Blender 3.0
blender.org
blender.org
So I have been thinking about what makes this project so special. I think it's the fact that the community owns it. So you don't have to ask for permission to do anything. Mix that with inherently creative people who approach the tool and you get:
AI-generated Kanye West rap teaching you how the modifiers work - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7Nn5Uilso0
When I started using Blender I came from 3DsMax. Max took almost half aminute to start, Blender maybe 2 seconds. And now, years later, Blender is still fast. The architecture is just very good. And maybe it's one of the best in the wold.
A lot of people hated the UI, but I always loved it. I love that you can arrange the panels the way you like. I wish programs like Photoshop could do this as well. And yes, since v2.8 everything became even better and the learning curve was lowered.
I also love all shortcuts and user interactions. This was really made for users. And maybe that's because Blender is mostly made by users.
And now v3.0! I am excited about two things: Cycles X (very fast rendering) and the overhauled Geometry Nodes.
I believe Geometry Nodes are the next big thing because this is Blender's answer to Houdini.
Edit: if you are interested in Geometry Nodes you should check out Erindale @ YT https://youtube.com/c/Erindale
He creates complete scenes without modeling a thing. The models are all procedurally built.
It's incredible how far Blender has come. I remember the days when time between significant releases was measured in years, not months. The progress they've made in recent years — particularly since Epic Games gave them a $1.2 million Epic MegaGrant — has been impressive, and encouraging to watch.
Thank you to all who fund Blender, and thank you especially to the people who make it. You're making a difference in the lives of many indie developers.
A big plus for me is that they used their massive force to sue, and eventually budge Apple of their 30% revenue cut on their walled garden, but that's subjective.
I mean congrats, they sued Apple adding a precedent to let devs use external ways of paying for microtransactions, something 99% of actual devs don't have the infrastructure to do anyway. It only helps Epic stuff their face a bit more. Like winning a lawsuit that lets you run self-refined gas in your car or something.
Also they're owned by Tencent, so yeah.
You frame it as a bad thing but this is not a bad thing.
Epic seems like a pretty decent company overall. Not perfect by any measure of course.
(I play games occasionally and I follow trends but there's lots I don't get about the culture)
They own "only" 40% of Epics shares from what I can gather.
I highly recommend https://academy.cgboost.com/p/resources
Also free of charge, and a very good presenter (if you can excuse the German accent).
But most people like the Donut tutorial, that's true.
I'm interested it for making 3d printing models, so it wasn't all relevant to my goals, but it gave me enough familiarity to know where things are well enough that I can get by pretty well through googling the rest. Lots more tutorial videos to dig into, but already feel like I have superpowers.
(I've been applying sculpting and textures to objects I modeled in OpenSCAD, super cool to be able to leave the high-tolerance surfaces alone and add rounding and interesting detail to everything else!)
Oh, that's a cool approach I don't think I've heard much about people using.
Made a rough coffee mug with an internal diameter less than a millimeter greater than a soda can's circumference. Then smoothed and added the "Bepis" texture in blender.
In blender, started with some sculpting, then used the displacement modifier with a texture of a repeating image file and remapped the UV Map spherically with a tilt. It's easier than it sounds!
(Could have used blender for the whole thing, but I'm just more used to OpenSCAD, so used that for the base cup)
I've used this same UV mapping of textures for various christmas ornaments I'm making for this holiday season: can get some cool snowflake-ish patterns.
This is simply amazing.
If you want to learn digital sculpting and proper meshing (manually unfortunately, but still), this is a fantastic resource.
Thanks for the link.
After a minute or two I would occasionally find something that looked "CG-ish", but I wouldn't have found anything if I weren't looking.
It's amazing how good Blender has gotten.
EDIT: Not sure why I'm being downvoted for this, I can't find any comment from the creator, but it's widely talked about in the CG community how impressive it is how they managed to mimic the stop motion style so closely.
Even little details like occasionally showing fake strings to make them seem like puppets.
https://twitter.com/catsuka/status/1389289376031588352?lang=...
VFX Breakdown - Dynamo Dream Teaser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFJ_THGj72U
The full short Dynamo Dream was posted a few months ago by Hubert on his YouTube channel:
Episode 1 : Salad Mug - DYNAMO DREAM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsGZ_2RuJ2A
Make Nightmare Men in Blender - Lazy Tutorials
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgfJIZEDY44
Edit: Yes, I subscribe to his Paetron series to -- such awesome stuff!
https://www.patreon.com/IanHubert
I just dabble with blender but really enjoy his videos showing how he goes about various vfx with blender
Not only did I have fun using learning how to use Blender, but the model of my home that I built has actually turned out to be very useful. The VR support is especially neat, as I can take out a wall in my living room and then stand in the new space and see if it the changes I made work in (virtual) reality.
Highly recommended for anyone else thinking about doing work on your house.
I'm also thinking about using it to design some simple furniture that I could build, though haven't looked much into that yet.
I have a company where I design custom jewelry with my customers fingerprints (https://lulimjewelry.com) and I use blender on the backend to automate it.
NYTimes maintains a blender docker container and I run it on google cloud run to take displacement maps and use them to “engrave” my jewelry and output an STL file. The displacement maps are generated client side using fabric.js
It’s awesome that blender can be run headless in a docker container. I’ve also been looking forward to these new blender apps. It seems like you can specify a paired down interface for blender so you could have it purpose built for a single task.
Interesting, anybody know what NYTimes uses it for? Can't find much information about it.
They have an R&D page that goes into some of their 3D endeavours too https://rd.nytimes.com/projects/reconstructing-journalistic-...
https://code.blender.org/2021/04/cycles-x/
The realtime renderer is EEVEE, slated for big upgrades in 3.x:
Crazy performance gains!
Also here is a link to their download page as the Blender home page seems to be slammed today: https://www.blender.org/download/
Being excellent, open source and free it pretty much changed the 3d software landscape globally.
I found it odd they didn't include that video on the homepage. Its pretty great showcase of the tool (I learned its python scriptable!)
I’ve often heard the sound/plugin packs for DAW keep people on the paid products. Why shouldn’t there be a competitive open source option?
Edit to contextualize, and maybe an added question: Blender is amazing and competes in so many ways with high-cost, industry-standard software. How is the DAW world not a great analog and opportunity?
In the music production space, you have many DAWs being given away for free, or coming with your OS, or not costing exorbitant amounts of money. My guess is nobody has been motivated enough yet to do what people like Ton Roosendaal or Linus Torvalds have done and devote years of their life to producing a viable open source alternative to the closed source (and moreover, non-free) behemoths.
I do expect that it's only a matter of time, though.
Granted, it's not perfect - some people like some of the workflows, some don't - but I find it very good, especially if you spend some time customizing keyboard shortcuts and maybe adding a script or two (it's scriptable in Lua, and you can even write audio plug-ins in that)
It supports LV2 and VST2/3 plug-ins natively, and with Yabridge you can bridge Windows VST2/3 plug-ins very seamlessly.
(Full disclosure: I have a few bugfix patches in Ardour; I'm fairly committed to it for my needs and happy to help debug crashes and such, though these days they're very rare; the developers are very responsive on IRC though!)
1) Blender is ~25 years old and has been open source for ~20. That's a lot of development hours.
2) Blender marketplace and the acceptance of the existence of paid addons by (most) of the Blender community means that addon developers can actually be paid for their work and to maintain their addons.
Addons add a lot of features that Blender doesn't have out of the box and if you're using blender professionally you are probably reliant on addons for your workflow and it is a pain when they break (which they do frequently because the API is so unstable).
Not being attacked, and even being encouraged to charge for open source software (and adddons are all open source) on the understanding that not all devs are lucky enough to work for faangs, be tenured professors or still live with our parents, and that we need to eat is something that is pretty unique in my experience.
* There it's a strong "vendor lock" in DAWs (Studios don't like to invest in re-training their audio engineers)
* Lack of a strong initial sponsor that creates momentum.
* Codecs with patents that can be scary
* I don't want to imagine what a mess should be with the QA of the VTS plugins out there or things like ASIO drivers for interfaces.
Blender is a rare case: Exists in part thanks to a lot of studios taking the risk of using it, therefore a few professionals want to use it, which made more studios want to use it too and sponsor it, which attracted more users, creating momentum, then a positive feedback loop.
In any case, right now I'm happy with Reaper. It's cheap, reliable and easy to use. For people hardcore into the free software movement, are usually fine with audacity (at least the forks without spyware). I bet all that make the incentive to make a new FOSS DAW reduce even more.
I'd like them to bring back some more of the game engine components.
I use Unity, but seeing what Blender can do, via their demo movies, I'd love to see a Blender Game Engine!
A powerful mature engine with Python, one can dream.
Unity is mainly useful since if you're willing to drop a few thousand dollars on assets, plus about 200 hours of your own personal time, you can have a shipable game in a month or so.
Godot looks really neat, but at least with my skill level I need a starter kit to get going on most projects. Then again, I know Godot's gotten a ton of funding lately so we'll see what happens.
Back when I was using 3D Studio Max, I wished it had a fast sleek efficient minimal game engine runtime called "3D Studio Min", but that never panned out either.
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/106972/what-will...
>As for the reasons for removal we can conclude it was an old and aging component, it was largely unmaintained, suffered from several bugs and limitations, and the Blender Foundation probably lacked the energy, motivation and manpower to maintain it properly.
>"Adding new things to Blender gets much easier that way. The Blender Internal code started in early 90s. Over 25 years old! Functionally, EEVEE can (and will) completely replace it." -Ton Roosendaal
>It was also very architecturally outdated, lagged severely behind the current industry standards and modern technologies in many ways, it would be very hard to bring it up to date. Modernizing it or introducing new features would end up being more work than a full rewrite from scratch. [...]
>What About Forking It?
>UPBGE is a third party fork, whose objective is updating and modernizing the BGE with better technologies and features, with the end goal of eventually merging it back with main Blender development branch.
>I fear its future is uncertain at this point unfortunately. While I believe Blender developers won't actively do anything to purposefully break Blender trunk codebase compatibility, I speculate it will naturally become increasingly hard for UPBGE developers to maintain their code working, as features are removed and main Blender development deviates further from the current design. [...]
>There have been talks about replacing the old game engine with a newer better integrated "Interactive Mode". It would be a more integral part of Blender, as opposed to a separate component with a lot of duplicated code that re-implemented a very limited subset of supported features we currently have.
>This is not meant to be a direct replacement of the old BGE, nor a discrete game engine in the traditional sense with wide publishing capabilities, rather more of an integrated real-time "presentation tool" or interaction mode with a physics simulation sandbox environment, that runs directly inside Blender's viewport on currently supported platforms.
>On 28 May 2018 Ton Roosendaal announced in the Developers Mailing list that a portion of the 2.8 Code Quest funds were reserved for the development of a new and improved real time rendering system or "Interactive Mode" and Benoit Bolsee, a developer historically known for his involvement in real time side of Blender, accepted a grant to work part time on this for one year.
https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2018-May/0...
https://www.blender.org/2-8/quest/
https://code.blender.org/2013/06/blender-roadmap-2-7-2-8-and...
>I speculate this will probably feature a new node based workflow and logic system, real time physics, and integrate well with other upcoming features like "Object Nodes" also known as "Everything Nodes" in one way or another.
Unfortunately blender is GPL, but otherwise I would wonder if the Godot team could just use blender's rendering engine instead of implementing their own.
I will say blender is exceptionally polished, probably the best open source content creation tool ever made. We'll see what Godot comes up with next year
There’s armory3d which is impressive but it’s still early days
Blender 3.x roadmap - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024572 - Oct 2021 (114 comments)
Pretty much all the tools I've developed in the past couple of years for AAA games have been almost exclusively made with Python.
One of them we even developed tools to be DCC agnostic, which means that they could run both in Maya and 3ds Max flawlessly.
The usual GPL issue around plugins is whether program+plugin are a "mere aggregate" or a "derivative work". This doesn't really matter if they aren't distributed together, but even if it did, the question is no easier to answer in the case of interpreted vs compiled code. They are still running in the same process, exchanging internal data structures through direct procedure calls. It just so happens that one is running through a translation layer.
If that translation layer protects you, then you could just as easily enjoy that protection by running binary plugins through a no-op emulator.
And regardless of all of this, there's no reason Blender Python plugins can't use Python native extensions for performance. FLIP Fluids, for example, has a C++ fluid sim engine and uses Python just for the interface to Blender.
If anyone already has the files and cares to share the magnet, I'll gladly help with seeding.
Much appreciated of course!
In concrete terms, it means convincing universities to train students on your tools. Autodesk has the dollars to spend on efforts like that.
Blender isn't THE industry standard by any means, but I don't think it would be a stretch to call it an industry standard. EA uses it for a lot of their concept work, Ubisoft uses it for their animation studio, it's the modelling tool at Infinity Ward, etc.
It definitely is a strong show of support for Blender, but there aren't a lot of studios in the industry using Blender, so it's quite far from being anything like a standard yet.
Blender is gaining ground, yes, but most studios are very much Maya based still with Blender used sparingly.
The one major Blender studio (Tangent) has also shuttered and were mid moving away from Blender at the time. I think the next biggest users of Blender are a division within Ubisoft, but it's not the primary DCC for Ubisoft in it's entirety either.
Where Blender is gaining most traction is freelance artists and people who don't need to work with a pipeline. Blender is slowly getting better for Pipeline integration, but it really doesn't like to play well yet within a studio where you're dealing with many different artists working on a shot, in possibly multiple DCCs.
The new asset browser is also another great addition for plugging into pipelines.
As an anecdote, I installed GIMP for my son 6 years ago, who is now going to college to be a graphics designer. He did all of his digital artwork in GIMP and Krita, now Blender as well, for the whole length of that time.
He now has to use Photoshop for his classes. There are some tools in it he is impressed with but overall doesn’t care for Photoshop at all.
Unfortunately the industry doesn't care if he doesn't care about photoshop, it cares about it and if he wants to be a part of it he should start learning to care unless his work is beyond amazing and he will only be freelancing then ignore everything I said.
Photoshop is not impressive but it gets the job done quickly and smoothly with minimal friction and that's why it is number one.
I do also feel like a top down flow is more conductive to "process-oriented" or procedural design. I've done my fair share of procedural visual scripting with nodal systems such as UE4's Blueprints, PopcornFX or Blender's Geometry Nodes and none of them feel as "natural" as Houdini's.
It almost feels as though vertical lines occupy less space in my mind than horizontal lines do. Perhaps it's because our brains are hardwire to deal with lots of top down structured environments (plants, tree-trunks, other Sapiens).
I agree with this. I've never used Houdini, but I have used Max/MSP and after using that, always found the horizontal visual programming systems very clunky and, as you say, they just feel like they take up a lot lot more space. Of course, Max's nodes are quite compact in comparison to something like Blueprints, but horizontal ones always are because each additional input/output makes the node one connection taller, while with a vertical layout you tend to fit many connections in the available width (of course, connection labels aren't clearly visible in that case, but I find that's something you get accustomed to).
Personally, I greatly prefer a vertical layout for visual programming systems.
It's just a difference of approach in what's going from one to the other. Houdini for example switches to horizontal data passing for VOPs.
I find horizontal data graphs easier to reason about at a glance, whereas vertical ones are easier to quickly prototype things.
Horizontal is just more explicit about data flow.
I think Blender is a project I'd be really excited to contribute to. Are there any tasks that might be worthwhile for a beginner? Or am I aiming out of my league?
As a general tip over recent years there has been a growth in "standard" ways that a project can communicate tasks/bugs/issues that are particularly well suited for people to start their involvement with a Free/Open Source project by highlighting ways someone can get involved as new contributor.
I'll hype Krita's 5.0 release (still in beta) - it has the same "turnaround" feel.
Thanks, everyone, for plugging the donut tutorial link! Checked it out today. 3D modeling has lots of subtle, jarring nuances and the author addresses them head-on. Recommended.
It's exciting to see libre software becoming so refined. Several projects are serious about managing the triangle of UI, stability, and features. These tools aren't "in the artists' way" anymore.
(I don't mind, I like this kind of heads-up.)
Release notes will be there when the release is officially announced and linked from Blender's home page.
Blender is probably the most important part of my life software-wise, and it bugs me that I never managed to use it (even older versions) at its fullest.
Congratulations to all the people behind this behemoth of a software who carried and carries many of the best artists out there. If I ever get anywhere in life with game development / 3d art I'll wholehartedly credit Blender.
An animation company in Wales, https://www.clothcatanimation.com/cloth-cat-awarded-epic-meg..., is using Blender, but I'm not sure what for.
It would make a really good research/documentary to go behind the history and the growth of blender. I bet we can learn ton of lessons in software engineering, open source software management, creative tool creation and herding open source communities.
Personally I eventually found my way in by focusing on lighting and procedural textures. I got really good at making decked-out spheres. :-) It's still a favorite doodling activity. In the process of learning I ended up contributing to Wikipedia articles on things like global illumination, and some of my texturing images are still up there.
(And to this day I don't find the modeling part that interesting. One of my projects was in the 2005 Blender showreel I think, it was just a simple project that seemed fun and I couldn't wait to have the modeling part complete)
I’ve helped my colleagues and my students use it for a range of different applications from communication of science to the implementation of simple physics simulations to explore chaos.
It’s just amazing.
12 mins to 5 mins with a software upgrade is pretty good!
Not sure I agree here! I work primarily in Substance Designer and Painter these days because I want more portability and basically everything has a substance plugin, or at worst I can export them for a regular PBR workflow, and I've played around with mari, and there's yet to be a situation where I thought I couldn't do the same thing with blender's node system.
You don't read that very often in changelogs.
Maya is the videogame industry standard for modeling, just like ZBrush is the industry standard for sculpting. It is almost 100% non destructive-editing and integrate with studios asset pipelines perfectly in various ways. It's paid and closed source.
Blender is a jack of all trades, master of none. Aside from a game engine (removed since 2.8) it has basically all that you need to do modelling, sculpting, physics,3D painting, 2D and 3D animation, compositing and even some quirky video editor with audio. And it's free and open source and it has the largest community, by far, since version 2.8.
In the nitty gritty, they're all substantially different and have very different views of scenes, data representations and workflows.
It's easy enough to jump between all three, at least for me, but they each have their respective strengths and weaknesses, that lend themselves better to different kinds of work.
So IMHO it's one of the best executed desktop programs while also being in a massively difficult field, and they deserve the praise. In many places there are outliers like this; Stripe for Documentation, Wikipedia for encyclopedic knowledge, Google for search, etc.
The two main criticisms that I've found is that first the interface is very confusing (but this has been improved constantly in the last 5-10 years!). As a personal opinion, I believe this video was a big inflection point (Blender seemed stubborn before the video, but this video at the very least softened the opinion of Blender): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWacQrEcMHk
The second one is that it's not "industry standard", but as more and more people are using it for hobbies and indie projects, this will def change eventually, so I'm not too worried about that as well.
If you want a critical take on Blender therefore, for one you ought to look outside a community of business-minded devs. Look where artists hang out and you'll find a less rational take that is based on individual likes and dislikes. Where logic doesn't matter so much--it's how you feel. That's where you'll get into it. And if you look at other FOSS graphics software communities where the project lead is someone who just does whatever they want, even better, you'll find a group of users who either adapt or leave, and that's quite different from Blender's psychological development ecosystem in a lot of ways.
Alternately you could go more-business and go ask a SolidWorks user group to tell you how great Blender is. They will probably tell you how business is done properly and why the Blender way is clueless in various ways.
It so happens I ran an online community for another FOSS 3D package for over a decade. We got some people who were anti-Blender, and some who were pro-Blender. Often the anti-position was based in prefers-underdog reasons, which I understand. Even in FOSS there are some clear underdogs and people get upset when they like the underdog and continually see another project winning attention instead.
We also got some people who were pro-Blender, who thought that our community must be anti-Blender, because we were obviously "competitors in the space." In fact there was never a competitive mindset, it's more that people who lean into that business psychology of "here's how you win" think more often in terms of competition.
BTW Blender is definitely an awesome project, I've used it since 2002 and on various commercial projects in addition to hobby stuff.
That sounds more like FLOSS done right than most "doin' business" available these days. If most "doin' business" worked as you describe, FLOSS wouldn't have eat so much market from them.
It'd be nice if they made some sort of "stable" API that plugins can rely on in the long term, even if they had another one that is "better" (whatever their current definition of "better" might be).
Blender is indeed great but Maya is still extremely popular and many professionals happen to prefer Maya for one reason or another. I don't often see that fine grained of a discussion of media tools here.
My bet is Blender will become more standard in the next 10 years. It’s becoming big in gaming (I’ve heard)
They also break the API accidentally frequently. My favourite is that they have accidentally inverted the direction of rotation of the rotation operator 4 times since 2.8 and randomly removed one of the modes that the UV Smart project operator worked in.
The documentation is also lacking for the API and none existent for the main code base.
Despite this Blender is amazing but I do wish they were more professional. From a developer point of view the two things that would make life vastly better is if they
a) hired a technical writer to produce decent docs
b) stopped breaking the API every 5 minutes and when they did documented it properly (and in advance)
So, not such a bad decision. Building with MSVC used to be a bad decision, less so now.
Having to have divergent code paths per version is hell.
Blender has a Python API. Which is arguably one of the easiest languages to keep a stable API in, since you're not dealing with an ABI.
Yet that breaks regularly.
I'm okay if I had to recompile for every version of maya I support. I just don't want to have to have to maintain tons of ifdefs per version
The technology & the creative development are part of an intertwined process.
Also its competitors are buggy-ass insanely overpriced monthly subscription proprietary editors, so no surprise there.
There are still things to complain about, like the undo speed, CSG modifier unreliability, lack of certain features, but none of them are strict deal breakers.
But it is minor... and i can still use 2.79 anyway :-P
The main issue is that data is only stored in the geometry itself, per-vertex. So if you just want a single variable you're out of luck. Math operations operate on vertices so you can't just multiply two numbers, you have to store a number in each vertex, then multiply all vertices by the same value. It's like every node is for-loop that loops over vertices.
This limited design is useful for certain things like scattering rocks over terrain but not much else.
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23nodevember2021%23geometrynod...
And the ability to write plugins in C, or rather offer a native api so i can use my language of choice, i despise python..
People can't help but mistake familiarity for quality.
The most intuitive interface is the one you're used to.
If you can't, then I rest my case: Max has an ANCIENT outdated user interface, and it's been stagnating for decades. So what if you're used to it? I'm used to Windows 95 and Microsoft Visual Studio 6 too, but that doesn't mean they have good user interfaces.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYt0khR_ej0
>"Jim, let me tell you something: there's gonna to be a WHOLE BUNCH of things we don't tell Mrs. Clinton. Fast food is the least of our worries, ok buddy?"
I even offered to help Kinetix implement pie menus for Max, since I was already writing Max and MaxScript plugins, and wanted their help integrating my open source ActiveX/OLE pie menus with Max. But Kinetix wasn't interested then, and Autodesk still isn't interested in listening to their users or improving Max's user interface decades later, apparently.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/automating-the-sims-character-...
After 25 years since it was created, 3D Studio Max STILL doesn't have pie menus (while Blender has really great built-in pie menus).
Kinetix's 3D Studio Max and Alias's Maya used to be competitive and innovative when they were owned by different companies.
But now they are both owned by Autodesk, so they have both stagnated and failed to innovate, listen to the demands of their users, and improve their user interfaces, the way Blender rapidly and continuously does today, and always has.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26917124
Alias used to spread FUD about pie menus, and now Autodesk and their minions spread FUD about Blender, like falsely claiming Blender's GPL license means that you can't use it to make copyrighted artwork.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26918150
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26923816
https://www.blender.org/about/license/
As if stagnating and ignoring the demands of your users while spreading FUD and innuendo about Blender wasn't bad enough, it's rumored that Autodesk even went as far as to mercilessly attack Ton Roosendaal with a ceiling tile ;) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-sgk
Pie Menu FUD and Misconceptions: Dispelling the fear, uncertainty, doubt and misconceptions about pie menus.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menu-fud-and-misconception...
>Huge Problem: Software Patents and FUD
>There is a sad history of people using software patents to make misleading claims about obvious techniques that they didn’t originate, and constructing flawed straw man definitions of ersatz pie menus to contrast with their own inventions, to mislead the patent examiners into granting patents.
>There is a financial and institutional incentive to be lazy about researching and less than honest in reporting and describing prior art, in the hopes that it will slip by the patent examiners, which it very often does.
>Patent Abuse Example: US Patent US5689667A: Methods and system of controlling menus with radial and linear portions
>Unfortunately a bad patent that covered an obvious technique, and also made some incorrect misleading claims, was abused by Alias marketing in Bill Buxton’s name to baselessly threaten and discouraged others from using pie or marking menus, by exaggerating its scope and obfuscating its specificity. It’s my strong opinion that the particular technique that it covered (overflow items) was quit obvious.
>Gordon Kurtenbach and I discussed pie and marking menus in 1990 before he wrote his paper and filed the patent, and at that time he made it clear that he understood pie menus supported mouse ahead display suppression, and that pie menus enjoyed the same benefits as marking menus have in easing the transition from novice to expert user:
>“The the cool thing is that expert can mouse ahead like you’ve talked about but they get an ink trail so they have a better idea what they’ve selected without even bothering to wait for the menu to come up.”
>However that contradicts what the paper and the patent implies, and it’s misled other people into incorrectly believing that pie menus don’t support what I call “mouse ahead display preemption” (or “suppression”, a harsher word), and that the patent covers much more than it actually does.
>When Gordon applied for the patent on in 1995, which his employment contract with SGI required him to do, the patent had at least two misleading statements, and the “overflow” technique claim was obvious, which should have prevented it from being granted or invalidated it.
>Another piece of mistaken but published misinformation about the differences of “typical pie menus” and marking menus is that “typical pie menus” pop up submenus after the cursor has moved a certain distance from the menu center, without clicking the mouse button. However, I have never seen nor implemented such badly designed pie menus in the real world.
>“Typical pie menus” (such as those in The Sims, played by hundreds of millions of people) have always selected leaf and submenu items by triggering on a button press or release (or pen or finger tap or release). They also typically support mouse-ahead. Pie menus can seamlessly support both quick press-drag-release gestures, as well as the more leisurely click-move-click gestures.
>The patent US5689667A “Methods and system of controlling menus with radial and linear portions” also makes the mistake of claiming that that pie menu selection is based on pointing at the items like linear menus (or PIXIE), instead of the direction of cursor motion, which Kurtenbach and Buxton know very well is simply not the case with “typical pie menus”.
Flight of the PIXIE: This video is derived from a film that demonstrates an early graphical user interface in use. The film was made in 1969 to accompany a paper entitled “PIXIE: a new approach to graphical man-machine communication” presented at the 1969 CAD Conference held in Southampton:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI
>“Radial menus include two types: pie menus and marking menus. Pie menus are typically used in item selection using the location principles of linear menus as discussed above. Marking menus operate on the principle of the direction of cursor or pointer motion as being the basis for item selection.” -US Patent US5689667A
>Unfortunately they were able to successfully deceive the patent reviewers, even though the patent references the Dr. Dobb’s Journal article which clearly describes how pie menu selection and mouse ahead work, contradicting the incorrect claims in the patent. It’s sad that this kind of deception and patent trolling is all too common in the industry, and it causes so many problems.
>Even today, long after the patent has expired, Autodesk marketing brochures continue to spread FUD to scare other people away from using marking menus, by bragging that “Patented marking menus let you use context-sensitive gestures to select commands.”
>The Long Tail Consequences of Bad Patents and FUD
>I attended the computer game developer’s conference in the late 90’s, while I was working at Maxis on The Sims. Since we were using 3D Studio Max, I stopped by the Kinetix booth on the trade show floor, and asked them for some advice integrating my existing ActiveX pie menus into their 3D editing tool.
ActiveX Pie Menus: Demo of the free ActiveX Pie Menu Control, developed and demonstrated by Don Hopkins:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnC8x9x3Xag
>They told me that Alias had “marking menus” which were like pie menus, and that Kinetix’s customers had been requesting that feature, but since Alias had patented marking menus, they were afraid to use pie menus or anything resembling them for fear of being sued for patent infringement.
>I told them that sounded like bullshit since there was plenty of prior art, so Alias couldn’t get a legitimate patent on “marking menus”.
>The guy from Kinetix told me that if I didn’t believe him, I should walk across the aisle and ask the people at the Alias booth. So I did.
>When I asked one of the Alias sales people if their “marking menus” were patented, he immediately blurted out “of course they are!” So I showed him the ActiveX pie menus on my laptop, and told him that I needed to get in touch with their legal department because they had patented something that I had been working on for many years, and had used in several published products, including The Sims, and I didn’t want them to sue me or EA for patent infringement.
The Sims, Pie Menus, Edith Editing, and SimAntics Visual Programming Demo. This is a demonstration of the pie menus, architectural editing tools, and Edith visual programming tools that I developed for The Sims with Will Wright at Maxis and Electronic Arts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs
>When I tried to pin down the Alias marketing representative about what exactly it was that Alias had patented, he started weaseling and changing his story several times. He finally told me that Bill Buxton was the one who invented marking menus, that he was the one behind the patent, that he was the senior user interface researcher at SGI/Alias, and that I should talk to him. He never mentioned Gordon Kurtenbach, only Bill Buxton.
>So I called Bill Buxton at Alias, who stonewalled and claimed that there was no patent on marking menus (which turned out to be false, because he was just being coy for legal reasons). He said he felt insulted that I would think he would patent something that we both knew very well was covered by prior art.
>I told him that companies try to get bad patents all the time, and that I did not mean to insult him by simply repeating to him the misinformation that his marketing people were spreading around the computer industry, in his name. I told him that should not shoot the messenger, and he should reel in his marketing department and tell them to stop spreading FUD in his name, which he refused.
>I tried to explain how Alias’s FUD had adversely affected the user interface design of 3D Studio Max, who refused to implement pie menus in spite of user requests for them. But he did not care about 3D Studio Max, since Kinetix was his competition. I asked him whose side he was on, the user’s or the patent lawyer’s?
>He claimed to be on the side of the users, since he is such a well known user interface researcher, but I believe he has sold out to big corporations like Alias, SGI, Microsoft and Autodesk by abusing the patent system for profit, and is in the thrall of corporate lawyers, so he wasn’t being honest. Users beware!
Are there any associated patents that haven't expired?
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22pie+menu%22&tbm=pts&sxsrf...
A lot of them are expired, and a lot of them cover something really specific or not directly related, some of them are really terrible ideas you wouldn't want to copy anyway, and many of them make trivial but obvious changes in the hopes of abusing a patent system, which is an extremely common practice, and a whole lot of them are completely oblivious to prior art, and shouldn't have been issued in the first place, but they were.