from Hacker News

Blender 3.5

by emadabdulrahim on 3/29/23, 4:43 PM with 117 comments

• by lars_francke on 3/29/23, 5:35 PM

  It's become a ritual for me: Get excited by the Blender release notes on HN, try to find good beginner resources, play around with it for an hour, give up.

  This is not a negative comment about Blender. I'm not their target audience I guess. I just _want_ to learn it but I can't really find good resources that start at 0.

  There are some Youtube channels out there but videos have never been a good way of learning for me. It's tough keeping material up to date with a fast moving project.

  I enjoy these threads every time!

• by dividuum on 3/29/23, 5:31 PM

  I hope this doesn't sound negative, but I'm curious about the converging feature set of modeling software like blender and game engines like Unreal. From my total amateur point of view it seems game engines slowly get all those nice modeling features and visual fidelity, while also being able render all it in real time. How can modeling software compete with that? Vastly better tools for modelling?

• by thomastjeffery on 3/29/23, 5:27 PM

  Every Blender release is exciting to read about.

  How many other software projects can you say that for?

• by douglee650 on 3/29/23, 6:55 PM

  Ok, native Metal 3d viewport is ++++. Tested on a Macbook Pro M1 32 core 62gb ram Ventura.

  - In Properties > Render Properties > Cycles => set device to "GPU Compute"

  - In Preferences > System set Render Devices to Apple M1*, GPU Backend to "Metal"

  - If you have a scene open it will black out for a few, mine was about 20 sec

  Very much faster and better

• by ccity88 on 3/29/23, 5:25 PM

  Blender is what I point to when people tell me open source is doomed for failure. There isn't anything that comes remotely close in terms of features and ubiquitous support, and its free. Honestly the best example of open source done right.

• by mixmastamyk on 3/29/23, 7:04 PM

  This is an impressive project, but I was hoping the UX standardization would continue. Seems to have slowed? I've started using it this month due to hearing things had been improved, but what did I find?

  - Window always opens maximized, which I never want. Couldn't find a way to change it. (A common arrogance of media apps.)

  - F11 key doesn't toggle fullscreen. To its credit I was able to change this. Defaults are important however.

  - When in full screen the top left menu doesn't extend to the edge of the screen. So you can't easily hit it without slowing down. I first learned about Fitt's Law in the 90s, not exactly new:

  https://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html

  Is this a lack of interest? Or special-snowflake syndrome?

  Another quibble with media apps is that they want to use their own special hotkeys for zooming, panning etc, but I never want them to be different from my browser and/or web maps, which are used every single day. Option doesn't seem to exist to change them in a group to standards. Probably could do individually, but don't yet have time, and risk conflicts.

  To be a good desktop citizen these things still need to be addressed. Looks like they have profiles now so non-standardisms could be moved to the classic profile.

• by preommr on 3/29/23, 5:23 PM

  The vector displacement maps for sculpting look amazing.

  Kind of surprised they didn't lead with that instead of focusing so much on the hair.

• by Reitet00 on 3/29/23, 5:34 PM

  Blender looks better and better!

  I was wondering... Is there a good book teaching Blender fundamentals covering more recent versions?

• by antoineMoPa on 3/29/23, 5:57 PM

  > With great power comes great complex-ability, so Blender now includes hair assets to make your life easier.

  That's a good lesson is software/product design. As things get featureful/complicated, it's nice to provide carefully chosen defaults and samples to help people get started.

• by dan_hawkins on 3/30/23, 12:52 PM

  If anyone is interested in following works of this release splash screen artist, here she is: https://twitter.com/nicky_blender

• by jzer0cool on 3/29/23, 8:20 PM

  Anyone know the performance on M1 Mac, 16GB ram for use creating only simple model s? I do not plan on creating thousands of objects for a scene and wondering if it is suitable machine for learning and where it might start to lag.

• by lovehashbrowns on 3/29/23, 5:54 PM

  One of my favorite projects ever. I’m having a ton of fun learning blender and I can’t wait to get to the point where I can start learning hair modeling.

• by geenat on 3/30/23, 4:25 AM

  Always excellent to see Video Sequencer updates so we can eventually replace After Effects / Premiere

• by wahnfrieden on 3/29/23, 5:35 PM

  I hope grease pencil gains full exportability to use assets in games / RealityKit on iOS

• by programmer_dude on 3/29/23, 11:56 PM

  Does it still crash a lot?

• by ftxbro on 3/29/23, 5:20 PM

  me: wondering if it has gpt integration

  blender: HAIR

• by koch on 3/29/23, 5:17 PM

  What's blender