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Comment by royjacobs | Hacker News Reader

It never ceases to amaze me how much improvements Blender is getting all the time. I've never used it much, simply because I got burned in the past by the (legacy) esoteric UI, but it has increasingly become a joy to get started with and just noodle around with.

There are other cool open source tools of course. Blender could've easily remained another one of those hard to use niche applications, but they've definitely managed to transcend that.

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The EU and the Dutch government does not get enough credit for sponsoring Blender until very recently when corporate sponsorships took off.

In the US the commercial competitors would have sued the government for anti-competitive practices if they had sponsored Blender.

> In the US the commercial competitors would have sued the government for anti-competitive practices if they had sponsored Blender.

Can you give an example of where this happened?

This sadly happened in Germany, actually. We have a state sponsored weather forecast service, who also released a free Android (and possibly IOS) app. They were successfully sued by a for-profit commercial weather app (that even uses the publicly available data from the state sponsored service).

Now the state sponsored app is required by law to not be free. Last I checked it costs about two Euros.

Maybe they are talking about SpeedTax etc?

Heard of Google? The latest, and biggest one, is probably when 3K+ companies sued the Trump administration over the Chinese tariffs.[0]

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-china-tariffs-idUSKCN26H...

Honestly hats off to the Blender dev team for taking their technically impressive but extremely tricky to use software and managing to over just a few years turn it into the one piece of 3D software everyone is suggesting to beginners and the fact it's free isn't even what you mention because the software is just great.

Really showing the great user experience on open source projects is possible and that the benefits are worth it.

Well damn, I didn't know that it had gotten easier to use but I am so glad to here it! I will definitely be giving it another go.

Oh I had no idea it was improved now. I tried it about 5 years ago and couldn't make heads or tails of it. I'll try it again.

As a career developer 40 years into specializing on 3D graphics and animation, Blender's progress and accumulative feature set is stunning. I realized about 6 months ago Blender had cross a threshold of usability, and in those years of being "difficult to learn and use" the Blender community quietly built out a feature set that rivals, if not exceeds every commercial 3D modeler, animation, node based procedural subsystem, compositing, and scientific visualization product on the market. Due to Blender's deep Python integration, deep learning libraries can be imported and integrated to significant mad computer wizardry. Blender has come of age, and it is going to eat several commercial software publisher's lunch, if they don't wake up.

I think I read the focus this year is also live action tools / production tools, so lots of things coming that fit a professional environment.

it's improved by quite a bit, I wouldnt call it "intuitive" to an existing 3d user, it just goes against so much pre-existing muscle memory and assumptions from other apps... but so does Z-brush and people love that,

I'm using it more and more these days for little tasks, processing meshes, plug ins here and there, it has a beautiful and easy to use renderer but I dont work in a field where rendering matters.

I dont really want an alternative way to sculpt texture or model, I have several already, and really my industry (film / previz) is moving to rendering in Unreal or Unity (much more unreal) but as a tool Blender is quickly becoming much more impressive.

having tought myself zbrush before it was useful (2.something?) blender feels like it's just gaining that usability now to expose useful features... but there's so much more that can be done.

I've been using it since it first went open source, and while it was (and still is to some degree) a beast to learn, it was pretty much always the best 3D software feature for feature compared against other (quite expensive) software I was using / learning at that time. Over the intervening years it's improved in every possible way (except that it's still extremely complex and powerful, but no getting around that). The thing that helped me learn it then, and still helps now, is that there's a plethora of excellent tutorial videos and websites available (as well as these days many great books and courses), all of which can be easily found with your favorite search engine. For some really great resources, check out Blender Guru, CG Cookie, Blender 4 Noobs, and other such channels (found easily on YouTube and other video hosting websites, and on their own websites as well).

I would highly recommend trying it again -- it's improved drastically in the past 5 years!

Blender was one of those things that I got into when I was in my early teens. This was around version 2.3X.

It has always had a great community, and made amazing development progress.

Version 2.5 was a big ui shift at the time.

These days with 2.8 then 3, they have managed to make some amazing progress, in a much faster turn around time.

I commend Ton's direction and the amazing work by the devs :)

I have trouble keeping up with the updates lately. To be honest, compared to quite a few CAD programs common in mechanical engineering, Blender doesn't have to hide here. Quite the contrary indeed.

Something about the project is very interesting indeed. It grows at a regular pace for non trivial ideas. And it seems all joyful and light.

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