Commoditize one's compliments: <a href="https://jasongriffey.net/wp/2012/04/19/commoditizing-our-complements/" rel="nofollow">https://jasongriffey.net/wp/2012/04/19/commoditizing-our-com...</a><p>Unreal Engine, like Unity, right now has to be used with Autodesk products like 3DS Max or Maya, or at least that is the case with the large majority of professionals. This is an impediment to using Unreal Engine and thus makes Epic Games sort of dependent on Autodesk.<p>There is probably no coincidence that the new general manager of Unreal Engine is an ex-Autodesk SVP, Marc Petit, who used to be in charge of Maya, 3DS Max, etc for a decade (<a href="https://www.awn.com/news/marc-petit-leaves-autodesk" rel="nofollow">https://www.awn.com/news/marc-petit-leaves-autodesk</a>). He definitely sees the value of building up Blender to remove the dependence of Unreal Engine on expensive tools from other vendors.
As someone who's done lots of Blender work as well as Maya and integrations with Unity and Unreal Engine, I still think there's quite a long way to go to make Blender a good option for game development. It's free, it kind of works but it's very painful when it comes to animation, texturing, and details.<p>Right now, this is what I usually do:<p><pre><code> - Basic Modeling: Blender
- Sculpting + Details: ZBrush
- Painting: Substance Painter
- Animation: Maya
</code></pre>
So yeah, the last 3 are paid and it's not cheap. Blender can do all three but not as good. I hope that with this additional money the Blender Foundation team can hire more people to close these gaps. In 2.8 they've improved on different fronts but they are still quite behind in those departments.<p>Last but not least, they should make more effort to improve their keybindings. They've been monkey patching it in 2.8 with the "industry-compatible" keybindings but when you use it a bunch of other things stop working.
In the spirit of supporting open software, it would be fantastic if Epic Games Store and its DRM warmed up to Linux next.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19844241" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19844241</a>
Awesome. Blender is on the cusp of releasing a major UI overhaul (2.8) that will make it more accessible to newcomers (left-click is now the default!). I'm excited to see it getting some major support from the gaming industry as well as the film industry.
This is great!<p>As a slighty OT aside, I really hope blender's UI changes sloooow down. I've been using it for 16 years. 2.8 versus 2.7 is so different, It almost feels like they're making changes for change sake.<p>I've been trying to use their various 2.8 RC's so I don't have to say I don't know how to use blender anymore when it pops.<p>They made the following things toggleable at launch, but man these are some muscle memory breaking changes that are now the default.<p>- Changed selecting objects from right to left click
- Space bar no longer opens up the function search. The search is like 50% of my workflow, so this one hit me in the gut until I changed the setting.<p>Then there's some other things that feel renamed for no discernible reason.<p>- I can't search for 'remove doubles' anymore. There are certain geometries that I've come to build by snapping to axis, extruding, snapping to vertices, remove doubles. Now it's buried in a menu at mesh->clean up->'merge by distance'. It also makes a GUI element pop with the distance argument, and there's no obvious way to "apply". So weird.
- Ambient occlusion in the view appears to have been renamed 'cavity'.
- The tool panel lost its words, it's now just icons. Functionality has to be discovered by hovering. This is the worst UX habit from mobile, I wish it would stay out of my desktop tooling.
- The view/selection/snap/etc settings bar has moved from the bottom of the screen to the top. Why?
- Properties tabs moved to the side from the top. I can see why.
- I can't make objects unselectable but visible in the outliner. Why?!
- Layers are gone, they're now "collections" but they don't do the same thing at all!<p>This is the stuff I've hit in a about 2 hours of messing. I'm willing to acclimate to about 90% of these changes. So far it's just the layers / merge doubles thing that really sucks. Eevee is really pretty, so it's got that going for it, which is nice.
This is really smart move that helps Epic more than you might think.<p>UE4's own tools (which are based around creating environments from existing models, placing actors, and realtime rendering) are WORLDS ahead of common Autodesk modelling tools eg 3DS Max and Maya (which Epic itself uses). UE4 is easy to pick up, but then you have to learn Maya and it becomes a grind.<p>There needs to be something as powerful as Maya with a better UX to stop modelling being a blocker for new UE4 users. Being Free As in Beer and Free as in Freedom help too.
I just did some research on Chinese tech companies and realized how big Tencent is in the gaming. They have 40% stake in Epic Games, majority in Supercell, Grinding Gear Games, Riot Games and Miniclip.
Anyone interested in following a fantastic Twitter account that is always doing fun stuff in Blender, especially with Grease Pencil.<p>This is a 2D animation generated from a 3D environment. Mind blowing -><p><a href="https://twitter.com/5agado/status/1146021523460935681" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/5agado/status/1146021523460935681</a>
Shameless self plug: If you use Unreal Studio and Blender, please check out the project I am working on: <a href="https://github.com/0xafbf/blender-datasmith-export" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/0xafbf/blender-datasmith-export</a>
Epic are doing a great job improving fairness in the gaming industry, and the economic conditions for developers. I'm looking forward to their Epic Store opening up to more (high quality) Indie games.