I think you are leaping to a judgement, which may not be wise.
They are open source. Their current addon is Python-based, using blender, so GPL is mandated. You can get downloads for it from their site. It works on all platforms and uses blender to operate. To get access to the latest versions, a donation is requested (this is not incompatible with GPLv3 - see, for example, the bulk of addons on BlenderMarket). Older versions are freely available.
The image you link talks about the upcoming system, which is in design and development. It may have components that operate outside blender. They are therefore making a commitment to open source, not rejecting it.
Regarding their site, they are using Wix. It’s not exactly uncommon, and judging their product by their site seems very harsh. They aren’t selling web site infrastructure, after all.
Coming to your other question, the addon works inside blender by slicing the image and sending the slice to a blender process running their addon on other machines. These slices are computed and then the image sent back. The controller then reassembles the frame from the slices. It’s quite helpful.
Anyway I need to learn about render farms in general to make anything work. But first i will do a local network renderfarm ( multiuser )
To make reach a point where simply by having 2 version of the same project open on 2 computers like this. And clicking on the asset it let’s you know if the other project has the more up to date version of it. DAMN. This is some crazy stuff.
Basically there is a server thingy. That you can run using a terminal command and soon using a button in the multi-user window. Or something. To which any instance of the project connects automatically. And talk. I have a feeling that quite soon it will work well enough for a release. But first I want to add to it all of the functionality and test it on multiple machines.
Look at this beauty. I’ve made a fake client script to test the server. And it handles all Bob, Steve and Frank quite well. Also there is a script to send Server messages without being one connected user. For example to close the server I’m using it. And of course the server talks to UDP all the time. So everybody whould know stuff it does at all times.
I’m don’t care about security here too much. Tho there is a password thingy. It asks the name of the project when connecting. I need people to test this stuff when it comes out. For the features
- [v] List of users | Important to know the usernames of all users
- [ ] Assets | Important to have up to date assets everywhere
- [ ] Shots | Important to have up to date shots / and their assets
- [ ] Rendering | Ability to render on a separate machine.
- [ ] Story | Real time Sync of the story editor and the script writer
- [ ] Analytics | Real time Sync of History and Schedules.
- [ ] Messages | A little messaging system in the Multiuser window.
For now only getting what users are on the network works. As you can see on the previous post I already half way the asset thing. Next I want to actually take the easy ones out. Messages , Analytics and Story Sync.
Shots going to be a complex version of assets. Because assets are linked into shots. And it’s a bit you know. Crazy. I don’t know a good way of making it work 100% reliably. But will see.
And rendering. Like a render farm type thing. I have not a clue. But hopefully I will know what I’m doing well enough by the end of this to make the rendering.
Assets Synchronization
Do you remember the red button?
I’ve got rid of it. I’ve optimized the transferring of assets to such the button is irrelevant. It’s literally updates in a fraction of a second. It has a quite a bit of algorithm complexity to do this.
But.
Imagine this. You just so happened to be in the asset window like the one in the picture. And Bob on the other computer just so happened to be in the same asset. He opens a blend file. Moves the pose of Moria. And saves it. What you see is that the thumbnail of Moria just updated to the pose that Bob did. Automatically. You open the file. The pose is there.
Issues
While doing all of it. I had to make sure that the thumbnails are refreshed. And it introduced a bug in the image loading algorithm. I will have to fix it before shipping. Basically 2 functions of the Multiuser are done.
- [v] List of users | Important to know the usernames of all users
- [v] Assets | Important to have up to date assets everywhere
- [ ] Shots | Important to have up to date shots / and their assets
- [ ] Rendering | Ability to render on a separate machine.
- [ ] Story | Real time Sync of the story editor and the script writer
- [ ] Analytics | Real time Sync of History and Schedules.
- [ ] Messages | A little messaging system in the Multiuser window.
Next I want to do Story editor. But it’s tomorrow.
Video Overview
A little video about the current state of the project
Early Multiuser UI
The UI of the multiuser is a challenge because it has to work on so many levels. For example. This top, left part where it’s the server output. What if you are not on the same computer as the server? For this tiny thing I need to make server send messages, client save them and UI script draw them. It’s 3 different programs.
This whole multiuser system is going to be quite an update. This is already quite insane. But it needs to be even more insane.
Themes
I took a break from Multiuser craziness to give the user an ability to customize the look of the program. Themes were supported from the beginning. I just had only the Default one. So I could not design / test a setting to change them. I took an hour to create this theme. Most of work was to copy over the Blender Legacy icons. Because this theme will be called OldSchool and it will have Blender legacy icons. Also it’s bright. Some people like this look. So why not.
The theme is already available on the repository. This is the folder. There is no setting for it yet in the current last update. But in the VCStudio installation. In the settings folder there is a setting.data file where you can specify the name of the theme. So in order to use this theme now. Copy the theme folder into settings/themes and change the setting.data to use this theme instead of the default. Also create your own. Let’s see what you can do with that, I might do a theme installer from like zip files or something. Could be cool if people could just share their looks with each other.
Okay so far you can Edit your username, the language (which are easy to make text files), theme (which is a folder with an easy to make color data text file and a pack of png icons), the blur, and the amount of roundness. Maybe people want squares everywhere.
And yes, I did use a scroll slider for the value slider, my toolkit is very flexible, I mean round-rectangles are also circles, buttons with the logic of the button, that can have icons in them. This is weirdly flexible way of working.
The UI is almost there.
Multiuser is a very hard thing to do for me. Maybe there are people who are hardcore network developers that can make it simpler and quicker. But I’m a noob. So here you go. Tho there are so cool stuff going on. For example every user will have a terminal output of the server. Ever user. Not only the one user who is running the server. That’s kind a cool.
For the UI side of things. I will need to only make messages. And everything is cool.
The UI is done.
We’ve got the UI of the Multiuser. The place where users will be talking to each other and stuff. Now. This doesn’t mean that the multiuser is finished. I’m far from it. Even this little thing revealed some insane networking bugs I had to fight with. It has to be at least alpha stage ready before I’m going to ship it.
Contact Me Live
I’m going to hold a Jitsi conference 24 / 7 for the VCStudio project. Click image to join. Or use https://meet.jit.si/VCStudioDevelopmentConference
Live story editing
Live text and live story editor space sync is already implemented. I did had to redo a large portion of the server / client communication. I implemented a script that handles any complex object very easy so I could send lists and dictionaries and files like nothing. And it helped me think more about the what and less about the how.
I will have to re-implement the assets. but I’m going to use most of the same way of doing it. Analytics is synced ones at this moment. I just need to add calls to sync it when ever a change happens. But it’s it’s own headache.
Some massive changes came to VCStudio in 2021. Version 21.0 is epic.
Multiuser
Note: The multiuser is still in a very early stage. It works. But a lot of bugs are still there that have to be fixed. So please report them.
The multiuser feature will help you work on one project from multiple computers. Please have a backup of the project. The Multiuser is still very unstable..
In the multiuser window you can find the setting to start the Multiuser server. Please do that while only 1 VCStudio is open. Else it might introduce bugs I’m yet to find out how to fix. Multiuser will have a server that is serving all the multiuser’s users. Each computer running the on the multiuser will talk to this one server. So choose the computer where you activate the server wisely.
To activate the server click on the multiuser icon in the bottom, left corner. Which will give you the window on the picture above. Then press the server icon in the top, left corner. To stop the server, press the same button again.
The multiuser by default is running on the local network. Meaning all the computers should be connected to the same router. There is no global server to connect computers which exists remotelly from each other. But if you know what you are doing, you probably can do something like this. Note that transfers are not encrypted.
Note: Multiuser server is a separate process. Closing VCStudio will not close the server.
To use Mulituser. Apart from text messages in the Multiuser window is as straight forward as using VCStudio. Any change to assets, scenes, text of story or anything in the story or analytics will update automatically on all of the computers connected to the multiuser.
On this image you can see 2 VCStudio instances running at the same time. In the story editor you can see the location of the other instance in real time. So you can hang out in the world of the story so to speak.
Themes
Now you can change themes. One more theme is now available by default. To edit themes you need look into the settings/themes. An editor for themes is in the plans for future releases.
Moria’s Race Theme
The new Moria’s Race theme just introduced a way easier means to make new themes.
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Auto Use Default Icons. Now if the
icons folder of a given theme is empty. Or a given icon is not there. It will use the Default theme’s icon. It gives you a way to make a theme without creating a whole set of icons for it. And make just some icons or non.
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Icon’s Coloring. Now you can specify
icons color in the theme. See Moria’s Race theme file for the example. It will color the icons of your theme. Or the default icons to any color, you specify. This allows you to change the look of the program without making a whole new set of icons.
Multiuser Polish
Since the initial release there were some changes to the multiuser.
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Server more stable. It’s still in alpha but it’s a bit more stable. Now you can turn it on with more then one user open at ones.
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Teleport to users in Story Editor. Now as in with the markers you can click on the users in the story editor and be teleported.
Blender Dumbass Theme
Blender Dumbass is my tutorial channel. Where I post various parody style Blender Tutorials. From 2018 to 2019 there was a period of a channel when everything was in red. The entire channel style was theme red. Up to the mouse cursor.
So I made a theme about that time.
You can select the theme in the settings.
Multiuser Improvements
This update change a couple of thing in the multiuser.
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Schedule Username Menu. Now you can select the name of anybody in the multiuser network to send them the scheduled task when editing the task.
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Main Checklist Synchronization. I completely forgot about the
/set/project.progress file when writing the multiuser. So any other checklist was syncing but not this one. I fixed it in this release.
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Checked Schedules Was Wanky. Something was not synchronized well. When I editing the checklists. The analytics would not update.
Working on the new Screen Play Exporter. This is a reference file I made in LIbreOffice. I already did a basic exporter in the old Blender-Organizer. But it was basic. This time I want to make a more complex exporter.
I want to do a number of features that did not exists in the legacy Blender-Organizer:
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Shots Marks. Well I can put the colors of the shots right in the exported text. I don’t remember the reason I couldn’t do that earlier. Maybe it was just the fact that legacy Blender-Organizer had Shot viewing and script reading in multiple different windows. And the one that had the export button didn’t care about shots.
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Images. This one I’ve tried in the old one. But could not figure it out. Hopefully now I can.
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Title Page. I want to have a basic title page with the name of the movie / writer / comment.
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Assets list. I had written a script with the old Organizer that there was a lot of work to do after export to list all assets somewhere in the text. Why no do that at every scene.
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Scene name. Well scenes have names. Why not put that in the script.
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Separator. I think a scene separator could be a pretty thing. Since it’s going to make everything a bit tighter.
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Footer. In the footer I can add the name of the writer. And the page.
It’s kind of already mostly working. I mean this is the test file I just generated. Compare it to the actual scene.
I didn’t even think that I can do the inside of the phrases work with the highlights. But I kind of figured out the ODT format and It worked.
There are the <text:p> types and <text:span> types. One is more like per line thing. And the other can be used in the first. So margin is a p thing while color is the span thing. So I can combine them to do various things.
16:9 images are export fine. Tho there is some kind of declaration problem. I think it’s something to do with security inside of the ODT file. I have no idea what.
Every time you try to open a file with images inside it give this error.
I press Yes and it works fine.
Exporting Story to ODT
This update gave the user the ability to export the story into a more standard file format. It could be used to print the story out. Or to distribute it. Or to further convert to formats such as PDF.
I’m not using PDF format here because it’s way too complicated. And ODT is simply a zip file with XML documents. So it’s easy to write an exporter to ODT. And over all. I don’t like anything by Adobe. So here is that.
To export you have the new export icon in the story editor.
It will give you a standard Gtk save dialog.
Images problem
At the moment there is are 2 problems with images. 1 is easier to fix then another.
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16:9 Only. Every image will be stretched to 16:9 aspect ratio. But you can just fix it manually at any moment.
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File Appears to be Broken. When exporting with images. LibreOffice gives the following error.
It’s something to do with the security and the files that are inside the zip. If they are not declared properly, this window will appear. By simply clicking the Yes button it will launch the file normally.
