New Blender 3D with Motion Tracking, new rendering engine, dynamic paint
blender.org
blender.org
This summer, I used the "tomato branch" (Blender branch where motion tracking was developed) to track points in a landscape for a small project. It worked well but at the time the workflow to transfer 2D movement to objects in the scene was not obvious.
Thanks again.
There's no question that the workflow inside Blender is not optimal. Fixing this is planned for the 2.62 release. If you have specific suggestions on what you were expecting vs what was actually necessary, filing a report on the Blender bug tracker is a great way to get it addressed.
Keep doing it, and know your work is appreciated.
Blender is, in a way, similar to VIM or Emacs, in that the user interface is highly optimized for keyboard navigation. A lot of things can be done with the mouse and the keyboard without ever having to move through long and convoluted menus or hierachies.
It's also scriptable in Python. It's one of the first apps I install on my machines.
Edit: Typo
It's been a long, long time since I understood 10% of what a production-class modeling and animation tool can do, but maybe someone here knows:
How does Blender compare to Maya, for example? What would this project need to achieve before folks would start switching?
Since then, it's fluctuated in its rate of evolution relative to the industry standard. It always had cutting edge features, but they were trapped behind a troublesome UI, while the big competitors made their tools ever easier to use.
In recent years, the gap has been drastically closed due to a ground-up rewrite, completely new approach to the UI, and a tremendous effort to modernize.
Unfortunately, Blender still has a bad reputation, a legacy from the previous design. What's more, many studios and schools have firmly entrenched workflows, or depend on custom extensions written for a specific tool.
On the other hand, Blender seems to be enjoying popularity in the booming indie games community, where it integrates well with other free tools like Unity 3D.
With the new design, I wouldn't be surprised if Blender's best and most-popular days were ahead of it. I see share growth coming from individuals looking to make great graphics on a shoestring budget, as opposed to big studios or schools adopting it instead of Maya or Max.
I would argue that it is now roughly equivalent to those other tools in terms of features and usability. So, no real reason to switch (which requires expensive adjustments to existing workflows), but great incentive to adopt it in the first place (because it's free).
Blender 2.4 also let scripts create UI components, such as entire control panels to influence the running script. The last time I checked in 2.5, this was either not possible or not well documented. But I'm not up to date on this.
I'm also not familiar for comparison with the scriptability of Maya or other tools.
There is some lack of consistency between the different approaches, not just in the languages but in the presentation of the underlying data model, which isn't always helpful. Still, as a guy with a programming background, I actually found it easier to figure out how Maya works by playing with scripts and the underlying object model than by experimenting with the user interface. :-)
I know some 3D guys who prefer the way Blender handles a lot of basic modelling tasks. Others prefer Maya. I get the feeling it's a lot to do with what you're familiar with these days, because they're both quite capable in terms of functionality but they both have quite powerful, complicated user interfaces.
Unless something changed very recently, Blender still can't use FBX files properly. That alone is a deal-breaker for a lot of projects because FBX is very widely used in the rest of the industry.
Also, for all the talk of community around Blender, Maya still has a far bigger user base and far more professional-level tools you can plug in if you need more than the standard offering.
On the flip side, Blender is free and Maya costs several thousand. And to get Maya you have to deal with Autodesk, whose approach to customer service appears to be that they don't provide any. And the last two major releases of Maya have been absurdly buggy, to the point that Maya 2012 is already on 4 hotfixes and counting.
<<< - Texture display in the viewport. Somewhat amazingly, Blender doesn't seem to support this. When you're doing UV editing, you can see the polygons that use the UVs you're editing mapped with the texture you've selected as being visible in the UV editor, but that's about it. The sort of textured display that I'd expect, where all polygons are displayed textured with the texture(s) from their material, doesn't seem to exist.
- No N-sided polygon support. Yes, seriously. Quads or tris or nothing! So I think there's a mode where it works like MAX, where it works in tris but hides some of the edges to fool you (N-gons I think they call it), but I couldn't work out how to make this happen. (And there's some guy rewriting the mesh editing core to support N-sided polygons, but it's not done yet.) This caused me a big problem: Blender kept getting in my way! No way to create a rectangle with 6 verts, that's going to get an edge in the next step that splits it into two, because Blender will turn the intermediate result into triangles, forcing me to clean things up -- an extra step, that I didn't want, nor did I need. Now, maybe there is some special tool that I should be using, that does this in a Blender fashion -- but, seriously, I don't care. I can do things my way in every other package. >>>
Blender is one of the very few programs that has successfully moved me to tears of sheer frustration (funnily enough, I am very unlikely ever to try using it again), but plenty of people get on with it fine so it could just be me.
Regardless of my own inability to get to grips with it, I did think that the two limitations I describe above are kind of ridiculous for a 3D modelling package in 2010 - and I still think that. Every other package I've used just lets you jump in and create polygons with as many edges as you like, and shows you each material's texture in the viewport as you do it. Even if you can jump through some hoops to ge blender to do that too, that's too much - these things are basic features...
N-sided polygon support will be there in 2.62
Just compare the price of other packages ;)
Blender is everything that is right about the open source community.
The feature list is very comparable to commercial applications (which usually run > $500)
http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/features/
The community(s) are great, super helpful, nice, and diverse.
http://www.blender.org/community/user-community/ http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/ http://www.blendernation.com/ (and many more, in other languages)
But one of the most important, and as far as I know, unique things about blender and the community are the open movie projects.
The Blender Foundation establishes clear and detailed roadmaps for features (something many open source projects struggle for). Then they take a small group of some of the best artists and programmers from the community, and pay them to create a open source project using the current goals in the roadmap. The most recent was Project Durian, which created the short CG film "Sintel" with a focus on developing blenders renderer to do high res (4k) renders, and the animation system to allow for crowds and complex animations. They also developed some sfx like fire and explosions. At the end, not only was the film released as creative commons, but all the files from the film were too, so the community could benefit.
Where did the money come from? Presales of the DVD, which contained all the special features and files, and was released before the movie was posted to youtube, giving a "sneak preview". One project serving as fundraising, community support, community outreach, tutorial/teaching, feature development, focus grouping, beta testing/dogfooding, and publicity. Success.
Here are links to some of the other blender open projects.
- http://www.sintel.org/ - Project Durian - Sintel, focus on special effects, high res cinimatic rendering, and animation improvements. - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRsGyueVLvQ
- http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/about/index.php - Project Mango - Big Buck Bunny - focus on hair/fiber, work with outdoor/large scenes, improve animation system for cartoony deformation styled animations. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSGBVzeBUbk)
(Note: Chances are you've seen this somewhere, because of the CC licence, stores and online video hosts love to use it for a placeholder)
- http://orange.blender.org/ - Project Orange - Elephants Dream - This is the project which developed blender into a program that had all the features to compete with the big boys, added the node compositing and spleen animation controls, plus lots more. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFtg0WBD5Hc&feature=fvst)
I would advise watching all of those, besides being great artistically, the stories are actually pretty good.
As of 2009, the most common acquisition medium for digitally projected features is 35 mm film scanned and processed at 2K (2048×1556) or 4K (4096×2160) resolution via digital intermediate. Most digital features to date have been shot at 1920×1080 HD resolution using cameras such as the Sony CineAlta, Panavision Genesis or Thomson Viper. New cameras such as the Arri Alexa can capture 2K resolution images, the Red Digital Cinema Camera Company's Red One can record 4K, and Sony's F65 CineAlta camera can capture 4K and beyond to 8K 8768 x 2324.
So it is actually twice the resolution you would expect to see in theaters.
P.S. Don't show your daughter Sintel until you've watched it, it's actually fairly sad.
Ton is fantastic at making things happen, from setting up a movie project to coding in Blender (which he still does very much of) to organizing the three-day Blender Conference that every year lets a couple hundred Blender users and developers meet up in wonderful Amsterdam.
On top of that, he's a really nice guy!
One tip: don't try to use it on a Mac without a 3 button mouse.
Yes, Blender is that awesome.
Well indeed, not very noob-friendly and not very respectful of UI conventions. However, it is reckoned that once you get use to it, it is very efficient :
No modal screen. The screen is divided. You can adjust your workspace depending on your current task. Tweaking parameters is very easy thanks to well designed widgets.
If you try, remember that you should leave your left hand on the keyboard (like a fps) and use the keyboards shortcuts.
Blender's new (introduced in 2.5) UI is pretty cool. They try to have all operations available through a widget in the UI (with a tooltip), a shortcut key, a quick launch menu and through a Python scripting interface.
My favorite feature is the quick launch menu. Hit spacebar and a menu pops up, type in what you want and and it searches for operations using a fuzzy text search. It's also nice to see that you can adjust parameters to your operation and see your results live. Previously you had to enter all parameters beforehand and couldn't see the results, now you can e.g. draw a sphere and adjust the number of vertices in it, when you see the sphere.
Blender's UI has gone through a vast improvement and it's great that the UI devs have done their job well despite all the bashing they've had - I'm sure they would have done a lot more if they would have gotten more positive feedback.
Back when I started using Blender, when it was still a proprietary shareware software, most operations were only available through keyboard shortcuts that were mostly not documented. That was not a barrier for me, I quickly fell in love with the software.
Now let's hope that someone has the time to translate (more of) the manual to the new UI.
download.blender.org did not go down, so everyone interested in downloading even if the server goes down again the newest release can be downloaded from
http://download.blender.org/release/Blender2.61/
michael
Here's a working mirror of the latest: http://mirror.cs.umn.edu/blender.org/release/Blender2.61/