Apple Joins Blender Development Fund | Hacker News Reader

Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

blender.org

826 pointsdagmx280 comments

It's great to see Blender get the support. The user numbers seem to be arcing upwards.

https://www.blender.org/news/blender-by-the-numbers-2020/

If you've ever had a passing interest in Blender or 3d modeling I recommend checking out the donut tutorial, which is fast becoming the "hello world" of blender -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPrnSACiTJ4

And check out all the donuts -

https://www.reddit.com/r/BlenderDoughnuts/

I've been helping add it to University curriculum because it's enabled us to contract and hire really talented and motivated people without the vendor tax of 3ds Max or Maya, and they usually have broader skill sets that we can apply elsewhere.

Not knocking all the amazing people who use other software, but if you want new opportunity, use Blender!

We had a class on Blender in high school (mandatory even!) and it was very popular.

A lot of people in our school played with Blender in their free time in the following years.

Why would a Blender class in high school be mandatory??

We had a mandatory Java class, why not a 3D modeling class?

Why wouldn’t it be? There’s far less practical classes that were mandatory

I had mandatory drawing classes.

PE, French. I’m sure understanding a bit about computer graphics is at least as useful to the average person as the quadratic formula.

Is that an argument for making 3D graphics mandatory or the opposite?

I am suspicious of arguments of the form: “Here’s some stupid shit people do! Let’s do more.” Although I will grant there is a seductive consistency to the logic.

It’s not an argument for or against anything other than saying it’s no more or less absurd than having compulsory classes in badminton or years of a single foreign language

There are of course more generic ways to use the time to teach in that area — teach person so finance instead of quadratic equations, teach a wide selection of introduction to language and importantly culture from a variety of places around the world instead of a single foreign language for years on end, teach personal health instead of whatever PE is, teach more generic computer concepts (what a file is, what a network is, some form of programming) rather than specific tools (be it blender or powerpoint)

But we don’t do that

I think it's nice to learn a bit of many things. It gives you a better idea about what you want to do after graduation.

You probably didn't blink when MS Office was made mandatory at a high school near you. That's obvious, all the tools you need in the world of business. Obviously, that's all you need ...

I used to teach National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) level 1, 2 and a bit more, in IT, in the UK, back in the mid 1990s. The ones I worked with were RSA based which means that they were basically typewriter type exercises that were slightly sexed up to deal with word processors etc.

We had 12 modules to cover. Each student needed three pieces of "evidence" per module. So a module might be word processing or spreadsheet or database. We also had to cover fax (office equipment) and email (as was).

A folder of evidence would end up with roughly 50 sheets of paper, a few letters and prose, some spreadsheets and simple database reports. A few emails and so on.

You were allowed three mistakes. Yes three, across a lot of docs/body of evidence. An example of a mistake is a speling mistake. Another mistake would be not exactly two spaces after a full stop (period). It was awful and generally ended up with quite a lot of the trainers "truing up evidence".

On the other hand, I have an eye for noticing mistakes that is close to legendary.

Soz, waffled on a bit.

If your child was taught rudimentary Blender in school, I hope you'd be pleased.

We had a mandatory "informatics" class in all years (age 6 to 18).

At start we learned how to use computers and programming in logo. Age 10 was HTML. Then there was a year for OpenOffice, a year for 3D graphics in Blender (I think when we were like 14). We had some lessons on vector graphics in Inkscape. Some lessons on audio editing in Audacity. We learned some Unix basics. Later we returned to HTML and learned CSS.

Age 13 we learned C, the more motivated ones continued with Allegro and later C++. Age 15 PHP and SQL There was also a semester on finite state machines, but that was much less popular among students.

I graduated in 2010 and I am very happy regarding the curiculum my teachers built (out of their own volition and motivation).

Nowadays I think they also do Python and focus more on generic internet researching / verifying information.

Wow, where's this school with such program? Back in my day, we had BASIC programming on TI calculators. Younger (french) children i meet don't even have programming lessons, they're just taught how to use Microsoft Office and laposte.net webmail... just enough tech proficiency to be efficient wage-slaves, but no political/technical reflections.

I went to an experimental public school in Slovakia. We were allowed to diverge somewhat from rules ministry of education prescribes for the ordinary schools. So the teachers had more freedom in doing whatever they wanted. Usually it worked well, but sometimes it didn't.

Oh experimental schools are so cool usually. Too bad after a few years the ministry usually comes in and tears down everything because the experiments were so successful [0].

If you ever write about your experiences there and what worked and what didn't, i'd be very interested in a link to the post! :)

[0] For example in France, the public ministry of Education has been running test programs with "Montessori" education techniques for several decades (the techniques are >100y old). All of these experiments have been strong successes, and that's precisely why they were never implemented globally. The government doesn't want people to get too smart.. they'd rather have docile wage-slaves who bow before the flag.

blender grew beyond words, but I'm still not sure if it does reactive DAG propagation for animated attributes (like Maya). I was a bit shocked to read that you need to setup propagators or controllers (forgot the term tbh) to get a similar effect. Maybe I need to RTFM.

Maya's API around the DAG is unmatched, which absolutely everything in Maya is built around. If Blender would have such a thing, it would become pretty hard to justify paying the price for Maya.

Give it 10 years. A lot today is revolving around reactive, dataflows and dependency graphs .. it will probably diffuse everywhere.

Another good one by Grant Abbitt: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn3ukorJv4vs_eSJUQPxB...

And my favorite tutorial if you don't mind the strong German accent: https://academy.cgboost.com/p/resources

(Also available on YouTube, but on cgboost.com is the updated version for Blender 2.8).

I did the latter some time ago. No artistic talent, cannot find my way around even 2D software, and the result was really respectable. Zach is a really good teacher.

It's funny how donut and not circle is becoming the norm.

>>If you've ever had a passing interest in Blender or 3d modeling I recommend checking out the donut tutorial, which is fast becoming the "hello world" of blender -

I can attest to this. The donut tutorial is really good. It has all you need to know if you are starting from nothing.

I just went through this video earlier this week, and while it assumes a bit of knowledge, the modeling is as simple as possible and I found it to be a very good introduction:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBdGm_d_8XE

Anyone know a good intro tutorial for using Blender as a video editor like Premier?

I recommend looking into the Power Sequencer addon [1] that makes editing in Blender's Video Sequence Editor (VSE) a better experience. However, it's still pretty clunky so might be even better to wait for the upcoming VSE overhaul [2]

[1] https://www.blendernation.com/2020/05/17/blender-power-seque... [2] https://developer.blender.org/T78986

Blender’s video editing capability is most useful as a replacement for After Effects. A free tool like Davinci Resolve is a better replacement for Premiere.

I forget where I learned VSE, sadly, but came here to say that Blenders video editor is not so bad, if:

a) You want to assemble only rendered footage. If you have real footage, well the greenscreen node is actually good, but for color grading DaVinci or Premiere are more advanced (though you can get a lot done in Blender here as well if you fiddle with the right nodes compositor).

b) You can accept some limits wrt adding text overlays. There is no simple way of doing that like in P or DV. But: You can trick with preparing some .png's and fade these in and out (which works but limits you on the effects), or add the text during render, but that limits you on flexibility (someone needs a text change in last second, yay!).

But I think you can go with basically any tutorial you find, it is not complicated in general. And a lot of your general blender knowledge transfers to VSE, which is a huge bonus in comparison to learn DaVinci or Premiere (which are monsters, crashy monsters).

I used Blender to edit a bunch of my YouTube videos and can’t really recommend it. (Using Kdenlive now and it’s OK.)

Blender’s VSE is too unlike normal editing programs and the performance is bad as well. It makes your workflow more clunky for no gain unless you’re also mixing 3D scenes into your video.

There are ambitious proposals to overhaul the VSE so hope might be on the horizon.

I can only recommend Cinelerra. It's much faster and more intuitive than any other thing I've found, everything is keyframeable (...) and some forks found their way into common distros (my one: Fedora). The guy also did some video tuts in 2018 which are awesome!

I uncomfortably poked at blender a few times over the years until this tut by Imphenzia, which made me comfortable in under 2 hours:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jHUY3qoBu8

+1, I'd also recommend doing a low-poly lesson before attempting the donut tutorial. I did Imphenzia's low-poly tutorials after a few false starts with the donut tutorial, and found the low-poly approach to be much better at establishing a foundation for working with geometric primitives.

+1 from me as well.

Same channel author's vids on Unity are great too.

Imphenzia's channel is an incredible resource, even if you're not into low poly style he's just great at doing tutorials for both Blender and Unity. Plus just watching him do his modeling challenges teaches lots as you see all the little tricks he uses to get through them.

Recommend Ian Hubert's "Lazy Tutorials"[1], although they're not really so beginner friendly. More for inspiration and entertainment.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4Dq5VyfewIxxjzS34k2N...

I'm becoming more and more convinced that Ian Hubert is the patron saint of hobby CGI. Everything he touches turns to gold.

This is useful. I used to like, and went through lots of the "Blender Cookie" stuff; even got a paid subscription - but they pivoted to online courses and lots of their individual tutorials and previous work disappeared.

This might be an odd, or unpopular opinion, but I really wish there were more tutorials written down, in text, with separate images and instructions. I don't like searching YouTube videos for specific steps, but plain HTML documentation is greppable. Blender does have docs -- and they're usually very good, but often out of date. Creatives really shine on YouTube, and make amazing things, but hardly anyone seems to put together a page of instructions. I have memories of using an educational version of Cinema 4D, and one thing that struck me was the quality of the written, html-based documentation that was readable and educational.

I'm delighted Apple is helping blender, I think it's a fantastic amazing project, and I have huge respect for all who work with it and make tutorials. I just want to learn to get better at it, quickly. I've found that I've got an unexpected barrier to entry to get my brain to work with its UI -- probably because I'm conditioned by earlier experiences -- and I don't think that I've been helped by having to watch videos with frequent pausing to see what modifier keys were pressed, with little ability to quickly randomly access the material afterwards.

> This might be an odd, or unpopular opinion

Well, that used to be the mainstream opinion until a few years ago, when a lot of computer education switched to videos. I blame DHH ;)

I blame monetization. You can make more on YouTube.

s/more/anything at all.

Monetizing written content was (and is) crazy hard, comparatively.

Check out the Blender Secrets ebook. A fantastic resource of tips and techniques for working in Blender.

Blender Secrets is also very good.

One-minute tutorials about a tool, a certain specific way to achieve X and alike.

https://www.youtube.com/c/BlenderSecrets

> If you've ever had a passing interest in Blender or 3d modeling I recommend checking out the donut tutorial, which is fast becoming the "hello world" of blender -

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPrnSACiTJ4

Is there a good written tutorial? I can't sit through video tutorials.

I would be interested in this answer. It seems the era of good paper-compatible tutorials may be on the way out in terms of popularity of video and monetization.

I went through the donut tutorial on 2x speed. If you’re interested in learning modern visual arts (computer graphics, photography, videography, etc.) you’re going to have to deal with video tutorials. Make them work for you.

This is a polite version of "suck it up" and about as helpful.

There are official written docs (https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/) but they would be difficult to learn from by themselves. There isn't a more helpful answer because the fact is >99% of Blender content is video.

Yes, that's the problem. There needs to be more text/image guides as eddieh said. This used to be the norm. Now everything is a video. Worse, existing text/image guides are allowed to rot or removed outright in favor of video. Not everyone learns well from video.

I’m sorry that the free content isn’t in your desired format. I offered a genuine suggestion that helps me use it.

Your genuine suggestion was that they do something they plainly said doesn't work for them. Doing something that doesn't work for them at 2x isn't going to help.

Maybe it will? They didn’t say why they can’t sit through the videos, it might be because they are too slow to get to the point?

I don’t really see what value your comment is adding. The parents’ post was reasonable to me.

It was a patronizing lecture. The followup with more patronizing clarified the non-helpful intent.

I don't like videos either and I took watching at 2x as good advice I'll put into use.

I think you're the patronizing one in this thread.

Patronizing is being an ass under the guise of helping. I'm not putting on airs of being helpful.

Or convert a video one to a written one.

The conversion should do the trick for you to learn Blender and the next person will find your written one very useful.

Better link (includes the tutorial playlist in the sidebar):

https://youtu.be/TPrnSACiTJ4?list=RDCMUCOKHwx1VCdgnxwbjyb9Iu...

> ... Apple has joined the Blender Development Fund as a Patron Member.

To find out what "Patron Member" means, it's 120k or more per year[0]. It's the highest corporate tier Blender has. Nice to see Apple supporting open-source.

[0]: https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/

> Nice to see Apple supporting open-source.

... in a domain where they have either no products or their own products have clearly failed to obtain traction.

Not going to happen for anything where there's an even reasonably successful Apple product, I think we can be sure of that.

So yes, it is really nice to see Apple supporting Blender but let's not confuse that with open source/libre software in general.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

And: Downvoted whatsoever...

Edit: And it indeed is downvoted whatsoever...

No damnation involved. Just clarity about what "supporting open source" means in the context of Apple.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28866458

You mean a comment that listed several open source projects started by Apple?

Where are you getting your information from? None of the projects listed there were started by Apple, all of them are used in successful Apple products, and all of them have been used by both competitors, and the community.

Sorry, I was responding incorrectly to the first child comment of the one linked to

> Swift, FoundationDB, Obj-C, Darwin...

Still unclear where your information is coming from. Neither FoundationDB nor Obj-C were started by Apple.

Yep, 50% fail rate there. And arguably even Darwin too, so make that 75% fail rate. I lose.

WebKit, Clang, LLVM

Swift, FoundationDB, Obj-C, Darwin...

CUPS, Cassandra, FreeBSD

I know they didn't start those, but they all have major contributions from Apple.

Apples builds of Clang and LLVM are not open source by default.

Edit: No amount of downvoting makes me wrong, they aren't open source. The AppleClang != Clang trunk

Sure, but that’s deeply misleading since Apple contributes most of their code to trunk. The fact they ship private builds for their own machines is a complete red herring.

WebKit is a fork of KHTML and the source had to be released in order to comply with the LGPL.

Sure - just like anyone else who contributes to LGPL projects, Apple willingly chose to do so.

This is especially interesting because Blender is GPLv2. And AFAIK apart from Webkit which for historical reason it is LGPL, all other open source software Apple support are BSD / MIT / Apache.

It is also exceptionally rare Apple donate this amount of money to any open source organisation. To the point I would argue this is very non-Apple. There could be some strategic interest for Blender, although I haven't figure it out what it is.

Edit: Someone mentioned AR/VR. Which could be the case here.

Well I guess they also donate a ton of money to Adobe each year in the form of licenses.

Companies like Apple also need software. To me this donation to Blender is just a gesture to show they like to use Blender in-company.

Yeah, the interests are probably:

1) Attracting pro creators to MacBooks requires having top-tier Blender support and performance on Mac, so Apple's interest is in making it run as well as possible

2) some future AR/VR tie-in

This is very un-Apple-like, but I really, really, really, really hope they keep going in this direction. There's zero reason for Apple to keep being this stodgy. Why aren't they doing "cool nerdy things" anymore? Their built-in apps are fine but why don't they try to make an Apple-sanctioned macOS package manager, with Apple repos and third-party repo support? Don't they understand the incalculable goodwill and excitement that would generate? That by doing this, making Safari a top-tier browser with the best standards support, implementing zero-knowledge iCloud encryption, working with Docker to improve performance, improving Xcode stability, and refreshing Pro Mac hardware minimum yearly even just to keep them competitive, as opposed to letting them languish, like the Mac Pro (2019) and MacBook Pro 16" (2019), they'd more than make up for every bit of illwill they earned with the post-2015 MacBooks and come out ahead of Microsoft with their WSL2 and new Windows Terminal? Apple knows how to be cool to "average people" but they've forgotten how to be cool to nerds, when it used to be effortless for them!

None of this has to do with core strategy. I'm not asking them to open-source macOS here. It's just the basic ability to execute on obvious things that's missing.

For example, in Windows 11 Microsoft really opened up the Microsoft Store, by loosening the eligibility requirements. As a result, it has tone, tons of apps like Creative Cloud, Discord, LibreOffice, VLC, that would never come to the Mac App Store in a million years. That creates pro-user goodwill. So does this Blender news by Apple. I hope Apple realizes how much money they're leaving on the table, because often they don't seem like they give enough of a fuck.

it probably is a lot of 1).

Right now, Cycles does not have any GPU acceleration on Mac. Windows and linux its fine, but mac is very limited.

Having a group of people, even if its a small number, be vocal about avoiding their computers and have a good reason behind it, isnt worth the 120k a year that it would cost them to be a sponsor.

Apple has never had problems with GPLv2. The problem was always GPLv3 and that's why all their GNU tooling was frozen for a very long time at the last GPLv2 version of those tools.

Apple prefers BSD/MIT/Apache because that's just easier for developers to reason about but GPLv2 code that's a standalone binary is generally not a problem. Besides, Blender is a tool you use to generate non-GPL work product. From the perspective of authoring 3d content, GPL doesn't pose any kind of problem for them, even if they also needed to use Blender as part of an automated toolchain somehow for ARVR.

Pretty sure blender switched over to GPLv3 about 12 years or so ago.

Something, something linked libs something…

It’s GPLv2 or later, with some parts such as Cycles being permissively licensed. (Apache 2)

Once Blender becomes dependent on the money, Apple can make them change the license into anything they want.

Blender has 7 corporate patrons, a long track record of being open source and copyleft, a robust nonprofit structure, and importantly no CLA that I can tell. This comment is just false.

Apple probably doesn't care about the license, they care with how it interacts with their business. It's important to them that system level stuff is permissively licensed because they view it as important to keep their OS software completely closed. Blender OTOH is auxillary to their goals (whether AR/VR, gaming, or something else) so it doesn't matter as much that they can't make it partially proprietary.

I'm guessing it's because Macs are a second-class-citizen when it comes to Blender's technology stack. Intel has a hardware-accelerated denoiser, Nvidia has hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and Macbooks have... pretty much none of that.

In all fairness though, I'd imagine a big chunk of this being Metal's fault. I'd be dragging my feet too if I found out that I had to re-write our graphics backend just to support >8% of the desktop market share.

There is a bit of a problem in the AR space - the lack of cheap 3D modeling software. Maya is $1,700/year compared to Sketch at $99/year. If Apple releases an AR headset/glasses, developers will need an affordable way to create 3D models.

It’s great positive advert for Apple, and also no money for them. Not even a blip on their balance sheet. If they are going to contribute, that would be interesting.

Cheaper than hiring one engineer to work on custom improvements on it.

Apple also submitted a patch to port Cycles to run on Metal.

https://developer.blender.org/T92212

Cycles is good first step if Apple wants to make blender fully functional on Mac. I wonder if they'll ever attempt to port Eevee to metal, that seems like the logical next step if Apple wants to permanently remove OpenGL from macOS.

"Apple wants to permanently remove OpenGL from macOS" - that would be a poor decision.... although, they really don't care for the pro market in any case.

They've already deprecated OpenGL. Drivers on macOS are locked at OpenGL 4.1, which is missing a whole lot of nice features. Not because the hardware doesn't support them, but because Apple doesn't want to keep maintaining OpenGL.

And why would they? OpenGL is really unpleasant from a hardware manufacturer's / integrator's / OS author's perspective, it makes app ports for mobile that much harder unless you're using GL ES, and Metal works and many apps have a Metal renderer now. If you find the mere idea of Metal distasteful because it's an API that can't be used on other platforms, you can use Vulkan and MoltenVK to get there.

You're confusing not caring for the pro market with their approach to vertical integration. They care for the pro market, but they're not willing to compromise on ripping out what they consider to be dead weight.

> And why would they? OpenGL is really unpleasant from a hardware manufacturer's / integrator's / OS author's perspective

That's why it must be deprecated. Why do we need to reinvent the wheel over and over again ? I get it, X sucks and the answer to this is .... wayland. OpenGL sucks and the answer to this is ? DirectX ? Vulkan ? SDL ? Libcaca ? ( sorry i forgot ncurses). Just like an old builder: you have some bricks, use them.

I've only dabbled in GPU programming, but I think the issue is more serious than this. It's not really pointless churn.

OpenGL was released 29 years ago, and the way GPUs work now vs then is massive. Apparently developers want low level access, and that is what Vulkan/Metal give them.

As a user I wish Vulkan had a path without so much setup. I'm not sure if that's possible, or maybe it would defeat the purpose. It seems like it would be nice for hobbyists/beginners like me who just want to get a triangle on the screen and play with shaders though.

And OpenGL changed massively. Going from fixed function to programmable hardware.

I understand that a lot of developers want low level access to hardware - that's great for a lot of applications. But that low level access means that software is tied to hardware... and software is not forward/cross compatible. Which is a VERY big deal for pro market.

Remember when Apple just "forgot" to release a pro grade desktop for years? Do you think those pros just stayed with their outdated hardware?(they didn't, they moved to Windows)

Do you think that there's a good reason for many pro software vendors to jump to Metal, when the majority of their customers are on Windows with Vulkan support?

I mentioned this on another subthread - Apple just needs to offer a cross platform API, to prove that they want pro software to be developed on Macs.

> But that low level access means that software is tied to hardware... and software is not forward/cross compatible. Which is a VERY big deal for pro market.

As a game dev - hardware dependence has been a fact of life for a very long time. There are too many useful extensions not included in the base profiles, and enough video cards combinatorically combined with those - that the most tractable path is to actually care about the specific device's capabilities.

The best way forward is to be as detailed as possible than to come up with a new albatross to hang around one's neck for the next 30 years. A thin driver with a fatter app stack is probably more manageable going forward than a very fat driver with a continually aging app stack, so long as appropriate care is paid to forward compatibility.

Game devs are free to use whatever API you wish. You create entertainment, not design buildings that have to last decades or industrial systems.

You have the benefit of abandoning your product 3-5 years after it's published, without anyone caring.

Apple had their answer in form of Metal. Vulkan, DX12 came out later.

If memory serves - they introduced Metal as a high efficiency low level API for games, not a generic rendering API.

Deprecating opengl was confusing for me.

No, Metal is a general purpose 3D API, and has always been. Games are just one of the biggest things 3D APIs are used for, but Metal is for all uses.

Carmack, miniGL and Carmacks position regarding OpenGL is what made it relevant in first place.

In 2011, Carmack would have gone with DirectX instead.

https://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/pc/carmack-directx-bett...

> The actual innovation in graphics has definitely been driven by Microsoft in the last ten years or so,' explained AMD's GPU worldwide developer relations manager, Richard Huddy. 'OpenGL has largely been tracking that, rather than coming up with new methods. The geometry shader, for example, which came in with Vista and DirectX 10, is wholly Microsoft's invention in the first place.' > > 'It is really just inertia that keeps us on OpenGL at this point,' Carmack told us. He also explained that the developer has no plans to move over to Direct3D, despite its advantages.

ARB, Long Peaks failure, not defining SDKs and leaving to ecosystem to create tools on their own, making into a rite of passage that each graphics programming student needs to create their own SDK from scratch, is anything but appealing.

If ARB/Khronos would standardize networking protocols, we would have only IP, and then each developer would create their own networking stack on top of raw IP.

Apple could just use the vendor-provided OpenGL (AIUI most of the code is common between Windows and Linux for the major vendors), which e.g. for nvidia still happily supports everything from 1.0 to the present.

> Apple could just use the vendor-provided OpenGL

They are their own GPU vendor nowadays.

On Apple GPUs (including M1 Macs), an OpenGL->Metal layer is used.

>You're confusing not caring for the pro market with their approach to vertical integration.

Apple knows exactly what they need to do to keep the pro market on MacOSX, they are not interested in doing that at all. And that simple thing is standardization, not exclusive API. So they don't even have to support OpenGL... just not make it even harder for CAD/CAM makers to port their software/features back to MacOSX.

Lack of a good pro device for years already got a lot of pros off Macs, so companies like Autodesk have less and less value in supporting Mac. And the gap in functionality is already massive! Their vertical integration, aka platform lock-in, is impossible for companies that have majority of their customers on a different platform.(and again - Apple knows that)

You know, I'll just switch to Windows to have my designs automatically validated for code compliance... and I'll just stay with Windows for software development as well.

(I'm a software engineer studying structural engineering)

> already got a lot of pros off Macs

What is your quantitative evidence for saying this?

Opinion and personal experience.

Are there Metal compatible renderers on non-Apple platforms?

>> And why would they? OpenGL is really unpleasant from a hardware manufacturer's / integrator's / OS author's perspective

That's exactly why they should keep it. Now all those CAD programs that use older OpenGL features have to figure out how to do things that are not supported by Metal. Vulkan initially forgot about this market as well and had to add some things back in.

There is Zink to handle compatibility, but that should have come from the organizations and companied deprecating OpenGL. It should probably be standard on new platforms so they can keep OpenGL at the API level.

Except some of those CAD programs already support Metal.

> To prepare for future Mac OS changes, AutoCAD 2021 for Mac uses a new graphics engine: Metal.

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad-for-mac/learn...

The pro market that matters has already added Metal support long time ago.

Blender’s UI would also need to be ported to Metal, as that’s currently OpenGL if I’m not mistaken.

Everything Blender shows on screen is rendered using OpenGL.

> that seems like the logical next step if Apple wants to permanently remove OpenGL from macOS

They should just allow third-party OpenGL implementations. OpenGL on OSX is stuck in the past.

It would be great to see Metal die a fiery death too, and Vulkan being adopted. The current situation is just DirectX once again.

"Allow"? They aren't doing anything to disallow them?

You can use ANGLE if you want, for instance?

I wouldn't recommend using OpenGL for any new software, though, it is hopelessly clunky and outdated for modern applications.

I guess some will see this as good news, but further entrenching Metal is just sad in my opinion. So much wasted effort just because they can't admit they lost the standards game and won't move to Vulkan.

The generous interpretation is they just don't want to invest into that if it isn't "broken" but the cynic in me can't help but think at least part of the motivation is being different and maintaining the wall around the garden.

Vulkan isn't a viable alternative for Apple. Apple wants to give developer an easy to use API to encourage them to use it as much as possible. Vulkan does not offer that.

Why didn't they just build a higher-level API on top of Vulkan then? Surely it's not a lack of developers, interest or resources, is it?

If they have to build their own snowflake on top of others API, specially since Khronos doesn't care about C++ as shading language, why bother?

Nah they want lock in, in the Epic Suit Epic used almost none of their libs but had to use Metal to function, and they were about to extract leverage by pulling a dev license for desktop. All POSIX and Vulkan/OpenGL and they could have stayed safe.

Metal is by far a much friendlier API than Vulkan. Its approach with opt-in complexity is arguably the correct one. (Ever tried writing a Vulkan "Hello triangle" from scratch?)

It's also gaining some nice features that are usable out of the gate, rather than waiting on Vulkan extension standardization and adoption. It simply makes the most sense for Apple.

> Metal is by far a much friendlier API than Vulkan

Sure, but that was hardly the point of Vulkan in the first place. The point is to have cross-platform 3D grahipcs, but since Apple never gave a shit about anything cross-platform, they chose to write their own stuff.

And if they actually did care, they could have modeled the same API as they have with Metal, but over Vulkan, so the engine is the same but the API is "much friendlier".

It simply makes the most business sense for Apple, but as is tradition, the whole software ecosystem is worse off because of their choices.

Well you can use Vulkan over Metal with MoltenVK, so that point is a bit moot.

Opinion time: WebGPU will become the standard graphics API to target for cross-platform. gfx-rs/wgpu already works over Vulkan/Metal/D3D12/D3D11/OpenGL/WebGL & WebGPU in browsers. Much better than simply Vulkan, unless performance is your primary sticking point.

First they have to sort out what that frankenstein merge of C++, HLSL and Rust named WGSL is supposed to look like.

How is the point of Apple pushing Metal instead of Vulkan when the change request submitted to Blender is not using the MoltenVK stuff you're talking about? If anything it proves my point

I don't know why we have to keep having this discussion but Metal pre-dates Vulkan. It shipped to developers in June 2014. Vulkan didn't ship until Feb 2016.

Metal is the reason Vulkan exists: Apple announced Metal in June 2014 and the first Khronos meeting about a replacement for OpenGL was hosted at Valve in July 2014 so they could rush to announce an "open standard" under development at SIGGRAPH later that year. The only reason it managed to ship a final spec in 2016 was because AMD donated Mantle to boot-strap the process.

When you make your own GPUs and have sufficient scale to get developer adoption owning your own API can let you move much faster than others while avoiding vendor extension hell (that turns into a bespoke API-within-an-API at the extreme end).

Besides which MoltenVK effectively allows Vulkan software to run against Metal anyway. In that sense it's also better for Vulkan because it can ship API updates whenever Khronos feels like it.

> Metal is the reason Vulkan exists

That seems to give way too little credit to Mantle. Which was released in 2013 and became the basis for Vulkan.

Please re-read my parent comment. A few weeks after Apple announced Metal at WWDC Khronos members met for the first time ever to kickoff then project to replace OpenGL. I don't believe that is a coincidence. Maybe Metal was the straw that broke the Camel's back, maybe not.

I also noted that AMD donated Mantle as the starting point which is why Vulkan didn't take 5 years to finalize.

In any case claiming that Apple is somehow at fault for not adopting Vulkan doesn't make sense.

> Please re-read my parent comment.

I just said that it's severely overstating the case.

> In any case claiming that Apple is somehow at fault for not adopting Vulkan doesn't make sense.

Why not? They could have adopted Mantle instead, for example. It came out a year earlier. Or it could have replaced Metal with Vulkan later (as it is often a reasonable choice to replace your custom solution with the industry's standard). Or it could have chosen to officially support Vulkan alongside it.

Apple has lots of money in the bank, and with that, lots of options.

For Cycles, Vulkan is simply not an option. Metal compute is capable of everything OpenCL is, but is more modern / nicer / whatever, while Vulkan Compute is pretty crap and definitely can't be used as a replacement for OpenCL.

The only cross platform alternative that actually works is OpenCL, but Blender is moving away from OpenCL, mostly because literally every GPU vendor is doing so as well.

AIUI, Vulkan Compute is just missing a few math-focused extensions compared to OpenCL. The OpenCL memory model is also more full-featured (i.e. it allows for general pointers) but that can be addressed via other Vulkan extensions.

The more annoying variation between the two is the need to refactor the code from using "kernels" to "compute shaders", but that's just a difference in the underlying programming model.

Yeah, and is also "just" misses having an ecosystem like SYSCL or CUDA for C++, with polyglot infrastructure targeting the GPU.

Yes, there is SPIR-V, yet few care to target it in practice, besides typical shading languages.

This is fantastic news. On Big Sur currently, it’s very difficult to get GPU rendering working with Blender.

Hopefully, projects like Krita[1] and GIMP[2] would get more funding like Blender as well.

[1] https://krita.org/en/support-us/sponsors/

[2] https://www.gimp.org/news/2021/07/27/support-gimp-developers...

While I agree I think the reason a lot of big companies are funding Blender is because they use it internally as tool. I can imagine Photoshop is used internally at Apple and they will just pay a license for this. So there is no reason they would start funding Krita or Gimp.

Imagine if companies who heavily used Photoshop funded GIMP at half the license rate, and companies who used Illustrator funded Inkscape at the same half license rate.

Donating to LibreOffice at half the rate you pay to office 365.

The free alternatives would surpass the paid versions.

That's a lot of ifs. You'd also need to have people in influential positions in the project.

Let's not sugar coat that GIMP and Blender both went to great lengths to eschew industry workflow and UI/UX norms. they both only started shifting to more familiar paradigms when grassroots movements within their user communities pushed hard for it.

Development time and money are only half the battle. Project leadership and politics are an unquantifiable effort.

Blender for example has been capable of great things for a long time. Its surge in popularity was largely down to giving up the ideologies of its unique workflow.

If Apple gave me 120k a year and made a merge request for a Metal backend for Krita, I wouldn't say no to either, being Krita's maintainer.

^ Can someone get this over to Apple stat? This would be amazing.

Krita also has a nice funding website: https://fund.krita.org/ (forked from the blender one)

Kind of funny that the name of the Apple press contact person for this story on Blender is... Bender.

yeah, noticed that :)

He's got an L in his first name, so a good anagram for him would be: Axe Blender!

First thing that popped into my too

something of a blender bender

Blender is truly one of the most incredible pieces of software I’ve ever used in my entire life. The user interface may look daunting at first glance, but it’s actually incredibly intuitive to use and contains a host of amazingly powerful features that I desperately wish would find their way into every other program I use.

For example, absolutely any aspect of the interface can be bound to any key combination simply by right clicking on the control and choosing “assign keyboard shortcut”. You can adjust values, check and uncheck boxes, execute any menu command, trigger any action, and reconfigure it all on the fly in whichever way suits your workflow in that particular moment.

Another example: every internal function is searchable and executable by hitting F3 and typing a fragment of the code path / menu item title / function name into the box provided. Can’t remember how to slide a vertex along an edge? Just hit F3 and type “ve sl” and the function you’re looking for will be right there at the top of the list.

And another example: every input field can derive its value from simple Python calculations, called Drivers. Let’s say you have a 300 frame animation and you want to change the strength of a mesh deformation from 0 to 1 based on the current frame number. Rather than keyframing anything, you could simply enter ‘#frame / 300” into the deformation modifier’s strength input field and Blender will take care of the calculations for you. You can reference other input values by right clicking on that input and choosing “copy data path”, which will copy the internal reference to that particular piece of data to the clipboard so you can use it to power another input’s driver. So for the above example, if you weren’t sure how many frames your final animation was going to be and you didn’t want to have to go back and change the “300” every time you changed the animation length, you could simply copy the data path for the “frame end” input field and use that in the calculation instead, ie ‘#frame / bpy.context.scene.frame_end’ (that may not be the exact correct path, I’m describing this from memory just as an example of the concept). Every variable is exposed and can be referenced by almost any other variable. If your Driver is more complex than a one liner, you can open a fully featured driver editor window which lets you set and name variables within the driver’s scope, describe parametric functions, and tie multiple drivers together across multiple objects.

Everything is extensible, everything is controllable, everything is connected to everything else — the power it gives you is simply unparalleled, I’ve never used any software of any kind that even came close to putting this much raw control into the user’s hand.

While I totally agree with you that Blender is a joy to use I often think how would Larry "No Modes" Tesler program Blender?[1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(user_interface)#Mode_e...

I feel like if you wanted a no-modes blender you'd need to split it up into 5 or 6 separate programs. There's the vertex modeling aspect, the camera and object tracking aspect, the video editor aspect, the sculpting aspect, and probably a half dozen more things I'm forgetting.

Blender is an absolute massive collection of interrelated functionality. It's mental that they managed to make it all work so well.

> I’ve never used any software of any kind that even came close to putting this much raw control into the user’s hand.

Features you are talking about are present in many other professional 3d packages.

The impressive thing about blender is not it's feature set, but the fact that we can seriously compare a piece of FOSS software with professional products that cost thousands of dollars.

Glad to see Apple supporting more open 3d tools.

Apple was huge in getting open standards funded at Khronos for OpenGL ES, WebGL and more. These investments led to lots of great things and innovations.

The market for 3d tools is one of the most fixed markets out there and the tools are expensive, that has caused interoperability issues and standards being more proprietary. For instance, COLLADA wasn't great but it was one standard they pretty much broke in favor of FBX, which is probably better but also less open/standard.

Hopefully these investments can help change that in the 3d tools market a bit. Even getting your hands on Maya, 3ds Max, ZBrush, Houdini, Cinema4D, etc was difficult until recently. Blender might have made the pricing on those more competitive as well as Unity/Unreal opening up more on pricing.

Blender is opening up 3d tools for all and that is a good thing. The app used to be a usability complexity problem but is getting very competitive in usability and less complex on entry. Tools are like games, they should be easy to approach and more advanced on the backend/detail to master for advanced users, simplicity should always be the goal for tools.

Cinema4D is still ~$100 a month unfortunately. I prefer it’s interface to Blender, even with Blender’s recent UI updates. I don’t think my preference is strong enough to support forking over $100/month, though.

The others have a “lite” version or an indie subscription that is significantly cheaper. When you have those, and a lot of other software is is around $10-50 a month, C4D’s pricing is egregious.

Autodesk subs pricing is insane.

https://www.autodesk.co.uk/products

Except for OpenGL deprecation on Mac and forcing devs to use their proprietary Metal instead of cross-platform Vulkan...

I‘ve spent countless hours learning Blender over the past few months (being completely oblivious of other 3D software to that point), mostly through many excellent Youtube videos like from BlenderGuru, and I think it is the most wicket piece of software I have tried to learn in decades. It makes learning the fundamentals of vi a piece of cake. It has hundreds of features, dozens of property dialogs, and most of all it requires a very peculiar interaction style that is very different from 2D editors like the ones found in Office/Google docs. The difference is similar to switching from a notepad/Word paradigm of being in edit mode by default to switching to the command mode in vim.

The most important learnings so far have been:

- Instead of creating objects from scratch, the paradigm is to modify shapes, starting from a number of primitives. That’s why you get the “default cube” when you start it. An important operation is extrude, which copies the selected parts of a mesh and connects the copies to their original. So if you want to draw a curve, you place a default curve and then use an operation like extrude or subdivide to add new points.

- There is a heavy interaction between mouse and keyboard. Depending on the task, it is vital to learn the keyboard shortcuts by heart. Those are often single keystrokes - e.g. tab for switching between object and mesh edit mode, 1/2/3 for switching between vertex/edge/face selection mode, g for moving the selected item, x/y/z to lock to an axis, x for delete, f for filling edges or faces into the mesh, e for extrude etc. while all of this is also possible to do with the mouse, there is a 10x productivity boost from learning the 10, 20 keystrokes that are used all the time.

- It is highly extensible through plugins, mostly written in Python, though, unfortunately, lower layer operations are only exposed in C++. All of the youtube videos use one of the many screencasting plugins, which display the recent mouse buttons or key presses

- it is a good idea to use a numpad, mainly to switch between different views

The benefit: even with minimal manipulations in the lighting settings and the materials of the created objects, the renderer can already create raytraces that are absolutely jaw-dropping.

But: Even after several months I still often ask myself “how do I tell it the computer”. I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of what the tool can do. Rendering pipelines? Sculpting mode? Probably 2022.

Curious about the hottest tips from the HN users :-)

Sculpting mode is worth learning. Grant Abbitt has some great tutorials on that front. Though if you dive too far into that you may wanna look at getting a Wacom tablet or similar. Actually Grant has a lot of good tutorials in general on Blender.

A tablet makes a big difference. Doesn't need to be a Wacom though. There's plenty of very good much cheaper alternatives.

A small size is often better as less hand movement is required.

Yeah that was why I said or similar. Maybe should have called it out more, but I got a cheap wacom (non-screen) to learn with though I haven't been doing sculpting lately, need to get back to that.

I‘m more interested in geometric structures / architecture, so the sculpt mode isn‘t very useful as I realized today (after watching a video about it). This is all about taking a sphere with lots of vertices and pushing them around. I‘m looking for a way to fill gaps in meshes and deal with relative simple low-poly geometries. Ideally with semantics (a thing is placed on a floor). What should I use for that? Are there plugins thatbpush Blender towards CAD (which I know nothing about)?

You can sculpt stuff you made with geometry, you don't have to start from the sculpt sphere. But yes if you only want things to be fairly geometric sculpting is less useful, but if you want to make things like broken pillars it makes creating those effects easier.

Once you start learning 3D applications you realize most other UIs are toys in compassion. 3D tools are designed for professionals, who take the time necessary to learn how to be productive.

> It is highly extensible through plugins, mostly written in Python, though, unfortunately, lower layer operations are only exposed in C++.

Other than cycles all the plugins are written in python—there is a C++ api generated at the same time as the python one but afaict only cycles uses it. Haven’t done any blender stuff in quite a while so I could be (hope I’m) wrong.

Though, with a little gumption, it isn’t all that hard to expose the underlying functionality to python if nobody has gotten around to it yet. Most of my contributions were of that nature (honestly there were some big gaps and a lot of low lying fruit back then).

Interesting(?) side note: the original pie menu script was written because my laptop didn’t have a numpad and changing views is a PITA without one. People ran with it and it became really popular so they built pie menus into blender proper.

When looking (briefly) at the API documentation, I was mostly interested in mesh manipulation - and there it says "Currently, for more advanced features such as mesh modifiers, object types, or shader nodes, C/C++ must be used." (https://docs.blender.org/api/current/info_overview.html#inte...)

Yes, but those require rebuilding Blender. They're not expressed as plugins

In my experience sculpting is much easier to learn than the vertex-twiddling side of blender. Start with a cube. switch to sculpt mode. Find the remesher and give it a poke. That'll subdivide the cube. try some of the sculpt tools, most are pretty self explanatory. Remember to poke the remesher whenever the mesh faces get too distorted.

It's quite a nice workflow for organic shapes.

Registered just to reply to ya comment.

I've been using Blender for, ooo, I'd say about 15 years now?

I've got almost every hotkey down to a reflex, explored the software extensively, even written my own plugins for Blender. I've watched it grow over the years and man, has it come SO far.

And let me tell you... I can honestly say 15 years... I still feel like I'm barely scratching the surface.

Blender is just an infinite well of potential power and productivity. The more you put in to it, the more it will give you back.

And every few months the Blender devs put out a new update, making it even better than before. Absolutely amazing tool, would be easily worth thousands a year to me for my professional work and yet it's free. It's a 'must have' for any graphic designer/3D artist/etc in my opinion.

Thanks, the fact that you registered just to answer means a lot to me :-)

This is awesome. While far from a Mac app in terms of UI norms, I‘ve found blender to feel more at home on a Mac than expensive heavy hitters like Cinema 4D which still fails to render text and icons at a native resolution out of the box. I’m a very light 3D user, but I’ve been really impressed with it.

Cinema 4D R25 (released at the end of last month) finally overhauled the user interface. It looks much better (and much more like Blender) on macOS now.

Blender is a fantastic piece of software. I've dabbled with it for years but the 3.83 version and higher with the improved UI has made it better.

That coupled with some 3d printing marketplaces have made for some interesting experiments!

Apple is getting more serious about 3D and the gaming market, which isn’t surprising considering the market size.

More and more devices from Apple are getting LiDAR sensors so it makes sense to support it.

Apple also is taking open source more seriously .

Still waiting for FOSS version of Facetime ;)

https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/07/apple_announces_o... for those that don’t get the reference

You can thank software patents for that https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/01/08/apple-denied-new-...

It definitely makes sense.

Recently I had a need for a CAD program and rediscovered how insanely expensive commercial 3D software is for the average person.

Sure, many companies now offer monthly subscriptions, but even those subscriptions are ginormous for the amount of relative value returned. Like, do I really want to pay $220 a month for AutoCAD when I only need to design a part for a non-commercial personal project every so often? I'm sure even a lot of small companies secretly pirate such software, especially if they are relying on something like Solidworks. I really don't know how anyone affords that package.

And yes, there are sometimes free student editions of these packages, but unlike 15 years ago it's tough to get a hold of them without an email from an academic institution the company has verified.

In my case, I was looking at AutoCAD because FreeCAD is... well, pretty terrible as a n00b. From what I can tell it works very differently in many ways from standard CAD applications. It's good for converting between formats, but it's not at all intuitive and seemingly minor actions with nothing but a cube in the workspace can cause it to go into a tizzy and completely freeze.

EDIT: Ultimately I ended up using OpenSCAD.

Commercial 3D software isn't even necessarily better, though. I know I yakked on about CAD, but I have a sort of background in Animation and used Autodesk Maya for many years, which would be the closest direct competitor to Blender. Dear lord, what a disaster of a software package. Granted, I haven't used it since the 2018 edition, but it's astoundingly bad in many areas. The main reason it's so widely used is that it's established and is capable of just about anything. The downside is that, like AutoCAD, the slightest breeze can make it crash unexpectedly. Anyone smart will save their scenes in ASCII format because who knows, something might go wrong during the saving process that makes your scene unable to open when you reboot Maya, and looking through the text-version of your scene may be the only way to fix or recover anything. That's not even all of it. And Maya is also very expensive. Unless you are a student, the only way to use Maya on a hobbyist level is to pirate it.

Having switched entirely to Blender, although there's things about it that I still find unintuitive, it's a breath of fresh air having come from Maya. Unlike Maya, it's rare that anything I do will cause Blender to freeze or crash. The default viewport rendering not only looks better than Maya's "viewport 2.0" but just seems snappier.

What I don't like about Blender is that it tries to do too much IMO. Does Blender really need a video editor and to clutter up the UI with references to it? Not specifically related, but what's with the way that modifiers work? It's kind of like Maya's "history" except it's both better and worse. Unlike Maya, you can actually change the order of how modifiers are applied. But modifiers are really only good for specific things. In Maya, the history of an object is far more generalized.

But overall, I want to see Blender succeed and maybe, just maybe knock things like Maya down a peg, even if it takes another 20 years.

I know Blender as a 3D animation creation tool, so you get legacy features.

unfortunate because blender isn't really optimal for cad. Its a mesh based modeler which makes it great for animation and demonstrations but solid level modeling thats suppose to simulate real things isn't its intention.

I kinda realized after the fact that what I wrote made it seem like I'm using Blender for CAD. (though it would be nice if it had some more CAD capabilities) CAD just happens to suffer the same pricing issue general 3D packages like Maya do. Both are expensive as hell for non-professionals.

I use Blender these days mainly for direct manipulation of meshes in ways that a parametric CAD program won't let you. If I was doing character animation again, I'd probably still use Blender for that. General modeling, Blender is very good. I just hope the UI continues to improve and not obscure so many things behind various icons.

As a 3D print hobbyist I use Blender as a gateway to then be able to learn so many other things in the 3D world.

It is amazingly capable but for those who want a tool to do one job well it would seem like hell.

Wasn’t there a headline were it said apple made more on games than Nintendo, Sony, blizzard etc. together. Apple is already on top of the gaming market.

I doubt that Apple arcade makes them that much money.

Counting the App Store service fee of 30% as "game revenue" is disingenuous, as then we could count every single Windows license sale and every single dollar of revenue from hosting game servers as "making money from games".

>Counting the App Store service fee of 30% as "game revenue" is disingenuous,

It was total revenue from App Store derived from Gaming Apps. I dont see how that is disingenuous. Just like Sony makes a cut from games on PS5.

> I dont see how that is disingenuous.

When Apple has a total 0 input in making and marketing of said game and just charges for services - that's not revenue from games.

And if you want to put a bar that low - Google makes billions from ads for games, YouTube play alongs and other services purchased by game makers. Let's also no forget Starbucks revenues from all the game devs, that definitely counts as game revenue.

> Just like Sony makes a cut from games on PS5.

You do realize that all PS5 games get input and support from Sony, do you?

Apple dictate what is inside their App Store. Along with tools that partly support the Game Development. i.e Development of Metal and their Custom GPU ( At least that is the way Apple likes to formalise their argument in court ) . In reality there is no different between the role of Apple and Sony when viewed from a business perspective. No matter how big or small their input into Games. They take their Cut on Games purchase. So either Sony is not counted as one, and if they do the similar revenue counting could also be used for Apple.

Right... "Business perspective". Come back when Apple spends marketing resources on literally every single game that is published to App Store.

(Also - if you downvote, then don't bother replying)

>Apple dictate what is inside their App Store.

Walmart dictates what gets put on their shelves. Should we throw them into this contest too?

Walmart does make money from games if they sell games, yes. That doesn't make them "a game company," but that isn't actually the question.

I think people -- on both sides of this little mini-debate -- may be trying to carve out too fine a distinction. Insisting that it's only correct to say that a company makes money from games if the company is developing or publishing games suggests that GameStop doesn't make money from games -- a rather hard position to defend.

For the sake of clarity I just add something.

The reason why Walmart or GameStop wouldn't be counted in Game Revenue is because they belong to Retail segment. Even if they were to be counted I think retail label would have to be inserted somewhere.

Neither Walmart or GameStop contribute anything to the actual making of Games. They have added zero value to the making of Games in that value chain and act as distribution only ( and arguably discovery in terms of foot traffic ). Since Retail is a clearly defined term, It is perfectly valid to suggest ( Apple's ) App Store as similar to Walmart and GameStop. But I dont think anyone would agree Apple == App Store. Apple as a Platform ( providing tools and support ) Apple as a Publisher ( Buy apps from you and resold to their customers ) and Apple as a Distributor ( App Store ).

It is all about the value creation and where the cuts are taken. It is also the reason why most of the debate about Apple becomes pointless where these aren't clearly defined in the argument. Although Judge Rogers seems to be able to dissect all of these in a very clear manner.

Ofttimes Sony's "input" isn't much more than "your licensing message needs to stay on-screen for another 0.5 seconds to pass acceptance test X.X". Maybe they're doing more for non-AAA devs these days?

They did help us out when we ran into issues with the dev tooling, but then so does Apple.

Source: I was lead engine dev on a couple of mid-cycle PS2 games.

I wonder if they’ll ever add support for Vulkan to macOS/iOS then. If Valve can move the Steam Deck, then there could be a gigantic boost in the available library of games (since all of the big games on Steam will want to target Proton).

Architecture makes that still icky, but MoltenVK running Proton (so DirectX to Vulkan to Metal) makes Fallout 4 and Titanfall run playable on M1 (with some graphics glitches). If there was real funding behind it they’d have a winner on their hands.

Apple could literally print money if they put M1 into a steam deck.

I doubt about the gaming market. Plausible. But their upcoming AR tech needs 3D content and lots of it. Might include gaming as well but there are more uses than strictly "game games" for game like software and content.

The patrons are now: -Nvidia -Facebook -AMD -Amazon -Epic -Unity -Apple

... with Google, Intel, Microsoft and Adobe among the other sponsors.

https://fund.blender.org/

Probably just to make sure that Blender remains available for their platform. If popular programs aren't available for their ARM / macOS platform, it can hurt them. Good for Blender.

Another comment in this thread speaks directly to this concern. Though, I would argue the move is likely also part of a larger move back into the "creative market" of designers, cinematography, etc.

> If popular programs aren't available for their ARM

Not a problem. M1 blender benchmarks were already smoking the x86 Macs, despite the fact Blender was running on M1 with Rosetta.

A native build is obviously better of course. But OSX ports are a bigger deal, in general, than the CPU architecture.

In case any readers were wondering, Blender LTS Release 2.93 has native support for Apple Silicon.

I'm not a user but I know Blender had existed for quite a while but how is it gaining traction a lot these days suddenly?

Is there something that makes it a first choice for many professional users?

From what I have read (I don't do 3D modeling myself) Blender has overhauled its UI significantly over the past couple of years to great praise of a lot of people.

This is exactly the reason. Most 3D software has esoteric UIs, but Blender's workflow was extreme. Since its initial OSS release (2.4?) the UI has matured and changed significantly for the better. Its far more approachable now, and follows paradigms that every other solution does. It fits nicely in the pipeline alongside tools like Houdini.

- It's cheaper than alternative with no subscription lockin - Faster updates - Quicker bug fixing - now works well in the pipeline - strong ecosystem

Its great to see that Blender is slowly but surely becoming an industry standard.

I was talking to my younger brother about this the other day. He and his girlfriend have just finished Uni. My brother is trying to get into a career with CG for film, and his girlfriend into graphic design. Its not great for my brother as he does have to learn a few tools like Maya and the like, but 90% of his work has been in Blender, which is wonderful to see for someone who's been using Blender since the "old-old UI" days (you know the one) when it was considered as having no chance at being able to compete.

But on the graphic design side, the walls are much higher. His girlfriend can't afford the adobe suite right now, but it would seem has no other option. I naively suggested looking at the open source offerings and was, in the politest way possible, essentially laughed out of the room. I was told it didn't matter if the tools were as good or even better than say Photoshop, because its not industry standard. Bonus points as well if you use the most expensive OS. I'm not sure how true it is that you can't get a job unless you use those tools personally as well, but I'm no expert and I imagine they'd know more about this than me.

I thought it was funny to compare to programming, which I do know. There are industry standard languages, kind of, but all the ones that are industry standard (key word being standard, of course niche ones do apply) are all free. Bonus points if you use a free operating system.

I know they're completely different fields, and what "works" for graphic design would never work for programming, I just thought it was funny

Photoshop is no longer an industry-standard design tool, at least in digital. Most designers I know and work with use Figma, which is a browser-based collaborative design tool. It also has an unlimited free plan, which is great for students!

Photoshop was never really a standard for the kinds of work Figma is used for. The closest Adobe historical products would be Illustrator, or the now defunct, Fireworks.

Adobe doesn't really have a product to compare to Sketch or Figma. The closest currently is Xd but it's only a partial replacement

To the best of my admittedly very limited knowledge, Figma is used for a different purpose (mostly) than Photoshop. Still, its worth recommending anyway, on the off chance thats actually what she should be using

Wonder if this will lead to a functional iOS port of Blender?

Pretty much the whole reason I went with a MS Surface tablet instead of an iPad of some sort, was the lack of Blender.

Would be pretty wild to have a full Blender running on my M1 iPad Pro, though I imagine touch controls are somewhat tricky (maybe pen only?).

The UI is pretty flexible -- each panel can be resized and the elements of a panel can be blown up/shrunken. It does it's best to reflow things sanely... with varying levels of success.

Probably more augmented reality tools

Not unless Apple open up their locked-in platform. Blender licensed under GPLv2 or later and fortunately it's completely impossible to change source code license.

Could you please elaborate how does Blender's license prevent them from having an ios port?

Appstore rules are incompatible with GPL. There a lot of past discussions on this topic:

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store...

Thanks for linking this

Note that this is no longer true under the App Store agreements today, which allow using a custom license.

https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/us/term...

> Any App that you acquire is governed by the Licensed Application End User License Agreement (“Standard EULA”) set forth below, unless Apple or the App Provider provides an overriding custom license agreement (“Custom EULA”).

They may want to use it for TV production as well.

Autodesk continues to hurt itself in it's confusion. When I was in HS it was super easy to officially get their software as apart of a school. Now they require you to show student id's that many schools don't have, or give scanned documents of your attendance there. You know what students do? Pirate. Or just use blender. Nobody wants to use products they don't know, and by Autodesk being managed by old stupid people they hurt their future business. Same with Adobe. Fire yourselves and replace with engineers.

The fact that Blender has been so successful has probably done immeasurable good for the graphical art industry. Think about how many students who otherwise couldn't have were able to learn 3D modeling because of the program. I know at least one person who's entering that field after learning Blender in their spare time.

Honestly, I think Blender is one of the most successful open source projects of all time. It's such a good model for how open source can be successful.

The "problem" I have with Blender is that I can use it about once or twice a year, and of course every time I forget how it works (or the UI has been updated to include an even bigger maze of options). It would be great if Blender had an API on which someone could develop a more beginner-friendly UI. (Curious to know if that happens to be the case).

I think Blender does have a Python API [1]. I used this somewhat during my graduate school days to do rendering.

[1]: https://docs.blender.org/api/current/index.html

I have the same problem, but I am not sure other software is much better. Say Maya or 3DS Max. Try spending an year away and then come back to them :)

Blender does seem to have a UI that's optimized for power users. It's amazing to see someone that's experienced working with it, seems to be very practical. Maybe there should be a 'beginner' view though, hiding some more 'esoteric' options.

This guy has made a bunch of custom pie menus, which seems to be the kind of thing you're describing.

https://github.com/HEAVYPOLY/HEAVYPOLY_Blender

Check out bforartists, it's pretty much what you're describing.

https://www.bforartists.de/

I used Blender for years in Uni and when I was trying to get my own little game studio going. It was an awesome tool, but (at least at the time) a little overwhelming. Just the amount of things you could do was amazing. And how you could extend it was awesome.

So it makes me very happy to see Apple help fund it.

This is great news. IMO, Blender is a greatly under-rated FOSS story, on par with the kernel and firefox.

This is great news. Two features i’d love to see implemented are a dedicated retopo view and a sketchup like modelling view. I’d be willing to contribute financially to these two (don't have deep pockets but i’d spend 1k or two to have native support implemented).

Would be awesome if Blender got native support for exporting to USDZ.

It's very validating to see FOSS become industry standard. It's well deserved, and people also deserve to have legitimate free access.

Great news, Blender is an amazing piece of software that I always wanted to do more with but never eventually get the time/effort to learn.

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whyyy!?

First time I'm hearing about Blender. Seems super cool.

With a python API, would there be some automated way to turn drone footage into 3D environments?

Sure, but it seems you are looking for (monocular) SLAM?

I was thinking more so to add 3d objects to previously recorded drone footage.

Would SLAM be the best option there?

SLAM would be to build a 3D model of what you filmed with a drone.

Adding CGI to drone footage doesn't require that, and is absolutely something Blender can do. Look at its motion/camera tracking features.

This video is awesome for what it sounds like you're trying to do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY8Ol2n4o4A

This is great.

Highly unlikely, but maybe Apple could release some gems from the Shake code base into the Blender compositor?

What is the Shake code base?

> What is the Shake code base?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_Real

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shake_(software)

> Apple could release some gems from the Shake code base into the Blender compositor

You're assuming they still have a copy of the source code :(

I'd love to see some of the Shake feature set make it into Blender:

    - node-to-code  + code-to-node
    - 2.5D motion blur for transforms
    - general concatenation of image transforms for single pass resampling.
    - general C-style code expressions available in any text field of the UI and being able to reference any other variable in the entire UI
    - ability to call any function from libc / external DSO's directly from any text field in the UI.

etc ...

I’d love to take a look at it. Some bigger studios did buy copies of the source for $50k pet-site. It’s probably long gone.

Very unlikely they'd use that code directly - would likely be easier to re-implement the features wanted natively in the blender codebase...

On top of that, there were always suspicions that some of the Shake codebase didn't come from perfectly 'legal' origins from an IP perspective in the early days (its API was very similar to something Alias was working on at the time, and became Maya). I've heard rumours that was a reason the people responsible for Shake were never considered for SciTech awards.

That’s disappointing to hear. At least The Art and Science of Digital Compositing, I find, is still a good read.

In the website, Apple lists "Alex Bender" as press contact. Interesting coincidence.

Kudos to the creator for pursuing his original vision. Immense success :)

I really hope this means GPU support on macOS for blender is coming soon!

Great news! Always been a fan of Blender Foundation :)

Apple's software and hardware arcs are coalescing into them going all in on AR/VR. Things like LIDAR, Photogrammetry, spatial mapping, USDZ / PBR and friends all come across as pretty marginal novelties on smartphones, but they are all a part of that strategy, and will make much more sense with a headset. They're coming out of the gate with a robust ecosystem.

Blender is obviously a huge component of the software stack.

It also helps blender is a competitor to Epic's Unreal

Sort-of? They both compete in rendering, specifically for ArchVis. But otherwise they complement each other more than they compete. Likely why Epic is also a member of the Blender Development Fund.

I guess you confuse Blender 3D editor with Godot game engine.

Blender had built-in game engine, but it's been frozen and removed few years ago.

Also Epic is sponsoring Blender Fund too.

And Epic granted money to Godot:

https://godotengine.org/article/godot-engine-was-awarded-epi...

While it's great that Godot is getting better funding, that's about the worst insult I can think of. Epic is so confident that Godot will never be a serious competitor that they're giving them charity money. We'll see; there was a time when Autodesk viewed Blender as an also-ran too.

Not necessarily. While Epic has an interest in selling unreal they would also benefit from people selling godot games on their store.

I was thinking about Godot!

Wait, how so? Isn't Blender a pretty direct competitor to 3D modeling and rendering tools like Maya and 3dsmax?

AFAIK you can't directly author 3D models in Unreal, if anything Unreal has a dependency on tools like Blender.

There is some competitive overlap, but that seems mostly within the realm of real-time vs. offline render for producing video content?

You can do 3D modeling directly in Unreal, but it's very limited compared to something like Blender.

That's almost like saying Internet Explorer is a competitor to Microsoft Word because they both share text documents with pictures.

Yeah, Blender and Unreal kinda-sorta do the same thing (3d rendering). But their applications are completely different... and you'd be more likely to see people use both tools together on one project rather than a competition between the tools.

Epic doesn't seem to think so, since they majorly funded it just two years ago.

https://www.blender.org/press/epic-games-supports-blender-fo...

The only area I could see this in is in high-end movie production, like they did with The Mandelorian for the digital green screen stuff, but the distinction between real-time and non-real-time rendering seems pretty strong.

Blender does have a real-time engine called Eevee which is pretty powerful, although I don't think the use cases overlap enough to bother Epic.

Not to mention the platform wide rollout of spatial audio.

And the text and object detection in real world scenes that is the most underrated feature in iOS 15

Edit: this tweet I just found shows exactly what I meant: https://twitter.com/juanbuis/status/1448686889158983681?s=21

Interesting. I was working on an app that would let users scan logos and return company data; carbon footprint other industrial impact metrics, individual investors, board, C-suite… into a shared repo of oligarchs who have chosen celebrity and visibility by “leading” us with our own data.

I was going to send images to Google to pull objects and text from, but if I could just send text to search for, that would be great.

I like the sounds of that. I like the prospect of Apple competing with Facebook on AR/VR. It's an area I was quite interested in some years ago, but firstly wasn't well supported on the Mac, and secondly it got bought up by Facebook to a large extent.

I've been wishing for a modern Playstation so I could try the limited bit of Gran Turismo that's VR and uses their headset. I know the Nurburgring fairly well by now but would love to play there 'for real'. Quite an environment to be whizzing through: that and the tricky rally circuits would be real interesting to get more immersion in.

I want to share an amazing experience I recently had. I was looking through TV consoles on Crate & Barrel and found one I liked. I was unsure if it'd be too tall for my room (it's an extra 9 inches of height over my current TV stand, which is actually just a coffee table repurposed.) The listing page had a QR code I could scan with my iPhone. I was taken to a page that asked me for camera permissions and I said yes. In a few seconds, it placed a 3D model of the TV console in my room and I was able to get a good idea of how it looked. All so quick and easy - no extra apps to download - and actually useful. Putting Pikachu in my space is fun, but this is actually worth the extra lidar tech in the iPhone Pro.

I feel a weird sense of loss for Google Glass. I feel like the controversies that set it back also set back the entire AR space.

I wonder what life would be like if I could wear a HUD that showed me an AR overlay. It might bubble up an alert to remind me to drink a glass of water to stay on track for the day. A to-do list might slide in from the side if I tap a button near my temple. A friend calls and their animated avatar hangs out in the corner of my sight while I continue doing what I was doing... It feels like these things are very close, but society is struggling to integrate the amassing tech innovations we're encountering.

A camera in glasses is always going to be too intrusive I think. Norms may change, but even if there's a clear light indicating that a photo or video is being taken, it's offputting to feel the possibility of a recording happening at any moment. Perhaps the middle-ground is to have glasses with just a HUD, but no camera. You can still get useful info, but without the imposition on other people.

if companies and govt hadn't broken our trust so often wrt privacy, snooping, data-hunger, their might not have been so many controversies... I think the struggle is good if it stops or slows down these things.

The water alert will also mention that you would be better hydrated if you bought ElectroX, the electrolyte drink for serious thinkers. The to-do list will include an item to check out the latest release of Banging Cans, your favorite band. By allowing you to see your friend and his surroundings, you are implicitly allowing through images of the products that are visible, and therefore they will be added to your cloud targeted ad profile.

Not to mention what you won't see. When you drive by protesters about a topic that makes you uncomfortable, your SuperFlow2030 app will blur out the words and images on their signs so they don't disturb you.

The latest safety feature will use facial recognition to highlight anyone you don't know or is not typically in an area, so you can keep an eye on them. Coincidentally, a high percentage of those highlighted people will have a different skin color from you, which deep down in the weights of its classification model is still being used as a handy heuristic even though the developers tried to specifically exclude it.

I, too, wonder what life would be like. Sadly, I don't have to wonder too much, because it appears that it would be like it is now, only more so.

I definitely had a naive little image in my mind of how things would be, but I see where you're coming from. I think one of the things that would push monetization techniques like the ones you mentioned would be if the hardware doesn't have enough compute power to process video, audio, etc. Having to be tethered to a cloud would make it more feasible to do those sorts of intrusive things, ie how Alexa picks up audio but Amazon servers process it.

Although speculative cyberpunk is usually dystopic and oppressive, it fascinates me how much of those predictions have come through or are in the process of occurring. I think the major breaking point will be climate refugees moving toward cities, which could lead to megacities, which have notoriously been imagined as highly populated by an impoverished class of people.

Thanks for the little dose of reality. I hope we can nudge our future by starting these sorts of conversations.

If everybody used VR headsets all the time, you wouldn't even need a TV console in your room. In fact, you wouldn't need much besides a comfy chair.

This whole AR thing is just a transition technology, that will go away with time.

>If everybody used VR headsets all the time

You just described Ready Player One, which in some sense is a dystopian nightmare.

With the comfy chair reference, I saw Wall-E. Cartoonish dystopia is still dystopia.

> VR headsets all the time

I love VR headsets, but that's not going to happen - for so many reasons - I want to get up and get a coffee, I often read while half watching TV, or sit and chat with the family while watching TV and so on, fold the laundry with the TV on and so on. You can't do anything else when wearing a VR headset.

Assuming your life is spent in a virtual world consuming media, that is. For people who want to live in the physical world with maybe a few augmentations here and there, AR could be around forever.

Yeah, this is more and more popular. Apple has this built in on their product pages, and recently I saw it on Sonos’ website too. You can even preview some cars using AR.

A photo with a new McLaren next to your garage adds a lot of credibility to all of the “honey, I bought a new car” pranks ;)

I would bet my life savings that Apple are developing some form of VR - maybe headsets, maybe something more interesting like a lightfield display. They're clearly very interested in this space.

I’d say that’s a safe bet considering there are 90 job openings when you search “VR” on their careers page. Exciting to see what the future holds.

https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/search?search=VR&sort=relevance...

Well, yes. The current gen AR tech in the IPhone is direct enabler of AR once they get the glasses out (which have been rumored for years).

I wonder when apple will start taking the 'serious games' segment seriously. Like being able to play nintendo switch quality games on your iPad, AAA games on a laptop or some sort of apple TV++++ device and such.

Blender won, in a few years it will kill every and all competition. It is a great example of open source disrupting markets that have been traditionally entirely dominated by proprietary software.

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