User expectations have been shaping blender since I joined as a regular users and quite quickly Blender addon developer thanks to immense patience of Campbell Barton, 14 years which had the amazing patience to answer my thousands of questions about Python and Addon Development. Ton less so but we have our fair share of disagreements especially on matters of UI but we always had super friendly discussions.
Right select is an excellent example, named sillier even compared to your super silly example, yet here we are. We even have a website named after it as a joke. Switched to Left click as default the end. Not even fund related.
The reality of the case is that user expectation shape things inside the boundaries of the abilities of the developers. That mentality of “take my money and do whatever you want to it” , yeah I can tell you that won’t work well for Blender. It will work even less with mac users.
Don’t know where you see the combat, If I wanted to turn this to a combat I would be going ballistic by now. I am also not the demanding guy. But I am not afraid to hurt other people feeling with my criticism and disagreement if that is what you mean. I may be harsh at time but I am always polite.
I care about GPU support of Cycles on MacOS ,its my main platform afterall but since I decided to go pro with a project I am developing based on Blender source like forever, I am using Win 10 exclusively for the usual reasons and I won’t be offering a mac version or Linux version. At least not at first, I hope down the line to short out issues with my and Blender code and support all three platforms.
But yeah my opinion is that hiring a mac developer for Blender to work exclusively or mainly on mac related issues is very important for me and many other people. If not the vast majority of mac users. You are more than welcome to disagree.
I can assure you that is not the mentality i have, i know my funds are taken by the foundation and the only thing i get back is a (rather lousy) badge. I’m going to have to trust that they spend it wisely, they send out bi-yearly reports on what it is being spend on, and as soon as a new car for ton or a pair of golden sneakers shows up in there, i’d be pretty much in front of the line of people canceling my monthly donation.
As long as the things in that report and the weekly reports by the devs seem reasonable to me, i’ll happily keep contributing, sure sculpting is not my thing, but i’m pretty sure it’ll make a bunch of users very happy, don’t get me wrong i’d rather see them working on my bleeding eyeball related things but i knew what i signed up for.
If blender users expect something more than a badge for their contribution and mac users ever more than that, i’d say those expectations aren’t inline with what was promised to them before they signed up.
Uhm, the fund is currently at 70k/month. And about 30k of those come from Epic, and are supposed to be used to improve the development process and make industry contribution easier.
Apple dropped support for OpenCL, which AMD used, while not supporting any NVIDIA GPUs at all. All macs come with AMD graphics card, and AFAIK, only AMD graphics cards work on MacOS
I was not aware that the situation was so bad … what a shame.
at this point the most logical question is:
you want to work CGI 3D and still be chained by Apple?
Sorry, I’m very late in joining this discussion. I am also a devoted Mac user who loves Blender and I’m distraught at the possible rift between the two.
I’m no expert but I’m willing to help dev effort in any way I can. I contacted Ton today who confirms that there will be no dev activity to support Metal but that there will be a project to develop Vulkan use, and there is already 3rd party s/w that will allow Vulkan to sit on Metal. I think this is possibly the only way forward for Mac users
Yeah the third party framework you mentioned is MoltenVK. Let’s just hope it won’t affect performance too much compared to pure metal but hey, it’s better than nothing.
Hello everyone. Just chiming in as a long time blender user on both Macs and PCs. Starting with a discussion on blenderartists a member pointed me to this thread.
I am curious how Blender’s future on Macs is shaped. I see that Metal is not very popular in the Blender context. I frankly do not have the expertise to judge. But I have a strong interest in a fully functional Blender which works equally well on all supported platforms.
So for starters I just want to give everyone here who contributes to Mac development a thumbs up. Answering the topic question: Yes. Any effort to keep Mac Blender healthy and alive is appreciated, despite all the mistakes that Apple has made.
I’m an ex Mac user who was tired of waiting, and was longing to return to NVIDIA hardware and being able to utilize all Cycles rendering options. I’ve returned to a Windows system, and I don’t regret that decision.
I think it’s a pity Apple has chosen to discontinue OpenCL and OpenGL support, as well as NVIDIA hardware support, in favor of AMD GPUs and Metal. Metal is undoubtedly a great graphics engine, but with their current strategy Apple is drifting further away from common standards in 3D hardware and software, alienating 3D users working with Macs, and making it harder for developers to keep their software cross-platform compatible.
Yes I see this is is more or less the consensus on the topic. In fact, I myself sort of switched to Windows for similar reasons. It wasn’t only Blender, but also Fusion wich had some troubles on my MacBook Pro. That was two years ago. I know how to bend Windows to my will, but it remains a wonky behemoth that I’d like to ditch again sooner than later… Meanwhile, BMD and SideFX, among others, appear to adopt Metal. I hope that the trend continues.
I see that there are obstacles, but still hope that devs will find a way. I joined the development fund in order to support core development for ALL platforms and hope that more Mac users will follow and make themselves heard.
If Apple would give buyers a choice between an NVIDIA or AMD GPU, that would make it more attractive to go for a Mac. And if developers really start supporting Metal, so all important tools and advantages will be available for macOS, I won’t mind switching back. Blender has a long way to go in that area though. Metal will eventually be supported via a detour in the shape of MoltenVK.
You can still render with Cycles using Nvidia GPUs using CUDA (up to Pascal series) on OSX 10.13.6
Unfortunately there is no sign of Nvidia drivers for latest OSX versions and RTX GPUs.
Apple and NVIDIA have a very troubled relationship
So I doubt we will be seeing NVIDIA GPUs any time soon inside Apple products. In the end it should not matter we need a cross platform API anyway that will be embraced by all companies. Maybe Vulkan could, in the future, fill that role, maybe not. Time will tell. Metal has been massive success for Apple, developers switched to it very fast but then 99% of it is used through game engines which made the transition a lot easier anyway.
Just circling back on a previous post in this thread… I’m now part of the fund with hopes of improving the Blender-Mac situation not just for cycles, but also in general. If there a dedicated campaign were created for this I would bump up my contribution level immediately.
Hello everybody! I follow this discussion for quite a while. I’m thinking about switching over to blender from C4D in the future but I use to work on a Mac. Anyways…
I wanted to ask what the new AMD sponsorship could mean to this topic? I read that they want to help with the support of Vulkan in Blender. But what would this mean for the Cycles GPU render on macOS?
I asked this question today at Blender Con. I unfortunately did not receive clear answer on this. I will visit Blender Institute tomorrow I will try to investigate further.