
Blender 2.78 released - pettou
https://www.blender.org/features/2-78/
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valine
Blender has been an incredibly useful tool and I use it almost every day. The
number of things it can do is remarkable. Video editing, 3d modeling,
animation, physics simulations, ray tracing, procedural texture generation,
camera tracking, 2d image editing, character rigs, particle systems, the list
goes on and on. The Blender Foundation continues to push out theses amazing
updates despite the fact they only have a handful of people working full time.
Blender is truly something special.

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tetron
Blender is very much the Emacs equivalent for 3D editing software. It had a
kernel of functionality written in C but the majority of the functionality is
actually written in Python, which means there is really robust support for
extensions and plugins.

Also like Emacs, the UI changes based on what mode you are currently in, which
is super confusing at first because it is often not clear which mode you need
to be in to accomplish some operation.

Also like Emacs, they have managed to cram an amazing amount of functionality
into the program so it seems to do everything, and is rock solid (it would
never crash, when 3DS Max would crash 3-4 times a day).

It's not for everyone, but it is very powerful.

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valine
Blender on Linux is rock solid. Blender on windows isn't bad, but it does
crash on me occasionally. It's funny, four years ago this wasn't at all the
case. I can't tell you how much work I've lost from older versions crashing.

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Tarrosion
I really, really like Blender. I use it only as a hobbyist, but pretty
reliably once a year it's super useful - modeling furniture in my apartment
before moving, making visualizations, even playing with little artistic ideas.

Contrary to some other comments here, I like the interface. My only experience
with competing software was ~8 years ago, but I find blender's interface
faster and intuitive once you get over a slight learning hump.

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rwmj
I love Blender, and I also like the interface and like you I use it probably
once a year. Unfortunately I do forget how it works each time and end up going
back to my copy of the Blender book.

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ohazi
Just wanted to point out that Blender also has a surprisingly decent video
editing workflow. The usual caveats about the weird user interface and steep
learning curve still apply, but I gave it about two days of practice and am
very happy with the results.

Someone wrote a review claiming that Blender was the least painful way to edit
video on Linux. I'm not sure if that was/is still true, but after trying two
or three crash-tastic alternatives, I'm willing to believe it.

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franciscop
I haven't tried the blender video editor, but Kdenlive has gone a looong way
from the crash-all-the-time days to a modern and intuitive video editor (for a
hobbyist at least).

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kenoph
Unfortunately on my xenial it still crashes so often that it's basically
useless. I had to put together a short video recently and, after checking out
all the available options, I ended up using the free version of Lightworks. I
didn't try Blender though.

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ravenstine
The interface is the one thing that has kept me far away from Blender. Maya
has many faults but, in the end, it has a UI philosophy that let's you reach
escape velocity once you understand it. I have given Blender a chance many
times, and every time, its interface makes my head hurt. It has improved, for
sure, but still doesn't beat Maya in many ways. This is in now way a wish of
poor luck to Blender as a project.

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dirtbox
This is the big problem with Blender. The interface lacks an artist's eye for
what to prioritise and group, what to hide away in a menu with what and what
to have out in the open for easy access. It's an incredible piece of software,
but it has the steepest learning curve out of everything because of this. And
3D in general is the steepest learning curve of all without having to fight
the gui.

ZBrush is similar at the opposite end of the spectrum, with it's own language
and gui priorities, but at least it's entirely customisable.

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thedaemon
Blender is COMPLETELY customizable. It's open source. Most of the time you can
right click on something, and open the source code inside of Blender to update
it to what you want. I don't normally do that as I make my own add ons
instead.

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dirtbox
Good for you, problem with that for me is I'm not a programer, I'm an artist
and this is why Blender isn't used in studios.

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Daishiman
A Blender point release seems to have as many features as a pair of any other
piece of FOSS software major releases.

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keyle
Blender is fantastic. Not only the modelling package is great and free
(compared to the alternatives, aren't exactly cheap) and plugins are numerous
and really good on average. Then beyond that, the renderer Cycles is GPU
powered, and a beast, also for free. I've been using Blender every day for the
last 2 years and I can't recommend it enough. Yes the UI will drive you mad at
first until you get the hang of it. It's gotten better, but it's still
different, at first.

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doctorpangloss
The single greatest way to increase adoption is to support the Maya and 3ds
max camera tumble controls, basic transform and extrude hotkeys.

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memonkey
I've heard that Maya and 3ds max are miles ahead when it comes to the actual
manipulating of 3d objects and that Blender essentially has a steep learning
curve compared to those two. That someone who has experience with Maya or 3ds
has a lot harder time learning Blender than vice versa.

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parenthephobia
Blender's biggest weakness compared to 3DS Max, IMO, is the relative lack of
non-destructive editing options.

Specifically, Max unifies (many) editing operations on the modifier stack. An
object is the result of a sequence of operations on meshes/paths/patches/etc,
from a root creation facility.

In Max you can take a torus, say, apply materials, move it about, distort the
mesh, apply physics settings, and then go back to the first modifier and
change the torus' inner radius.

In Blender, although you can parametrically create a torus with the same
options as in Max and customize those settings _immediately_ afterwards, once
you edit the created mesh in any way - or even just select another object -
you can't edit those settings any more: it becomes "just a mesh".

Max has mesh editing as a stage in the modifier stack (it _also_ has Blender-
style "real" mesh editing). You can layer multiple mesh edits on top of each
other and toggle each off or whatever you like. Blender can _do_ the same
thing, but as shape keys. Both applications can make the same edits to a mesh,
but in Blender they can't apply at different points in the modifier stack:
they're all effectively applied before all the actual modifiers.

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mikebelanger
Non-destructive editing is overrated imho. In fact, one of the reasons I used
Blender to model instead of Maya was its _destructive_ editing features. Even
though I had a full, legal access to a Maya workstation through college, I
preferred Blender. I found that most of the time, Maya's construction history
was more of a hindrance, and if your scene file started acting funny for a
reason you couldn't figure out, you just had to delete all the construction
history. For this reason, working in Maya always felt a little precarious, and
Blender's relatively crude modifier stack felt more predictable.

Now, I was doing 3d, cartoony animation when I was working in Maya, and one
could argue that non-destructive tools aren't that applicable to that context
anyways. Fair enough -- if you need to change the inner radius of a torus
after you've distorted the whole torus, Blender has a fairly mature add-on
called sverchok:
[https://github.com/nortikin/sverchok](https://github.com/nortikin/sverchok)

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rattray
This seems like an incredible amount of features in a single release,
especially for such complex software. (I don't use 3D software, including
Blender, so I may be wrong).

Does anyone know what their codebase health is like, and how they retain the
ability to ship so much?

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mikebelanger
It is an incredible amount of features, but Blender goes through a lot of
updates with mostly bug fixes as well. I know a lot of the added features in
this release (Spherical Stereo, Bendy Bones) underwent development for quite a
while, and the fact that they've stabilized around the same time might be more
coincidence than anything else. As far as codebase health and its
sustainability, I think the role of the Blender Foundation, and a very
enthusiastic community has made Blender what it is today. Plus there open
movie/games has disproportionately shaped its development.

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pasta
A lot of people got problems with the interface of Blender. Comming from
3dsmax I also did.

What helped me a lot is to learn all keys. I even printed out a shortcut cheat
sheet.

Then I followed a moddeling tutorial and now I can say it's maybe the best
software I ever used.

But the key to learning Blender is to learn to use your keyboard.

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neoncontrails
How's Blender's support for WebGL? I use Three.js quite a bit to make fun
little animations, and for what it is I think it's the bees' knees. But for
me, the lack of GUI means it remains slightly more time-consuming to be
anything more than a labor of love.

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mikebelanger
While Blender doesn't directly support WebGL, there is a very popular add-on
that exports to WebGL called blend4web. www.blend4web.com.

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fulafel
What do you think about the Three.js editor?

A common workflow is to use the Blender Three.js exporter for exporting
models, then compose the scene with the Three.js editor, and do the rest in
code.

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mikebelanger
I don't have an opinion on the Three.js editor as I've never really used it.
In fact I've only really played with the basic Three.js code. Looks pretty
cool though -- who knows, maybe that's the next big open source 3d thing!
There's even some VR sculpt features there -- pretty damn cool!

The main reason I prefer Blend4Web is because I've been using Blender for
about 10 years, and for better or worse, it's the devil I know. Blend4Web
development tries to follow Blender versions as closely as possible too, which
means there's never any exporting issues. That said, if I was collaborating
with artists, and they were using other 3d authoring tools, then Three.js
might make more sense.

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thedaemon
I have been using Blender on and off since around 1999. I initially struggled
and kept my 3ds Max. After the 2.5 update it has been uphill since then. I now
use it as my primary 3d application. (I am mainly an animator but do
everything else.)

It's interface, once understood is blazing fast to me. Yes it has caveats. So
does every other big 3d package. I prefer some of the ways that Maya does
things, and other times the way Blender does things. (I will never go back to
the crashing fits of 3ds max, so much lost work.) But in the end it's the same
as all the other tools. You just need to keep at it and it will become second
nature.

The UI idea of no overlapping windows is probably my favorite feature of
Blender's GUI. The ability to split windows and swap them to ANY part of
Blender allows you to set it up exactly how you want, plus you can save your
workspaces. Set it up once and forget it.

I can agree that some common commands have obscure shortcuts, but EVERYTHING
is customizable. I do mean everything. (Side note, not everything is
customizable in Python. :*( But most things are.) I have my own tool panel for
all of my animation tools, I have custom shortcuts that overwrite some
shortcuts that I never use. In the end I'm faster because of it's UI. Most of
all I feel like I have a custom studio proprietary software because of how
customizable it is, with just a tiny bit of Python knowledge. I don't claim to
be a good programmer, but if you can write some html, you can customize
Blender till you get what you want. Heck you can even make Popups/overlapping
windows with 1 hotkey + mouse gesture.

I may be an advocate of Blender, but I have used just about all 3d packages
and can gladly say that I'm happy with my experiences with Blender. (Since
2.5)

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esotericsean
Blender can do a lot, but I really hate the interface. I'll stick with C4D.

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logicallee
it's an unbelievably bad interface, I mean to the point that it's unbelievably
bad even for experts [EDIT: for the sake of the thread I'll keep this, but I
shouldn't speak for "experts" \- only myself and the days I poured into it.]
It's not about being, erm, "differently intuitive", or requiring learning -
it's simply broken. Imagine if while you were typing into this text box (as I
am) the cursor would randomly move up a line, down a line, right a character
or left a character and you had to manually put it to where you wanted the
next character to go - the cursor didn't stay at the end of the line you were
typing, as one might "expect". (This is just an analogy for nothing working
the way anyone might reasonably use it.)

That's how broken blender is. It's hideously painful. If this text box were
Blender, it would have taken me about 148 minutes to type this reply, with a
random adjustment or undo or redo every letter of the way, I would have been
fighting with this text box the whole way.

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macawfish
I think you just never got the hang of the interface. A lot of people really
like it. I used to use Maya. It's very different. I prefer Blender's
interface, personally, and can get things done very quickly and smoothly with
it.

if Maya is emacs, Blender is vim. Neither of them are Sketchup, and neither
are trying to be.

By the way: I used to hate vi, cause I never gave it a chance. Recently I
buckled down and learned how to use it. Now I think it's awesome, and I've
hardly scratched the surface. But I finally got over the steep hump, and it
was worth it.

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psyc
With Blender, it's more than that. I've been a 3D person for almost 30 years,
and I've never encountered an interface as user-hostile as Blender's. Never.
In 2001, it took me less than a week to get super-productive with Maya, and it
was like a dream. Just off to the races. I use Blender constantly now. I did
get the hang of it, and I'm very productive with it now. I still consider it
hostile. It fights the user every single step of the way until you learn all
of its irrationality by brute force.

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logicallee
I agree with this sentiment and nobody should downvote it - it's not unusual.
The downvotes might be due to the fact that this article is about a blender
release so will attract readers as expected.

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tobltobs
Blender is great. The best thing for me is that you can automate everything.
The API is very good.

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moccajoghurt
I was working with Blender for the last few months and it can be quite
confusing. Yesterday I had this weird occurrence where I had call
bpy.ops.object.select_all(action='DESELECT') everytime before changing the
matrix_world.translation values of some meshes. (Even though I didn't select
anything in between). It took me hours to find out why the meshes weren't
moving correctly.

I guess Blender is not perfect for using it with python only.

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chi_cg
Blender 2.78 cannot use png images as textures. Jpg images work fine, but png
images render out as pink.. .. Any help??

