Canonical Offering Blender Support | Hacker News Reader

Canonical Offering Blender Support

blender.org

163 pointsasicsp37 comments

The canonical website [0] has this paragraph:

> The support offering will include Blender LTS releases > across Linux distributions, Microsoft Windows, and macOS. > Canonical’s engineers will engage directly with customers > to provide comprehensive technical support to users by > understanding, diagnosing and resolving issues as swiftly > as possible. Canonical will manage the entire support > process including integration with Blender’s support > infrastructure.

It reads to me mostly like customer support, but if their contract specifically says they'll provide "long term security maintenance" as stated in the article, then I guess they'll have to engage directly by providing the security patches? At least if the blender team themselves don't have the time/inclination to do so, Canonical wouldn't really have much of a choice.

[0]: https://ubuntu.com/blog/blender-support-from-canonical

Many years out of date (but from experience working with animation teams), Blender and other modeling tools were used by "creative" teams. They would build assets like the canonical version of the eponymous character for the production.

_Animators_ would then write the algorithms to animate said models within the studios chosen engine. For smaller studios this looks vaguely like integration on a service bus. At larger studios this would look more like "team X who writes a particle effects library which is then used to create snow" or "team Y who is making a kinematics extension and to inject the hundreds of slight nuances when a character jumps" (then a poser has tools to say "take Dinkey Donkey, move him from (x y,z) to (x',y',z') and have him jump".

Animation in video and gaming often looks like software development at this point (library management, shared objects, compiling frames, linking them into a video, etc).

I don’t know what kind of animation teams you’ve been working with, but animators do not write algorithms xD

Someone in the character animation department might not even spend most of their day at the computer. They’re more like a combination actor and assistant director than a technical department guy.

This sounds fascinating. Can you share articles to know more?

> Canonical agrees on building and maintaining their own Blender services organization, based on their trusted Ubuntu Advanced platform.

The article is probably intending to say "Ubuntu Advantage"[1] there. "Ubuntu Advanced" is not a thing as far as I'm aware.

[1]: https://ubuntu.com/advantage

Interesting. Has Blender made inroads in pro cinema/gaming, and are those people using Linux? Seems like Canonical thinks it can capitalize on Blender's success.

I think I saw in a podcast with someone from the anime industry that it is being used for digital animation by some people there. So I definitely believe it is making inroads. NVIDIA has also included it into omniverse as a first class citizen with other more "enterprise" applications. So I would definitely say it has traction.

I do not believe a vast majority of those people are using Linux however, or at least I haven't seen any indication of it. (But maybe some companies render servers do and maybe Blender is useful for that, but like Maya works on Linux iirc)

Can you specify which Podcast? Would love to hear this episode.

If you're still curious, the podcast is Trash Taste which is a bunch of friends talking about their lives really but they had an animator on their for an episode[0], the entirety of the podcast is 2 hours long and the mention of blender is fairly short. I was trying to find a clip because they do that of their own shows, however I found a tweet [1] in looking by the guest. It may still be an interesting one to watch and two of the members Joey (theanimeman) and Garnt (Gigguk) have done tours of anime studios (CloverWorks and JC Staff respectively).

Edit: If Twitter wouldn't have wigged out on me I would have found the link to the clip I was searching for, it was mentioned in the first tweet in that thread [3].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9ulkFRXkvQ

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/kenarto/status/136386214032346726...

[3]https://t.co/4fq6LRvHmr?amp=1

Thanks for the detailed response. Will definitely check this out.

Seconded

I have fulfilled my responsibility (in the parent) just in case this is easier to see.

Yes, it seems so. For example a couple of years ago the anime studio working on new Evangelion movies moved to Blender [1] and there are other success stories [2]

1. https://www.blender.org/user-stories/japanese-anime-studio-k...

2. https://www.blender.org/user-stories/

edit: add second link

Check out these videos by Ian Hubert.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFJ_THGj72U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whPWKecazgM

Game Studios like Epic Games and Ubisoft are contributing significant amounts of money to Blender, so if it hasn't made an impact yet, prominent players sure thing it will and are trying to make it happen.

Also Unity, and others.

https://www.blender.org/press/unity-joins-the-blender-develo...

IIRC Movie Next Gen (available on netflix) creator's– Tangent Animation used blender extensively

source : https://lesterbanks.com/2018/09/rigging-next-gen-feature-fil...

The cinema people use this industry stack,

https://vfxplatform.com/

For those wondering what happens to bug reports (Note: I suspect that 90% of what they'll do will just be general help and support e.g. "why does X not work?"): There were some questions from BF devs on this as well. "Do their bugs get priority? or do they do any fixing?" Ton stated in a discussion on blender.chat [0] that Canonical will file bug reports just like everyone else on developer.blender.org (though the quality of those reports will probably be very high). Additionally, their partnership with the Blender Foundation also means that they will funnel parts of their income through the program back into the Blender Development Fund [1]. So then the Foundation can hire more developers working on the bug tracker to tackle the additional reports coming in. Quite a nice dynamic going on here imo. We'll see how it turns out in practice.

[0]: https://blender.chat

[1]: https://fund.blender.org

This is interesting. Does it means that Canonical will now employs one or more Blender developers?

From reading the press release. It appears as if Canonical will just handle support contracts with external companies. Basically they will have a help desk or something if those companies/their employees are having issues with Blender. Part of the proceeds from those contracts will then be passed to Blender for it's further development and to fix bugs that may arise in LTS releases of Blender. I do not believe they are hiring developers it looks more like Blender is out sourcing technical support to Canonical with a bit of a kick back.

Seems like a good partnership to me imho, granted I've never worked with Canonical's support.

fwiw, one time I went to their jobs page and it was down. I filed a ticket on their Github repo and was able to follow every single step of the resolution in public. They also were quick to fix it.

I don't know if that's indicative of the typical support contract experience with them, but would happily repeat the experience.

my only experience of canonical the company was when one of their technical consultants showed up to a meeting, opened his laptop and it was running windows. Bit disappointing really! Was a few years ago tho

To be fair, Canonical partnered with Microsoft to make Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Perhaps the consultant was running Ubuntu (on Windows).

Given my experience with similar products at Canonical, they will probably employ folks familiar with Blender, maybe even engineers who can fix bugs here and there, but those developers will not be spending their days working on upstream Blender. They will essentially be maintaining a Canonical fork of Blender, with occasional upstreaming of security fixes where it makes sense.

I expect most things they'd do wouldn't actually require a fork of Blender, just developing Blender extensions in Python, and integrating existing and bespoke Python modules into Blender.

They're not developing new features, though. They're literally supporting Blender as it is. If there's a security issue in Blender, you probably won't be able to fix it by creating a new Python extension.

Since this appears to be a collaboration with Blender that would be a bit weird.

Not really, like I said this isn't the first time Canonical has done stuff like this. They both make money from it-- for the most part, that's the collaboration.

Don't read evil intentions into the word "fork", it's really the only way Canonical can promise any sort of support. They won't be developing the fork to compete with Blender, they'll just be supporting it and maintaining it. Trying to do that in a place where you have no commit authority would be impossible.

Would probably be more palatable to say they are maintaining their own branch or release. Yes, it is the same thing, but there is a bit off implied intent with the word fork.

shrug sure.

"Fork" kind of implies the codebases have diverged and there is active maintenance of the fork; "Patchset" is the more common term for changes distros apply to an upstream project before they package it - and this is something most distros do when they fail to upstream the changes (usually due to some benign differences with upstream).

However, sometimes the differences can be sharp, such as when Mozilla disagreed with Debian's patchset[1] (it was around trademarks, UI assets and branding). IIRC Mozilla asked Debian to stop calling its package Firefox, so Debian - perhaps vindictively - chose "IceWeasel" instead. Good times.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_software_rebranded_by_...

A fork is a copy that is maintained separately, and that is exactly what is happening here. You're actually quite right that, if all they were maintaining was a Debian package, they could theoretically maintain a source package with a vanilla orig tarball and keep their changes to patches, but that's not what they're doing here:

> The support offering will include Blender LTS releases across Linux distributions, Microsoft Windows, and macOS.

They're not using quilt to do this. They're using git. At least, that's how I did it when I did it for Canonical.

Fair. And I fully cede that insisting on other words here is silly. I had meant my post mostly as a question, but forgot the right punctuation.

What would this type of support encompass? Is it limited to things like “Blender is crashing with this file, please help”, or would it include things like “this particle system is using all of my memory, am I doing something wrong”?

This is awesome

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