Just playing with it now. The new geometry nodes are the beginning of something big... a more procedural approach to modeling. Perfect for natural distribution of things like rocks and plants.<p>Our department (art and design) moved from 3ds Max to Blender last year, and have not looked back. The rapid pace of development is testament to the fact that Blender now has more than twice as many full time devs working on it than Max.
Once again Blender is killing it! I find Blender to be one of the best examples of how FLOSS software can be substantially better than their proprietary alternatives.
I hope one day there's a "Blender, but it's actually ZBrush" open source alternative to ZBrush.<p>Once you use ZBrush, you'll never want to go back to traditional CAD-style creation.<p>I won't claim that Blender can't solve it, but, the workflows are completely different. You end up thinking of models like clay that you can shape and paint, not triangles with textures.<p>Please, someone, somewhere, spend five years making <i>that</i> an open source project. (Realistically, it's a bit melancholy that such a project probably won't ever get made; there's no incentive to. ZBrush exists, and it has a fine price point. I just love thinking about all the algorithms under the hood that power the whole thing... It would be so cool to see the code.)
I think Blender might be the most complex and feature rich open source application in existence, period. (By "application" I mean a standalone product for end users with a GUI.)
The amount of support and updates Blender gets makes me extremely happy/confident in the amount of time I've spent with it over the years. New functionality tends to work really well with already implemented stuff and allows for a lot of cool experimentation.<p>In that regard I'm really looking forward to messing with the geometry node stuff. Based on videos done with beta version it seems like there is a gigantic amount of potential there.
Anyone know how Blender fairs with Linux & AMD GPUs? I'm in the market for GPUs and am super torn by AMD vs Nvidia. Not only is that a tough choice on Linux, but it sounds like Blender is simply much, much better on Nvidia.. at least for rendering.<p>Thoughts? My goal is of course to use blender to build stuff, but also render them out performantly.
Damn, this looks nice! Especially the procedural stuff.<p>I did use Blender roughly 10 years ago for school projects, and I would like to get back, anybody has a good tutorial lying around? :)
The one killer feature I'm still missing from Blender is <i>real-time simulation</i>. I absolutely adore using Blender for hobby and art projects, but as a full-time robotics and computer vision researcher, Blender just still isn't quite there when it comes to being able to generate images in "real time" (even with Eevee) for robotics sim applications, and I'm still using hacked-together tools in game engines like Unity to achieve this and render images. Would really be great if the Blender Game Engine effort could continue as a part of the main branch, but I understand the need of a software to limit it's scope.<p>Never hurts to dream...
I'm in 2.92 now opening projects from previous versions and all is well so far.<p>Q: When the new-version splash screen asks to select new or use previous config, am I missing out on optimizations or new features by selecting previous?<p>- The render cache indicators in VSE are gone. The orange bar segments that show strip cache building is comforting while Preview FPS stutters. Confirm that caches are being built ... but in default /tmp/ vs what's in my previous config. Will start w/ a 2.92 config and update.<p>Tangent: 2.92 was in the Snap Store earlier this week and updated without hassle. Understood there are issues w Snap, but this was a good experience.
I was trying Blender like 15 years ago and I was unable to do anything. But lately, for three or four months I am working on a video composed of multiple 3D and 2D animated scenes and it is mind blowing how easy it goes.<p>I must say I'd never imagine to be able to do stuff I do. Blender is not only extremely stable, but also it is so easy to use. It is the finest software I have seen.<p>You can see my results here if you like: <a href="https://twitter.com/SummonTheJson/status/1365363920417005570?s=19" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/SummonTheJson/status/1365363920417005570...</a>
Is this the version that gets Apple M1 support? I know it’s on their roadmap and I thought it was 2.92, but I don’t see anything in the release notes. Might not be big enough to mention.
I find Cinema4D’s UI and approach toward everything just brilliant. Tried using Blender 5 years ago and it was extremely unintuitive to use. UI consistency was all over the place. Has that changed since?
I've tried 3D modeling and failed to get anywhere several times. My only observation is that the mesh fairing example looks like a really cool feature. If 3D modeling "felt" like that, it probably wouldn't be so intimidating.