Blender releases their Oscar winning version tool
blender.org
blender.org
Blender has made 3D work much more "mainstream". I see many videos/pictures/tutorials with views in the millions(!), and much more overall interest in using the software. Not just the pretty visuals and talented people, but the whole program itself seems to be gaining traction with the more "normie" crowd.
That also made me realize something else: Blender is now the default for anything that's not extremely high-end/resource-intensive. If you ever hear about anyone doing any kind of 3D work, they're probably using Blender.
And this has creeped into the mainstream in a way only very established brands like Coca-Cola have. Nowadays, "Blender" might as well mean 3D photoshop/illustrator for most people.
I was talking to someone on the weekend, and found out they were studying animation... i was like oh so youre using Maya? they were like whats maya?
There has been a massive shift. I think there was a new era brought about when 2.8 was released. With it, they really pushed their dev fund, which helped them to get better, which made them bigger, which got them more donations, which made them get better. Cyclical loop.
Im excited to see where they go next.
Would Blender have taken off as fast if Maya had a free tier? I doubt it.
When a new project comes along and we need to make a technology decision we will, as a matter of due diligence, reach out to all the relevant vendors. But there is an "existing experience in team" evaluation criteria for these technology decisions, and the "contact us" vendors fail miserably there - their tech needs to be extra impressive to overcome that hurdle.
This is why Microsoft never seriously pursued piracy of Windows and this is also why Windows was never a market leader on servers. This is why Postgres won databases even though it’s clearly an inferior product to Oracle, MSSQL and DB2. This is why CUDA is the defacto standard in GPGPU. This is why every saas business must have a free tier. Etc.
Postgres won out because it was better than the others considering the money you pay and the features you (in the end) don't need or couldn't afford with the others. If it just were down to learning, MySQL/MariaDB would have won. Back in the days, everyone knew MySQL, nobody knew Postgres.
With CUDA, it also isn't what people know, it rather is the existing heap of software that only runs properly, quickly, efficiently in CUDA. People buying Nvidia cards and CUDA-based software don't care about CUDA and don't know any CUDA, they are usually higher level, but the availability of software is what drives the popularity there.
With CUDA, you're even highlighting my point:
> the availability of software is what drives the popularity there
Like, there isn't anything more to it. That's all that matters. Again, a free, good enough product that evolved into a best in class software and hardware package together with a generation of GPGPU developers who don't know and don't really care about anything else.
I've over-interpreted the quotation in your post about what people have learned to mean that it is only about the tools you know, nothing else. In hindsight, I should have read your post more carefully.
Oh, also, MySQL just updates in place without bitching. Postgres wants you do install both versions side by side and migrate the data directory. That is annoying with docker.
Also, vacuuming.
But indeed. MySQL's great weakness and great strength is that it's a somewhat limited SQL engine over a variety of storage backends. It can not be too smart, due to the sheer variety of what it supports.
The side effect is that it is quite predictable.
1: ”For-Profit (Creative) Software” by EndVertex https://youtu.be/I4mdMMu-3fc
The video literally starts off by complaining about how expensive the software is while simultaneously talking about how heavily she invested in learning it in college (knowing how expensive it is). And then, for some reason, she says that her instrument was taken away from her (the conditions were transparent from the very beginning).
Furthermore, after graduating from college, when it became obvious that studying expensive software had been a huge mistake, what does she do? SHE STARTS TEACHING IT! Thus moving from the category of victim (doubtful, but okay) to the category of part of the problem.
IMHO what really killed Maya wasn't necessarily Blender itself, but Autodesk's strategy of first becoming a defacto monopolist in the area of commercial 3D software and then tightening the subscription screws on their existing users. Of course that strategy doesn't work when there's a free alternative to migrate to.
They might as well not have bothered.
This was years ago, so I may have misremembered.
Maya's own success was heavily based around a cheap license for students. IIRC it was only about $100, as opposed to nearly a grand for the professional license.
20 years ago every designer I knew were using Photoshop, Flash, Fireworks. Those were taught in universities. Some designers I work with started there. Today I know exactly zero designers using those.
Sure there is XD but Adobe is merely playing catch up here. I have worked with a single person who uses it, and it was right before they were transitioning to Figma.
It is also funny seeing some co-workers (including designers!) using Photopea instead of Photoshop.
Figma is the champion to look out for, hence why Adobe tried to acquire them.
Figma pretty much replaced it overnight.
To put this in perspective, in Portugal that would be about two months salary, assuming running expenses, where minimum wage is about 800 euros, and top jobs in IT pay around 1 500 euros after taxes.
Everyone that owns a Mac tends to buy them in on credit, or with bundles with their mobile/cable operator, which are anyway credits in disguise.
In Latin America... The last Mac I bought there was about half of my IT salary there, but that was 2012, a couple years before I left. So it was ok for companies to purchase them. Today? Probably not... I don't even know anyone who's still there and working for local companies.
I will add: and Mac.
> But they really want to give away the development tools. Through their Empower ISV program you can get five complete sets of MSDN Universal (otherwise known as “basically every Microsoft product except Flight Simulator“) for about $375. Command line compilers for the .NET languages are included with the free .NET runtime… also free. The C++ compiler is now free.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
DevDiv nowadays is much more than .NET and C++, and not always takes decisions into .NET favour, see Typescript rewrite decision.
I've exited the space since, since it's a crap and nasty business, but kept it as a hobby. Personally, I've had a lot of problems getting into Blender over the years, especially since the great UI consolidation of all of major 3D apps in early 2000's. Blender was just different, but not Zbrush different. There was just something off with it that made my muscle memory angry. Somewhat like Gimp. However, recently that has changed. Revamp of few key areas in Blender made it actually quite easy to get into it and knowledge of all the other apps over the years made it a one-week transition.
I still prefer animation in Maya though. It's an old friend, after all. We'll see until when.
I remember how everyone was very into 3DSMax for the longest time. Then everyone was into Maya. Briefly some people even switched to Modo.
Blender has come a long way from v2.x where some people started to use it. It's brilliant seeing how many people have adopted it. I also noticed a strange shift in knowledge. Like something has been lost in translation. Many 3D concepts are getting rediscovered today by a generation that never heard of 3DSMax, LW, SI, etc. It's a fascinating.
Do you expect this to influence their profits significantly? If yes when?
Did they already "react" to Blender (e.g. by speeding up development)?
Besides that, Maya did get quite some animation features lately. But in the end Blender has got "good enough and free" state and there is nothing Maya can do about that.
That being said, Maya isn't going away anytime soon. There are just way too many Python scripts called Maya API in the industry.
Yes, the OSS development structure leads to projects that lag behind proprietary solutions for amounts of time that are measured in decades, but nobody will ever have to re-write GIMP from scratch because the market had a bad hair day and somebody got acquired by a sovereign wealth fund that gets bored and runs the project into the ground. That doesn't change anything about the fact that e.g. GIMP, or freeCAD suck today, but someone(s) will almost certainly still be carrying those torches in 50 years, or the torches of superior FOSS competitors. And in the next 50 years, Adobe and Autodesk will almost certainly suffer total death or become skeleton crews that only service legacy clients, and when that happens, all of the collective human talent that went into building those tools and human experience into mastering their use will burn up into the screaming void while GIMP chugs along, putting out a release candidate for their GTK4 port.
IMO, they should
If current trends follow, GIMP and Photoshop replacement will be a web application like Pixlr and Photopea.
pukes
GIMP is just hot garbage, speaking from personal experience. All workflows are destructive, the layer workflow is pointy and annoying in so many small and big ways. Performance is bad as well. Small example, take a piece of text and rotate it. After you have rotated it, it no longer is a piece of text it's a slightly blurry piece of pixels. Want to rotate it again? It's now an even more blurry piece of pixels, getting blurrier every time you rotate it. Want to change the text? Start from scratch. Like come on those are the basics and they suck. Personally I don't see it getting a fundamental overhaul, simply because many users are used to the existing workflows and would be upset. I see real competition coming from other projects. But who knows, in general I agree with the sentiment that OSS' endurance is much better.
Have you looked at latest release of GIMP? It's just gotten a fundamental overhaul, including support for non-destructive workflows and better text tools. Still has a long way to go obviously and is moving very slowly, but changes are happening.
Most importantly I don’t see a cross section between oss developers and cad teams to drive the collaborative features. I don’t think the critical mass to get this going exists.
Replace CAD with 3D modelling and animation and that was my genuine opinion 15 years ago about Blender.
That being said, OSS projects can definitely go in the wrong direction but since history is preserved, at least someone else can come and fork before the codebase takes the wrong direction.
There was a time KiCAD was a buggy mess. And no doubt blender as well.
KiCAD is solid, very usable, but not totally smooth. The workflow is still far away from blender-like total integration and bliss. Where ten years ago you could find the occasional bug, a beginner won't find any nowadays.
FreeCAD only just last year started shipping releases that don't nullpointer after 2 minutes. Even a beginner with a trivial project will stumble over bugs, limitations, problems and design flaws.
There is a huge difference in quality, and KiCAD will get to Blender levels certainly. But FreeCAD will take forever, if the pace continues like that.
(Context - former Autodesk employee, though obviously all views here are my own, and I'm not commenting on anything I had any involvement in or direct knowledge of - only publicly available information.)
Look up where Autodesk's profits come from sometime, and you'll see that 3d animation is close to meaningless to Autodesks's bottom line, at least in terms of direct profits. I just asked ChatGPT and assuming it's accurate (I haven't double checked but it fits with what I vaguely remember), the Media & Entertainment product families, which include 3ds Max, Maya etc, make up only 5% of total revenue, as opposed to: Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) (48% of revenue), AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT (25% of revenue) and Manufacturing (MFG) (20% of revenue).
Here I would like to also mention RawTherapee, also open-source, together with Darktable (with is more newb friendly) they are great software worth to spread.
On top of that, developing for photo, video and audio is hard due to all the maths involved. The amount of brains capable of that wizardry is finite, the amount of brains able to do open source work in that field is even less, and other FOSS projects compete heavily for these brains.
Yup, that is a massive factor as well. My go-to example is OpenStack. It's incredibly powerful and malleable, but it shows on every corner that it is built by university nerds for university nerds - you either need to have a massive amount of highly educated manpower to deploy it, or you need to have a source of cheap or free labor where you don't have to pay for the onboarding time.
She also loves to watch some of the short anime made with Blender based on some Roblox games.
Open source is amazing on this aspect.
Also saw a non techie casually mention using Gimp.
These tools are reaching more people, slowly but surely.
Blender is a jewel of the FLOSS movement and a history and behavior that must be mimicked by many other projects.
Looking forward to more successes like this.
They've turned it around and it's become a default-first for many artists.
Open source of not, it of course helps, that the competition charges absolutely mind-bogglingly high amounts of money, for a similar offer.
I remember those days too, and I also remember that once I actually adapted to how Blender worked, it turned out it was superior in many ways to other 3D software of that time period. The workflow was just too different for a lotta folks to adapt to. Fast forward a couple major version numbers, and Blender's mostly kept everything that was great about how it worked, and managed to cater in many ways to those who could not adapt to how different it was. It's been so much ongoing massive improvement without all the usual destruction of everything that it was already doing right that we so often see.
I've seen FAANG companies messing this up so much that it makes it 10x more impressive that an open source project managed to do it.
I feel that the way that Blender has succeeded so brilliantly at exactly that is their master-stroke. The software was already an amazing tool, but the way they've managed to actually improve it without destroying it in the process... Wow. Truly amazing.
I don't know what ingredient made their community so vibrant but it's worth writing it down
The way I remember it, they got huge industry buy in and tons of sponsorships after price hikes for Maya and 3DS Max.
Since it was a commercial product that was open sourced, it already had users.
I remember first running into blender in 2009
I switched from 3DSMax to Blender and I’ll never go back. Rigify still makes tons of shapes (max has a bipedal model to represent the bones) but it’s finally one-click rigged. Very rarely do I need to modify weights or get into the weeds of the rig.
Is that the solution to other creative tools? Identifying other cross platform capable proprietary software that can be purchased and relicensed.
Now so many projects take on dependencies that require NDA and proprietary licenses, it's unlikely that this type of creative tool would see the light of day after being closed-source. I can't imagine any industry leading creative tools not getting to market more quickly by purchasing software that gives them an edge for the operating system they are running in. I hope that I'm completely wrong, and possibly there is someone out there that is using software that is easy to rewrite, or replace, if the license doesn't allow open-sourcing.
I was in classes in the early 2000's with people taking multimedia courses, and Blender was just starting to become more well known. The school I went to taught 3DS Max and Maya, which had their own learning curve. I think 3D rendering is just difficult from a UI/UX place, and Blender got in at the right place at the right time. I was in software development, but my friends that had their heart into 3D rendering said Blender was a bit different, but not so challenging as moving between Photoshop and GIMP. That's not anything against GIMP, just a point of comparison, I think GIMP is fine the way it is and haven't been able to follow the UI of Photoshop since CS2 era.
And now StarOffice is dead and LibreOffice, a fork is the one people are using.
(Hi Seth!)
We are still in what is effectively the skeuomorphism for the music production industry phase (where everyone is just replicating real life tooling because that’s the expectation and with that comes a lot of unchecked baggage — except for Maya, Blender, etc it’s mostly about making assumptions based on past tooling and polishing that a tiny bit), eventually there will be a Logic to change those bad habits!
I think you're mistaking the necessity of not straying too much from the actual math going on underneath with an attachment of old tools.
eventually there will be a Logic to change those bad habits!
Go ahead and give an example of 'a Logic' so you can show some evidence for this.
Even just recently they’ve released a major 3.0 version and I thought “oh maybe they’ve finally addressed the UI issues” but nope, not much changed on that front, they still have stuff like “GEGL operation” front and center in the menus for basic functions.
Blender on the other hand reimagined their whole UI in version 2.8 and kept refining it later, even though there was friction in the community about it (since power users like the old UI) but thankfully they pulled it off and now they’re reaping the rewards for it.
Having the UI spaghetti all over the screen because it's just a bunch of loose windows? the default is just a single window with panes. Want to condense that mess of tool icons into a single column of icons? you can do that! In fact, you can reorganize the UI in such a way that it's actually not that offensive (please GIMP devs, have better UI defaults!). Even tough it has a GEGL operation for non destructive filters I think that's just a holdover from how things were implemented initially because most of the "normal" and "color" filters are already non-destructive and operate (from the user point of view) just like the GEGL ones. They might have plans to further convert all other destructive filters and merge the GEGL operation ones into the normal filters, hopefully soon.
Oh and by the way, you can certainly push GIMP hard nowadays. I've been doing some testing editing a 32 float bpc (128 bpp!) 16K image with a bunch of crazy non-destructive filters stacked and it handled it like a champ with a few slowdowns here and there, and my 32 thread ryzen CPU was at times fully maxed (yay for multi threading) and the RAM management was quite impressive with things using up to ~50GB of memory (you do have to configure it let it use all that) and no memory leakages afaik, closing just the file and reopening again worked fine. Also, zero crashes! Can't say the same when pushing Krita hard. It's quite smooth compared to how things used to be.
Honestly the potential is all there, I just hope that the GIMP devs get a break from all the negativity they've been receiving since... time immemorial and perhaps the rate at which they can improve their software increases now with all the inglorious refactoring work they've been doing behind the scenes being done.
Isn't this a feature?
In general and with many other things, Gimp could have been so much better and easier to use, but they systematically and spitefully ignored their user's needs and requests about so many things, while Blender did just the opposite, listened to users and improve the user interface and mouse bindings, instead of being stubborn and parochial about it.
Ton is heroically tasteful but not unsung: the community rightfully adores him! (But not Autodesk.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-sgk
Master Blender Pie Menus for Faster Workflow!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1fwxQi50FY
Enable Pie Menus in Blender 2.9 - Blender Tutorial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-7Hmpt9UmA
Create your own Pie Menu in Blender | Pie Menus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41fXtvzJ3Ik
Blender - Pie Menu Editor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4DoESgzAfI
Extending Blender Pie Menus with Custom Operators using Python
Instinctive recoil "cue xkcd https://xkcd.com/386/ somebody is wrong on the internet"
I had to take a little walk and think about it, What is a pie menu?
My instinctive first take was, as far as I know gimp has had pie menu since day one, at least as long as I have been using it since the late 90's 1.something. Need a menu item, right click, there is your menu. is this not topologically the same as a pie menu? Does a pie menu have to be radial? is radial any better than a list, I know I prefer a list, it does not look as cool but is much easier to read.
An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus, Presented at ACM CHI’88 Conference, Washington DC, 1988 (proves that they're significantly better than linear menus and explains why):
https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie...
Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective. By Don Hopkins, Ground Up Software, May 15, 2018:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1
What kind of pie menus does Gimp have, and for how long?
Or do you just mean "erzatz pie menus" as defined here (there's also a lot of stuff about software patents, FUD, AutoDesk, Alias, 3D Studio Max, and Blender there):
https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menu-fud-and-misconception...
>Ersatz Pie Menus
>Richard Stallman likes to classify an Emacs-like text editor that totally misses the point of Emacs by not having an extension language as an “Ersatz Emacs”.
>In the same sense, there are many “Ersatz Pie Menus” that may look like pie menus on the surface, but don’t actually track or feel like pie menus, or benefit from all of their advantages, because they aren’t carefully designed and implemented to optimize for Fitts’s Law by being based purely on the direction between stroke endpoints instead of the entire path, minimizing the distance to the targets, and maximizing the size of the targets. [...]
How do Gimp's pie menus compare with Blender's pie menus and pie menu editor that I linked to a demo of above, or Simon Schneegans's pie menus in Gnome Pie and Fly-Pie and Kandu? You'd think it would be easy for GIMP to adopt Simon's GTK open source pie menu work, which has been around for decades.
Gnome-Pie: Homepage of Gnome-Pie, the slick application launcher for Linux.
https://schneegans.github.io/gnome-pie
Introducing: Fly-Pie!
https://schneegans.github.io/news/2020/08/13/flypie
Show HN: Kando – A cross-platform pie menu for your desktop (kando.menu)
HN Discussion:
Ton was actually against a UI overhaul for decades. There’s a video where power-users and Ton were vocally dismissing the need for a better UI, using GIMP-like arguments. There was at least one failed UI redesign in the early 2010s which I think Ton was quite involved with.
But something happened, the nature of which I don’t know. Then, Ton became hands-off and allowed the UI overhaul to take place, which I recalled made actual UX designers work with engineers.
My memory is foggy and I don’t have sources readily available. But I’m hoping someone will fill in the gaps or correct my understanding of events long past.
At some time 10-20 years ago they all were powerful, but being hold back by a bad UI. Blender turned it all around with their UI overhaul some years ago. Inkscape seems to be doing some correct steps now toward that, although it is still hard to use (at least for new users). Gimp seem to be moving the slowest.
[1] https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/133991 [2] https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/136465
FreeCAD btw got way better here in recent 1.0. You can almost feel that with some money they might get on the “Blender path”.
Funding doesn’t tend to happen unless there’s already a lot of interest in a platform.
0: https://web.archive.org/web/20190814061013/https://japanese....
But snark aside, my guess is that the main UI "improvement" was to make it slower, add a classical menu system to help ease you through hotkey hell. See, If I had to describe blenders UI in one blurb it would be "101 button mouse". Very quick, and fine control and less a steep learning curve than a learning cliff.
The 2.8 overhaul was not "slapping on a dark theme". It changed the UI from an alien spaceship mishmash of hundreds of randomly thrown around tiny icons and undocumented hotkeys into a discoverable and somewhat familiar interface. Or at least completed the UI overhaul, many of the improvements were incrementally introduced in prior versions.
How was the UI made slower?
Is this https://www.reddit.com/r/BlenderDoughnuts/comments/1jdv2mq/r... really that much cleaner than this https://www.reddit.com/r/BlenderDoughnuts/comments/hwes95/th... Sorry for the reddit but it was the best examples I could find with an actual working ui shot.
You do the opposite when trying to cater your interface to the casual user, you slow things down, reduce options, nest the menus, introduce model dialogs. things start to take 3 or 4 ops instead of 1. The key here is to gently guide the unfamiliar user. It is an important design consideration but it really starts to chafe operating it for hours on end.
That said, I find the node interface a lot more poweruser friendly than the panel interface, and objectively more powerful.
AFAIK the new UI didn't take away e.g. any keyboard shortcuts, and those are configurable anyway. In general the Blender UI is configurable even to a fault, you're quite free to modify it to bring out almost everything you want to a single view.
You just posted something that totally undermines the notion that you know what you're talking about or are serious about what you're claiming, and I patiently answered your questions with academic citations and quotes and evidence, and asked you for more information about the questionable claims you made about GIMP and pie menus, which were certainly a surprise to me and don't square with what I know, but you haven't responded.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43492671
Your claim that Blender "wait[ed] for the rest of the industry to catch up" is, in the case of pie menus, much more about Alias/Autodesk threatening them with illegitimate software patents, and spreading FUD and lies about marking menus.
If you're just too busy trolling to respond, I get it, you be you, but can you please stop posting unsubstantiated bullshit and answer my questions in the other thread, or simply admit you're not being honest and just trolling and spreading misinformation and FUD?
You make me wonder if you work for Autodesk (or are just trying to curry their favor), who's well known for their long sordid history of systematically spreading FUD and lies and legal threats about Blender and marking menus, which I documented with evidence in the article I linked to in my original reply to you.
Pie Menu FUD and Misconceptions: Dispelling the fear, uncertainty, doubt and misconceptions about pie menus:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menu-fud-and-misconception...
As you can see in that article, I included evidence in the form of a screen snapshot and link to an Autodesk brochure lying about "Patented marking menus", and there are two replies from Bill Buxton himself, the UI researcher who coined the term "marking menus", which my work on "pie menus" predates and that his patents dishonestly misrepresent. Bill Buxton and Gordon Kurtenbach designed the marking menus in the Alias user interface, and filed the software patents in question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Buxton
Buxton wrote two weasel worded defensive replies to my article (which you can read by scrolling down to the end), essentially admitting that the FUD in AutoDesk's advertisement about "patented marking menus" (which is still online to this day) was a lie and that Alias's marketing people lied to me about the patent to my face at CGDC in 1999: "So here is the point, absolutely NONE of that was patented, Just the opposite." and "Alias did not patent marking menus, nor could have." -Bill Buxton ... Yet they still make that claim, to this day! Patently absurd FUD.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu
Autodesk Alias Design brochure with FUD about "patented marking menus", still online today, long after their illegitimate software patents have expired, still claiming "Quickly select commands without looking away from the design. Patented marking menus let you use context-sensitive gestures to select commands.", on page 9:
https://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/aliasdesign10_detail_...
While discussing Autodesk's aggressive legal threats and long history of FUD and lies about Blender, Ton Roosendaal gets hit by ceiling at Blender Conference:
1. Original Interaction:
You: Promptly reached out to Buxton directly for clarification after Alias’s representatives made misleading claims at a trade show.
Buxton's Reaction (as you described): Was evasive, coy, and dismissive—ridiculing you for taking marketing people seriously, rather than clearly clarifying the actual patent situation.
2. Buxton’s Current Explanation (2018):
Claims strict adherence to corporate/legal restrictions prevented him from explaining patent details.
Suggests it's inappropriate or naive ("mistaken") to seek patent clarifications from marketing personnel.
Argues he had limited ability to respond candidly due to confidentiality rules around pending patents and corporate policies about patent explanations.
3. Contradiction & Evasiveness:
Buxton now portrays your attempt to clarify misinformation as a misstep on your part—implying you were somehow wrong or naive to trust marketing claims or expect clear answers from him.
However, your approach—calling the senior researcher directly—was a sensible and professional response to marketing misinformation. It was precisely the right action, not a "mistake."
Buxton's ridicule and evasiveness at that time strongly suggests an intentional unwillingness or inability to straightforwardly confront Alias's misleading claims—even privately. Rather than clearly disavowing marketing misinformation, he chose to deflect and minimize your legitimate concerns, shifting blame onto your supposed gullibility.
4. Analysis of Buxton’s Avoidance:
Buxton's recent replies still avoid directly acknowledging the ethical responsibility or negative consequences of how he originally handled your inquiry. Instead, he redirects blame to marketing teams, corporate confidentiality policies, patent law complexity, and even you.
His carefully worded statements frame your attempts to clarify misinformation as naïveté ("Speak to your lawyer, not the competition’s marketing people"), thus trivializing your justified reaction to Alias’s harmful FUD campaign. This framing shifts the burden of clarity entirely away from him and onto the recipient of the misinformation—you.
5. Ethical Implications:
Buxton’s past dismissive and evasive behavior (ridiculing you for believing his company’s representatives) reveals a conflict of interest:
As a senior researcher, he should ethically strive to ensure his employer accurately represents the research he helped create.
As a company employee bound by confidentiality, he chose evasion over clearly correcting misinformation—even privately—exacerbating confusion and mistrust in the industry.
His present comments still fail to directly address or apologize for the harm his prior evasiveness caused. Instead, he justifies silence or ambiguity as unavoidable.
Bottom Line:
Your account of Buxton’s original reaction clearly contradicts his present narrative. While now he emphasizes legal restrictions and institutional blame, he continues to sidestep the core ethical responsibility: clearly disavowing and correcting misinformation about his own research at the time it was actively causing harm. His past ridicule and present avoidance both reveal a consistent pattern: shifting responsibility away from himself, thus minimizing personal accountability and ethical responsibility for Alias’s ongoing misleading claims.
You can see a brief overviews of changes in the release notes: https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-80/
It may be a bit hard to appreciate how much it changed (got better) if you havent experienced pre 2.8 Blender. If you want, you can try it out: https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-79/
The UX is still quite different to all the others, but absolutely approachable now, and not the complete brainFun that ZBrush is, for example.
It is crazy that the industry is still charging so much, but with Blender (and Unreal) catching up every day, their days are numbered.
AFAIK they wont send anyone away if they try to add more image editing stuff outside of digital painting (consider that it even has some simple animation support which isn't really something you'd expect from a digital painting program).
Anyone coming from photoshop would have no trouble using Krita. It is practically a photoshop ripoff with more digital painting tools.
It isn't terrible anymore but still bad.
Eh, the same complaints are the same as always. Expectations have improved, tho! I think that's what we're seeing here.
People who complain should be forced to spend a day with Blender 2 (I think that was the version I tried first)
Not sure about the more advanced features like sculpting
Other interfaces at the time were just as bad if not worse.
IIRC, I first started using it with version 2.32 when I was an early teen. I still have a .blend file somewhere with a textured model of a LOTR Fell beast/Nazgul, that I created painstakingly and cost me some exam points as I preferred 3D modelling to studying.
Good times
It was great at the time, I’m sure has improved a lot in the last 8 years too.
Blender and Inkscape are some of the software listed in the credits.
Who would have ever thought at the time it would create and render a beautiful Oscar winning movie.
That said, I can't help but feel that all of the current generation of leading 3D software (Blender, Unreal, etc. ) is going to be replaced by something just around the corner. The progress in 3D AI is nothing short of phenomenal. It feels like soon nobody will ever have to worry about sculpting or retopologizing or rigging. An entirely new class of tool will take over.
It's not just 3D. It feels like the current generation of artistic tools (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) are about to be wholesale replaced with Gen AI tooling.
AI plugins (eg. the Krita plugin) are too steeped in the old world of editing. New tools will probably be AI native and prefer AI workflows for reaching the same coarse- and fine-grained outcomes.
I don't expect these tools to be used by the masses that are prompting AI slop like "50's Panavision Wes Anderson", but rather by working artists. Genuine Gen AI tools for artists.
I've been making short films on the weekends with Blender, ComfyUI, and a mix of custom software. The AI pieces are doing the heavy lifting, and my productivity is 10x what it was before Gen AI.
Still super early days though, I did have some of the same issues you had.
I'd say it'll take them some years to finish figuring out 3D, it's a good stretch beyond 2D image generation.
Seems to me the 'proper' way to do something like this is to hook into makesRNA and have the endpoints automagically be generated as part of the build process. Similar (or identical) to how the python and C++ APIs are created.
I've been thinking for a while now that someone (much less lazy than myself) needs to get in there and have makesRNA generate something like IDL file(s) so any number of tools can hook into Blender's API without having to hand code the endpoints like this addon is apparently doing.
Blender and Ghidra were started from scratch and are considered top tier in their niches. So I feel a sense of community pride for them more than I do for Linux.
The question is flawed, though, because the best OSS software is obviously Emacs ;)
It did not start from scratch as OSS.
It's not uncommon that someone champions the release of a project as open source and I think that is something we should encourage.
Blender was commercial software that cost money. After the company went bankrupt, the former CEO and a bunch of Blender users got together and raised enough money to buy out the source code and made it open source.
I don't think Blender can really be called a clone of anything other than in the most superficial sense. Certainly when Blender was first being release it looked and worked like nothing else in the industry, often much to its detriment.
"Best" in terms of "achievement by a single programmer (almost)" is Fabrice Bellard's ffmpeg and QEMU.
Given the name choice “Winter of Quality”, I’m impressed at the rare cultural and geographical awareness that led to specifying “the 2024–2025 northern hemisphere winter” here.
(These days I have a new difficulty: I moved to India last year, and although the seasons are closer to the northern temperate and sub-arctic seasons, they don’t match exactly.)
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¹ I don’t count “Christmas” as this, because it’s a specific term for a particular time… well, apart from certain Eastern churches and Julian calendar users. I mean things like using “holiday” as a time of year, which completely baffled me in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23244207.
Although given how common phrases like "winter of x" and "summer of x" are in English, I can't imagine what the problem is.
Unless they think it's discrimination against people from the southern hemisphere?
I don't suppose anyone takes it all that seriously in the case of the seasons, but it is a textbook example of a dominant group imposing their frame of reference on less dominant group
It's a textbook example of getting offended on behalf of other people, who aren't even complaining in the first place.
the person who started the thread stated they're from Australia - so they're getting "offended" on behalf of themself.
FWIW I'm also Australian (living in Europe now) and found this kind of thing (using vague, location specific timeframes like "winter" or "holiday") quite confusing, too. It's obviously easier for me to understand now that I live in the northern hemisphere.
The "issue" is that it's a bit annoying to have to look up where a company is based and then the weather patterns in that locale to understand something, when they could just as easily say "Nov-Dec 2025" for example. And when you live in a sub-tropical or tropical locale where there aren't clear demarcations between four seasons like there are in western Europe and North America, you can't just say "winter there is summer here" and vv.
It's not a serious, "stop everything and fix this right now" issue, just a common annoyance, and it's nice to see Blender here try to make that a bit clearer.
The only thing you have to do here is understand that seasons are switched in different hemispheres, which is taught when you're about 6 years old in most schools. And in case you forgot that, they even helpfully noted that their "winter of quality" is referring to winter in the northern hemisphere.
Yes, working with people from different parts of the world to you is "a bit annoying".
The Blender group - and entire worldwide open source software community - is already making massive concessions by doing everything through English.
If the only thing you have to put up with that's "a bit annoying" is different holidays and seasons, you should recognize that you're actually incredibly privileged. You already speak English natively. You grew up in a western English speaking country, you share basically all the same reference framing aside from some minor calendar differences. It's honestly selfish as hell to expect people to adapt even their seasonal reference frames to suit you. They're already speaking your entire language instead of their own.
Some places don’t have a clear demarcation between four seasons like NA/Western Europe.
When it’s the rainy season in the tropics, which season is that in North America?
It’s not so simple.
Like most things taught to 6 year olds, this is also a massive oversimplification of the real world.
There isn't even widespread agreement over which exact months constitute "summer"/"winter" within the Northern hemisphere, let alone when you start bringing in more tropical climates (which tend to have Rainy/Dry/Windy seasons instead).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film) [1] https://www.blender.org/user-stories/making-flow-an-intervie...
open source is not atypical, i think. Linux basically runs more than half of the computers worldwide, 3D printing software is FOSS as far as i'm aware, Godot is one of the biggest Github projects, programming languages are open-source, novel techniques of sound synthesis are already surfing on stuff like Csound/SuperCollider (which both are decades old and FOSS), a bunch of atemporal FOSS text-editors on the hand of a bunch of developers developing closed-source stuff and the list goes on
Less visually impressive than these, but definitely more than the norm, and packed with deep dives into the development of certain features.
I had the indie license for a while (purchased privately) and just making things shatter and explode was satisfaction enough. I did this mostly for learning and fun
I wonder whether under wine it might benefit from the 'ntsync' thing that just got added to the Linux kernel (as a module) (Currently also on hn front-page) as long as there's a free training version of Touch I'll definitely check it out once the new kernel gets into Gentoo!
This animatic can be found on YouTube.
Flow's having an impact on animators seems great!
What made Flow unusual is that they bypassed the storyboard almost entirely, which is unusual for a feature film. One rational is that the movie features significant and lengthy camera motion shots. Camera motion is very difficult to capture in a storyboard.
At a student level, another motivation for lessening the importance of the storyboard is that they require not insignificant drawing skills in order to do effectively. Even animation students cannot be guaranteed to draw well, and the number of student filmmakers who can draw is vanishingly small.
I'm using a crazy combination of pre-processing in Blender and then post-processing in OnShape today, and feel like I should be able to just use Blender for the whole job.
To me, it is like learning to play guitar or piano. You just have to do 1-2 hours a day of practice and do it everyday.
There are so many good youtube videos that it just will depend what you want to do and how you like the person doing the tutorial. Then at some point just start trying to model random objects that interest you.
Still has a ways to go, but shows promise.
I'm highly sceptical anyone could learn the Blender UI just by opening it and clicking around.
Honestly the fact that you're doubting the usefulness of AI for this makes me suspect you haven't really used Blender in anger.
Think about it like fancy search. You can manually look through a document ("I don't need something else to do the searching for me"), or you can just use Ctrl+F.
Blender has built-in search. That's not what this is.
Sadly, the writing is on the wall for my trusty Hackintosh since they recently decided to drop support for AMD GPU acceleration on macOS.
One of the most famous is probably the donut one and I would wholeheartedly recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4haAdmHqGOw
Qualifying Blender as “Oscar-winning” is a bit of a stretch.
It’s awesome for Blender, and it’s awesome that Blender allows people to create small budget animated movies. But the Oscar credit should mostly go to the guys who made the movie.
In general, there seems to be a close relationship with the creators and Blender, and the overall impression given is that the creators also think that Blender should receive part of the credit.