With great power comes great responsibility

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Merry Xmas for everyone!

I would like to thank the blender development team for giving the opportunity to work in independent software and wish you patience and strength to do your job.

You have gained tremendous influence in recent years. The community has grown exponentially and requests have grown along with it.

I wish you to be as open with the community as you are, but pay a little more attention to requests.

As far as I know, a new version of the RCS is already on its way, and together with it I wish you to pay more attention to user requests. Ideally, fulfill 1 request with the most votes per month (with each new release users will have 3 new features from RCS).

I also want you to understand that there can be both positive and negative reviews for your every action.
Nobody likes negativity and I wish you as little of it as possible, but if you still got it, then try to understand what is the matter, do not push it into a corner.

Regards,
Eugene

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I mean - I know it’s not that easy to simply “take the most requested feature” and implement it. Especially not “per month”. But I do support the idea of committing to core features wherever possible. Blender has taken huge steps the last two years. Gained a sit ton of traction in the professional industry and support thereof. Gaind even more well deserved recognition in the indie and small teams market. Rightfully so.

When I was at University 10 years ago (gah! where did the time go?) I told my professor that my secret plan would be to make a sit ton of money and sponsor Blender to become the tool of the industry. True story. Very apparently, it didn’t turn out that way. First and foremost I never made tat much money :sweat_smile: and secondly the Industry finally jumped in with muc bigger money when Epic entered the scene.

Buuut Blender is on a fantastic way now and I guess people don’t have the right to say “it’s too difficult to learn” and “has a too quirky UI” any more now. Blender has come much farther in the last two years, professionally speaking, than many of my former colleagues and friends along the way would have ever expected.

I remember Pablo Vasquez saying, when the discussion about why Blender wouldn’t be versioned 3.0 came up, that it’s better to release it now and polish it up so tat when all the features are back in place and better than ever it’s time to truly call it Blender 3.0.

Let’s get there. :slight_smile:
Let’s acknowledge that there are some maybe rather unsexy parts in a 3D software that are yet so essential.
Solid UV tools.
Multi-Object property editing.
Fading out the wireframe mode instead of making every other line invisible (like what’s that even god for?).
Implementing the retopology shading setup without touching 4 different menues for each object.

Flipped Normals had another article about this and while I don’t necessarily agree on everything in it it shines a light on it from people who are NOT hardcore Blender users for years but have a lot of experience in the professional industry. The worked as creature artists on Alien: Covenant among other things, for example.

Again: I also love Blender and I love how much work all of the developers pour into it.
I can’t wait to see where we will be in a year from now. :heart:

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I kindly disagree with this.

They have limited experience in their fields, I tried to speak with them in the past to illustrate what things were they saying that were wrong simply because of lack of knowledge of the software, no answers back, their analysis is not very good TBH, you don’t analyze something that you don’t know, or at least you treat with experts in the matter to contrast your analysis.

Being a character artists gives you expertise in that area, but not in many others.

Thay may be right in SOME things, but in general they are compairing vanilla Blender with what they use, which usually is Maya boosted with plugins, or Max boosted with plugins, for example the retopology talk, what about RetopoFlow?

I won’t enter into a discussion about what was right or wrong about what they were saying, but IMHO their article is not a trusted source of information, but rather a limited one to what they know, but not to the “industry”, because as I always say, what’s the “industry”?

Do archviz has the same needs as character development? and FX? and Engineering visualisation? and medical visualisation? and character animation? and mocap cleanup / animation? and many other things.

Not a good article, not a good info source for Blender, and personally not a reliable one, because they prefer to ignore who try to talk with them unless they agree with them.

With that, I can agree that Blender has many things to improve in many areas, but not under the terms they plan IMHO.

I could analyze what you propose based on other softwares, and I can bring up a ton of things done wrong in other packages, they solve that with plugins, you can solve that in Blender with addons too :slight_smile: not sure why they ignore that other packages are NEVER used without plugins, and specially in production, where many times the plugins are in-house developments.

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I think you misunderstand me posting that link as completely agreeing with their point of view. On the contrary. I don’t agree with some of their views, either. And I find your point that they are biased towards what they know very true. That’s something I dislike about their Blender coverage, as well. It’s the same bias Blender users do have - like everybody has for their own software in varying degrees. And it’s kind of hard to keep in check. Backfire effect and all that. Everybody wo is passianate about something suffers from it. Me included. :smiley:

What I absolutely do agree with, despite the Maya bias they have, is what I understand the core of the article tells us. Blender is not yet better than other software (can’t argue with that - every software has some areas that are stronger and some that are weaker than others) and as long as something isn’t at least equally good you don’t change a pipeline. Especially not in a large production company where sometimes even commercial software is locked in versions years behind current stable one jsut to not break plugin compatibility or pipeline stability. Especially the very cautious pipeline changeing is something I can completely relate to.

I also agree i the regard, that I think that these kinds of articles glance over one fact very easily: Blender cannot be taken away like any other software owned by monopoly companies like Marvelous, Adobe or Autodesk. I bought a Marvelous Designer license literally two weeks before they announced that every version from now on will be subscription only. And I pretty muc immediately stopped using it, I was so pissed. (also true story) :stuck_out_tongue:

I also do not understand how anyone can see vanilla Maya as a good modeler. Then again (backfire effect) I never got to a point where I had to learn it thogoughly enough to know its full potential. So I may be just as wrong and only repeat what I’ve heared from others. I do know that Maya relies on plugins, as well (I do use it in my regular job). And I also know that everybody is biased towards the software they’ve know for years.

The core functionality I keep bringing up is something that other software packages are as well not immune to, either.
Just look at the comment section for 3DS Max Feature videos for the last years :smiley:

Yeah. I hear what you say and I tend to agree partially. Hence the “I don’t agree with everything they say” - but the important part from the article for me is this: they do come from a production background. And more importantly they show an image Blender still has to people who are not yet involved in it. What Hening and Morten say is a good indicator for one mayor point of view or perspective from the outside. A point of view we as Blender users often neglect to see or realize as maybe equally important.

We need those solid foundations. I know I want the bread and butter of everyday 3D work covered and as fun to use as all the existing advanced Blender features. And I can only assume that others want them as well judging by the traction these requests get at RCS. Those are the functionalities everybody has to get back to in nearly every project. Nail the basics everybody needs the most. That’s what makes the difference between software people use because they have to and software people root for because the love to use it. Love for software establishes in new pipelines.

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I’ve been a max and maya hardcore user for 16 years, beta tester of max and maya, and charter of max, and still have deep knowledge of both softwares plus Blender, I’ve been in the 3d field for 20 years and running my own studio doing very different types of projects for nearly 15 of those 20, it’s not that I’m the know-it-all of the 3d world, but I deeply know the three softwares because I’ve been fighting with them day and night for a long long time and every single aspect of them.

I just tell you this so you can understand that I’m not talking with knowledge just from the “Blender side of the fence” but rather from “both” sides.

Also another not, I will never defend that Blender IS THE BEST IN THE WORLD FOR ALL THE 3D TASKS AND YOU SHOULD NEVER USE NOTHING MORE, that’s a non-sense XD

I know what the “new versions” of max/maya bring to the table, TBH it was taken as gimmicks by the majority of users, the first serious improvement has been in the latest one with the remesh toolset, previous years, not a good example, you can do practically all within Blender, there are some small differences with the bevel modifier, some better and some worse, as it’s normal, but keep in mind that the bevel modifier in max was a joke, opposed to the bevel modifier that was already present in Blender that was quite good, nevertheless it has been improved.
The other improvements, look closely, REVIT related, OSL related, Arnold related, there is one that is good, the performance one, and we need performance in edit mode of course.

Blender is not yet better than other software

Well it depends, max is way worse than Blender in many areas, and the same goes for Maya, it depends on the area and the type of project.
That’s why we shifted from a Max/Maya hardcore workflow to a Blender hardcore workflow, it depends on many things and you must know blender very very well to be able to analyze that, Max/Maya users tend to think that many things cannot be done in Blender just because they are done in different ways, but they can be done.

I won’t argue about shifting an entire pipeline to Blender, that’s a non-sense, there are much more things to consider than just if Blender is better or worse for the task, an stablished pipeline takes years to make, a lot of money, no matter the area of the industry you work with, there are much more variables to consider than just if we want to use Maya or Blender.

What I mean is that the article is completely non-sense, but people takes it as “look! they say Blender is not the industry standard” and there it goes, when the majority of time they don’t even thing that every single aspect of a production can be defined as an “industry”, set dressing, character design, character modeling, mechanical rigging, character rigging, procedural shading, non-procedural or smi-procedural shading, cloth simulation, hair simulation, different fluids simulation, simulation mixing, and I can go on and on, and every single part of the pipeline may or may not leverage Blender, or Maya or Max, saying sometehing like “industry standard”, as I explained in the previous post, just seems to be a tight view of “The Industry”

Think about one thing: why is there a “Nodevember” challenge with Blender and with Substance Designer? why are there not also Maya/Max “Nodevember” challenges?

And maya in modelling, not that bad, just not as good as Max, and IMHO Max not as good as Blender :rofl: However there are procedural workflows that has to improve, like doing intermediate topology changes (Edit Poly) or intermediate data channels (Editable Poly - UV Mapping channel 1- Edit poly with changes - UV Mapping channel 2) or other examples like (Edit Poly - TurboSmooth - Edit poly with topology changes - Turbo smooth - displacement - Edit poly with changes for small adjustments - Smoothing modifier), but that’s one thing that will probably be solved with all the nodes effort, anyways, not something “easy” to do either in “THE INDUSTRY STANDARD” and yet it’s still widely used :slight_smile:

They should not be taken seriously TBH, they speak without knowledge, and I profoundly dislike that, no matter if I agree or disagree with them, I don’t think they should do such an article without having a real expert besides them.

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Nice! I was a 3ds Max user since version 1.x (around 1996 / 1997), and an alpha / beta tester in the early 2000s, when Max was still owned by Discreet. Max was still exciting back then. I’ve switched to Blender in 2012, when the Autodesk subscription hassle started, and Blender’s UI had been refreshed with the release of 2.5. I’ve never looked back since then.

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I started looking at blender just before 2.5, later on we slightly used it in some projects, and in 2016 we did the full shift, with Blender 2.78, thanks to the inclusion of the Principled Shader :slight_smile:

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Fair enough and I agree.
Just that we shifted thread focus again away from the fact that Blender still needs fundamentals and people seem to want it. And want to be heared and not want the important core functionality to be forgotten in open design tasks.

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Totally true, to good thing is that it’s clear that the team is working on it, they are aware of many things, but nothing bad in exposing other things to add to the list :slight_smile:

However some things are not obvious, for example geometry nodes will solve many needs that are often asked for, but it’s not obvious since it does not solely solve that need, but many more :slight_smile:

The key thing is to try to find a developer from the outside of the B.I. to help with some things, for example a new UV Packing algorithm is not that hard to implement, but so far it’s being implemented as commercial addons, the same goes for a new auto-uv algorithm, there are meny techniques out there in papers that can be used, but a dev has to want to collaborate or we will have to wait until UV’s are a priority :slight_smile:

What external people (like F.N.) often don’t understand is that in other situations you can do nothing for the dev team to add something to the main program, but with Blender if it’s not a priority for them, maybe is a priority for a developer or a studio and can be added externally, in the same fashion Stefan Werner adds things o Howard has been working on the new boolean system.

So it’s not just a matter of exposing the problems, but also trying to find a collaborator that wants to add a grain of salt to the lunch :slight_smile:

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Good to know about Geometry Nodes probably solving a lot more things than people expect. I have to admit that I am not really sure where the developers are ultimately aiming with them. I’m really looking forward to seeing what the full power of those will be some day, though. :smiley:

I am aware that FOSS requires people to help as well. I do not know the internal structure of the Blender Institute. Intuitively I’d have expected fundamental functionality to be soething the core developers would take care of. Not all of them but a part of them. Core team and fundamentals somehow felt natural to me.

It would probably also be nice to know how much it is on the actual agenda as well. I’d assume that if more people knew how urgent some very heavily requested features are handled then they’d might easier be inclined to help or at least assess whether it’s okay to hold off and not maybe dou double work/work on thhings that were planned differently.

Son’t know if I’m seeing this correctly. I guess that we would just really want to know if features are planned, forgotten or even worked on but not yet in a presentable state.

The “10 big projects in 2020” was a very positive example, in my opinion. Doesn’t even matter if the goals are met or not or even is some things maybe turn out differently. It’s just really good to know even as a on developer. :smiley: