Blender 2.81 released

Everyone wants Blender to work for their workflows perfectly, and their features, now I ask:

Why don’t you gather enough people, do a crowdfunding campaign and hire a developer to code that part that you want/need?

No matter how big is it, it can be divided into smaller chunks that can be coded part by part.

Blender is open source, solve the problem, be part of the solution, don’t complaint 🙂

The support is there for the priorities set by the Blender Foundation / Institute.

Part of the money is going towards more general archviz things, in general the work being done by Germano Cavalcante for precision modeling.

If you have other priorities just fund it separately, stop giving money to blender (if you re doing so) and make a campaign to fund such importer/exporter or proper NURBS support, with Autodesk the only option is to give your money to them and hope for the feature that may will never come, then complain to Autodesk, this is not Autodesk, bring the feature yourself together with others.

What I say is that complaining won’t bring the feature faster, working towards it will do.

Not specifically you 🙂

I mean in general, users that are not Blender users but in some way see that there is a possibility for them to use Blender and they want to but they miss “feature X” or “feature Y” that is absolutely important for their workflow, usually complain.

WHy? Because if you see that Max lacks “feature Z” that C4D has, and you need it because without it you cannot use Max, but you don’t want to keep using C4D for whatever reason, the only thing you can do is the prey to autodesk to implement “feature Z” (or hire a developer to program a plugin, but that’s something less usual for small medium studios in Autodesk realm, and you cannot do everything with a plugin, you are limited to the given API).

In Blender things works differently.

There are several ways for a feature to be implemented:

– It’s in the Blender Institute roadmap: that means it’s a feature, major or not, that has been decided by the developers for several reasons, this affects mainly internal developments that are important but invisible, or general improvements that can benefit everybody, like the asset manager that it’s under development.

– It comes from users requests: There is a website, Rightclickselect.com, where people can propose features, usually if a feature is proposed with enough detail and it gets enough support devs will check it and include it in the general roadmap, but there is no guarantee that this will happen.

– It comes from a new developer: Maybe a studio, or a single developer, or an investigtor inside a university, or whoever, did a development, that development can be uploaded in the form of “patch” to developers.blender.org, main devs will have to review it to be sure it conforms to development guidelines and style, to ensure it does not break anything else (including things that maybe the studio don’t use, so they don’t care if there is something broken there), and after the review process it’s included in master.

One example of this situation is the Blender Animation Studio, the general idea is that the devs from the Animation Studio are the same as the main devs, they are not, sometimes main devs can be hired by the studio to fix something, but they are separate teams, also in the Animation Studio there are developments that don’t reach master because they don’t perform well enough or they are too specifically designed towards the production, from that point they could be improved to reach master or they could be abandoned (do you know that Blender Internal had a version with something similar to Path Tracing?).

Of course if it’s a complex feature, like the asset manager, it needs commitment by the original developer to maintain it, it’s not just a piece of code that will be wildly implemented and left to the dust, it needs a maintainer, if it’s something general enough and in the interest of a majority of users, and the original dev can’t maintaint it for some reason, it may be implemented and the maintainance may be adopted by the main devs.

Usually big features are divided into small patches of functionality, some are maintained by the original dev and some are adopted by the main devs.

There is other case, a small feature that is just a single patch, it comes from a single developer, the risk of breaking something is small and the mainteinance is minimum for the future, then it may be just accepted by devs (always after review) and implemented in master.

Of course there are more possibilities, for example talk with a dev that it’s already doing some development, help him to test (if you can’t help with development) and encourage him to continue development, or if you can, fund him to focus in that development, and after that, all the review process I said before.

There are more situations, like bringing the features in devtalk.blender.org and talk with some developers, maybe it’s a simple one and can be done fast as part of a small patch.

There are tons of situations where a feature can be implemented, but rest asured that it’s not just the Blender Institute decided features, a lot more people come into play to implement new features in Blender, anyone can affect Blender in the end.

In general one golden rule is that the feature is not “just because I need it”, but it’s a feature that will benefit everybody, and a proper STEP/DWG file import, and proper NURBS handling is something that will benefit everyone so I clearly see it could be a feature that could come from the community, why not?

If you (not specifically you, now I’m talking to anyone wanting a new feature) want this feature, the best way to start it to prepare a design document, a bunch of clear use cases compairing it with the current Blender state and possible used workarounds and why they are not desirable, and then show the desired result, and publish it, you may not even need to get funding because there are a lot of developers that want to do things for Blender, just to improve Blender and collaborate.
Now if you have money, do the same but also hire a developer 🙂

Cheers!

Let’s see point by point 🙂

RightClick Select is useless

I disagree, go to the site:

https://blender.community/c/rightclickselect/

And configure the filters to TOP and “In Development”, you will see several things that are under development that came from right click select, now configure it to “Done” and you will see several requests that were done already.

“Onlu implemented features are the ones from the “Blender Animation Institute”

First, there is no Blender Animation Institute

There is a Blender Animation Studio and Blender Institute, two separate entities, different devs, as I already said some times during the production, the Blender Animation Studio can hire a main dev to do something specific, but they are separated teams, separated funding, separated targets that some times aligns.

If you want a sample, as of today has been implemented a new feature that was developed by Omar Emara, Random Per Island, I was the one who personally asked for this feature, I spoke with the developer, I waited until he told me he was available to do the implementation, when he did the first one I tested it as soon as I could and implemented it in our build like a month ago, after a month I poked a bit so main devs could do the review when they could have time, they did the review and the patch was accepted and landed in master today.

It was not a feature from the Blender Animation Studio or from the Blender Institute.

Given it is an open source project, it would have been logical to make an official poll so that everybody could vote for a feature they wanted most but instead they did things their way

I don’t see the relation of Open Source with a voting system, Open Source just means that you can do whatever you want with it, you are free, it does not mean that the Blender Institute has to be guided by anyone, they have their own roadmap, if you want to support them you are free to do so, if you don’t want to support them, you are also free to do so, but you won’t loose access to blender no matter if you support them or not.

Open Source =/= Collectively Managed

Point is open source software should be community driven

Why?

I depends on how the project is organized, IMHO Blender is where it is right now thanks to the way it’s organized, I don’t see a need to change it, Blender is partially community driven, and partially main developers driven, why? because the community will never ask for an improvement in the depencency graph, or for an improvement in the OpenGL subsystem of the UI, why? because they will just ask for “drag and drop in the modifier stack” without knowing at first that right now that’s not possible because some limitations on the OpenGL UI system, something that will be solved, but it’s not fast, specially now that in the future Vulkan is what seems more logical, would you do a major change that will take a lot of dev effort to improve something you are going to deprecate rather sooner than later?

In general these reasonings are explained, visitng just rightclickselect does not gives you the whole view of a feature, more information is present in developer.blender.org and in devtalk.blender.org.

If you have doubts on why something has not been implemented you can always ask in devtalk.

Nothing is wrong with the voting system except than the voting system focuses usually in shiny features as I already said, instead of internal improvements, for example, thanks to the deps grah improvements now the HORRIBLE Undo of Blender is being fixed as we speak, but without all the deps graph changes (that are still going on, it’s not in it’s final state at all) now the Undo can be reviewed and improved.

RightClickSelect is a thermometer IMHO, it’s a good guide to understand what users are interested in, and in general features are added when it’s possible or when there is a dev for it, for example there was no dev for particles since ages, until Jacques Lucke arrived, but current particles won’t be improved, they will be replaced with the new system, but a lot of people asks for particles improvements, will they be done? yes, when? well first we need the new system to be stable and performant, and in the case that after all that the feature still don’t exists we can start speaking about it’s possible implementation.

Development is something that requires organization, a simple change for a feature can break other features, the difference with other softwares in general is that:

1.- Blender development pace is fairly fast

2.- Blender development is public, you know what is being done, you can ask for the status, and you can enjoy the new features as soon as they are implemented, yesterday there was a new feature, today we use it.

🙂

Thanks Technomancer! 😀