It did take me a week or two to adjust to Krita’s hotkeys coming from a lifetime of Photoshop, but the software in the end is leagues better for painting.
It's an exceptional drawing tool that is well-suited for professional work and is headed in a really promising direction. It's got a couple of weaknesses (vector layers) but it really shouldn't be discounted as a professional-level tool.
Unless you're claiming that Inkscape is in the same position and has gotten a lot better than the last time I used it, which :shrug: could be true, I don't know. I'm not trying to bash Inkscape here.
So the workflow I end up using for digital inks is: Open both programs, sketch in Krita, copy-paste the vector data into Inkscape, stroke->path, then use tweak tool to sculpt the lines. This adds line weight in seconds-to-minutes. Alternately, I can apply path effects instead of stroke->path, if I want a more programmatic design. If I want to paint, I can copy-paste the shape back into Krita.
With the death of EAGLE it's rapidly becoming the obvious choice for all hobbyist use, and it is powerful enough for quite a bit of commercial work too. It definitely isn't at Altium's level yet, but unless you're designing something like a motherboard you probably won't be missing much.
That's what separates it from most open source projects: not that it started as a commercial product, but because its designers and developers stowed their egos and worked diligently on creating a solid piece of software (and documentation and community and support) for a long, long time. In this way, it surpasses even many of its commercial contemporaries, which are driven by a profit motive to become increasingly paywalled and enshitified.
I think your minimization of its original commercial nature with additional facts about the UI is also an innocent misrepresentation.
Even though the 2003 Blender didn't have the optimal UI, what the commercial investment did for Blender was put enough value into software such that it had a headstart and momentum for subsequent investment from corporate donors/sponsors and volunteers to create the later UI overhauls. The substantial €4.5M business investment set the stage for the later developments. That it happened 20 years ago isn't the key. What's key is the financial investment to help motivate 20 additional years of work.
Compare that to the open-source development of Octave (a MATLAB alternative) where the developer is lacking money and is looking for employment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13603575
Observers can say Octave is not as polished as MATLAB. But a similar hypothetical investment of €4.5M of 20 years ago might have helped give it the "Matthew Effect" like Blender got. That the hypothetical Octave v2023 has a revamped UI compared to Octave v2003 would not remove all the causal effects of that hypothetical investment.
The next substantial investment was a €1.2M grant in 2019, and it was a direct result of the development of 2.80, both the new GUI and other improvements. It suddenly became an actual viable alternative to commercial products, making it worth investing in. These developments only happened due to the hard work of mostly volunteers, and a lot of donations from primarily the community.
It did not, because Blender went 7+ years without substantial improvements to its modeling and rendering tools and interface. It was a zombie, with a lot of resources wasted on the now-defunct game engine. The pivot away from what it had been is what made Blender what it is today.
>crote: Just because they shoveled a lot of money into it, doesn't mean they actually created a great product.
I'm citing these 2 comments because it's another example of mentioning observations that can be true -- but are still not a good explanation of _why_ Blender's level of polish is different from other open-source projects.
You guys are emphasizing the artifacts of the software as the proof of Blender's unique situation. Instead of the artifacts, I'm emphasizing the _community_ and _why_ they're invested in Blender to motivate the work on the subsequent artifacts (e.g. revamped UI) that you're referring to. The explanation of the community momentum starts from the business investment. In this framing, it doesn't matter that Blender v2003 wasn't great software. What matters is that v2003 (with whatever flaws) -- attracted enough community -- to keep working on it (and eventually "pivoting") for 20 years.
I go back to this you claimed as the key reason :
>yterdy: , but because its designers and developers stowed their egos and worked diligently on creating a solid piece of software
That would be a more convincing argument if the developers used the 2002 crowdsource money to build a clean-room rewrite from scratch instead of buying the existing codebase to get the millions in sunk development work at a steep discount. E.g., if what truly matters is the humble developer egos rather than the value of the exiting codebase, then there was no need to buy the old codebase. Just advertise the 2002 crowdsource money as paying for humble diligent developers to build a new 3D modeler from scratch. But that's not what happened. Both the crowdfunders and the original developers wanted that old codebase that was already paid for by business investments as a starting point. Even though the later v2.5 was a big rewrite, that doesn't change how the community thought of the v2002 software. It already has the interest level and evangelism to attract future work leading to the 2.5 rewrite.
If Blender was "zombie" software, _why_ were people working on "bad software" to make it better? Work backwards from that. Consider the motivations and interests. Saying "Blender v2003 wasn't great" doesn't really explain things.
Again, an emphatic, "No." Blender's massive improvements in the early-to-mid 2010s are what brought investment from outside sources, not the other way around. It was an artifact around which interested parties could rally; that says nothing of its value as an executable piece of software, but rather its value as a focus to fulfill a need, which could be freely used to fulfill it. Its commercial codebase was not valuable to anyone but the people who meant to work on it as an open-source project, and only because it could be picked-through, modified, even most of it scrapped if desired. This can be - and has been - done with software that descended from non-commercial codebases, because the motivation to create a polished product does not necessarily lie in a profit motive, and it definitely is not a product of some esoteric design homeopathy wherein that profit motive lies buried somewhere in Blender's code.
I think it's an insult to the hard work of the people who've produced the modern version of Blender that you insist on attributing the decisions they've made and implemented to some dedication to maintaining standards that did not exist for the product before they arrived.
What I will concede is that everything that has happened was necessary for Blender to be precisely what it is precisely at this moment, for better or worse. Including it's commercial history. I don't like that this conversation is becoming so contentious and I would suggest you think about what like concessions you can make to your counterargument before becoming married to a wholly antagonistic stance.
As a commercial product, it failed. We shouldn't say that being commercial is a model for success, Blender tried being commercial and it didn't work. If it had stayed commercial and had not been Open Sourced, it likely wouldn't exist today.
As a side effect of its origins and what people saw as the opportunity behind the project, it then got a lot of investment, and it turns out that Open Source projects with heavy involvement from their userbase (and not just from programmers) and with heavy monetary investments and a positive community that gets excited about the project -- it turns out that yields exceptional tools. But it's not the commercial aspect that caused that, the investments caused that, and other Open Source projects could be given the same level of investment -- after all, many of them are as good or as competitive (if not more competitive) than Blender was when it was Open Sourced.
As an Open Source program Blender has introduced architectural improvements and structural improvements that rival its origin, and it was able to do that without going commercial, which is evidence that this kind of investment and funding can exist for a non-commercial project if a significant portion of a community and businesses think the project is worth funding. It is arguable that starting out as a commercial project helped fuel that optimism. But to say Blender owes its success to being commercial feels backwards. Blender owes its success to the fact that it stopped being commercial, which was (and is) a contributing factor to why people and organizations feel so good donating to it. Like if we're going to take a lesson away from Blender, that lesson might be, "want to compete with Maya? Dissolve your company and give away your code."
I very much believe that Blender wouldn't have a community today if it had stuck with its commercial origins.
You're misunderstanding what my attempted explanation is about. You're arguing about reasons for Blender's success. That's not my angle.
My explanation is about something else: why Blender's level of polish (not "success") seems to be so advanced in relative comparison with other open source projects out there such as Gimp, etc.
In other words, people's expectations of open-source software usability/polish is so low that Blender's level of execution is surprising. This is the gp's particular wording I'm commenting on, >" I'm amazed at how professional and finished Blender is for being an open source project." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38262825)
The negative (usability) connotations with the phrase "for being an open source project" is something I've analyzed before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29605885
...all those open-source projects (Gimp, SageMath, etc) that are GUI instead of command-line that people complain of not having the polish of their peers -- don't have Blender's unique accidental history of having the (failed) commercial product kickstart the momentum and evangelism of a community to make subsequent Blender versions eventually exceed the expectations of typical open source projects. The multi-millions gave it a unusual headstart that Gimp, Octave, etc do not have.
I do agree with the following parts of your comment which don't contradict my argument:
>Blender owes its success to the fact that it stopped being commercial, which was (and is) a contributing factor to why people and organizations feel so good donating to it. [...] I very much believe that Blender wouldn't have a community today if it had stuck with its commercial origins.
I think the majority of Blender's polish came after being Open Sourced, and I don't think that movement was kickstarted by its origins. I do think its origins arguably played a role in its investment, but early Blender had a reputation of being exactly like many other Open Source projects -- powerful if you knew how to use it, but unpolished and arcane and difficult to learn.
When I first ran into the Blender, its interface was the biggest criticism I saw online about the project. Wherever the momentum came from to say "we could refactor this and make it attractive to regular modelers" I don't think that momentum was present in its early days or right after it was Open Sourced.
I'm tempted to dig into the history a bit more now, because I bet if I went back in HN history to the early 2.0 days, I would find comments saying that Blender is just like other Open Source projects in that its too confusing and difficult to use. The interface was what everyone trashed about Blender.
Of course investment helped with giving Blender the ability to undergo those kinds of radical transformations, but the transformations were sorely needed and I'm not sure that its UI was what fueled that investment. I think both overstate the connection, but I'm more sympathetic to a claim that Blender's commercial origins fueled its architecture or resources than I am to a claim that it fed its interface polish or excitement about its interface.
----
Personally, I think the biggest contributor to Blender's interface is the fact that its community is made up of a ton of artists and not just programmers. Additionally, a lot of its investment is coming from studios -- notably not from a company catered to studios, but specifically from people who are using the tool in-house as they develop it. Greasepencil in particular is heavily influenced by this; the current rewrite for Greasepencil 3.0 is being pushed and developed by people who are intimately familiar with Greasepencil as a creative tool.
In theory, Open Source should be a much better match for this than commercial software, because commercial software caters to a client-base but is developed usually by a player outside of that space that is seeking to monetize it. Open Source often falls into the same trap, but at least has the possibility to be developed and driven and to have feature requests prioritized primarily by artists and community members who rely on the software rather than by a separate entity that is interested primarily in how the software is marketed or sold. That Open Source very often fails at this is (imo) more of a commentary on the lack of community experience and community investment that most projects have. Stereotypical GUI Open Source projects are very often the result of external efforts from people who are not trained in GUI work and who are not quite as closely tied to their users.
I'd bring up Krita as another example here -- Krita has no commercial origins (https://krita.org/en/about/krita-releases-overview/) but is miles ahead of Gimp in terms of building a polished interface that caters to artists. One immediately obvious difference is that Krita's artist community is heavily engaged in the project and in regular communication with the developers and regularly gets involved in feature development and prototyping and testing. <incorrect, see correction below>In fact, Krita started out as a fork of Gimp, and yet has surpassed Gimp in terms of ease of use and polish.</incorrect>
"I think this is because plugins are made for people to pay attention to them and then buy more plugins. I just do patreon, so I make plugins to be used, and only by those who need them. They should be boring and never change, but the sound should be amazing and just immediately there so you can pay attention to the music, not the plugin, and then not have to buy more."
That's the secret to open source software if we choose to maintain it. There's a catch: OSS projects also gain mindshare through promotion and attention, putting them on exactly the same grounds as commercial software, and if you had an ideal project that perfectly met a need without drawing any attention to itself, that need would prosper and the OSS project would languish.
It's the old 'tiny piece of unsupported OSS software on which the world depends' problem. You absolutely can do that and the cost is that the project either languishes or fails (in the sense that it can't be maintained, not that it fails its task). Or you can lean towards seeking payback, in the form of money or in the form of attention, and it costs the users something but sustains the project more fully.
I'm starting to believe more and more that this is the essence to most things that look beautiful/simple/elegant.
It would definitely be nice to know more about that history, though.
That's just what I was getting at when comparing Blender to GIMP in this other discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38235871
>All of these ideas could be applied to Gimp too, of course, but I've found the Blender developers to be much more open to entertaining other people's ideas and contributions about user interface design than the Gimp developers, who have been historically NIH-limited and stubborn (especially about changing the name to something less offensive to the general public). At least Blender already supports pie menus well, and changed the default mouse bindings in response to user demand, and has made huge strides in usability lately. At this point I think it would be much easier to just add a great image editor to Blender, integrated with its video editor, than try to change the minds of the Gimp developers.
[...]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38232543
>>Blender has something else. Loads of money compared to Gimp.
>Blender EARNED every cent of its loads of money be being RESPONSIVE TO ITS USERS.
The overall UX structure has not diverged much from the old 2.x days.
As a commercial project it was a failure. It only became successful due to two decades of open-source development, and the willingness of its users to invest in it - even if only to stimulate the development of a competitor to expensive proprietary software.
Blender only became an even remotely viable option in 2011, after being open-source for 9 years. Its popularity only really started in 2019 after a massive UI rework made it actually nice to use. This and related changes led to Blender receiving a $1.2M grant in 2019, leading to other companies re-evaluating it and awarding even more grants.
If anything, compared to today's successes its initial proprietary development should be seen as nothing more than a historical curiosity.
A lot of that comes down to days structures used, system modules, abstractions, If that's done right, it's possible to make a good UX later.
That's very hard in modern software processes which emphasize short term spirits.
Back in the mid 2000s, I was on the "FOSS talk circuit" in Europe talking about Ardour. Blender stuff was often happening in the room next door (way more people ... graphics ... sigh :)
Blender got huge grants from both the EU and also, I think, Apple back in the mid-to-late 2000s that in retrospect look critical in boosting them out of their somewhat "stuck" development status.
Very little of what constitutes modern Blender came from NeoGeo/NaN. The original software was uncompetitive and unremarkable. In fact, Blender had to change most of its original UI conventions to feel less alien for CGI professionals. (because the original paradigm was from the ancient times before the commonplace UI conventions)
What made it stand out in the open-source community is devs using it for actually creating something (best investment!), positioning it at the intersection of interests of non-competing companies that need to get shit done, and also attracting a massive army of game modders.
It's the same modal editor with a million hotkeys and dense packed stacked dialogs, the most intrusive workflow change was when they swapped the default mouse keys.
Not to say the blender project has not done amazing work making things more discoverable. But as a occasional blender user from the sgi 1.X days. I suspect "the complete 3.0 overhaul making blender more standard" was more marketing than anything else. Blender had got a reputation has being hard to learn(all 3d programs are hard to learn). So while they did do a lot of work on the UI and it is much better, mainly it was loudly saying "we made the UI easier" and everybody sort of went along with it.
What kinds of widgets would Dennis Rader have in his "Bind, Torture, Kill" tookit? ;)
It couldn't be any worse than Motif.
BTK would also imply the existence of:
BLIMP: Blender Image Manipulation Program
Oh the humanity!
BLOME Desktop: Blender Object Model Environment
I would totally be down for that.
BIOME: Blender Interactive Object Model Environment
Little touches like this make the world of difference in professional tools
But then again you may be a much more productive programmer than I.
For a side project? I could never do it, not with everything else I got going on.
While not quite the same thing, if you have the time, dip your toes into some immediate mode UI, for example imgui. It is enjoyable not a grind.
Internally that's what Chrome/Firefox are, they render much of html/css on the GPU using OpenGL/DirectX/Vulkan/Metal.
> Do you think wasm has any chance of replacing the whole html/css stuff with just
No, you also need the DOM to enable frameworks like React which are used by a large number of sites.
* text entry (right to left as well as left to right)
* file browser
* treeviews that scale to 50k nodes or 10x that
* menus
My apologies for the word "just" doing a lot of work in that sentence.
https://devtalk.blender.org/t/blender-and-accessibility-for-...
> As a multi platform OpenGL app everything we draw is quite hidden from screen readers. Without cross-platform open source libraries available I can’t think of a feasible way of interacting with existing screen readers.
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/301899/blender-a...
To be fair, there's not all that much use in Blender for folks who cannot see a screen clearly.
Edit: Oops, somehow forgot input - but there again, I would natively expect most things to work via keyboard/mouse emulation, and beyond that you'd probably need custom integration, but it's got the Python hooks to facilitate that.
I wish they had at least a setting to change that.
Pro software made for speed and efficiency, you usually want to be able to do things quickly, even if sometimes people not used to the software might screw up. Holding right-click, selecting menu item and releasing I think is one of those things.
In consumer software, users would be confused because maybe they long-press the right-click, drag the mouse a little while holding down then releasing, and the menu would just appear and disappear. Confusing UX for most users, I bet.
Parent said blender was opening the menu onPress, which according to your comment is OK for pro software, Chrome is also doing the menu onPress
Blender dates back to 1994, when many modern conventions weren't really a thing yet (Windows 95 didn't even exist)...and they have put a lot of time into modernizations in recent years. Back when I was dabbling in Blender, in the early 2000s, Ctrl+S was the keyboard shortcut for "erase everything and create a new scene."
So it's slow, bloated, and crashes regularly?
I think Adobe has really improved the last decade or so in this regard.
Blender is really amazing and just seems to get more powerful every year.
I was experiencing less bloat and crashes in versions before Creative Cloud.
Nope. Been using Photoshop since version 1, AfterEffects since its inception (by a company called Cosa AFAIR) and InDesign since version 1. 30+ years give or take.
There all indeed so slow and bloated that they feel mostly unusable to me today.
And it's the opposite. It got to this over the last 10–15 years. Except Are. That was always slow but for motion graphics it's hard to get around it.
All the freelance VFX artists I know use old versions of PS and Ae.
InDesign is so buggy that I switched to Affinity three years ago.
Only younger people, who never experienced the snappy desktop systems & software of the 90's or early 2000's, think the state of things today is somehow normal.
I know after a new version a year or two ago some actions were noticeably slower, but I complained to the project manager on Reddit on the specifics and it got tightened back up pretty quickly.
Also, anyone using old versions of Photoshop are missing out. Both the new Remove tool along with the generative AI fill are absolute gamechangers.
I've found the latest Creative Cloud versions to be the most stable. I cannot recall a single Photoshop crash.
The bloat was ramping up pretty aggressively through CS3, CS4, and CS5 but the shift to subscription model really gave Adobe a license to not care about efficiency or UI snappiness.
They massively increased the complexity of their products after introducing the Creative Cloud. It's an absolute mess that can cause delays in Microsoft (!) just to make the new Windows release work with it. And Photoshop in particular has the byzantine PSD format that requires them to keep old versions of the code to read old versions of the format.
Adobe software in general resembles Windows nowadays - they are trying to modernize it but legacy decisions keep them from doing too much, as they can't break backward compatibility, their entire business model depends on keeping the users locked in. As a result, their old software is a terrible mishmash of UIs from different eras.
Learned python for use in blender, am a software dev in robotics now, using a lot of python.
Like EPIC giving them 1.2M: https://www.blender.org/press/epic-games-supports-blender-fo...
It does appear that the majority of top contributors are from European countries but overall pretty diverse: China, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Brazil, Egypt are represented as well.
That said, if I revised my comment to say two developer salaries per month, or 3, 4, etc. it is still impressive in my view.
I'm amazed at how much prejudice people still have about open source projects.
Blenders ui overhaul made it an entirely different beast
The "open source" label applied to Blender today inadvertently minimizes the commercial origins of it.
Blender's development has a unique (accidental) history that other open-source projects can't replicate deliberately: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/getting_started/ab...
In summary:
- Blender was originally paid commercial software that attracts venture capitalists to invest €4.5M and funds the salaries of 50 people to work on it
- The VC investors later sell it at a loss for €100k back to the original team to release it as open source.
Because many users of Blender are unfamiliar with the timeline of its development, they wonder why other open-source software like Gimp "isn't more polished" like Adobe Photoshop. Well, Gimp never had investors write off €4.5M of development on it.
Notably, there is literally nothing stopping other Open Source projects from being given grants of millions of dollars other than social convention.
We saw this with Godot after Unity. There's a coordination problem here, but we all mostly recognize that many of these fundamental tools would be better if we all collectively put our resources into an Open tool that is focused on serving the community rather than exploiting it.
It's just that without shocking events that prompt the bigger players to say, "you know what, heck this, let's just fund a good tool", it's very tough to get people to make that kind of investment, even though it would very likely be better for them and in the long-run more cost effective for them if they did.
I would argue that the majority of Blender's development (both architecturally and in terms of cost) happened after its commercial origins. But Blender continued to get investment because the community was invested in building a usable tool that wouldn't force them to deal with the crap of the other commercial products in the 3D industry.
Every other year I follow that "make a realistic looking donut" tutorial but mine always comes out lumpy and misshapen.