I totally agree, Jonathan.
More often than not I find that Blender has a negative reputation among many professionals and though it is getting better, it is still a problem. I have been using Blender for years and have been flamed out of BlenderArtists/elysiun on numerous occasions for suggesting features or improvements that other software has (and quite often Blender still doesn't have).
I recall on one occasion I suggested a GPU powered renderer and was flamed off the thread...oh how times change.
I think that the main issue is that many Blender fanboys are very hostile towards anything that isn't Blender and have an almost automated response towards any possible corruption of the hallowed source code by polluting it with ideas from industry standard applications such as Max or Maya, often seemingly because it was from these evil applications so it must be a bad idea.
Max and Maya are industry standard applications for a reason...because they are awesome at what they do. If Blender is so perfect then how does Autodesk still rule the roost? Companies/artists have to pay a lot of money for these and the market always decides.
Please dont get me wrong, I really do think Blender is an amazing application and I use it daily but it does have many flaws and sometimes Blender fanboys can be very protective over changes, or suggested changes, due to a fear of Blender turning into Max or whatever.
Personally I think the "Blender is for Blender artists" mantra is bullshit and is not something that should be encouraged, especially from leading members of the community and it doesn't help that Ton posts messages on Twitter that constantly promotes this anti-Autodesk agenda. It's childish and it deifies this sort of protectionism which makes new users feel isolated because they are not part of the elite club or unwelcome because they come from other software and wish to bring workflows/feature ideas with them. Ultimately it slows Blenders progress and development because as a community we are actively being extremely selective in Blenders direction by shutting all these other people out.
Blender should be for everyone and everyone should have equal say and often it seems that Blender does things in an awkward way because it can. Until the voice of reason is louder than the Blender fanboys, I really don't see this changing.
As someone who lives in both worlds, this drives me crazy and I can see why people get put off.
Fanboys are not specific to Blender, all apps have them. So laying the blame solely (or in the main) at their feet is remiss with respect to wider issues concerning professional uptake that have very little to do with the community itself, simply it has to be said because professionals don't engage it. So.. where's the problem?. We need to look further up the chain of command.
Fanboys are not specific to Blender, all apps have them. So laying the blame solely (or in the main) at their feet is remiss with respect to wider issues concerning professional uptake that have very little to do with the community itself, simply it has to be said because professionals don't engage it. So.. where's the problem?. We need to look further up the chain of command.
Yea, I agree, but I think that the Blender fanboys are much more vocal or have a louder voice than most other applications and therefore more easily heard. Also there seems to be a larger fanboy as a percentage of the user base than many other applications...at least in my experience.
It also doesnt help that many of these fanboys are crappy artists which has a knock on effect that people see and hear the negative aspects of Blender due to this vocal group before they see or hear anything good, which causes many people to automatically write Blender off as an application for amateurs or any artist that uses Blender as an amateur or poor artist. Tarred with the same brush etc.
Fanboys are not specific to Blender, all apps have them. So laying the blame solely (or in the main) at their feet is remiss with respect to wider issues concerning professional uptake that have very little to do with the community itself, simply it has to be said because professionals don't engage it. So.. where's the problem?. We need to look further up the chain of command.
I would argue there is a key difference between blender fanboys and those of other apps.
Other applications, for the most part are investments...they are not cheap and many are used by industry professionals. Believe it or not, its a small world when it comes to CG. People know people who will probably know you. Word can get around quickly. Therefore there is this sense that if you are A)investing into an expensive and professional application and have a name for yourself...that you will be more careful with your words as it can easily come back to bite you in the butt.
Blender on the other hand is free, international, its users i think have the anonymous effect. Anonyminity and lack of professional community can easily result in this: John Gabriel's Greater Internet D****** Theory.
We cannot detach the vocal minority from the whole; the way the application has been managed and the decisions made pertaining to that over the years are just as culpable in this matter, it's all tied together. The one cannot be properly addressed without looking at the other. And in fact, one could argue the point that a vocal community is (or was) what has driven Blenders success.
So the article being used above as a talking point is only doing so at a very surface level... it needs to go further. From my own experience being critical of Blender and it's management over the years, that type of analysis is not welcome and often dismissed out of hand.
Having said that.. I *do* get what you're saying (and what is being said in general here)
fair play Jonathan. about time someone within the community raised the issue.
I don't really agree that its not about the tool, some tools are better, and I think Blenders still got a way to go before its knocking shoulders with max and maya (the open films have been a great help here).
It would be nice for the Blender Foundation to focus on something other than films... film work is only one part of a much larger industry, and apps that specialize in film are a dime in a dozen (meaning the market is over saturated with them).
BF would be smart to focus on game development and maybe CAD type of projects for awhile. Balance blender out a bit.
It would be nice for the Blender Foundation to focus on something other than films... film work is only one part of a much larger industry, and apps that specialize in film are a dime in a dozen (meaning the market is over saturated with them).
BF would be smart to focus on game development and maybe CAD type of projects for awhile. Balance blender out a bit.
They're (BF) not interested. It's been said a number of times, publicly.
They're (BF) not interested. It's been said a number of times, publicly.
Regardless if they want to or not, it would still be smart to branch out a bit. I am aware of what the BF has said but also dont assume they will ever change their mind if the feed back pushes them in that direction.
The truth is, humans always judge a group by its most vocal members. Take the tea party for example, or atheists. It's really the fault of the observer who judges a group's common interest by its loudest members without taking the time to give it a thorough examination. As the saying goes, "a few rotten apples spoil the bunch". So toss the rotten apples aside and see how the others taste, you might be surprised.
Thanks Andreas. It's an article I have been wanting to write for a long time. Have you personally been pushed back by fanboys? I'm curious to get more people's opinions from outside the Blender community as well.
The only way fanboys have negatively affected me is when I visit blenderartists and try to suggest a feature, only to be shouted down because I should be thankful because Blender is free, because Blender is 'perfect', and because if I really want this feature, I should just go and learn Python and script it myself.
Yeah, Blender fanboyism is really annoying, and chronic on BlenderArtists.
BF would be smart to focus on game development and maybe CAD type of projects for awhile. Balance blender out a bit.
I would love to see this but I can't see Blender ever competing with even the likes of Unity again, the BGE fell way behind. With a lot of new tools and polish, and a dedicated workflow to getting BGE games on a PSVita though, I could see it happening though.
I would love to see this but I can't see Blender ever competing with even the likes of Unity again, the BGE fell way behind. With a lot of new tools and polish, and a dedicated workflow to getting BGE games on a PSVita though, I could see it happening though.
Blender shouldn't bother keeping up with Unity, it's good enough for testing assets. Unity is far better, even the free version. Blender should focus on improving the tools for game asset creation (baking, texture painting, etc) rather than trying to make it into a jack-of-all-trades game dev tool if they want to get the attention of the game industry.
Agreed and from what I've seen Unity has/will have some pretty decent Blender support. Right now I'm learning max coming from blender and I'm not so impressed, but it's industry standard so it's kind of do or die. I don't like the bad wrap Blender gets from some people and I'm not so sure the fanboy community is always the reason, but rather an excuse.
Blender shouldn't bother keeping up with Unity, it's good enough for testing assets. Unity is far better, even the free version. Blender should focus on improving the tools for game asset creation (baking, texture painting, etc) rather than trying to make it into a jack-of-all-trades game dev tool if they want to get the attention of the game industry.
I agree, the focus should be focused on tools and features that can aid game asset creation, not on the BGE itself. I do however dont think they should abandon the BGE or the desire to have one however. I think a smarter approach would strive to have basic realtime rendering capabilities as seen in the Marmoset Toolbag, and create a platform in which users can create modules that can attach to the engine for gameplay.
Is BGE being actively developed by the Blender Foundation. It was my impression that any recent features have been submitted by independents. BF seems to have spent most of their time on the renderer and the new UI
In a word, "no". Since it's initial inclusion in 2.5+ it's not really been touched, at least not in the same significant way other areas of Blender have been. So whilst they've not officially dropped support (it *was* mooted some time ago), they're not actively perusing it either.
Having said that, Cycles is supposed to be a significant upgrade to 'real time' functionality, but that's as a means to improve the 3DView and other live functionality, not the game engine.
I've been playing with Cycles today after discovering it exists, and I have to say I'm hugely impressed. It won't cooperate with my GPU and falls back to CPU rendering but even then I'm looking at it and wondering "how long before this is what we use for realtime?".
Having said that, Cycles is supposed to be a significant upgrade to 'real time' functionality, but that's as a means to improve the 3DView and other live functionality, not the game engine.
If I am not mistaken, it has nothing to do with the real time functionality or 3d view. Rather, it seems like it is just trying to pull from Modo's rendering method which is generally considered one of the better rendering approaches out there. The Blender Internal is generally considered dated and lacking... I believe any 3D viewport improvements are being done through open GL changes.
No worries, I understand what you are getting at and have played with cycles as well. It is the same in Modo if I am not mistaken...the point being that it uses a different rendering approach. You can get a rough, though noisy, image to see where the render might go, pumping up the samples gives a cleaner image. Still its not quite rendering the way one expects when one says real time.
This is not to say cycles is bad in anyway, just not exactly in the real time category..rather its just a fast and accurate renderer.
Still its not quite rendering the way one expects when one says real time.
A few more runs of Moore's Law and we might be able to get 4-8 passes going in realtime. A transition away from, and all the problems of, a scanline rasterizer and towards a system with full-scene realtime reflections and raytrace lighting with better control. It doesn't appear to use any form of caching/reuse of fragments when moving about the world at the moment either which could do wonders for the grain problem at lower pass levels in a realtime viewport. If we could distort the previous frame to match the models in the new frame and sprinkle new fragments on top here and there it'd be closer to viable.
I should note my specs, because they aren't great:
AMD Phenom II X4 840 (stock 3.2gHz)
2x Corsair Vengeance 4Gb DDR3 1600
Inno3D GTS450 1Gb (for some reason incompatible)
Personally I think the "Blender is for Blender artists" mantra is bullshit and is not something that should be encouraged, especially from leading members of the community and it doesn't help that Ton posts messages on Twitter that constantly promotes this anti-Autodesk agenda. It's childish and it deifies this sort of protectionism which makes new users feel isolated because they are not part of the elite club or unwelcome because they come from other software and wish to bring workflows/feature ideas with them. Ultimately it slows Blenders progress and development because as a community we are actively being extremely selective in Blenders direction by shutting all these other people out.
Thank deity-of-choice! I'm not the only one then. I think Ton is a great developer, but his "Blender is for Blender Artists" mantra just aggravates me beyond reason. It plays right into the fanboy mindset and, in general, is simply used as an excuse not to change something that people complain about.
Take for instance the much maligned use of right-click for select and left-click for placing the 3D tool. Firstly, left-click for select is standard across almost every software package that supports the concept. Secondly, even the users I've talked to that make frequent use of the 3D tool do so by snapping it to (surprise, surprise) elements they've selected. However, when this is discussed with Ton (years ago and today), you get the "Blender is for Blender Artists" line as if that somehow makes the decision justified.
As someone who straddles the software development / graphics artist divide, it is beyond frustrating to see the fanboy stuff most communities get over quickly encouraged by the behaviour of the lead developer. A man I respect for his software development but, sadly, cannot for his self-imposed isolationism.
I gotta disagree, I would still like to see the BGE developed. Otherwise I feel they'll try to remove it eventually. It's got to do something different to Unity and UDK to stay relevant though. I would really like to see an easy, dedicated pipeline to the PSVita SDK, that would be the best way for it to stay relevant IMO.
The problem with the BGE is the GPL license attached. That might be fine for prototypes, donation-ware, and open-source projects... but it's kind of a no-go when it comes to larger commercial game projects. Steam, AppStore, MacStore, all major consoles, etc are all ruled out when you have a GPL engine.
It's for that reason I've been using GameKit. It doesn't support everything the BGE does, but then again it also supports stuff the BGE does not. It's based on the OGRE engine (think TorchLight here folks) and runs your basic BGE setups straight out of the .blend file. More importantly Erwin Coumans, the original developer, has a non-copyleft license policy on it (pretty much everything used in it is MIT/BSD) so you can use it on your platform of choice.*
* Mind you, Unity is still better out of the box. This is for those that have a developer who knows what they are doing and want full control over the engine. Artists and small indies would be better served using Unity to get the most bang for their buck/effort.
Anyone know if there's a way to download Venom's Lab 2? I wanna do my bi-yearly Blender donation (:P) but I don't want to have to wait for shipping, and also I don't have a machine with a CD drive at the moment. But I can't find a download link, just a link to buying the DVD. Anyone know?
Anyone know if there's a way to download Venom's Lab 2? I wanna do my bi-yearly Blender donation (:P) but I don't want to have to wait for shipping, and also I don't have a machine with a CD drive at the moment. But I can't find a download link, just a link to buying the DVD. Anyone know?
I tried the same, its strictly postal. no electronic delivery.
If I am not mistaken, it has nothing to do with the real time functionality or 3d view. Rather, it seems like it is just trying to pull from Modo's rendering method which is generally considered one of the better rendering approaches out there. The Blender Internal is generally considered dated and lacking... I believe any 3D viewport improvements are being done through open GL changes.
Cycles was originally looked at by BF as being an update to live view. It's obviously grown beyond that since it's inception.
Anyone know if there's a way to download Venom's Lab 2? I wanna do my bi-yearly Blender donation (:P) but I don't want to have to wait for shipping, and also I don't have a machine with a CD drive at the moment. But I can't find a download link, just a link to buying the DVD. Anyone know?
I tried the same, its strictly postal. no electronic delivery.
It's licensed under creative commons. Find a torrent or download somewhere on the web and then make a donation directly to the Blender Foundation. It's all perfectly legal and encouraged.
Venom's Lab! 2 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License.
Giving you the freedom to share this DVD with anyone you like (or don't), study, modify, and share again!"
@BTolputt, I'm sure the situation will improve, but it might take a while :P
It's licensed under creative commons. Find a torrent or download somewhere on the web and then make a donation directly to the Blender Foundation. It's all perfectly legal and encouraged.
@BTolputt, I'm sure the situation will improve, but it might take a while :P
I think it'll take a couple of non-film projects for that to happen honestly. To Ton's credit, the open film projects have made him seriously reevaluate the user interface, animation, rendering, and composition functionality of Blender. Perhaps not always making the right decisions, but definitely making better informed ones and, overall, making great improvements to the software.
The problem with the open film projects is that they tend to use (as one would expect) long-term Blender users, already used to and accepting of it's faults. More importantly, being long-term Blender users and, generally, well respected amongst the Blender community already - they're not likely to create waves about functionality. We all like our heroes and, given what most of them consider an awesome "once in a lifetime" opportunity, are unlikely to rock the boat by challenging Ton on some of the long-term issues.
I always thought it would be interesting to see professional-level artists from other packages contribute their thoughts on Blender's development. It would do the community a world of good to have people who are actually in the trenches contributing.
Amateurs and hobbyists dominate the Blender community (naturally) but there's a huge difference in the amateurs of, say, Polycount and BlenderArtists. Not so much in artistic contribution or integrity. Rather, it seems like Blender doesn't approach things like the rest of the... world, really.
I mean, on the other hand, I've stuck with Blender from the point where I discovered it. I've tried looking at other programs but had such a struggle making the conversion that I usually fell back to Blender without realizing it. But seeing the way everything is presented on Polycount alone makes me wonder how much I would have to rewire my thinking if I make a switch to Maya or Max.
@BTolputt, I'm sure the situation will improve, but it might take a while :P
It's licensed under creative commons. Find a torrent or download somewhere on the web and then make a donation directly to the Blender Foundation. It's all perfectly legal and encouraged.
Yes I thought of this, and would happily choose that avenue, tis all the same in the end innit, but I can't seem to find a torrent Bloody feds took down my favourite site, Demonoid. What site does everyone here use for their torrents? The Pirate Bay is shit.
wow. Pablo's a legend! Glad I bought it all the same.
+1. I wish we saw more of him to be honest. I'd like to see him do a few video podcasts a year, just talking about the development of Blender, showing the latest tools off etc... basically digest all the programmer friendly documentation into something more ADD friendly :P
The thing I love the most about Blender is how the UI helps keep the mouse travel down. It's very shortcut driven and where the shortcuts leave off, the viewport context menus pick up. As long as you know the transform shortcuts, and CTRL-F, CTRL-E, Space Bar, and W, you rarely have to take your mouse away from the work space.
Now, if they could do something about that F6 menu...
Latest Blender movie's out. Focus of this one was largely on compositing, green screen keying, and and motion tracking. 2.64 will be along shortly as well.
The Blender action enables the fast creation of RGBCMYW Materials for use as selection masks during texturing and the action splits the colours in the texture and places each of them in their own layer, which is named after the colour within the layer, and then places them all in a group called RGBCMYW Masks.
It assumes that the colours used are in the correct order and that the background colour of the RGBCMYW base texture is black. As long as you use colours in the set order of Red, Green, Blue, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and White (i.e. RGB rather than GBR etc.), everything should process correctly and you will just need to delete the layers that have been created for which you do not have colours on the source image.
Currently the action has 2 versions which do slightly different things, depending on your needs:
RGBCMYW Splitter
Splits the colours in the texture and places each of them in their own layer, which is named after the colour within the layer, and then places them all in a group called RGBCMYW Masks. Retains a copy of the source image which is located at the bottom of the layer stack.
RGBCMYW Splitter + Remove AA
Attempts to remove any cross contamination due to AA or due to colours mixing where bleed/edge padding is present. The actions then splits the colours in the texture and places each of them in their own layer, which is named after the colour within the layer, and then places them all in a group called RGBCMYW Masks. Retains a copy of the original and modified source image which are both located at the bottom of the layer stack.
You can grab the PS action HERE and the action HERE
Holy crap. I've been getting into After Effects recently, but after I watched a small making of one of the compositing and keying scenes....
This makes me want to pick up blender again...
I mean, Blender has literally everything built in now.
Except for decent modeling
I've been using it a lot at work (Eld set up our pipeline), but the tools are still largely atrocious. The latest version is supposed to add a decent bevel I believe, but there's no build of that with psd-support on graphicall, so I'll be waiting for that.
The current Blender modeling toolchain is a relict from pre Ngon times. It`s just half a year gone since Ngon support finally found its way into Blender. It will surely need several months up to years to get all the tools to play nicely with the new Bmesh core, and to bring Blender modeling tools to a state of the art state.
I think you guys are probably underselling it in the modeling department. I use Max, Maya, and Blender (Max less so now), but model mostly in Blender. I think it has significant advantages over Maya for modeling (largely modifiers and gestural stuff), and is about equal to Max (faster to model in, but certainly less depth of modeling features). If need be, I'll jump my obj over to Max if there's a specific tool or setting I need that Blender doesn't have, but for the most part, I have had no trouble with Blender, and coworkers have remarked about the speed with which I can turn something over. I can't speak to any other packages, because I really haven't used them.
This isn't to say Blender doesn't have huge disadvantages with its learning curve, because it certainly does. It's difficult to reach a level where you can take advantage of that speed, so I understand that the benefit may be limited without a large time investment. There are a lot of other reasons to dislike Blender, but I wouldn't count modeling among them.
I've been using it a lot at work (Eld set up our pipeline), but the tools are still largely atrocious. The latest version is supposed to add a decent bevel I believe, but there's no build of that with psd-support on graphicall, so I'll be waiting for that.
The default bevel is crap, mate. Use the Bevel Round addon (it's in contrib) as it is much better.
I just downloaded and opened Blender for first time in many years.
The interface is still odd enough that I have no clue where to start.
Wings3d took my just a few minutes to make something simple the first time I opened it. 3dsMax4 was the same back when I first opened it. In Blender I cannot even click through and find how to create or modify an object.
I've been looking for a simple alternate UI for Blender but still can't find a published version.
Replies
More often than not I find that Blender has a negative reputation among many professionals and though it is getting better, it is still a problem. I have been using Blender for years and have been flamed out of BlenderArtists/elysiun on numerous occasions for suggesting features or improvements that other software has (and quite often Blender still doesn't have).
I recall on one occasion I suggested a GPU powered renderer and was flamed off the thread...oh how times change.
I think that the main issue is that many Blender fanboys are very hostile towards anything that isn't Blender and have an almost automated response towards any possible corruption of the hallowed source code by polluting it with ideas from industry standard applications such as Max or Maya, often seemingly because it was from these evil applications so it must be a bad idea.
Max and Maya are industry standard applications for a reason...because they are awesome at what they do. If Blender is so perfect then how does Autodesk still rule the roost? Companies/artists have to pay a lot of money for these and the market always decides.
Please dont get me wrong, I really do think Blender is an amazing application and I use it daily but it does have many flaws and sometimes Blender fanboys can be very protective over changes, or suggested changes, due to a fear of Blender turning into Max or whatever.
Personally I think the "Blender is for Blender artists" mantra is bullshit and is not something that should be encouraged, especially from leading members of the community and it doesn't help that Ton posts messages on Twitter that constantly promotes this anti-Autodesk agenda. It's childish and it deifies this sort of protectionism which makes new users feel isolated because they are not part of the elite club or unwelcome because they come from other software and wish to bring workflows/feature ideas with them. Ultimately it slows Blenders progress and development because as a community we are actively being extremely selective in Blenders direction by shutting all these other people out.
Blender should be for everyone and everyone should have equal say and often it seems that Blender does things in an awkward way because it can. Until the voice of reason is louder than the Blender fanboys, I really don't see this changing.
As someone who lives in both worlds, this drives me crazy and I can see why people get put off.
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Yea, I agree, but I think that the Blender fanboys are much more vocal or have a louder voice than most other applications and therefore more easily heard. Also there seems to be a larger fanboy as a percentage of the user base than many other applications...at least in my experience.
It also doesnt help that many of these fanboys are crappy artists which has a knock on effect that people see and hear the negative aspects of Blender due to this vocal group before they see or hear anything good, which causes many people to automatically write Blender off as an application for amateurs or any artist that uses Blender as an amateur or poor artist. Tarred with the same brush etc.
I would argue there is a key difference between blender fanboys and those of other apps.
Other applications, for the most part are investments...they are not cheap and many are used by industry professionals. Believe it or not, its a small world when it comes to CG. People know people who will probably know you. Word can get around quickly. Therefore there is this sense that if you are A)investing into an expensive and professional application and
Blender on the other hand is free, international, its users i think have the anonymous effect. Anonyminity and lack of professional community can easily result in this: John Gabriel's Greater Internet D****** Theory.
See link for visual explanation.
So the article being used above as a talking point is only doing so at a very surface level... it needs to go further. From my own experience being critical of Blender and it's management over the years, that type of analysis is not welcome and often dismissed out of hand.
Having said that.. I *do* get what you're saying (and what is being said in general here)
I don't really agree that its not about the tool, some tools are better, and I think Blenders still got a way to go before its knocking shoulders with max and maya (the open films have been a great help here).
BF would be smart to focus on game development and maybe CAD type of projects for awhile. Balance blender out a bit.
The only way fanboys have negatively affected me is when I visit blenderartists and try to suggest a feature, only to be shouted down because I should be thankful because Blender is free, because Blender is 'perfect', and because if I really want this feature, I should just go and learn Python and script it myself.
Yeah, Blender fanboyism is really annoying, and chronic on BlenderArtists.
I would love to see this but I can't see Blender ever competing with even the likes of Unity again, the BGE fell way behind. With a lot of new tools and polish, and a dedicated workflow to getting BGE games on a PSVita though, I could see it happening though.
Blender shouldn't bother keeping up with Unity, it's good enough for testing assets. Unity is far better, even the free version. Blender should focus on improving the tools for game asset creation (baking, texture painting, etc) rather than trying to make it into a jack-of-all-trades game dev tool if they want to get the attention of the game industry.
I agree, the focus should be focused on tools and features that can aid game asset creation, not on the BGE itself. I do however dont think they should abandon the BGE or the desire to have one however. I think a smarter approach would strive to have basic realtime rendering capabilities as seen in the Marmoset Toolbag, and create a platform in which users can create modules that can attach to the engine for gameplay.
Having said that, Cycles is supposed to be a significant upgrade to 'real time' functionality, but that's as a means to improve the 3DView and other live functionality, not the game engine.
If I am not mistaken, it has nothing to do with the real time functionality or 3d view. Rather, it seems like it is just trying to pull from Modo's rendering method which is generally considered one of the better rendering approaches out there. The Blender Internal is generally considered dated and lacking... I believe any 3D viewport improvements are being done through open GL changes.
Scene is 150419 faces, 1024x1024
Internal (21:23, 16xAA, 1024x1024, 3 16-sample lights, all glossy materials 4-sample reflection, 2 bounce lighting, AO)
Cycles (4:50, 1024x1024, 3 point lights)
@Dataday you can use the renderer in the viewport to see updates to materials and lights in near-realtime, see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc_B190c0WQ&feature=youtu.be&t=35s
No worries, I understand what you are getting at and have played with cycles as well. It is the same in Modo if I am not mistaken...the point being that it uses a different rendering approach. You can get a rough, though noisy, image to see where the render might go, pumping up the samples gives a cleaner image. Still its not quite rendering the way one expects when one says real time.
This is not to say cycles is bad in anyway, just not exactly in the real time category..rather its just a fast and accurate renderer.
A few more runs of Moore's Law and we might be able to get 4-8 passes going in realtime. A transition away from, and all the problems of, a scanline rasterizer and towards a system with full-scene realtime reflections and raytrace lighting with better control. It doesn't appear to use any form of caching/reuse of fragments when moving about the world at the moment either which could do wonders for the grain problem at lower pass levels in a realtime viewport. If we could distort the previous frame to match the models in the new frame and sprinkle new fragments on top here and there it'd be closer to viable.
I should note my specs, because they aren't great:
AMD Phenom II X4 840 (stock 3.2gHz)
2x Corsair Vengeance 4Gb DDR3 1600
Inno3D GTS450 1Gb (for some reason incompatible)
Thank deity-of-choice! I'm not the only one then. I think Ton is a great developer, but his "Blender is for Blender Artists" mantra just aggravates me beyond reason. It plays right into the fanboy mindset and, in general, is simply used as an excuse not to change something that people complain about.
Take for instance the much maligned use of right-click for select and left-click for placing the 3D tool. Firstly, left-click for select is standard across almost every software package that supports the concept. Secondly, even the users I've talked to that make frequent use of the 3D tool do so by snapping it to (surprise, surprise) elements they've selected. However, when this is discussed with Ton (years ago and today), you get the "Blender is for Blender Artists" line as if that somehow makes the decision justified.
As someone who straddles the software development / graphics artist divide, it is beyond frustrating to see the fanboy stuff most communities get over quickly encouraged by the behaviour of the lead developer. A man I respect for his software development but, sadly, cannot for his self-imposed isolationism.
It's for that reason I've been using GameKit. It doesn't support everything the BGE does, but then again it also supports stuff the BGE does not. It's based on the OGRE engine (think TorchLight here folks) and runs your basic BGE setups straight out of the .blend file. More importantly Erwin Coumans, the original developer, has a non-copyleft license policy on it (pretty much everything used in it is MIT/BSD) so you can use it on your platform of choice.*
* Mind you, Unity is still better out of the box. This is for those that have a developer who knows what they are doing and want full control over the engine. Artists and small indies would be better served using Unity to get the most bang for their buck/effort.
I tried the same, its strictly postal. no electronic delivery.
It's licensed under creative commons. Find a torrent or download somewhere on the web and then make a donation directly to the Blender Foundation. It's all perfectly legal and encouraged.
http://www.venomslab.com/
wow. Pablo's a legend! Glad I bought it all the same.
AFAIK, all the Blender Foundation DVDs are licensed under a CC license.
I think it'll take a couple of non-film projects for that to happen honestly. To Ton's credit, the open film projects have made him seriously reevaluate the user interface, animation, rendering, and composition functionality of Blender. Perhaps not always making the right decisions, but definitely making better informed ones and, overall, making great improvements to the software.
The problem with the open film projects is that they tend to use (as one would expect) long-term Blender users, already used to and accepting of it's faults. More importantly, being long-term Blender users and, generally, well respected amongst the Blender community already - they're not likely to create waves about functionality. We all like our heroes and, given what most of them consider an awesome "once in a lifetime" opportunity, are unlikely to rock the boat by challenging Ton on some of the long-term issues.
All the ones I purchased are. That said, I found it cheaper to get them sent out on DVD.
Amateurs and hobbyists dominate the Blender community (naturally) but there's a huge difference in the amateurs of, say, Polycount and BlenderArtists. Not so much in artistic contribution or integrity. Rather, it seems like Blender doesn't approach things like the rest of the... world, really.
I mean, on the other hand, I've stuck with Blender from the point where I discovered it. I've tried looking at other programs but had such a struggle making the conversion that I usually fell back to Blender without realizing it. But seeing the way everything is presented on Polycount alone makes me wonder how much I would have to rewire my thinking if I make a switch to Maya or Max.
Yes I thought of this, and would happily choose that avenue, tis all the same in the end innit, but I can't seem to find a torrent
+1. I wish we saw more of him to be honest. I'd like to see him do a few video podcasts a year, just talking about the development of Blender, showing the latest tools off etc... basically digest all the programmer friendly documentation into something more ADD friendly :P
Now, if they could do something about that F6 menu...
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This makes me want to pick up blender again...
I mean, Blender has literally everything built in now.
I made a script and set of actions that do something similar to Per's actions that EQ mentioned at the start of this thread.
The Blender action enables the fast creation of RGBCMYW Materials for use as selection masks during texturing and the action splits the colours in the texture and places each of them in their own layer, which is named after the colour within the layer, and then places them all in a group called RGBCMYW Masks.
It assumes that the colours used are in the correct order and that the background colour of the RGBCMYW base texture is black. As long as you use colours in the set order of Red, Green, Blue, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and White (i.e. RGB rather than GBR etc.), everything should process correctly and you will just need to delete the layers that have been created for which you do not have colours on the source image.
Currently the action has 2 versions which do slightly different things, depending on your needs:
RGBCMYW Splitter
- Splits the colours in the texture and places each of them in their own layer, which is named after the colour within the layer, and then places them all in a group called RGBCMYW Masks. Retains a copy of the source image which is located at the bottom of the layer stack.
RGBCMYW Splitter + Remove AA- Attempts to remove any cross contamination due to AA or due to colours mixing where bleed/edge padding is present. The actions then splits the colours in the texture and places each of them in their own layer, which is named after the colour within the layer, and then places them all in a group called RGBCMYW Masks. Retains a copy of the original and modified source image which are both located at the bottom of the layer stack.
You can grab the PS action HERE and the action HEREEnjoy!
Weird how some things never change... Ob: La: Ve: Fa:......
2.64 is out. Get it here: http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/
Release notes: http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-264/
Mainly a VFX release. Some new features:
Biggest thing for game dev is probably the skin modifier which can create super-fast base meshes. Sorta like ZSpheres but with automatic skinning for posability.
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Some new sculpting features (including getting masking back)
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Other than that, HUGE changes to green screen keying, compositing, rendering, motion tracking, color I/O, and masking.
nuff said.
Except for decent modeling
I've been using it a lot at work (Eld set up our pipeline), but the tools are still largely atrocious. The latest version is supposed to add a decent bevel I believe, but there's no build of that with psd-support on graphicall, so I'll be waiting for that.
This isn't to say Blender doesn't have huge disadvantages with its learning curve, because it certainly does. It's difficult to reach a level where you can take advantage of that speed, so I understand that the benefit may be limited without a large time investment. There are a lot of other reasons to dislike Blender, but I wouldn't count modeling among them.
The interface is still odd enough that I have no clue where to start.
Wings3d took my just a few minutes to make something simple the first time I opened it. 3dsMax4 was the same back when I first opened it. In Blender I cannot even click through and find how to create or modify an object.
I've been looking for a simple alternate UI for Blender but still can't find a published version.