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Blender and the Rabbids

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333 pointsTomte95 comments

Nice to see more professional commercial projects picking up Blender. It helps to see what are the things missing or suboptimal for "expert" users of the system.

Blender and OBS Studio are very good examples of FOSS software that are the best at what they do and can easily offer competition to even the commercial alternatives.

Most of all their design and UI language is consistent - something very rarely seen in FOSS software.

And they have incredible depth of features 90% of which are overkill for the casual user but the experts sure do appreciate them.

And the best part is the well-thought of extensibility and API story. Both of them have a very good community of plugins and extensions which add very useful features without feeling out of place.

I first learned 3D graphics on Lightwave 3D on Commodore Amiga ages ago, and since then have tried many other 3D applications, many of which (like Lightwave) cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

True Fact: Blender beats every single one of them hands down in every way that I can think of. :)

Funny, there are UI affordances I remember from Lightwave 8 and 9 that I still miss when I'm using Blender. Capability-wise the set of functionality is streets ahead (although if I could find a reasonable approximation to LWCad I'd be deliriously happy), but the UI just doesn't click as nicely for me.

Don't get me wrong; I did really love Lightwave. It was prolly my favorite by far before I got my brain wrapped around the Blender workflow. You can thank YouTube (and some amazing tutorial creators there) for me bein' able to finally grok Blender enough for it to replace all my other 3D tools properly.

I think one of my favorite things still to this day about Blender is how heavily customizable the UI is. How easily you can recreate your favorite workspace layout from whatever software you're most comfortable with. I still tend to set me up a tab with a Lightwave-like 4 pane 3D view just because it's sometimes still useful to me. :)

Isn't the reason why 3DSMax is so popular(or at least was haven't followed this in decades) because of the abundance of plugins?

I never used any of these enough to understand what the advanced differences were, but 3DSMax definitely seems easier to use than Softimage and Maya. I'd assume one of the reasons why softimage died was precisely for that reason.

The thing I miss from 3ds Max is that you could have a non-destructive workflow for basic primitives because the geometry of simple objects like a cylinder just lived at the bottom of the modifier stack and you could change them later.

Once you need to edit the mesh you have to “apply” that geometry and lock it in, but it’s handy to be able to go back and say “When I merge these objects the topology flows better with 24 faces around the cylinder instead of 16.”

Haven’t used it too recently, but in blender I think that still means deleting the object and making a new one to replace it.

Blender also has modifiers and can do many things non destructively. (Been a while since I've used Max heavily though.)

Yes, but the geometry is not a modifier. The “how many rings/segments” configuration shows up during primitive creation, the geometry is generated, and that’s your geometry unless you want to delete it and make a new one.

You can see what I’m talking about in 3ds here: https://youtu.be/Dp9Ozs3HjzY?t=120

Yes, I know what you mean now. (Perhaps they could add primitives to the modifiers for a similar workflow.)

You can setup parametric primitives other ways though, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaHL7jRo6mM Or putting a screw modifier on a curve... ( torus, sphere, any lathed object...)

Or there's likely a number of different ways using geometry nodes. Granted it's not currently simple and intuitive though.

I need to try out blender's node systems. I've done a bit of texturing with Substance Designer and really liked the approach, just not been doing this kind of 3D work lately. Flipping through some image search results, geometry nodes look pretty cool!

The shiny new geometry nodes feature in Blender is a modifier and can be used to perform some pretty nifty non-destructive trickery on basic primitives too. Not exactly like what that video shows, but still some really neat stuff can be done with it. Well worth playin' around with a bit. :)

2.93 has a Mesh Primitive node! Seems like what I wanted from 3ds should be directly doable with this, if not quite as simply! https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/geometry_...

^^^ And this right here is one reason I love sites like this one. Seems like I always get to learn somethin' new from folks. ;)

Thank you for finding that! I have played with the geometry nodes some, but somehow I'd missed that particular detail. I suppose I should peek at the docs a little more often. :)

There are ways it's not better over other tools, but many of those are being addressed, because it's a strong open source project with increasing resources.

Maya has a one up on the character animation tools, with addons like Studio Library for a pose library, though now Blender 3.0 in October(ish) will have a very similar feature. And there's others like lattice in the graph editor that Blender does not have yet.

Houdini is awesome for node based procedural animation and simulation, now Blender has Geometry Nodes, as a step in that direction...

Geometry nodes are fun as hell. You played with them yet? I wasn't a fan of all the node based stuff at first, but it's really grown on me…

If Blender comes close to Houdini in the future in terms of procedural workflow, especially with physics, then Blender has a real chance at conquering the space.

The "Node Everything" project is producing such exciting stuff. Animation nodes and now geometry nodes have made some really amazing things possible. Geometry nodes have been iterated on so quickly, too!

Pretty sure Blender is going to be best in class, or very, very, close for basically every portion of 3D cg work within the next 5 years.

But does it really beat every single one? I’m a blender user myself and really like it but I was under the impression that most professionals use Maya. And I guessed for some reason?

It is what they are frequently trained on in school. That is one reason for it to be an industry standard.

I'm also a sort of amateur at 3D modeling (though my background is in VR programming so I have a lot of exposure to it) so take my knowledge with a grain of salt, but afaiu there's a few different steps:

Modeling: Maya is best, Blender is a good substitute

Sculpting/topology: Zbrush is best, Maya is runner up, Blender is a good substitute

UV Unwrapping: All the above are good at this

Texturing: Substance Painter is best, Blender is a good substitute

Animation: Maya and Blender are comparable

So as far as I understand the cool thing is, aside Blender is essentially a nearly as good replacement for Maya, and can do everything to an adequite degree for high quality production.

The only things Blender is decidedly not an equal substitute for is Sculpting compared to Zbrush and Texturing compared to Substance Painter.

Again, I'm not an expert, but I think the above is roughly accurate.

I keep hearing really good things about Substance Painter from a ton of folk. I'ma really have to prolly have a proper look at it sometime soon-ish.

It's now Adobe's, though, so no more lifeteime licenses, only subscriptions. 50 dollars a month (with introductory price of 25 dollars).

I'm not sure if it is still the case but you used to be able to get a perpetual license on steam for ~100

Just checked. Looks like both Substance Designer and Substance Painter are available on Steam.

Sounds like it's the Python [0] of 3d tools: the 2nd best 3d tool for everything.

(It's cool that it's arguably the best in some areas even if that's a controversial argument, I think the same true of Python.)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17571705

Blender's procedural ability isn't to be understated or underestimated, either. It's not Houdini, yet, but I don't think the 3rd place competitors are particularly close to Blender, especially with the recent and rapid development of geometry nodes.

> Animation: Maya and Blender are comparable

I’m a VFX artist who loves Blender but unfortunately they’re not even close when it comes to animation, even less so rigging (the process of making a 3D mesh animatable). Maya allows for much more sophisticated rigs, and to have them perform at much higher framerates than Blender, which is crucial for animation workflows.

So far Blender is a much better Maya substitute for modelling and rendering than for rigging and animation.

IMO, no, it's not better than every other 3d tool for every problem. (I've used it for 20 years.) You can get by with Blender for many of them. But for example, Maya's character animation tools and available addons are more mature. Blender is working on a pose and asset library, that is being used now in their open movie project and should be ready by Blender 3.0 in October... I learned Maya in character animation school, and that's how it happens, that's what's used in studios, so that's what people learn. I think that will change as Blender developers remove more reasons for not switching.

> "I've used it for 20 years."

Wow. So you remember back when the Blender UI was a total nightmare then… Total night and day difference between then and now, that's for sure. :)

Yeah, I used 3ds r4 and max 2 before then. In 2001, I didn't want to pirate, and saw blender in a magazine, so I dug in. I brute forced learning hotkeys, took apart example files... I really liked the UI once I learned it, it was designed for efficiency not discoverability or following existing conventions.

Now, everything is much more discoverable (f3 search access to most commands, things can be set to hotkeys...) and there's tons of great content on Youtube.

> "Now, everything is much more discoverable" …

And yet despite all the massive improvements over the years, Blender managed to successfully keep all the stuff about it that made it great back in the beginning and simply improved everything around and over the top (and under the hood). Things like the utterly customizable interface, and the hotkeys available for everything (which are now also super configurable), just to name a couple of examples. And now we also have this nifty Eevee engine, too. Am really enjoying that one a whole lot.

Beats every one of the tools I've used in the past (though they've all probably matured significantly since I last used them, but then again, so has Blender in the time I've been using it). :)

As to Maya, I've personally shown Maya users around Blender and gotten quite a few "OOooh"s and "Aaah"s out of them, so I dunno… Maybe they might be easily coaxed away from Maya. I certainly intend to sing the praises of Blender to any of 'em that'll listen. ;)

Blender has been getting better and better with time. Many studios started with Maya or other commercial software have written tons of custom scripts to integrate better with their own workflows. Additionally, Maya/max/etc all are taught in schools, I haven't seen a school that teaches blender, at least. That means that there might be less onboarding time.

I am also believe that blender is the best all-around 3d software out there, but that doesn't mean it's best for the studio or cost effective to switch.

I have one big problem with Blender, and that's all the upgrades its been through.

As a result when you're trying to figure out how to do something you can't just google a youtube video because inevitably it'll be of a different version. So you'll see a guy telling you, "now click the little x button" etc.

Of course in your updated version the x button has long since been replaced by something else.

I think in most cases it is relatively easy to find the button in the new version, there are exceptions though. Hotkeys didn't change for ages I think.

But I would still recommend to use the version of Blender from the tutorial. If you get familiar with the rendering pipeline, you will find those buttons more easily.

Blender has become so awesome in the latest versions. I think switching from other software is quite easy, even if some things work differently. It also has an industry standard preset for hotkeys...

I use it as an amateur, but there are really good tutorials that allow you to render high quality scenes in a day or two.

I use the occasional 3D model on a website, and the pipeline from our industry CAD software to the web with an short detour through Blender works flawlessly.

Blender has gone from being a tool professionals scoffed at to one that professionals are stressing over themselves to learn by binging tutorials. It is quite the sight, I remember in 2008 wanting to get into game development and being poopooed on forums from picking up blender and instead pirating maya instead. I obviously dropped the idea completely because of it.

Idk, I think there might be a larger lesson somewhere in there but regardless it's amazing to see the shift that has occurred.

The larger lesson might be that most people see a product's status and not its momentum?

I'm a daily blender user, but I'm a daily modern blender user - the pace of development is rapid, but 13 years ago, you might very well have been painting yourself in a corner if you wanted to do 3d work in the games industry and learned it instead of maya or max

holds true for people, too.

You can't use momentum if you want to get work done today.

Blender's advancement has been an amazing thing to watch, and it is deserving of enormous praise. Today it is afaict a really legit option for learning 3d.

That doesn't mean that saying it was a bad idea to use it 13 years ago wasn't correct.

Blender is a very good piece of software. The main problem I usually have with it is finding documentation. Although the official documentation is fairly good, Blender is a huge program, and it can be hard to find the info you need. Also the documentation is not always up-to-date.

Between the official documentation, blender stack exchange, and YouTube I've never had a problem finding what I need.

This is a common issue in large free software projects. For instance Godot has hired some contractors specifically to write documentation.

Personally I usually end up using Youtube when I need to do something with Blender.

Youtube is best I found. Just find tutorial for your area of interest and do the basic tutorial a couple of times till you get fluent in it.

My daughter likes to play around in Blender and is getting decent at it. Her issue with YouTube tutorials is that a lot of them are for older versions of Blender and they are different enough that the workflow has changed.

Making a good point there, add “2.9” as a search parameter! Also try to follow recently updated channels.

Also it would be nice to have the version number displayed in a text area somewhere within blender itself so the video captures it.

There are some really good YouTubers that do great tutorials that are fully up to date. A lot of them might not be entirely child friendly (sweary language) depending on your daughter’s age.

I stumbled across Ian Hubert's Blender-focused channel (https://youtube.com/c/mrdodobird) even though I have no interest in CGI production. His one-minute lazy tutorials are fun to watch and funny. My favorite: https://youtu.be/imkSdlbXB_U

That was way too fast for me but funny (but a great example how to make something quick)

Ian's tutorials sort of illuminate the path quickly. If you need more details on any specific part there's typically a standard tutorial floating out there about it.

That’s the funny thing about Blender. Beginner tutorials are painfully slow for anyone who’s anyway familiar with the software. These videos and those by CG matter adopt this really fast style be use that how the work flow goes.

That is fantastic, thank you.

If you're talking about the actual documentation as opposed to the API documentation, then I beg to differ. The Blender documentation is fairly up-to date with each release (stable) and in some cases even the alpha ones.

On the other hand, I found the API documentation to be lacking and I had to visit the Blender stack exchange multiple times to see any examples or the usage of most of the APIs.

The API is the worst part of Blender.

* Almost every release introduces some breaking changes

* The documentation that you find online is almost always out of date

* Most error messages give you very little feedback to figure out the problem

* Most of the existing operators/scripts are implemented in C/C++ and are built into blender. So when you encounter a useless error message (extremely common), your only option is to clone the full Blender source tree and start searching for that particular operator

* Many functions/operators are dependent on the editor state. For example: the only way to pass an input to an operator is to change the currently selected object, and you have to make sure the editor is in the correct mode (object/edit/pose/etc). All of these things are visible to the user, so you better revert any changes you made once your script completes to avoid interrupting their workflow/annoying them.

But the built-in Python console with tab completion is excellent. Even though the API has all those problems, having an interactive REPL to figure things out is great. If the API were more stable, documented, and less clunky with the editor state stuff, creating extensions for Blender would be an awesome experience.

While I think the documentation is pretty good, something like Blender is really hard to find your way around initially as a layman.

I’ve found YouTube tutorials to be the best way so far but, My God, they’re slow going. Don’t get me wrong BlenderGuru has done incredible work. I just really struggle with video as a long form learning medium.

Does anyone have a good (non video) resource for getting into Blender? I know my way around a bit, but would love to get deeper into it. I recall an article on HN in the past that walked through the controls from a coders perspective (vim like control). Something along those lines.

Apart from the Blender manual itself, I don't think there are. In general, I also find the repetition of basic things in every Blender video to be exhausting, even if by sticking to it I do learn a lot more stuff. Ian Hubert and his 1 minute tutorial are fun exceptions to this.

Perhaps you could study Blenders' nodes systems? I've found that channels dedicated to shader and geometry nodes are a lot more precise in their terminology and succinct in their explanations. Probably that is because their target audiences are slightly more advanced and, also, the positive influence of math on their method.

Here are a few Youtube channels I recommend: - Erindale. He's probably the most known Blender node wizard. His videos are pleasant, thorough and accurate. - Just 3d things. Another channel about nodes, also very thorough and precise. - Sam Bowman. A channel that methodically goes through the creation of different materials. A very useful resource. - Entagma. They're mainly Houdini people, but in the last months they've also started doing geometry nodes videos. Great and informative stuff.

There are many others, but I can't remember them right now.

That’s awesome. Thanks.

Different use case (of more engineering / 3D printing), but I've also found the channel Maker Tales and his Precison Modelling tutorial series really good, with relatively short, focused videos.

This is true for every 3D editor.

Blender documentation is more useful once you know Blender well enough to even know what to look for, but in all honesty I've found that it's far more effective to just search your Blender question on YouTube and watch a video from BlenderGuru or CG Cookie or one of the many other fantastic tutorial creators out there. :)

Ditto. I use Blender at an amateur level from time to time and I feel that every time I want to do something that i know is possible and I look it up, the official documentation mentions menus or UI items that don't exist anymore so I have to figure it out myself.

It wasn't clear from the article whether or not the released their Shot Manger plugin as FOSS or kept it an internal tool. I found a plugin called "Shot Manager" but it seems to have been authored by an unrelated Australian company (although some of the features sound very similar).

I am not saying they are obligated to release their custom tools. It would just be very interesting if they did. I am not in this space at all other than my kids are learning Blender and love it.

Tangent: Completely unrelated to this, I am truly hoping that a large company takes interest in KiCAD and helps push development to the "production ready" stage that Blender seems to have achieved. The EDA market is in serious need of a solid FOSS tool that isn't driven by the latest shinny thing companies go after.

To be clear, KiCAD is absolutely fantastic and I am looking forward to version 6.0. We are planning on migrating our work from Altium Designer to KiCAD, likely starting around the end of this year. I'm sick and tired of what has been happening with Altium and the other tools are just as bad or worse.

And something suitable for (non-EDA) CAD would be great. KiCad's surface area is small enough that its rough edges can be worked around. FreeCad's isn't.

An example of what a single person can achieve in Blender - the work of Ian Hubert. This is a split-screen comparison of a green screen shoot and the final video rendered using Blender. Seriously impressive:

VFX Breakdown - Dynamo Dream Teaser:

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

If you prefer watching the teaser in full screen, it's here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG31WSioSxk

How is Blender managing to reposition the camera from a 2D recording (at 30s)? Is it building a 3D model completely automatically from the 2D source?

That's Ian Hubert magic - he explains it in this (very entertaining) video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxD6H3ri8RI

I have a small startup that sells custom 3D printed jewelry (https://lulimjewelry.com)

I use blender and the blender python API to automatically generate 3D models from my customers engraving images.

It’s a great piece of software. Highly capable and the scripting interface is great. You can pop up a window that shows the python command for every action you are doing in the GUInso it’s easy to automate anything you can do manually.

I remember you posting on another post! Did you ever manage to figure out how to use ML to clean up the prints?

Also, can you point me towards how to see the python command for everything you do in the GUI?

I had some success running this model[0] but I think the training data doesn't sufficiently capture the variety of inputs my customers give me. I don't currently have nearly enough training data to retrain the model.

[0]: https://towardsdatascience.com/fingerprint-denoising-and-inp...

To see the python commands add a Scripting > Info window to your workspace. I like to change the animation timeline in the "Layout" tab to a Scripting Info section.

To do this hover over the Editor Type tab in the top left of the timeline area (should be a clock icon). Select the Info type under Scripting.

You can also turn on python commands in tooltips in the blender settings.

Very cool!

Did you look at tools like OpenSCAD before choosing Blender?

I did initially try to tackle this problem by constructing procedural solid models, but that solution wasn't sufficiently general.

I ultimately went with blender's displacement modifier, which works by using a UV mapped bitmap image that displaces the model's vertices as a function of the pixel intensity. This workflow adapts well to arbitrary geometry and customer images.

One of the biggest problems I have with professional software (eg. Bitwig, Ableton Live, Sony Vegas) is that I lose interest in learning how they work after the initial learning curve. All of those programs have a featureset that can be fully explored and understood in a few weeks, or perhaps months for the more complicated stuff.

I have been using Blender for 6 years, and still have seen less than half of the features. It's not for lack of searching, but Blender's density is hugely under-appreciated in the industry. If you're a creative or artist in any capacity, Blender has features that you can take advantage of right away.

Familiar with NLEs? Hop into the video splicer and play around!

Comfortable mesh editing? Stay in the modelling view!

Wanna get your hands dirty? Sculpting is just a tab away!

Perhaps the most impressive part of Blender is that it's provided for free, in a tiny download, with a deeply caring userbase that maintains it. Here's to another decade of Blender releases!

The industry doesn't appreciated that blender can mesh edit and sculpt? What can it do that their existing software can't?

Maybe 2D vector animation?

Blender can do that, too, with the "Grease Pencil".

https://www.blender.org/features/grease-pencil/

Here's a short film produced as a grease pencil showcase. At the end, it shows what working with it looks like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKmSdY56VtY

Yes, that's why I suggested it to a question asking what Blender can do. ;)

It’s a real jack of all trades, instead of moving media from package to package, such as animating something in Maya and combining with a camera track in After Effects, you can do it all in Blender.

With the recent Eevee real time renderer you get a common material pipeline with Cycles.

Add the exceptional 2D animation tools, and rapid improvements in sculpting and the speed increases of CyclesX to the mix and you’ve got one of the most capable pieces of software going.

I can see the others, but Ableton Live has M4L. You can do pretty much anything in it. Get a license for the full Max and you can do anything in it.

TLDR:

Conclusion

This production on Blender was a great experience for us. We were able to integrate the application into our in-house pipeline and connect it to the other applications quite easily thanks to the strength of the Python API. In spite of some features that would need some maturity we had the confirmation that Blender is production ready and comes with tools that can really push up our way of working in terms of creativity.

Their comment just prior about what they saw as a lack of guides for workflows in a studio environment is worth noting, too, as they felt that could be expanded upon for helping Blender reach more. Though frankly the article isn't that long a read anyway.

Blender is insanely great, and honestly one of the best fully open source software projects out there. The only thing I wish from it is Apple M1 support. Personally, I’m just not sure I’m going to own a big desktop computer with an Nvidia gpu ever again.

This would be a lot easier if MacOS supported a graphics API other than Metal. As it stands, I doubt many people are excited to reverse-engineer a nigh-undocumented iGPU to patch in support for features that it's overarching API doesn't support in the first place (eg. true RT, proper SIMD optimizations, etc.)

It looks like M1 support was added in 2.93, released last month. It's not super-clear from the release notes (in fact, it's not explicitly mentioned at all), but the requirements are listed as requiring "macOS Version 10.13 or newer for Intel processors on supported hardware. Version 11.0 for Arm-based processors (Apple Silicon)." You can download binaries for "Apple Silicon" as well.

I have 2.93 and it is native Apple Silicon. Your wish is granted.

Never mind the other answers. GPU rendering is not supported on macOS. Generally CPU rendering is quite slow.

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/cycles/gpu_...

Blender is a great tool beyond typical 3D applications largely due to its Python scripting and ability to run it headless.

I find it great that they're using Blender, but

> This episode is named Rabbids Invasion: Mission to Mars and it will be released at the end of the summer on France Television and on Netflix worldwide in 2022

3-6 months between releases? I get that it's a licensing issue - France Television probably knows more people will watch it on Netflix than on their own network - but this is just asking for piracy.

It's entirely possible that the slowness is on Netflix's end, especially if they're doing the English dub themselves. They frequently take 6+ months to release English versions of anime they license.

> this is just asking for piracy

If you're desperate enough for entertainment to pirate the... checks notes Rabbids Invasion: Mission to Mars special, I think you deserve to watch it.

France Television is the French national public service for television, so it'll probably be free to watch.

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