by zaphar on 8/31/20, 6:02 PM
Blender is as far as I can tell one the best run and marketed Open Source projects out there. They seem to have a great way to pay for development. They are have a lot of industry invested in their success. They have a great focus on the end power user.
by hellking4u on 8/31/20, 6:18 PM
This is great, but I have to say, I'm a bit concerned about multiple Intel tools (Embree, OpenImageDenoise) that are now integrated into Blender. The tools seem to depend on Intel MKL, which has famously been crippled on non Intel CPUs.
The big concern, for me, is the wide usage of Blender in common CPU benchmarks, which potentially could give Intel an unfair advantage in those.
by matsemann on 8/31/20, 6:07 PM
The new search will be great for people like me that only use Blender sporadically. I often know what I want to do but don't use it often enough to remember where to find it or the shortcut. And even for regular people it can be great, I use "find action" in IntelliJ all the time just because writing the name of a seldom used feature is faster than navigating to it.
by seccess on 8/31/20, 6:08 PM
"The new shadow terminator offset setting helps you to avoid shading artifacts with smooth normals on low-poly meshes."
THANK GOODNESS, man those shadows always looked so ugly. I primarily use EEVEE so this makes me happy.
by 91edec on 8/31/20, 5:58 PM
Really happy with the direction Blender is going, more polish and better outreach. Just scrolling through and being able to see the before/after for new features is amazing, makes it really easy to share with friends who haven't checked Blender out before.
by open-source-ux on 8/31/20, 7:40 PM
I've posted this before but it feels appropriate again...this Blender example of green screen VFX was created by a single person and demonstrates the amazing skill of the film-maker and how powerful Blender can be. It's really impressive work:
https://twitter.com/DrewCoffman/status/1274743473732632576
by bootloop on 8/31/20, 6:29 PM
I used Blender extensively the last few weeks for a prototype project. It's really a great piece of software but when it came to baking/texturing/painting my models (game assets using the PBR workflow) I grew more and more impatient with the build-in tools it offers .
So I gave up at some point and following some suggestions I finally tried Substance Painter to do these things (Industry standard). Using both tools in tandem was a real game changer for me. Definitely would recommend it if you want to speed up your process. I am sure all this can be done in Blender but it will be a pain to do so.
Some things I was missing within Blender:
- Baking and baking groups (it's extremely annoying to select all the objects each time but I have seen a few extension who help with this process)
- Painting on multiple layers at the same time (e.g. paint a PBR material on a PBR material)
- A non-destructive workflow with support for the above
Nevertheless I love Blender and I would like to be able to use their UI-Framework for my own applications because it works just great.
by arduinomancer on 8/31/20, 6:31 PM
After trying blender for the first time the other day I was amazed at how good the interface is for an open source program, it feels really modern.
I'm used to open source programs usually having pretty janky/outdated interfaces.
by polskibus on 8/31/20, 6:27 PM
I'd love to see blender expand into precise modeling area more (CAD).
by mensetmanusman on 8/31/20, 7:41 PM
We need more open source software modeled off of the blender system.
Imagine if customers of all the major closed-software players also put aside some small amount of funding to support full time developers of open source systems.
This benefits everyone, because it gives these customers some potential future leverage for lower prices, it gives the closed-software players some competition to keep them nimble, and it benefits the next generation of users who can’t afford the closed-software prices, but could get their fingers wet with less capable software.
by mekster on 8/31/20, 6:28 PM
How is blender compared to competitors? Are people starting to use it as a professional tool?
by checker659 on 8/31/20, 6:04 PM
I wish there was support for Metal on macOS for EEVE.
by bitbang on 8/31/20, 5:59 PM
Well that was fast considering how long the 2.8 lts release series took...
by vardump on 9/1/20, 9:45 AM
Newest Blender on Raspberry Pi seems to be 2.7, which works surprisingly smoothly under a 64-bit OS. RPi4 has 96 Gflops of CPU FPU power, making it a reasonable option for 3D-rendering for kids.
I hope there are chances to get 2.9 to run on Raspberry Pi, especially once RPi Vulkan support matures.
How's Blender Vulkan rendering path doing? Is is possible to use it instead of OpenGL one day?
by mhh__ on 8/31/20, 6:31 PM
Having recently started trying to learn to make and setup game assets (I can do CAD but not rigging etc.), I was really shocked how much cleaner Blender is compared to Maya.
I'm aware Maya is more powerful for some tasks, but - considering that other Autodesk tools are not too bad - Maya genuinely nearly put me off doing it at all.
by ww520 on 8/31/20, 6:02 PM
That's great news. Glad to see Blender keep moving forward.
One thing I wish they would add is to export the color information along with the vertices in the Wavefront OBJ file when exporting an model.
by nyanpasu64 on 8/31/20, 6:13 PM
I scrolled down a page or two...
> Meet Nishita, a physically based texture built-in Cycles.
I think the hyphen shouldn't have been added. The sentence doesn't parse with it present.
by buovjaga on 8/31/20, 6:52 PM
Recently on HN someone mentioned the core UV tools were lacking. Now the release notes highlight several improvements in that department :)
by travbrack on 8/31/20, 7:48 PM
my main wish is for improved undo performance
by brundolf on 8/31/20, 6:32 PM
It must be a really fun job to be the person that just makes all these different demo scenes to show off new features
by ElijahLynn on 8/31/20, 11:04 PM
Too new of a release on Arch. Still shows 2.83 in the repo and that is now 404ing. I'll check tomorrow.
by pradn on 8/31/20, 8:11 PM
Kudos to the team for the excellent work and for the flashy, yet useful release page!
by dinkblam on 8/31/20, 9:59 PM
by agumonkey on 8/31/20, 6:16 PM
seriously impressive, we're on an exponential