Offer to game programmers from a Blender 3D developer | Hacker News Reader

Offer to game programmers from a Blender 3D developer

blenderartists.org

86 pointspWneD19 comments

Game industry veteran here...

It's an interesting idea, but there's a some problems. First, the crossover between those who need art in their spare time, and those who know how to contribute to projects like Blender.

In reality, the people (like me), who love making games and are constantly on the lookout for artists to help out with side projects, spend all of our time doing gameplay code. Heavy 3d math, number crunching, data management -- that kind of stuff tends to fall under the category of things we don't like doing -- thus the expertise and passion for making games themselves.

On the flip side, the programmers with the ability to contribute to a project like blender, are the kind of programmers who are specialists in a particular field, and thus, from my experience, don't really branch out from that in to the kind of things that would need art on the side.

Granted, these are generalities, but I've been in the industry for eleven years and I've only met one person who crossed those boundaries (one Stan Melax, a dude smart enough to correct John Carmack and passionate enough to walk away from a job when it doesn't challenge or interest him).

Second, those of us who are passionate about making games and do need art, are often more interested in collaborations which further our side projects. If I were to contribute to blender, this doesn't really get my own projects further. At least, not in a parallel fashion, more it's like I'm doing the coding AND the art. Only I'm trading unrelated coding for art. Really, game programmers who do this stuff on their own time are often selfish and/or extremely focused on our own projects.

Third, even if I did contribute to blender as a trade, the reality is that it doesn't further my skills in the direction I actually need for the stuff I do. So ultimately, the whole thing is kind of more downside than upside.

Anyway, not to say it's not an interesting idea, and that it won't rope in a few people, but it's going to be hard to find those people, ultimately.

Interesting idea, but the barrier of entry to contribute code to a complex project like Blender is waaaaaaaaay higher than the artists there seem to imagine.

I don't know, having seen the quality of some models programmers (including myself) have made... the barrier of entry for non-sucky 3d models seems larger... If you aren't lucky to work in an "A" grade game, odds are high that you'll never be able to do anything other than diddle.

I guess I wasn't clear enough. I meant having to learn the existing code and building on top of it. Whereas to make models... you just make them.

I'm not saying it's easy or requires any less talent than coding - just that it doesn't have as many "prerequisites" as modifying Blender would.

You've clearly never used Blender.

I never really thought the barrier to entry for blender was that high. I tinkered in the blender codebase for a while and the code isn't that hard to understand. They've since made huge strides in code organization so it's even easier. Blender was my first real introduction to hacking on C code and I found the dev community very helpful and accommodating.

From a user perspective, Blender seems to have cleaner code behind it than most of the commercial 3D apps; it starts faster, it crashes less, and I haven't encountered bugs in functionality.

As for the interface - I find it dire for detailed editing tasks(I opt to use Wings for modelling) but not too bad for managing the overall scene, applying materials, lighting, compositing, etc. I speak as someone who's invested a bare minimum of time into properly learning to use it.

Blenders interface is built with power users in mind. They've made some progress in reducing how steep the learning curve but they still have a ways to go.

Your right about how clean/responsive and fast it is. They have justifiable pride in how many features they include in such a small binary. When I was hacking on it Blender weighed in at under 10 megabytes with features other apps needed 100s of megabytes to provide. I think they still come in under 20 but I haven't checked in a while.

Blenders interface is built by programmers. There wasn't a visually creative bone in the UI designers body.

I would have agreed a few years ago, but the interface has come a long way, especially with the 2.5 alpha: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Blender_2...

Have you tried the new Blender 2.5 (now in alpha)? The interface is a major improvement... It's much easier to find things in menus and figure out what various options do. And you can edit the camera movement keys to match other 3D applications. There is still some weird modality, but I think this version's interface is becoming normal enough to see some significant adoption once it gets out of beta.

(But Wings is still a better modeller.)

I think this is one of those moments where it would be considered wrong to disagree, but everyone eventually will just disregard it due to impracticality.

It might work in a place like New York City. One of the Android groups here is doing some OpenGL stuff. We're trying Blender, but most of us are a little challenged.

http://www.nycjava.net/JSPWiki/Wiki.jsp?page=JavaMobileStudy...

It's not that hard to feel challenged when it comes to Blender. If you can afford it, check out Silo3D - probably the most intuitive 3D tool I've ever used; it doesn't support animation yet, though.

As a Blender user myself I can say that it is very challenging to get started, but once you learn all the keyboard shortcuts things become very fast and easy to use. I feel that Blender gives me more control, even though learning it was rather hard.

The same is true for many other tools like Mutt, Slrn, Emacs and Vim. It takes some time to get a feeling for them, but it's always worth the initial learning effort!

I was always thinking that the best recruitment grounds for open source game content are design/architecture/animation/mechanical engineering college and uni courses. The students can do their assignments plus have some fun playing with their own models in an open source game.

Why is that not happening??

I think it has been - Blender foundation is a participates in Google's Summer of Code: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/GSoC/2010/Info

My first thought is that it isn't a fair trade - art is a one shot thing, code has to be maintained.

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