Blender 5.0 (opens in new tab)

Probably requires something that is almost there then a sponsor(s) to throw in developers or funding to get the rest of the way. On the EDA side CERN did a lot to lift Kicad to the point of being a credible alternative that could breakthrough like Blender. Both those projects are over 30 years old and for a lot of that time were dismissed as too difficult to use or lacking in features. FreeCAD is only 23 years old. I don't know what the code base is like but if a large org put a couple of good devs into it for a few years who knows.

It must be difficult when so much management is short sighted and focused on delivering short term profits for shareholders. Even academia is run like a business now.

Unless a privately held rogue company like Valve got interested its probably going to have to wait for a government/ngo/scientific. Industry, particularly the tech industry, is notorious for leaching of free and open source software and in some cases building entire businesses on it and not giving back.

"first class open source kernel"

Speaking with over a decade of experience as a developer in industrial CAD (but still just one random guys point of view only). The question _isn't_ about the availability of a 3D kernel.

3D kernel is not the "moat".

You can cross that with money.

You can purchase a ACIS or Parasolid and you are off to the races. Or even use OpenCascade if you know what you are doing.

The more interesting question is: Ok hotshot, you have a 3D kernel, 10M of investor money (or equivalent resources).

What's your next move? What industry are you going to conquer? What are the problems you are going to solve better than the current tools do?

What's the value you provide to the users except price?

What are you going to do better than the incumbent softwares in relevant specific design industries?

Which industry is your go-to-market?

Etc etc.

The programmer's view is "I will build a CAD". The industrial user on the other hand does _NOT_ want a "general CAD software".

They want a tool with a specific, trainable workflow for their specific industrial use case.

So "if you build it and they will come" will require speaking to a specific engineering/designer audience.

You can of course build a generic tool (it's all watertight manifolds in the end) but the success in the market depends on the usual story about market forces. What's your go to market/beached. Does it enable you to move to other markets? And the answer usually is - NO. You need to build the market share in _each_ domain separately.

The problem with FreeCAD and every other free/open source MCAD project of note is the Open Cascade kernel they are built on. While Open Cascade is fairly mature, it has dealbreaker issues in a few key areas: fillets cannot consume connected faces and may fail for a number of other reasons, cylindrical and spherical faces require seams which often cause issues with boolean operations, and shapes like helixes are also often troublesome.

Same, but I don't think it's possible without a large and sustained investment into a free geometric modelling kernel, which can probably be only done by a government.

Parasolid is powering practically every major CAD system. Its development started in 1986 and it's still actively developed. The amount of effort that goes into those things is immense (39 years of commercial development!) and I don't believe it can be done pro-bono in someone's spare time. What's worse, with this kind of software there is no "graceful degradation": while something like a MIP solver can be useful even if it's quite a bit slower than Gurobi, a kernel that can't model complex lofts and fillets is not particularly useful.

3D CAD is much harder than Blender and less amenable to open source development.

Something that I've daydreamed of in the past is making a new constructive solid geometry "kernel" around which a CAD application could be wrapped based on projective geometric algebra (PGA).

The algorithms it enables are fundamentally more capable and robust than traditional kernels based on linear algebra (vectors and matrices). You can do really fancy things like interpolating in space and time robustly, find extrema in high-dimensional phase spaces, etc...

This could potentially allow straightforward and robust solvers for kinematics, optimal shape finding, etc...

Every few decades there's a "step change" where some new algorithm or programming paradigm sweeps away the old approach because suddenly a hobbyist can do the same thing solo that took dozens of developers a decade in the past. I suspect (but cannot prove) that PGA is one of those things.

If you are looking for a tool that handles constraint based CAD for mostly like 3d printing your stuff, give Dune3D a try (on github), it's currently my go-to to keep a workflow similar to what I used to have on Fusion360, it's lightweight, open source and pretty damn good. The author also develops a EDA/circuit board designer called Horizon EDA.

IDK how they compare to professional CAD tools, but I've heard good things about FreeCAD and OpenSCAD. I know that some people use Blender for CAD work, and there are even some extensions to make it easier, but I'm dubious that the representation of meshes that Blender uses are well-suited for CAD applications.

I did a lot of parametric 3D CAD work in college as a MechE student, and switched to webdev after graduating. Recently, I had a hobby project that would have involved dusting off my CAD skills, and was bummed to find that there wasn't any software readily available that allowed me to lean on muscle memory I had built up using Inventor/Creo/SolidWorks/Unigraphics.

A viable OSS alternative, particularly one that prioritizes simplicity and being a gentle on-ramp for hobbyists, would be fantastic.

It wouldn't need (and I would argue shouldn't attempt) to compete with the big for-profit outfits to be useful either. Offering a simplified UX for the most-used features of the pro software would have a ton of utility, while also being a great place to build the foundational skills you need in order to master the more complex stuff.

Furthermore, a project with the mission of complementing the pro tools rather than replacing them would probably be far more likely to succeed, IMO. As long as projects could be exported to variety of formats and brought into some other software when a specific use-case arises, you'd have all your bases covered.

Onshape has blown me away with its browser interface and how quick it all loads. And as long as your projects are public, it's free.

You may be interested in CAD Sketcher: https://www.cadsketcher.com/

You're on point that there's a tremendous amount of money captures by Autodesk for CAD software that could be better directed at the open source community instead.

Software like OpenSCAD and FreeCAD are obviously not suitable for much commercial work, and have very irritating limitations for hobbyist work, in my mind a big part of that is the UI and Blender has a good and established UI at this point so I'd love to see the open source CAD that provides an alternative to vendor lock in come from a Blender add-on instead of a separate program.

I am no expert but as I understand it the primary difficulty with developing good alternatives to commercial CAD software lie in the development of an effective geometric kernel.

It seems to me that if a developer of an opensource CAD program develops it as a Blender add-on they can effectively outsource the remainder of the development efforts to the Blender community while focus can be made on the CAD kernel itself.

agreed!

take a look at https://Plasticity.xyz. It's not open-source, but it's got a small, highly dedicated team behind it. It's built on Solidworks' kernel, so it's quite robust.

Also take a look at solverspace, caligula, FreeCAD, ...

FreeCAD is still in active development and there was a major release (1.0) recently. There will be a feature freeze soon where the devs will focus primarily on stability and eliminating bugs.

That said, I use FC as my main CAD driver and, not only tolerate it, but enjoy using it. I had to watch several hours of introductory videos to get the hang of things initially, but now I'm quite fast and proficient.

The initial pains and common complaints about UI and such, are basically non-issues for me now and when I model, my cognitive energy is basically devoted to the design problem itself rather than issues with UI or the behavior of the software.

It's necessary to put the time into learning it, but it's worth it.

As an addition, KiCad is also an example of exquisite Blender-like software for designing things. It solves a simpler problem of note. Both are paragons, and to your point, it would be lovely to have traditional CAD software on its level that's not expensive.

There is CAD Sketcher, which is an extension for Blender which could allow to unite both worlds.

I'd like to hear someone's perspective on how difficult it would be to unify OpenUSD and CAD file formats so that they are portable between programs?

FreeCAD is the front-runner for me.

KiCAD was also a meh ECAD FOSS alternative 7-8 years ago, now it is by far the tool of choice for regular ECAD designs. I can see FreeCad getting there by 2030.

Plasticity is the closest thing to this, I think. It uses Parasolid, which Blender does not, and supports xNURBS, which Blender does not.

Blender is a decent option for low effort 3d modeling for 3d printing in my experience

> I wonder what will be the next category of open source to pull ahead?

KiCad, for PCB design. They have been making massive improvements over the last few years, and with proprietary solutions shutting down (Eagle) or being unaffordable (Altium) Kicad is now by far the best option for both hobbyists and small companies.

With the release of KiCad 5 in 2018 it went from being "a pain to use to, but technically sufficient" to being a genuine option for less-demanding professionals. Since then they've been absolutely killing it, with major releases happening once a year and bringing enough quality-of-life improvements that it is actually hard to keep track of all of them.

From the type of new features it is very obvious that a lot of professional users are now showing interest in the application, and as we've seen with Blender a trickle of professional adoption can quickly turn into a flood which takes over the entire market.

KiCad still has a long way to go when it comes to complex high-speed boards (nobody in their right mind would use it to design an EPYC motherboard, for example), but it is absolutely going to steamroll the competition when it comes to the cookie-cutter 2/4/6 layer PCBs in all the everyday consumer products.

> Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche.

I can think of a few more: Git obsoleted an entire category of commercial software seemingly almost overnight, VSCode has become by far the most widely used IDE (not entirely open source, though), TeX still dominates mathematical typesetting AFAIK (as it has for as long as computers have been used for that), (lib)ffmpeg is used everywhere for video/audio transcoding and between them nginx and apache still account for the majority of webservers. Most popular programming language compilers/interpreters/runtimes are open source too, of course.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves, Blender has done far better than most open source software but Maya is still very much the industry standard. I don't think we can realistically say that Maya is beaten until Blender is battle-proven to the same degree, on the most demanding real-world production workloads (think Pixar/Weta), which for now it hasn't been.

Maybe obsolete in the sense of feature to price ratio (infinite in Blender's case), but Maya is still very much used for the sole reason that entire studio pipelines are likely built around it. Years of tools programmers and artist knowledge build-up don't go away just like that. Licensing costs are a drop in the bucket compared to all the other overhead. Of course that's mainly concerning big productions, there's obviously no reason hobbyists or indies should be using anything except Blender. I will say w.r.t to sculpting specifically ZBrush is still king mostly due to how its technology is fundamentally unique in its ability to easily handle huge poly counts. Blender is still not quite there in the high-fidelity regime.

I suspect in general "big companies" and the ecosystems they operate in are the main reason adoption (and subsequent investment and development) hasn't happened. The Microsoft Office suite is a good example, since many companies likely run the full Office + Teams + Outlook stack. It all "seamlessly" (not really lol) works together, and it's attractive to sell corporate solutions like that.

Video editing? Adobe has set themselves up for failure there, everyone wants an alternative

Davinci Resolve is probably competitive with Premiere, but while free it's not actually open source. But either a viable competitor catching up or Davinci publishing the code could change that fast

> Meanwhile, in other niches, Microsoft Office still beats open source office suites like LibreOffice; Photoshop isn't about to give up its crown to GIMP; Lightroom isn't losing to Darktable; and FreeCAD isn't even in the rear view mirror of Solidworks.

Tbf, everything starts somewhere and all the proprietary apps you listed were not instant market leaders.

I can and do use all those FOSS tools just fine both as a hobbyist and professionally, my needs are meet. Others may not find the same, but I suspect there's just a lot of stickyness preventing even trying new workflows.

> Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche

OBS is on line 2 ....

QGIS is pretty amazing. And it is helped along by not trying to pull you into a cloud ecosystem that ArcGIS does.

>FreeCAD isn't even in the rear view mirror of Solidworks.

I think FreeCAD might be on a distant hilltop in their rearview these days, check it out again.

As a game developer, I'm really rooting for open source game engines.

Unity and Unreal are dinosaurs that target the shrinking console market. Godot is being built in their image. My hope is that something more versatile like Bevy becomes common so that we have something that could potentially compete with the next generation of Roblox.

Possibly Audacity, given the direction v4 is taking. Great video essay / update here: https://youtu.be/QYM3TWf_G38

MuseScore is good enough that I haven't bothered to check back with commercial vendors. I'm pretty novice with it, however, so perhaps Sibelius power users will disagree.

> it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche.

gcc? It’s hard to imagine any of the projects mentioned without a good compiler.

Microsoft Office is dying. Most grads we get only know Google docs and avoid Office. Most of our docs are on wikis or email now.

How does GIMP compare to Photopea. On occasion I open a file in GIMP by accident and end up waiting 20m for it to load and am almost always disappointed. Meanwhile Photopea always just works super fast and supports a lot more. What the hell is it doing?

https://www.photopea.com/

Blender has the advantage of having been a commercial product that went open source, thus many people on the initial core team cared about stuff that other projects don't, plus they already had an installed base.

You don't see the same success with Gimp, Krita,...

GIMP really has tons of issues. I can barely compile it these days.

GIMP 2.x was IMO better. Also much easier to compile and get running. Fewer things to worry about.

I think you paint a rather selective picture here though. Quite a lot open source software is really really bad.

To me, the really impressive thing about Blender is that it now has a pretty good UI. I'm pretty snobby about the GUI apps I install, and Blender is probably the only professional-level (as in professional users) open source tool that feels pretty good to use on a Mac. In the early days it was pretty rough, but it's rare to see open source software UI consistently improve like this.

On aesthetics, it definitely beats out Lightroom Classic, which is a closed-source paid tool (sidenote: I really miss Aperture).

>>Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche. It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete.

GCC and now Clang has beaten Intel compiler (and others). Nginx has beaten/replaced commercial web servers. Stockfish has beaten commercial chess engines and Lichess is much better than commercial chess sites.

Just 3 examples that came to my mind reading your comment.

The comment I've heard is that Office (or was that Word?) doesn't necessarily beat LO, some people are just forced to use it because of file formats

Maya is the industry standard. Blender may offer most of what Maya offers from a features standpoint, but Maya had the first mover advantage / network effects advantage of an ecosystem of third party plugins sprouting up over the last 20 years which VFX / Mograph houses now depend upon, thus forcing vendor lock-in despite Blender now being on par.

2D motion graphics maybe?

DaVinci Resolve is getting better but still not comparable to After Effects.

Blender already has a lot of pieces in place to tackle this.

>>It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete

Hadn’t heard that. How many AAA vfx studios have left Maya for Blender?

I'd add postgres to that list.

I’m rooting for gimp but they are truly a decade behind photoshop. I don’t know how they can compete. Luckily it does not seem like they are in the market for professionals so the need to match Photoshop isn’t quite as high

Isn't it more like the other way around, i.e. Office being an exception of a category where open source solutions lag far behind the proprietary ones?

Of course Blender is a marvelous piece of software, no doubt in that.

"It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete" Wow, that is great news. I guess its support for Pixar USD is equal to Maya and Houdini then, so all the big studios can finally switch

> FreeCAD isn't even in the rear view mirror of Solidworks.

I'm curious, what are the main points where it's lacking? I hear stability is one of them, but what about features?

In the 3D printing realm most slicers are open source. And I think a lot of professionals are also using them. Though maybe not in the very expensive end of industrial printers.

If you ignore the massively easier learning curve, better usability and presentation, purely in terms of raw outcome and capabilities (to an extent), Dark table actually comes ahead of Lightroom. Not saying it will replace it at all though, it's software for power users, while Lightroom is for both novices and pro's who prefer UX over features.

> It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete.

really? I haven't done 3D rendering in a long time, admittedly, but back then Maya and Lightwave were miles ahead of Blender. Rhino3D too. Even 3DSMax was better. Lightwave seems to have sadly fallen off (unfortunately, IMO it was the best at one point, had excellent ray tracing). I didn't really Blender had come such a long way -- that's great.

Since you mention niches: Adobe InDesign has no OSS competition at all, and Illustrator is still much better than Inkscape.

> It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete

Is this even true? My understanding is that 3D Studio and Maya used to be ahead.

I think the dog fooding their own software through all the amazing movies the Blender Institute made plays a huge role.

Relying on individual donations from users helps a lot with blender being aligned to the interest of its actual users. There is not one or a few corporate sponsors controlling everything.

Plus the GPL license which protects the freedom of its users.

I think at the very least they've found those rare individuals who can both code well and manage well. There are countless open source project leaders who might be the most knowledgeable person in the world on that area but have no idea how to communicate and collaborate in an open-source setting, especially as the project gets popular and attracts people who're detrimental (not necessarily malicious) to the project's growth.

Yeah this is a really good question. I'd love to know more about that too. There's some good history on the website here [1].

The creator apparently was selling it as freemium software in 1998, and then the bubble burst and the corp shutdown in 2002. But the creator created a non-profit called the Blender Foundation, launched a Free Blender campaign [2] (the forum post is still up!) to raise money from its users and bought out the rights to the software from the investors.

[1] https://www.blender.org/about/history/

[2] https://blenderartists.org/t/free-blender-campaign-launched/...

One biggest thing that I cite when I bring up Blender as probably the best open source software is that it has stellar UI/UX.

NO other (yes I’d die on the hill) open source software has good UX and it’s horrible for adoption by the larger public.

Ignoring open source ideas to be different and instead following industry standard options.

GIMP vs Krita is a similar story. GIMP never will be the Photoshop replacement they aimed to be

I've used blender since 1999. It's my favorite open source software. Simply amazing

I just wish there was a nice text based representation. I hate dragging boxes around the screen.

If the volume was defined by a manifold mesh, it was already trivial to scatter points, then remove points that when raycasted down on that manifold mesh "volume" hit a normal.z < 0, hardly a node spaghetti as the article says.

This though has huge feature releases, biggest one seem to be a complete overhaul of the video editor, among others. Just so people don't get the impression that your comment is actually about the Blender 5.0 release :)

Can you link to a Blender issue?

It might be possible to reproduce the same effect in EEVEE using geometry nodes. I know people have done that for automatic level of detail work. That being said, IDK if subsurf as a geometry node will take a non-constant number of iterations.

There was a big interface rehaul for 2.80, and I suspect upcoming versions will continue to improve as interest in porting to platforms like iPad increases.

Learning the shortcuts is really the way to go though. Initially painful but 100x more productivity in the long run, and really the way Blender is meant to be used. Honestly just doing a single basic tutorial will have you learning all of them in no time.

Intel Macs were always a second class citizen for Blender. There was a lot you couldn't do because the GPU drivers just didn't allow it.

They actually announced they were dropping support in February. Nobody noticed or cared.

I get a never ending cloudflare verification on repeat. I'm on my local network. On my usual machine. On chrome. No funny stuff. Sucks. Can't see the page.

Why do you think so? As far as I can tell - a lot of GPU empowered data centers are being built

But after that, all the other things on the page are AWESOME! I’m super stoked about the proper HDR support and all the new node improvements.

Looks like they picked a bad day to do a major release.

That's the whole internet now. That or Anubis.

You should have the power to do what you want, be it photorealistic or stylized. With blender you can do that.

Why?

If you don’t work in the industry, you have zero chance of accurately evaluating whether or not, or how, it will be impacted by any new technology.

The fact that it “seems easy” is a great flag that it probably isn’t.

Directors spend a LOT of effort trying to keep continuity and that's the weakest part of AI.

What blender and other CGI software gets for free is continuity. The 3D model does not change without explicitly making it change.

Until we get AI which can regenerate the same model from one scene to the next, the use of AI in CGI will be severely limited.

"AI will make this pointless" is so exhausting.

Can there please be one post on this godforsaken website where there is no attempt to shoehorn it into the AI craze?

If AI is at the point where it is exactly as capable of your average junior 3D professional in 10 years, it will probably have automated a ton (double digit percentage?) of current jobs such that nothing is safe. There's a lot of complexity, it's fairly long time horizon, it's very visually detailed, it's creative and subjective, and there's not a lot of easily accessible high quality training data.

It's like 2D art with more complexity and less training data. Non-AI 2D art and animation tools haven't been made irrelevant yet, and don't look like they will be soon.

I design projections for independent theatre in Baltimore. I use AI in my workflows where it can help me and won’t compromise on the quality of what I’m making. I frequently use AI to upscale crappy footage, to interpolate frames in existing video (for artistic purposes, never with documentary archival stuff) and very occasionally to create wholesale clips in situations where video models can do what I need.

I recently used WAN to generate a looping clip of clouds moving quickly, something that’s difficult to do in CGI and impossible to capture live action. It worked out because I didn’t have specific demands other than what I just said, and I wasn’t asking for anything too obscure.

At this point, I expect the quality of local video models (the only kind I’m willing to work with professionally) to go up, but prompt adherence seems like a tough nut to crack, which makes me think it may be a while before we have prosumer models that can replace what I do in Blender.

You will still need the tool but the interface to it may start to change.

A lot of the editing functions for 3D art play some role in achieving verisimilitude in the result - that it looks and feels believably like some source reference, in terms of shapes, materials, lights, motion and so on. For the parts of that where what you really want to say is "just configure A to be more like B", prompting and generative approaches can add a lot of value. It will be a great boost to new CG users and allow one person to feel confident in taking on more steps in the pipeline. Every 3D package today resembles an astronaut control panel because there is too much to configure and the actual productions tend to divvy up the work into specialty roles where it can become someone's job to know the way to handle a particular step.

However, the actual underlying pipeline can't be shortcut: the consistency built by traditional CG algorithms is the source of the value within CG, and still needs human attention to be directed towards some purpose. So we end up in equilibriums where the budget for a production can still go towards crafting an expensive new look, but the work itself is more targeted - decorating the interior instead of architecting the whole house.

As someone who's actually used Blender for small video projects, I'm fairly confident you'll still need this type of tool even with AI assistance doing some of the work in it, especially for at least the next 10 years.

AI coding agents didn't make IDEs obsolete. They just added plugins to some existing IDEs and spawned a few new ones.

You build apps for Shopify.

You are asking for industry predictions from industry professionals in an industry you know nothing about while assuming a lot about that industry.

Why do you think they should do all the heavy lifting for you?

You might as well ask ChatGPT what it thinks because it seems you already have an idea of what you want the answer to be.

What will AI train on?