a great solid modelling tool. Fusion 360 is a solid modelling CAD/CAM program aimed for 3d printing/milling. The open source scene there is pretty bad.
To echo LegitShady, FreeCAD is the only open source tool that even aspires to be anything like Fusion 360. Blender is essentially unusable for precise modeling since it doesn't have a constraints engine or a proper history. For example, you can't (easily) draw a 2D sketch of a rectangle with 5mm fillets, extrude that into a cuboid, drill a hole in it, then go back later and change the rectangle dimensions or the size of the fillets.
However, that's also not the same type of program as Fusion 360. Fusion 360 is a parametric modeler, which means it's used for create precise mechanical designs, rather than artistic pieces or animated figures. For example, you might use Fusion 360 to design a adjustable desk or car part. Fusion 360 also has built in CAM features, which allow you to automatically generate commands for a CNC mill, lathe, or router.
Some of us are still pissed that Autodesk tubed Generic CADD.
As for arrogance... You probably didn't work with Bentley Systems or their MicroStation. As a long time AutoCAD nerd, I made the switch for a gig (1993), because it's the work that matters, right?
Huge mistake.
As a kid, it was a cold shower introduction to the arrogance of the phenomenon of the willfully ignorant. I was invited to participate on their product steering committee. Big honor, right? Total waste. I don't think the Bentleys ever used, or watch someone use, their products for real work.
You can use Blender for some CAD work... But it's not a solid modeler like solidworks/inventor. It doesn't have many of the precision and parametric tools.
Blender's internal representation of objects is vertices (defined with IEEE single precision floats) connected by lines, and faces --just the shell of the object, and no real curved surfaces (just more and more faceted to approximate curves, and smoothed normals to look curved.) It also does not have guaranteed precise measurements. Blender can do some parametric and Boolean operations and many of the same things, but sometimes it fails and the limitations get in the way.
Some have built CAD tools into Blender, but it's a hack on an artist's tool. For some types of CAD projects, it'll do great, particularly in some very creative directions, but I'd start with the other tools you mentioned.
I export Inventor models to Blender for better rendering and animation.
I think now you can define circles and extrusions parametrically. I'm sure I've seen videos of people adjusting circle radii and facet count and it adjusted the parameters and re-tesellated based on the new parameters. Visually you see the polygonal representation you asked for, but at least some things do seem to be parametric underneath if you define them in the proper way.
I also believe I read about parametric model definition being something they are working on more, since so many folks are asking for it. I do hope that comes to fruition. A free parametric modeler would be absolutely lovely.
Yes, there's some parametric things you can do in Blender. You can have a beizier curve that you can later change the facet count on... and you can use a spin modifier on a shape, but you're not going to get a perfect tangent line off a perfect circle like you can in a proper CAD tool for example.
and you can boolean with another object, are you're not able to add a perfect fillet at that intersection.
In Blender, with care and if you're clever, you can do many of the same things you can with a CAD program... good enough for many cases. But Blender is still more of an artist tool than an engineer tool. For serious uses you're going to run into the limits.
There are free cad parametric modelers. FreeCAD is one.
Yes, there is FreeCAD. It crashes constantly and is very difficult to use. ..it doesn't really count, in my mind; if it isn't usable, it may as well not exist at all.
Autodesk, the company, releases not only Autocad, but also 3Ds Max and Maya, two 3d packages which are arguably the most popular in industries like gamedev and 3d production.
> We expect faster improvements by using open source software.
As a long-time consumer and contributor to open-source, I would caution one to temper their expectations when it comes to velocity. Glaring problems (like CVEs) get immediate attention, but features are another story - remember that open-source projects are a democracy and the loudest guy in the room often gets their way...
I don't think anyone switches from proprietary to OSS with the expectation that asking for features will cause the new features to come into existence. Rather, they expect to hire software engineers to write those features, which is not possible with proprietary software and is merely "very difficult" with OSS.
Indeed, animation and special events shops are along the most likely to do so. They often create custom add-ons for the commercial software they use so they have the in house skillsets already for this in many cases.
Yes but think of this. With Blender at least they can make the modifications themselves and use it while waiting for it to be up-streamed. They could even keep the work in-house.
On the other hand Autodesk has no open source.
So this studio would have to make a request to Autodesk to include this feature. Then wait for Autodesk to make the change and then wait for a version to include this change.
With Blender they can create their own fork and Blender will merge their work if they like the code.
One business model they wait for Autodesk and the other they make their own modifications to Blender.
I would conclude they are on the right path.
With all the money they save on licensing fees they can hire developers.
No more dongles.
Feature velocity is all over the place in open source. GIMP is glacial. Blender is pretty good. Just a few weeks ago in 2.80 they added: totally revamped UI, brand new realtime renderer, hugely improved grease pencil, etc etc. And if you really want a specific feature you can hire someone to write it for you and upstream it.
Blender has a solid history of having paid development. If they need a feature really bad, they can pay someone to implement it. This is not an option when using closed-sourced applications.
Instead of paying X dollars per year in licensing costs, you can spend that money on getting features you really need.
That's such an exciting sentiment to hear, that open source could beat the economic incentives of propriety software. It's so far from what you would have heard in 1999.
Only a few years later I tried to tell people how big Wikipedia would get. When it had tens of thousands of articles, everybody told me how it was pointless and would go nowhere.
That's awesome. Combine this with Epic's recent investment and it looks like the modelling community may be mobilising behind Blender as an alternative to Autodesk tools.
2.8 already has the vastly more useful version of grease pencil, and the demo the foundation commissioned was amazing. I love how seamlessly they mix the 3D in with the direct illustration. It shows what skilled animators can do with a tool like Blender.
Historically, you'd mark up a drawing or schematic with a grease pencil (1) on top of a velum sheet or similar. The original implementation of grease pencil in Blender was similar -- it was for non-permanent markup on top of your scene. This gradually evolved into what, in Blender 2.8, is a full on drawing tool that can be used in part to create (with Blender's other tools) entire 2-D animated features. I agree they should change the name soon. :)
That's pretty cool. I wonder what kind of anime-focused features will come to the next version of Blender as a result.