Even just a coffee a month will help immensely. Please consider supporting :)
Supporting open source creates competition for your paid alternative, so they're forced to give you a better product or a better deal.
You get access to training, assets, source and production logs like the recent Dog Walk update while also supporting Blender:
https://studio.blender.org/projects/dogwalk/production-logs/
It's easily one of the most well-made FOSS projects out there!
I know the industry standard of animation is still Maya, and geometry node isn't as powerful as Houdini, but Blender has made such great progress so far... I wonder if there any hobbyist/student who learns 3Dsmax or 3DCoat as their first DCC anymore?
*: Assuming genAI won't deliver and make that world disappear entirely, ofc.
I get the concern and the reasoning behind it but having spent most my adult life and career in digital content creative tooling (2D, 3D and video), I believe AI will be short-term disruptive but also a long-term net positive. It should make skilled pros faster and more productive while helping non-pros achieve more of their creative vision on their own.
For over 30 years progress in tools has been about giving creative people the power to realize their visions. To create more and do it faster, cheaper and at higher quality. Of course, they don't always choose to use that power well but the concern that "these new tools are just enabling bottom feeders to create more bad content" has remained a pretty constant refrain since I started in 1989. Even back in the 90s I said "Sure, these new tools will enable 95% more crap but they'll also unleash 5% that's great which wouldn't have existed before." I think that's just as true today as it's always been.
The problem is, AI is good enough to replace juniors. That means companies are already cutting positions at that level and some are just itching to ditch intermediates as well once quality improves.
But when juniors and intermediates are all gone... how are the beancounters expecting to get new seniors when the old ones go to retirement or hand in their 2 week notice because they are fed up cleaning up after crap AI?
But, I do wonder about smaller teams accomplishing more, which the unit of work-doing-people can be much smaller. The org tree can shrink, probably knock out some levels. Maybe a team of 4 that does the work previously done by 10 finds it easier to just have someone directly interface with the customer, rather than needing a layer of project managers and customer service to receive customers messages and distribute them.
I’d be worried if I was… anywhere above an IC really.
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:
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)
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.
Even if genAI were to kill the cinema/animation back-end industry, I still think 3D software would be needed to continue videogame development, and godot is far behind in modelling/animation capabilities compared to blender. Hopefully they can latch on this in the long term if it happens that AI keeps eating artists lunch.
The current state of things leaves a lot to be desired. I have yet to see a model, or technique that actually tackles real 3D content creation problems, aside from animation of course.
Most solutions are trying to solve things completely orthogonal to what you really need in the real world. They produce bad meshes, if meshes at all, have bad topology or inconsistent point sampling, and are extremely prone to parroting their training data.
It's kind of incredible how far we have come but seriously, to understand a problem space you need to try to use the existing tools. Only then, do new, and useful ideas pop up that solve real issues. But man, nobody in the space seems to have a clue.
Believe me, 3D modelling software is REALLY good at what it does, it is really hard to try and dethrone human and machine working together in these really well thought out pieces of software.
Tugged away at the end is defining custom cameras through OSL, which is a very very interesting feature, because it allows more physically accurate lens emulation, with dramatically more interesting bokeh than the standard perspective camera model: https://www.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/1kehtse/new_camera...
this is way nicer
At some point I see an LLM more or less integrated into the UI.
At some point I see whole apps written so complexly that an LLM is the required interface.
Waaaaay back in the Quake 3 days I had a pirated copy of 3D Studio Max and decided to try and make a Quake (or maybe it was Half-Life) character model. Found an on-line tutorial that step by step showed you how to setup Max with a background image that you "traced" over. So I grabbed the images of front, back and side views of a human, loaded them into the various view ports, then drew a rectangle from which you extrude a head, arms and legs. Then you manipulate the block headed human mesh to fit the human background image - extruding more detail from the mesh as you go along. In one day I had a VERY crude model of a person. I also found out I dont like 3D modelling. Though I'd say a person who really enjoys it would pick it up in a week or two with good tutorials.
LLM's just cut out the learning part leaving you helpless to create anything beyond prompts. I am still very mixed on LLM's but due to greed and profit driven momentum, they will eat the world.
Could check out https://extensions.blender.org/add-ons/mpfb/ for low-poly character mesh generation tools. =3
I have not tried it. Instead I have been asking Claude (etc.) "How do I create a repeating triangular truss..." or what-have-you. And then I follow the steps they list.
Though I don't like the Wayland x X11 flamewar, I'm happy to see some modern features are only supported on Wayland.
That may please the crowd that will be able to say "sorry, I can't use x11 because it doesn't support a feature I need" bringing some symmetry to the discussion.
Edit: correction: it is about the development 5.0 version: https://devtalk.blender.org/t/vulkan-wayland-hdr-support/412...
Why?
If anything that's a reason to why I wouldn't fully jump to blender.
I have been working on my own hobby game engine for the past 15 years and have been excited to introduce Blender to the workflow. If this is the case I don't like it. Wayland has never work for me the same way as X has.
There's also a third option where Wayland is foundational and the X11 network protocol is implemented on top of that for people who need it. Why should a network GUI service implement a driver to talk to a specific model of video card?
Also, getting the most out of Intel+RTX CUDA card render machines sometimes means booting into windows for proper driver support. Sad but true... =3
Making a feature platform specific to a negligible fraction of the users is inefficient, as many applications will never be ported to Linux platforms.
Blender should be looking at its add-on ecosystem data, and evaluate where users find value. It is a very versatile program, but probably should be focused on media and game workflow interfaces rather than gimmicks.
Best of luck =3
If nothing else, it's better to have some implementation to reference for future platforms than none.
