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Comment by Joel_Mckay | Hacker News Reader

Maya hasn't changed much in a decade, and that is a wise choice for training/documentation. They focused on the content part which is its value proposition.

Blender has always had the perpetual Beta problem, as many boring core design issues were never really given priority. Fine for developers, but a liability in commercial settings.

Houdini is interesting, but with Blender Geometry-nodes now working it is unclear how another proprietary ecosystem will improve workflows. =3

The Entagma channel covers a lot of Houdini and Blender bleeding-edge features with short lab tutorials:

https://www.youtube.com/@Entagma/videos

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I've only dabbled with Blender but from what I saw of geometry nodes it's quite a long way away from competing in the same space as Houdini. Houdini's biggest single feature and the thing that allows film studios to use it at complexity and scale is the HDA system and there's no real competition for that.

Blender has solved several key challenges, but the learning curve is steep given many tutorials are version specific.

I usually recommend these courses to users when the under $20 sale is active.

They cover a lot of Blenders non-intuitive workflows :3

"Complete Blender Creator: Learn 3D Modelling for Beginners"

https://www.udemy.com/course/blendertutorial/

* Basics of low-poly design in blender

"Blender Animation & Rigging: Bring Your Creations To Life"

https://www.udemy.com/course/blender-animation-rigging/

* Some more practice rigging

"The Ultimate Blender 3D Sculpting Course"

https://www.udemy.com/course/blender-3d-sculpting-course/

* Sculpting, Retopology, and VDM brushes

* basic anatomy

"The Ultimate Blender 3D Simulations, Physics & Particles"

https://www.udemy.com/course/blender-simulations-physics-par...

* Shader/Texture basics

* Geometry node basics

* Boid sprites

* Hair and physics simulation

* Camera FX, and post-render filters

* Instructions on how to export your assets to Unity 3D and Unreal game engines

I think the main difference between OSS like Blender and the competition is it seems like OSS only gets better. Each version is a little bit better, so projects that were once not competitive catch up. Blender is an obvious example, but also look at Krita, or the entire KDE project. These pieces of software age like fine wine: they get more features, they get faster, and they get more stable.

Closed-source software seems to get... stuck. In the best case. Often, they regress: becoming buggier from version to version with less features. I think of Windows and the entire Microsoft suite of applications.

I think one exception is Gnome. Gnome loves removing features more than they love not implementing popular Wayland protocols.

With OSS, unless every add-on is part of the build tree or package repo testing... it quickly becomes broken as the ecosystem constantly evolves.

i.e. of the $3k of community Blender plugins/add-ons we evaluated last year, only around 60% are still functional in stable blender releases. Additionally, many built-in core features like Fracture became broken in 4.x due to API permutations, and getting split into its own module.

In a production environment one must version lock Blender for the project. =3

IMO it's always a good idea to vendor software. But yes, OSS typically moves fast. It's a tradeoff.

Blender is definitely getting better compared to things like Maya but I don't think this argument holds for Houdini & Sidefx.

What is HDA?

Probably means a Houdini Digital Asset which is similar to a maya reference.

At one time there was a Houdini-Engine Open Mesh Effect plugin, but no idea if that project survived.

Cheers =3

Houdini is entirely a node-based system and HDAs are just your custom nodes (on contrary to the built-in ones).

At the end of the day, an HDA is just a 'function' you define like what you do in a programming language. A function can call other functions etc. It might sound nothing special if you're a programmer, but Houdini is the only generic DCC that is built around this idea, making it more like a framework than an app.

Geometry node is not Houdini (yet) though. The main reason people use Houdini is it's easy to transfer data between modeling (SOP) and physical simulation (DOP) contexts. And they're working on integrating rigging/animation too.

Geometry node is quite a separate thing from what Blender already has. Last time I checked one couldn't even create vertex groups in geometry node, and there was no way to create an armature there either. (Not sure if it changed since I checked though)

Indeed, Geometry nodes is new, and I have also found documentation on many operations sparse. That being said, it has proven itself very capable.

The mini labs on Entagma's channel were very helpful for parametric surface operations =3

https://www.youtube.com/@Entagma/videos

I think you should've be able to access vertex groups from the initial version of geometry nodes. Certainly, at this point, you can dynamically access (and set) arbitrary vertex groups, including loading the names of the vertex groups you want to access from a csv file, or otherwise synthesizing the names using string operations.

Indeed, but it is non-obvious how to handle it...

I found the Entagma lab videos very helpful in understanding how to parse geometry with nodes. It is not obvious (unless you already get CLI pipes), but so worth it when things finally work... =3

its actually funny, the first version of geometry nodes was actually more powerful in that way. it didnt provide many built in nodes, but the nodes it did provide were arbitrary property setting/getting. the current and newer geometry nodes system based on "fields" is way easier to actually work with but they don't give you raw access to properties. so like in the first version of geometry nodes you could write custom mesh normals just by setting the "normal" attribute with some vectors, but then from blender 3.0 to 4.4 you could no longer set custom normals in geometry nodes and they only added a set normals node in 4.5

That's often a problem with Open Source. Lots of people steering the ship, and it's hard for any de facto captain to really demand a direction. If they do, they may not have the contributors needed to really see it through.

This can be solved with paid contributors, but FOSS organization don't have the most funding out there. So it can be challenging when trying to attract specialized talent.

Donated to most projects we find useful, and also tried a few Blender paid plugins.

The other problem is people Cowing anyone that may not agree with their personal opinions how projects should mature. QED: Our karma scores... lol =3

These plugins made Blender usable for a few projects, and I have personally found value in supporting for asset creation:

https://tinynocky.gumroad.com/l/tinyeye

https://sanctus.gumroad.com/l/SLibrary

https://polyhaven.com/plugins/blender

https://artell.gumroad.com/l/auto-rig-pro

https://fbra.gumroad.com/l/Faceit (for Unreal face mocap app with iPhone Pro Lidar)

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