Blender 2.91
blender.org
blender.org
And the release page is performant and pretty, and it works without Javascript but it still has all these great little diagrams and demo videos for each feature. Like, you can look at this page and even if you knew nothing at all about 3D modeling you'd still want to go download this thing immediately.
https://www.blender.org/press/unity-joins-the-blender-develo...
And a huge grant from Facebook:
https://www.blender.org/press/facebook-joins-the-blender-dev...
I suspect it doesn't go back to version 3 though
https://developer.blender.org/D6807
It's been waiting for review for about 9 months. :(
If this gets reviewed and merged (probably with some hopefully minor fixing), it'll put the foundations in place for Blender to start competing with CAD/CAM packages.
Which would be a really good thing (as a CAD/CAM and otherwise Blender user). :)
Am I looking at the right thing? Could you maybe elaborate a bit on why this will help Blender become competitive in the CAD/CAM space?
We might need to ping the patch author "xueke pei (yuzukyo)" to make sure I have that correct... and make sure I'm pointing at the correct thing. :)
https://developer.blender.org/p/yuzukyo/
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Blender doesn't really have any presence in the CAD/CAM space because (my understanding) is the geometry Blender uses isn't "solid geometry".
Because it's not solid geometry, Blender isn't able to export to any of the widely used file formats in CAD/CAM. eg STEP, IGES, 3DM, etc.
Nor even to other OSS packages (eg FreeCAD), as they too use solid geometry.
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Solid models are used in industry (CNC, plasma, waterjet, etc), somewhat similar to how STL files are used in 3D printing.
With 3D printing, the model file (eg STL) is turned into a gcode action plan for printing by a slicer. eg Cura (https://ultimaker.com/software/ultimaker-cura)
In industry, the model file (eg STEP) is turned into a gcode action plan for the machine cut out the part by CAM software. eg MasterCAM (https://www.mastercam.com)
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With that branch (D6807), my understanding was it enables proper in-depth NURBS (solid geometry) support.
The commit comments in that branch indicate it also allows importing of Rhino (3DM) and subdivision surface (subd) files.
If that's the case, it's the needed foundation piece to allow for creation of importers and exporter for widely accepted CAD/CAM formats.
The second an even basic STEP exporter is functional in Blender, it will start pulling users across from the expensive proprietary CAD/CAM systems. As almost no-one actually wants to use them, it's just a "lack of choice" problem. ;)
Especially when the other parts of Blender (animation, grease pencil) are already very complimentary to modelling and already support the right workflow(s).
You personally might prefer to use Rhino. But the vast majority of new users who come to the CNC places I frequent (eg PrintNC Discord) would easily choose a functional Blender over any non-OSS modelling package.
That being said, I don't have an account on developer.blender.org.
Is someone with an account able to contact them somehow?
CAD is all about building mechanical parts with features that match needed specifications. For example you need a block with holes in it with particular spacing, particular diameter and particular depth. CAD packages like Fusion 360, SolidWorks, FreeCAD etc. are all dedicated to this task and make features like constraints and measurements front and center.
Blender on the other hand is, at least in my experience of it, all about bringing somebody's artistic vision into a 3D environment. It's usually not important to somebody's vision that parts meet dimensional constraints, it's more important that it looks "right". And so Blender is full of tools that allow humans to change things to arbitrary dimensions.
Does it really make sense to try and fit both of these use-cases into one tool? I can't help but think that Blender would come out worse for it.
And that's CAD, I really can't come up with any reason why CAM would make sense in Blender.
Is there something I'm missing?
They're just so many years outdated, that they're pretty much unusable which is probably why you're not aware of them being there. ;)
This patch is to update the NURBS capabilities in Blender, so the "artistic vision" objects people create can then be turned into real life objects via industry standard processes (eg CNC machining).
If you personally don't want to use the NURBS pieces, then feel free to ignore them. But please don't block other people from doing so. :)
I'm not saying NURBS shouldn't be fixed/updated, I'm just debating whether "so that Blender can be a CAD/CAM package" is a reasonable motivation for it.
It has been great so far - and even more surprising i'm so far writing all the asset code 100% in Rust via Pyo3, which is really nice.
So i'm going to mock 2D design with 3D models. Starting also with isometric, so it's naturally a bit more visually 3D anyway - but still sprite based.
I'm also going to toy and learn a lot about the boundaries of where tons of 2D sprites become bottle-necked and instead 3D ends up being cheaper. As it stands i know nothing, but some of the things i've planned have quite an extensive set of assets - so i suspect there will be some limitations there.
My only point is that scripting is not an unusual feature of Blender. It's a "if it didn't have it it would be 25 years behind the times" feature.
Absolute joy to use.
Disclaimer: I have been happy customer since blender 2.7 days and I expect their old courses to be relaunched with new blender support.
Blender 2.8 onwards did a lot to rectify those criticisms, which in turn allowed people to view it and dismiss the FUD
I imagine that Blender is becoming more and more of a tool for students who now don't have to pay anything to have a good 3D modeling tool.
Most of the major film studios have huge pipelines in Maya and Houdini etc... Until recently, Blender wasn't even interested in partaking in a pipeline (Tons' own words at SIGGRAPH 2017)
Recently that has shifted and blender is looking to be able to be integrated into pipelines Which might help adoption. Such things as supporting Pixar USD and the VFX reference platform.
In addition to that, Blender did an overhaul of their UI and renderer that brought a lot of interest in.
I expect to see Blender in studios sooner rather than later, but I don't expect it to supplant the existing DCC packages.
There's still a lot of friction to working with other DCCs, still a lot of performance issues with larger scenes, and then there's issues with support, extensibility and licensing.
Corporations are averse to GPL and Blender is all GPL. They might get more adoption if they dual licensed their plugin API.
Also since it has no C api, it's not attractive from an extensibility perspective.
Finally, the major studios like to have support contracts to expedite fixes to blocking issues. Blender doesn't have such a thing. Yes , it's open source but it requires crewing up for something that a support contract would cover .
Blender is very extensible via its Python API
If you want to add performent extensions to Blender, it requires maintaining an entire fork of the app.
Contrast this to other DCCs, where they almost all provide compiled plugin support (usually C++) and API stability is largely guaranteed between releases.
This makes Blender very unfriendly for production pipelines.
Add to that, Blenders Python extensions don't have a very friendly UI story via ghost, whereas other DCCs largely provide a Qt + PySide2 backing.
Fwiw I'm very much pro blender, having rolled it out to artists in production settings, but I am far from recommending it in any core production pipelines unless the studios are willing to maintain an entire fork of the app.
A question on pipelines: are those different from what's mentioned on Blender's Pipeline page? [1]
> Finally, the major studios like to have support contracts to expedite fixes to blocking issues.
It seems like blender has something along those lines provided by the Blender Institute [2]
>> Co-Development with Blender Institute
>> If your company or studio has specific development targets or needs, you can contact the Blender Institute to discuss options.
>> We will hire or involve the developers for topics that align well with the Blender roadmap and benefit the contractor well. Such agreements can have milestones and deliverables. Co-development will especially work well when aligned to other projects that run in Blender Institute. Only projects that involve multiple months of work will be taken in consideration.
Blender has alembic support which is great for geometry, but its USD support is still nascent and limited to export. Additionally because it doesn't use Qt, it's hard to integrate tooling that can otherwise be shared between apps. (note there are third party projects to integrate Qt in Blender). It's also only recently that Blender has started following the VFX reference platform, which previously meant that all your dependencies and Python code needed to be redone to support Blenders versions.
The support for things like OCIO etc is also relatively new.
With regards to the Blender foundation and support contracts, it's quite different than what a traditional support contract offers.
Usually a support contract means you have a dev that responds to your companies needs, where they'll support you with custom builds of the software if needed, including back porting patches to your production locked version.
The Blender foundation instead takes donations towards development of future versions of Blender and it's still very hard to convince them to support specific studio needs. You're most likely NOT going to get backports of fixes to a production locked version of Blender.
It's only recently (2.83) that they've started having LTS releases..
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To caveat all of this, I'm not saying Blender shouldn't be used for productions. It's very capable. I'm just providing perspective on why it's not finding a strong foothold against incumbents even when it has some very strong on the surface features that Maya doesn't for example at an infinitely better price.
I have confidence that the Blender foundation are moving in the right direction after what seems to be a cultural and priorities change with 2.80 onwards.
Part of the 2.80 changes also brought a lot of outside funding from Epic, Ubisoft, Facebook and more that I believe will help steer Blender well in the future to unseating Maya etc.
I don't see Blender unseating Houdini anytime soon though.
https://www.blender.org/user-stories/japanese-anime-studio-k...
Or for code based modeling, OpenSCAD is the big thing, and cadQuery is a newer python-based system that seems very promising. Version 2 of cadQuery is built on Open CASCADE, the same backend as FreeCAD, and I gather it makes some modeling operations like fillets and chamfers much more possible than what you can do in SCAD.
I've been meaning to dig into that but haven't made the time yet.
I can recommend solvespace - it's quite basic in terms of features, but it's really well designed software, so it's nice for designing simple stuff.
But I started 3D printing Feb this year and started 3D modelling only for that purpose. I don't see myself investing in anything else.
Right now it works ok for 3D printed models. Not great but if you are aware of it's faults you can work with it.
In future it'd take a single blip of that focused developer firehose to address a whole lot of concerns for us 3D printer types.
But even without a big business throwing money at them for that exact purpose, I am excited by boolean modifiers and the knife intersect tool getting significant updates in this release.
Right now Blender is so much more than a 3D printed object modelling tool. I like having the option to explore other fields in the 3D modelling space too.
True and funny as my primary Blender use is for video editing. I like having the option to explore other fields in the 3D modeling, animation, and VR space too.