Blender Conference 2020 | Hacker News Reader

Blender Conference 2020

conference.blender.org

155 pointsTomte32 comments

Blender is a fantastic piece of software.

Its UI never agreed with me that much, but watching experienced users, it reminds me of VI. As in, it appears to be optimized for power users, rather than ease of use, or discovery. It does seem to have been steadly improving. I'll try again.

It's changed considerably over the past decade, especially at 2.5 and 2.8. A lot of the weird stuff like right-click to select is gone (or not on by default anyway). If it's been a while since your last attempt you may have a better time.

My breakthrough was memorizing hotkeys. Was more efficient and helped me more easily map the UI landscape.

It's been a few years so I've forgotten them, but should I need to learn Blender again that will be my go-to.

As the other comment mentioned, the UI is much better nowadays, especially with 2.8. I actually find it more intuitive than others like Cinema4D, Maya, and Houdini, whereas it was the opposite previously.

I used blender a bunch in 2.5 era and then coming back to it in 2.8 - can't say I'm a fan - old UI sucked discovery wise but it was streamlined, new UI is too clicky - but I've only did a few basic things

Spacebar -> type command name -> do anything from the keyboard

By default, spacebar now play/pauses the timeline, and search moved to f3

I found a bit of a learning curve with 2.8's input too, but I'm kind of okay with the tradeoff for newfound enthusiasm the program has with professional users.

Sounds like they made some significant workflow breaking changes in 2.8. How'd the community react when they rolled out the changes?

I don't see a schedule, just a landing page for a conference taking place in three days. Could be fun to check out, but I'm a complete newbie. I have no idea (or apparently way of knowing) if there will be any sessions of interest to me.

This year is a bit unusual and secretive to provide a bit of a surprise. The past conferences had a proper schedule, see e.g. the one from last year[0].

[0] https://conference.blender.org/2019/schedule/

Thank you for the link. It seems like there were a few sessions there that could have been interesting to me. I'll keep an eye out this year as well.

You can watch (almost) all past talks of previous conferences on Blender's YouTube channel [0].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/c/BlenderFoundation/playlists

There's also the Blender Peertube instance, in case you care about it: https://video.blender.org/

This is a great feature addition[1].

I've not tried to use blender for a while, but I love applications that give you a command palette, especially when they get proper fuzzy and prefix matching like this. Like the dude in the video says, it must be a godsend for non-native english speakers with something as complex as blender.

[1] https://video.blender.org/videos/watch/791b0736-9a55-4b72-9e...

Very cool link. Truly depressing that every video only has 30 views!

Only one way to add more!

Well, disregarding (h/c)racking the server or some other abuse I suppose.

Edit: Honestly, I think it's more important that it exists than that it gets heavy use. As it is now, it allows Blender to A) Have a better platform to link people to, and B) Have a fallback if Youtube starts causing problems.

I honestly think A is more important.

I will become a user! I think I've been waiting for this for a while.

A few weeks back I went to the LibreOffice conference and the vibes were really encouraging. It is really a strange time we live in, where there are these fundamental structural changes in gatherings, bringing communities together in a totally virtual space.

These FOSS conferences are a huge deal and really thrive on community support. I encourage you to go, if for no other reason to get a feel for where the projects are going.

I just wanna' say I'm not the greatest 3D artist, but I still love the Blender community! Enabling so many great artists to show their talent is an amazing achievement.

I am an expert, which is why I am even more amazed about the crazy speed at which Blender improves and how they managed not to fall into the pits so many Open Source projects regularly walk into with open eyes.

I am so no expert, but have been able to create a logo animation for a fake TV show for a university project of my significant other this year.

It was a blast and the tutorials were great. Using the software was a pleasure.

Looking forward to the next few months were I will have some time to just play a little bit more with it.

As someone who is not at all involved in that community, I'd love to hear what are the pits many projects fall into and what does Blender avoid.

Out of the top of my mind:

* Gets good enough, but not great. Then most contributor lose interest and the pace slows. It makes the original roadmap impractical and more devs lose interest, which spirals into a dormant project (Inkscape)

* Maintained flawlessly, but no new groundbreaking features get added and there is a slow exodus of users toward new-shiny until it is a perfectly bug-free irrelevant piece of code (most JS stuff, GnuPG, some crypto libs, OpenBSD).

* Maintained into the ground by aggressive/oppressive/elitist/cultist/dogmatic core team followed by a split of the community (pre re-merge of glibc/eglibc, GCC/EGCS, ffmpeg/libav, Gnome/MATE/Cinnamon/Unity, Vim/NeoVim, all of Suckless, most of GNU)

* Fancy/overkill roadmap made at a time when there is plenty of contributors, but so hard to achieve most of them give up before the finish line (KDE4, GIMP 2.10)

* Unresponsive/exclusive community toward new contributors and/or SJW attempts accidentally FUDding a previously functional community (lets not point fingers and start a flame war)

* Unwillingness to break things or pay up the tech debt in order to stay relevant (EMACS, pre-LLVM-era GCC)

* Break everything consistently and often and/or remove your contributions because of a dogma (Gnome)

* The Free-software people and the commercial contributors revolt against each other (OpenOffice/LibreOffice/StarOffice/CollaborraOnline, OwnCloud/NextCloud)

* Misguided attempts at making money by breaking things for your users (GhostScript, eLive, Mepis, Mandrake, every project who moved to AGPL)

* No attempt at ensuring the project can exist without its founder (CentOS, all single-person-army projects out there, all BDFL who refuse to let go when they lose interest)

* Sabotage (ion3, ffmpeg, Cyanogen)

* Suicide by committee (many Apache/Eclipse foundation projects like Apache OpenOffice)

* Make a major incompatible upgrade with no clear migration paths (Python, GTK, KDE, Gnome, AwesomeWM)

* Promise a major upgrade, tell your users to wait for it, then backtrack (Perl)

* Maintain multiple branches of your software forever until you fragment your user base so much you compete with yourself and lose to new-fancy (OpenSSL, pre-rolling Firefox, MySQL, most "enterprise grade stuff")

* crazy rebranding ideas leaving most of your users unaware of the new project (Apache OpenOffice, my own SFLPhone->Inutchuk->Ring.cx->GNU Ring->GNU Jami->Banji fiasco, KOffice).

"Crazy speed"? Blender was a commercial product in 1995. It went open source in 2002 after the vendor went bust. It had the UI from hell. It took another 15 years to crawl out of that pit. Finally, it has an adequate user interface.

Do you have any idea how hard it is for an open source project to _improve_ UX? Designers don't flock to open source the same way that engineers do.

Yes crazy speed. I use this thing since roughly 10 years, and used 3Dsmax and Maya before and parallel to using Blender (I work as a freelancer in the field).

Blender had more and bigger updates at a faster pace than any of the programs I used in the past decade. This includes commercial software as well.

And surprisingly there was never a single update that broke something for me or that. Most of the time it was more like: "Remember that thing that took you half a week to render? That now got 10% faster, because magic".

The commercial past of Blender doesn't really play that big of a role other than the very efficient binary file format it gave us.

"And surprisingly there was never a single update that broke something for me"

Blender's usual problem is "where did they hide that feature in this update?" Questions on that come up in the forums often. In the 2.8x series, visibility of an object is controlled by three different checkboxes in different places, all of which have to be on. Importing older Blender files sometimes resulted in some of them being off.

Look at how much the GIMP has improved in the same timeframe :)

Same, I'm no expert but Blender and it's community are such a blessing. I've been able to actually get paid for some stuff I've done with it!

I fully agree, it's both a fantastic software and community. I would also recommend it to everybody who is interested in contributing to open source software.

impressive

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