Blender 2.83 released
The Blender Foundation has announced the release of Blender 2.83, the last in the 2.8 series. According to the announcement, the release focuses on performance improvements such as faster undo, higher performance for the Grease Pencil toolset, and adaptive sampling in the Cycles render engines. In addition, it also adds some headline-grabbing features such as brand-new sculpting tools including an innovative physics-enabled Cloth Brush, sculpt face sets, RTX AI-accelerated denoising in the viewports, VR support for scene , the ability to import OpenVDB data, several Grease Pencil improvements plus many more features. to see a full list including video demonstrations, check the release notes at blender.org.
This version also marks the first LTS (Long Term Support) release. Intended to ensure that major projects can be completed using a stable version of Blender, LTS releases will continue to receive critical fixes for a two-year period.
just awesome… was here first 😉 !
This is sick!
Makes Autodesk look like grandads
More like poor relatives… oh wait 3ds max costs fortune a year.
Yeah,i saw your portfoli, grandson.
Still Amateur Software
Yeah… totally amateur… you know it with your long experience in production using Blender I assume… LOL
Butthurt Juang? Ain’t it annoying when people criticise your tools in comments….
Oh no! Go ahead, it’s always fun 😀
I’m reasoning, a person that does not have any production experience with Blender IMHO has not enough information about it to say “still amateur software”, but I’m just assuming that the user “MayaIndustryStandard” has no production experience with Blender, and make a critic without proper information. (that’s why I say “I assume”, but if I’m wrong he can clarify it and explain his trouble with Blender and why does he have that opinion)
I have 15 years of 3dsmax experience in production of different types, as artists and as a studio director, and 5 years with Blender, I can reasonably criticise 3dsmax because I already did it when I was a max user and I know it up to the bones.
Of course everyone is free to criticise Blender, again, please go ahead 🙂
But I will answer in the same way I answer with 3dsmax, asking for knowledge, experience or reasoning about the critic, reasoning is the best tool to accept or deny a critic.
Eloi has some good points about Blender’s required improvements, and while some things may be opinions (he likes A and I like B for example), other things are due to lack of knowledge (not knowing how to do a Volume Select in Blender, apprently is not possible, but it is, BTW Eloi, we have to talk, the full volume is with an empty 🙂 ), and others are just valid points (reasoned and well thought about possible improvements), and many other people has also very good valid points, all are very welcome.
Now criticism without knowing the software can lead to two things, wrong assumptions (Blender can’t do that) or just trolling.
IMHO everyone should do whatever they want, do a proper critic (informed and reasoned), accept false assumptions (usually due to lack of knowledge about the software) or troll a bit, all are welcome 🙂
Personally I’ll try to do one of three things that I always recommend:
1.- I’ll ignore or have fun with the trolls, but I will never ask them to shut up, they are free to speak whatever they want 🙂
2.- Try to explain the mistake made due to lack of knowledge or false assumption
3.- Discuss and reason any valid criticism, I may disagree with it, but I respect any well reasoned criticism, and at the same time I’ll try to give a possible workaround to the proposed problematic.
So if anyone is any of these three, please go ahead, you are my guest (well… not mine… Guest is “the original” Guest hehehe)
You know one of the key differences right now between max/maya and Blender, in general Blender developers pay attention to the user base important requests… Undo is a good example 🙂
Again, thanks for proving my point.
You did not make a point in this posts… you asked a question, I answered it.
It’s a pity that you find a reasoned and explained answer that shows respect to you as an interlocutor, rather than an insult, as something
, I hope your professional environment is not the same you picture here 🙂
What point???
I was wondering same thing.. was there some point in mdko’s messsage.
the point that putting down other users software feels a bit like a personal attack and makes people post defensively.
It’s always been this way.
I still remember the flame wars on cgtalk over “Which software is better” threads.
My point is not that complicated… If you criticise other sofware, be prepared to get it served right back to you. Seems blender users aren’t that self-conscious. No i’m not trolling, i’m annoyed.
Mdko is trolling, he hasn’t provided a single point to back up his claim.. don’t feed the trolls, it’s a futile waste of time.
He thinks he is not trolling, he thinks he is taking some kind of “revenge” or something like that.
To be honest, I think he can write whatever he wants here, it’s his choice, if he wants to troll thinking he does not trolls, it’s his right to do so, if he wants to provide constructive criticism or reasoned criticism, he is welcome.
It’s a pity that he thinks he is “taking revenge”, because there is no renvenge to take 🙂
I’ll explain it to you.
Max has bad aspects, so does Blender. Blender users can’t take when people point out the bad aspects, or have an adult conversation about them. Max users can. This is because the threshold to start working with Blender is very low (it’s free), and people like to feel special and fight against “the big corps”. This is annoying.
See? Simple.
First off everyone cool their jets. Second of all is has nothing to do with free. It has everything to do with having tools that work. I’ve been a long time max user sine max 6 when it was own by discreet. I have to say Blender by all mean isn’t perfect but damn near it compare to what Autodesk has done with max. As a freelancer i can save money doing work because it is free and i can put that towards other software or hardware that i may need. Autodesk is not listening anymore to the community they have share holders that pretty much run the show. Plus 300 a month for indie license yeah they go and stick it up their behind. Blender is slowly becoming a industry standard if it wasn’t then companies like Epic Games , Adidas and other companies such as Ubi Soft wouldn’t have invested time and money into Blender. Its not about which software is better its about software that works and crushes bugs that make you lose your work…can’t count how many times i’ve lost work from Maya or Max. Not only does Blender have good support but companies look at blender as a blank canvas that they can modify to their needs. Example if you look at a program called Armor Paint its basically Blender but modified as its open program which another program that has receive a Epic Mega Grant its about having something and making it your own. You can’t do that with Autodesk products because its a closed environment yes you can make tools for it but in less of a year or more you’ll see that tool inside of 3dsmax ported very poorly because autodesk doesn’t care only care about money and not the product. In all cool down bro.
Thats because Autodesk is losing users month by month…
This is just not true.
If you said based on cgpress comments from people that move from max to blender, yes, max should have -100 users by now. But you can see the numbers being autodesk a public trading company, and numbers are growing.
Going to the post topic, blender is having some great additions. (Is funny, in max posts people talking about blener, in blender posts people talking about autodesk, XD)
I struggle to believe that Eloi, Everyone in my team has started learning blender in their free time, with the motivation to leave Autodesk for good.
All my students are learning on blender. Those numbers might reflect that at the moment but I can assure you the new generation of 3D artists won’t be using Autodesk products.
I guess Autodesk numbers (if they are groing) are groind only because of student’s free downloads and old users who want to upgrade their old perpetual licensed versions. Like many is still using adobe’s cs products but many is going for cc but lukily also changing to affinity and other products like davinci resolve which is absolutely better than premiere in any tasks so much more advanced in many ways. Adobe has one good product at the moment: character animator but crazy talk’s animator is also quite good.
Hey Eloi, just taking the opportunity to tell you that I really admire your work, I remember watching the demos of your TP tools in awe when this was MaxUnderground a few years back 🙂
Regarding the state of the industry, winds don’t change over night, but there’s definitely a vector showing up and it’s not pointing to Autodesk, Switching from Max after 12 years was really hard, and it took the studio 2 years to do so, but now I own the means to implement my knowledge, what I know and the tools to put it into practice are mine.
This is not to say that Paid software is bad, Houdini is my favorite software ever and we wrote an internal instance exchange format for blender, but there is for sure a trend of client abuse by Autodesk which superseeds any discussion about the quality of their software.
Also, The trend of good quality work cheap s for sure going to draw another vector pointing to the non viability of such expensive software, mostly on economys where the cost of the software is a fourth of the animator salary.
Anyway I digress, thank you so much for keeping the community informed and for putting your voice into the conversation, and the same goes for Juan 🙂
Thanks Animatect!
That blender is changing things its for sure, and that you can see a lot of people transition to blender or just starting with it, its just visible everywhere. They did a good job transforming the tool during the last 4 years.
But all this is not contradicting the numbers that autodesk as public company reports. And that is that the ME business for them its growing as well. So saying Autodesk is losing users month by month….its just missinformation, maybe there is people leaving, but they have people starting with it as well. And again is not a “feeling”, the company reports are visible to anybody.
I dont want to start a debate here, its a blender news, they are improving at a good rate, I use it time to time, and the experience is good, not for my usual work, thats the reason its good to have choices.
That’s cool does anyone know where we can see how many subscribers/users Max and Maya have?
Genuinely interested
I think you are right, if this is what the Numbers bear There is no denying it, I think they might be a snapshot in time though at last time will tell but I agree, variety is important as well as tolerance
I agree with the fact that it can be miss information, in regards of what we see in person in our environment is one thing and the numbers are a different thing.
But the numbers have it’s tricks too, specially the numbers of a big company which future depends on those numbers, that does not mean that those numbers are false, just that they are conveniently presented.
I have a pair of questions about those numbers.
Of all those max seats being rented (not sold):
1.- How many of them are inside a “Collection”?
2.- And how many of them are active seats?
Because one thing some resellers told me, and I my self have seen over the time with some clients, is that some Architects have max, because it’s inside their collection of software, but they don’t use it, they don’t even install it some times, and the same goes with medium/big engineering and infraestructures companies.
So it’s not just the gross number of amount of seats being rented, it’s the amount of seats being actively used.
And with that I don’t want to imply that the number will be bigger or smaller, it’s just a note about the statistics and numbers, you know the numbers can dance at the rythm anyone wants, and specially big numbers like the ones from Autodesk, so the detail in the numbers is important to interpret them.
A link to the latest report could be interesting if you have it at hand, just out of curiosity 🙂
EDIT: The numbers I can find speak about net benefit of M&E, grouping Collections, Maya and 3dsmax, but so far I’ve been unable to find anything regarding 3dsmax specifically, no information about active seats or licenses being rented.
Their net benefit HAS TO GROW, that’s mandatory, they are forcing a lot of people into a way more expensive plan, anda piepline change takes a lot of time, so the question is… will this trend be sustained in the next 5 years?
Their net benefit increase from past year to this year in M&E (the delta) is just of 7 millions more, it may seem a lot, but if you take into account how much the price has been increased and how are they forcing people into renting… I don’t see that as a good result at all, but who knows 🙂
oh…little fanatic…if only would you spend so much time on your art…
Do you feel big now little dude?
mmm… ok LOL
Looks great!
I am so happy I have ditched the AD swamp.
Cue the totally non-biased Blender fanbase trashing Autodesk. Because if it’s one thing that makes you seem mature, is putting down others to elevate yourself. Just shows how immature and amateuristic their userbase really is. That’s what you get with free software.
Autodesk is trashing itself with their actions, no need for the help of anyone.
Or do you like what they are doing with licensing?
Do you like that now the don’t want to activate “perpetual” licenses, sold as “perpetual” forcing EVERYONE that wants to continue with their software on to a RENTAL SCHEME that milks them and puts their intellectual property behind a continuous paywall to be accessed and modified?
It’s interesting that you call
the Blender user base when you do what you criticise so much what you understand that others do in Max news, you come here just to, using your language, “trash” the Blender user base and
I find always amazing and I will never understand how a person can be such a big follower of a company that miss-behaves so much with their customers.
Nice whataboutism. Thanks for proving my point.
Oh no please, thanks to you for confirming my point with this last message 🙂
BTW I was just re-reading this, and I noticed the “nice whataboutism”… do you know that all what I told you it’s a fact, not a “what if” right?
I’ll explain here too, since apparently it’s needed.
Max has it’s flaws, just as Blender. I never said: 1) Max is perfect 2) Autodesk is perfect. 3) Blender is trash.
And because I use max, i’m an “Autodesk follower”? What kind of weird universe are you living in? It seems like you’re fighting some kind of imaginary war, when in fact, anyone can use any product they want. You just want to feel special because you’re not using the “big evil corp” software.
Lastly, I don’t care what they do with licensing, as I am not paying for them, my boss is.
A 20-years-of-Max user here. Definitely not a Blender fanboi, but currently transitioning to Blender.
Just want to add, every sheep should have the right to choose it’s butcher iteself.
If some are fine to use the “amateurish” Blender, like one of these trolls above flamed here, their choice.
If others follow Autodesk, they will be fine – as long as they pay. And if they stop payment and they loose access to their files, it was their choice.
Personally, I lived a bit under rock, in my max-bubble. Business was well and thing went well. When things changed a bit 2-3 years ago, I had to start looking for new contract work and I was quite shocked, surprised and even annoyed seeing that a couple of them had fully switched to Blender. That was when I started/had to learn Blender – to stay in business 🙂 Crazy times, but that’s how it is, all fanboi-bashing aside.
So far I feel fine, having gotten rid of the financial burden and bad policies Autodesk put on me, but that’s just my cup of coffee. I’m ok using a low-end, amateurish Software.
If you think that’s what you get with free software you obviously don’t know what you’re talking about. And you’re missing a lot.
The guy just said he has 20 years experience as a Max user. 3D programs are all pretty similar. He probably does know what he is talking about.
I was thinking a bit if Marco referred to my post or to the post from ‘mdko’ 🙂 In case he replied to me, maybe I made the irony of my last sentence not clear enough: I do NOT consider Blender low-end or amateurish, I’m fine with Blender because for my workflow it gives me what I need, in some areas a bit less than Max, but in many areas more than Max.
You said…’if it’s one thing that makes you seem mature, is putting down others to elevate yourself’
…then directly after that said…’Just shows how immature and amateuristic their userbase really is.’
HA!
Sure, got me there, that was not nice.
Hmm. Noting i could use on my current project.
What’s your current project about?
What do you need? 🙂
Normal performance in edit mode and in subdiv modifier please 🙂
That’s one of the main targets for 2020, and it’s being worked on as we speak, also SubDiv performance is already on track, patch is not committed yet, it’s being finished (it seems to have a 1000% improvement in performance vs current state, but current state is not good)
In the end, it’s being worked on right now 🙂
I hope so, because I’ve been wanting to switch to blender for 2 years now, but these problems are stopping me
Yes, it is one of the show stoppers for many people, depending on the industry you work, that together with the horrible CTRL+Z were two of the biggest problems.
Luckily the Undo problem is solved in general and they already started working in the edit mode improvement AFAIK 🙂
Layering USD Stages would be a good start.
Yep, that would be cool, you may be interested in this conversation:
https://devtalk.blender.org/t/2020-06-05-tangent-animation-labs-blender-universal-scene-description/13661/2
Nothing special. And cloth brush is only goood for fun. Tried it, big dissapointment. Looks good on video, poor effects in real use.
There is nothing amateurish about Blender. Only an amateur CG artist would say that. I’m a C4D user, which is an expensive, professional piece of software. It can’t natively load and render OpenVDB files (ProRender excepted because it’s rubbish in C4D); Blender can. It doesn’t have native polygonal remeshing/decimation tools; Blender does. It has nothing like Grease Pencil or the new cloth sculpting. It doesn’t have a built-in video NLE. C4D does way better smoke and fluids – but only because I added expensive plugins I bought personally. With each passing version Blender makes paid-for software less and less appealing. Is it perfect? Far from it (just try moving an object’s axis!). But it’s free – it will always be free – and is improving in leaps and bounds. I now keep a copy as an addition to C4D. There may yet come time when it replaces it. Amateur my ass.
hey, i just respond in blender user style, do you like it?
you clearly feel bad because you’re stuck with adsk products and others points out its weaknesses. Don’t project your anger towards others.
Stuck? Not at all. And dont have to pay for my 3ds max. Company i work for pays for my software. I could use blender, no problem, but dont want to. It’s too slow, it’s performance sucks. BTW i work in Zbrush like 90% of time.
Have you purchased a license of Max/Zbrush for home usage?
What do you use at home?
Because many artists don’t care about licenses because their company pay for it, but later at home they have pirated licenses, which is not good at all.
I have single user max license at work. I can use it at home , just not at two computers at once. I have my own Zbrush, for like 10 years, bought it when it was funnily cheap and all this years get free upgrades from Pixologic:D. ANyway i think 3d artists earn enough to pay for software:)
where?
That’s a key question, how much do you think it`s the salary of a… let´s say an environment artist in a medium or small studio?
Looks like Donald Trump joined the conversation;b
Blender lives matter.
Keep it respectful please. That is a much larger issues that really matters.
Agreed
naaah,,, it’s just hysteria.
Nonsense. I`ve never even touched sculpting in Blender and only tried the cloth sculpt tool because of your comment – it works right out the box! It was like magic!!
Didn’t say it doesnt work. Cloth brush works, but effects arent realistic, it’s good enough for maybe couple wrinkles on a sheet. Not for realistic wrinkles on character cloth. You’ll get better effects with simple alphas in zbrush…
That’s not the case according to the art made by Pablo Dobarro (the programmer author of all these features and also a character sculptor).
https://www.artstation.com/pablodp606
However it’s not the first time this problem arises, and this comment is heard, and some conversations have been made around this, it seems the problem lies in the default settings of the tools and the need for the artist to really understand how to use the tool, and both problems will be solved in the near future probably with a better documentation and better defaults 🙂
I know who Pablo Dobarro is. His characters are great but in cartoonish style. You need much moore for realistic cloth. You can use cloth brush for maybe little changes in ready cloth. For professional work there is marvelous designer and nothing better, or even comparable.
I’m not saying that this is not the case, but it may be that perhaps (and by all means I may be wrong) you are not very familiar with the tool, It happens all the time when people judge zbrush’s capabilitys, and without the amazing gallery they have people would for sure still blame the tool, I also would say that you don’t need the tool to get you all the way there, anyone that sculpts knows that having the gesture and the proportions of a volume is the more important part, all gravy on top that you add to get it to realism is just very very very fun 🙂
At our studio we had a couple of characters that required a bit of sim in marvelous for poses, the cloth brush has eliminated this step and we are very hapy.
I tried the cloth brush,i was very optimistic,used it with help of my friend which uses blender in every day production. Its just not good enough for me for now. Im working on photorealistic characters for FPS shooter game. All wrinkles just look the same, not good enough. I appreciate the idea, but it still needs improvements, or maybe time. When computers will be strong enough to calculate moore complex cloth simulation in real time.
well i don’t think it is meant to replace a full cloth simulator that is around since ages. This is a little tool developed by 1 person while doing other stuff with the focus of helping his character modelling workflow.
you don’t have to pay for it, don’t use it if it’s not for you. Ater all it’s somethig MORE that the software offers, not something less.
no point in complaining really here…
It’s not meant to replace a full cloth simulator at all!
It’s meant to ease the life of a sculptor, you may get a first version of your wrinkles and from that refine for example.
@Rollo
About the models of Pablo, they may be cartoon, but take a closer look to the clothes in those models, they are full of wrinkles and complex clothing, but I understand what kind of wrinkles you refer, it’s a diffeerent type.
Anyways, other artists are using it for realistic models, but if you don’t find it useful, no trouble 🙂 keep using Zbrush, an artist should use whatever is faster for its workflow
Now, you may be missing a new feature that I’m not sure reached 2.83, I think it does not, which is maintain volume while simulating, that could help you to get more realistic wrinkles, also keep in mind that to get different results you have to tweak the cloth settings.
Take a look at this:
https://twitter.com/pablodp606/status/1265375053681745921?s=20
plus there is no one stopping you from using alphas in blender too 🙂
why should i? When there is Zbrush:)
Oh, you SHOULD not, do it if you want, don’t do it if you don’t.
There are some benefits of working in the sculpt phase directly inside a full DCC, but it all depends on the artist and the work being done.
You don’t need/want to use Blender, then don’t 🙂
What benefits, i like to sculpt from sphere with dynamesh…moore freedeom, retopo/LP/uv at the end in max. Also im working a lot with scan data, stright to zbrush for cleaning:)
As I said, you may not need anything from Blender at all, keep using Zbrush and Max then 🙂
he’s trolling, not looking for a conversation
Well, in the other messages I think you are right 🙂
In this conversation specifically I think he is actually answering properly, he just don’t see the need to use Blender and prefer to keep using ZBrush and Max, which is totally respectable 🙂
Enjoy your pension Autodesk!
Blender new acceleration race!
enjoy your pension of Autodesk!
Blender new acceleration race!
And here I was thinking that the 3ds max update news was full of toxic Blender discussions 😀
Please calm down everyone.
Blender is showing some amazing innovations on all fronts of CGI development. Really happy to see so many new features getting introduced. Other software will benefit as well from this. It reminds me a bit of when Substance designer was starting to become serious software. Glad that Blender is not for sale.
(happy 3ds max user btw 😉
Both show progress indeed, it’s just that one software package’s fanbase is really annoying and can’t properly hold a discussion.
we are really sorry 🙁
Says the person who inmediately after giving him a respectful and reasoned answer to his
said
How someone can have such kind of revenge feeling because of some softwre discussions?
You are always welcome to talk and discuss things here, or in a max thread, a maya thread or whatever thread you want, as long as it’s kept respectful I think you have all the right to say whatever you want 🙂
Of course if the only thing you would do is to say the things you’ve been saying so far, the conversation will loose it’s interest sooner rather than later, and you will probably be ignored, but please, go ahead, expose your point of view 🙂
ok fanboy.
Did you heard me calling you Zbrush Fanboy?
When I try to respect both of you and talk respectfully, you answer like children, and you call me fanboy?
Ok👌
This Rollo guy is an idiot, ignore him. I stopped reading his comments lol
he’s just a troll, ignore him
just here to read rants and dissing . keep it up guys, it is awesome .
Really cool improvements.
In 3-4 years at this pace, it will be good enough to my taste maybe.
For now, show blockers are:
-no tabs for interface panels (and weird UI panel system)
-bad axis orientation for vfx
-horrible material assign system (reallly bad)
-very bad precision modeling tool (no snap.., no pivot..)
-medium overall performances
-really bad UV tools
-full of not industry standard behvior here and here (it seems to improve though)
-too simple render engine feature set
-many bad designs from the past that need clean-up/reworks..
I’ll expose my point of view of the things you mention 🙂
– Tabs: the UI of Blender is based on a non-overlap principle, you actually have tabs with the workspaces, and you can enable different tools in different workspaces, so they are shown in the N panel.
– Bad Axis: i disagree, it’s the same axis as 3dsmax and other packages, Ím not sure why you see this as a problem when for interoperability nowadays that difference it´s not a big problem in general
– Material system. Also disagree, having the materials tied to an object keeps the scene a lot more organized than just having a random material floating around and then applying it to an object, also you can use groups to instance parts of a material to others
– bad precision modeling: I don’t understand you, we have snap, and we have pívot, and we even have a cursor to give more control, also some amazing addons that extend those capabilities a lot more, like CAD Transform for example
– This depends on what area, Edit mode for high poly? It can be improved, characters with SubDiv, it can be improved, but general big scene performance with good organization? No problems at all, very good performance
– Bad UV tools. Apart from the packaging, that I agree is not good at all, the rest of the us tools are pretty good, not sure why you say this.
-Non industry standard: well, not every industry standard is the best choice, for example I rally prefer GRS way more than WER, and personally I also prefer RMB selection mode, but that’s a matter of taste
-Simple rendering feature set: can you elaborate a bit please? What do you miss? (Not implying anything,really, can you elaborate?)
– many bad designs: can you elaborate?
In general in your points I see what I see in many experienced artists, and please I say this with all respect, I see a resistance to use Blender as it is designed and a hope that it turns into another Maya, so it works like Maya because they like Maya more, I may be wrong, but that’s my general feeling.
Anyways I wrote this to talk about your criticism in a constructive way, not to start a fight,I find interesting to know other points of view because while my opinions are what I stated they are just my opinions and I may see things differently after a good talk 🙂
Thanks for the points!
Indeed, I am a experienced Maya user. And Maya initiated some good practices and standards that I miss while using/trying Blender.
It feels like it can achieve quick and dirty some small projects fairly well but no way it can handle multi-users and long term complexity in a good way. And don’t tell me “Next Gen” like I see often used as a production example where Blender shined, that’s not what I call complexity nor shining.
Like the material tight to an object that you like… no to be trolling/be mean at all but if you were doing some very complex projects with literally thousands of different meshes in it, you would think that such a limited system is a total joke.. And it doesn’t work with cache animation where you sometime have to deal with custom exceptions that can’t be changed then…
Not to mention the performances (that get better but still..) plus the rest I wrote. Non overlapping UI great.. 95 percent of CGI softwares have overlapping UI, maybe there is a reason for it some would say.. ?
Same for the rest.
But like I said, I give it a few years.
See, why do you have to react to EVERY small criticism of Blender? So insecure! You really don’t see why you’re annoying?
“In general in your points I see what I see in many experienced artists, and please I say this with all respect, I see a resistance to use Blender as it is designed and a hope that it turns into another Maya, so it works like Maya because they like Maya more, I may be wrong, but that’s my general feeling.”
So weak! People have legitimate criticism, and you say they want to change the software to be … not Blender? What?
A true patriot is critical of his country, you just want to feel special and that you’re “sticking it to the man”. Whoever that may be (in this case anyone who has valid points about Blender).
If you want to criticize something judiciously, you first have to understand that something, if not, what you are doing is transferring the desire that the new works like the old but with the good of the new, that never works 🙂
That said … I have never said that someone cannot criticize Blender whenever they want and however I want, I simply state my opinion about what I see in many cases 🙂
And regarding the
That’s your opinion, but I have not defended something that I don’t believe is better or true, for example:
– when someone tried to say that Bifrost is way better than Mantaflow, what was my answer?
– and what about Rollo and Zbrush did I defended that he should use Blender because it’s better or did I supported his decission of keep using Zbrush and Max because he thinks it’s a better workflow for his work?
Sorry but nope, I defend what I truly believe in, but I’m not a blind defender that “sticks” to something or wants to feel special, if that would be the case I would still be using 3dsMax and defending Autodesk bad behaviour LOL
But you make me feel special however, you dedicate some of your precious time to answer me, thanks 🙂
Accidentally, I have this time the the same opinion as Juang. 🙂
All listed points are irrelevant because Blender has now the initiative on the market and by the artists. This issues will be fixed sooner or later, on the fly; the rest of 3D-Apps must adapt to follow the tempo Blender dictates. This is fundamental change on the market; no one at Autodesk has anticipated this situation few years ago, everybody is evidently surprised, most developers behave like deer in the headlights.
We have already predicted that if a developer has not ported his plugin to Blender till 2022, they he has in the future no valuable asset in his portfolio.
In two years we will be talking here about how implement U4, Blender and VR in the newest games, movies or experiences. Themes like “Medium overall performance” and “Industrial Standard” will be sorted out and discussed in 3dsMax, Maya and Cinema topics.
Yup, and windows will die, linux will rule the desktops. I hear that stuff for years now. Sure.
Which is what approximately happened, but not in the way you describe it.
In my neighborhood there is no more family with a PC and monitor. They all have some kind of setup-boxes, teens are on MobilePhones and tablets. Ok, it is not Linux, but Android. Project it into the future, and there may be a possibility that WIN may (not die) become something only few niche-segments of market fully engage (Gfx, Code, Gaming, Offices).
Windows is not dead, it has no value (from economic point of view) for MS. MS is giving it away for almost free. If you look at the latest quarter report, it made almost no win, MS is making money with Cloud, Zoom and other shit. Same as Autodesk. Media&Entertainment is for them a penny-market. The numbers are official, you can check them.
In any case, it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact Blender has put the rest of the 3D-market in a great stress-test, which is evident and undeniable.
Have you heard the news about what the Windows 11 supposed kernel is?
Nope. Just checked in Google, they talk about something, it may run on Linux. Sounds crazy.
Yep, look also for DirectX for Linux, they are slowly taking the required steps, can you imagine how much easier their life would be if they don’t have to maintain the whole kernel?
They are the 5th largest corporate contributor to Linux and the largest open source contributor on GitHub (owning it has to help..). Even a full Linux kernel was supposedly shipped in Windows 10 last year.
And it will still be Windows, and You will pay for it:)
Are you sure?
Rumors in the tech sphere say that next windows release may become free, will see what happens.
Also that “will still be Windows”, do you understand what having a Linux kernel for Windows 11 means?
That it will work better? Let it be free, worst what can happen is subscribtion.
Ok, be happy with that idea 🙂
Eh, that’s a lots of predictions in one post..
Maybe you should check latest version of Autodesk Maya, and discover that they actually improved it a lot over the past few years. Blender dev might be effective but competition is also moving forward.
Bifrost in Maya CRUSHES mantaflow by example.
Performance is way better overall,
There is a good UV toolset,
Arnold is a better render engine than cycles on almost every aspect,
Anim/rig is still the best in class
…
I have some questions for you:
1.- Arnold is a better render engine, why?
IMHO Arnold is as slow as a turtle, and it’s nearly impossible to accelerate it, it’s a super powerful render engine, designed for what it’s designed, useless for many things like engineering viz or arch viz, meanwhile Cycles is much more adaptive, it’s several times faster, it lacks some features, but has other, it’s a different engine.
2.- There is a good UV Toolset
I asked about this earlier, I beg to disagree with you, not because Maya UV toolset is bad, it’s not, but because Blender UV toolset is good.
3.- Anim/Rig is still the best in class
I hear this a lot from riggers coming from Maya, but I never hear why.
– why is it better?
– what things do you miss in Blender rigging toolset?
– do you have proper experience in Blender rigging?
Don’t assume that I’m saying what you say is false, but I would like to receive an answer to these questions.
Performance wise, it depends on the situation, but yes, in complex rigs Maya is faster, and Bifrost is way better than Mantaflow for the time being.
Bifrost is the new guy in town.
Mantaflow has recently been implemented, but it’s workflow it’s still the old one, and it’s features are not comparable with BiFrost at all, the new node based workflow is being developed, not just for manta, but for many areas of Blender, not a excuse or to say “manta will be better”, just an explanation of what it’s happening right now.
Just as a side joke… does Bifrost has Rigid Bodies already? hehe
Maya improves, that’s good, from my colleagues working with maya on a daily basis they say that it has actaully got worse, not feature-wise, but crash-wise, they say it’s more unstable than ever, I can’t confirm neither deny, again, just information, you seem to work with maya on a daily basis, you should know better 🙂
Yup, manipulative questions. Sure, cycles is better than Arnold. And blender UV is great. Sure. How it is even possible that blender artist working with me unwrap models in external apps ? You are simply blind propaganda guy:D
I asked you your reasons and facts, and you answer with “sure…”
After not reasoning anything you tell me that I’m blind to propaganda.
Well, I use Cycles/LuxCore/Blender on a daily basis, I used Arnold in the past, and in the present day to help a studio to optimize their render times (which we did, from 45 minutes per frame to 7 minutes per frame, for a simple scene) what I said is that Cycles is way faster, and it lacks some features that Arnold has, for us Arnold would be useless, the same scene I told you could have been rendered in 1 minutes per frame or less in Cycles (we did a test later) with better quality.
Arnold is not a battle horse, it´s a precision tool, with that I mean that it’s designed to deliver quality, but not performance, it´s created for big productions, not for high quality fast productions, it´s what it is, does that make it a bad render engine? No, it makes it useless for us and for many people that not only needs quality but also speed, something that Arnold can not deliver.
And regarding the UV, I dońt know what your friends know about Blender and it´s UV toolset, ask them what problem they have with Blender UV toolset and post it here so we know why your friends do such thing.
Again, we use Blender on a daily basis, including the UV tools, and we don’t need to go to an external software, I alaways hated external softwares for UV’s
But if you keep answering without answering, that is, giving your subjective opinion but not supporting it with your actual experience facts, the. I’m afraid that you are propaganda-victim, not because you are right or wrong, but because you don’t factually know if you are right or wrong.
Wow, Damm, you must be coming from the Year 2004!!! I suddenly feel very nostalgic!
Your post sounds like the excerpt of discussions 15 years ago: battle-cries, bullhorn sounds, war preparations, units mobilization and massive clashes of armies of Maya VS Max. Hell, those were the times, do you remember 2002-2004?!! We have wasted the best years of our creative life in 3D-forums writing such … bullshit. In this misspent time I could have had five girlfriends (i was 25 back then).
Please don’t make this errors two decades later by starting comparing lists of features of expensive, subscription software application:
Max has BIP
Maya has Nodes
Max was used for “TombRaider”
Maya did “Finding Nemo”
…
Blender has Cycles
Modo good UV tool
Houdini LOL best smoke!
….
In the year where Unreal brings out Version 5 of its free, real-time movie-quality rendering app, you still talk about Arnold. A Brontosaurus, that renders a 1080p shot for few hours?
No one is interested in Arnold (or cycles), except movie makers and art-station portfolio/character designers. Even they render in Marmoset Toolbag.
Wake up, we must arrive into the present time. 🙂
TBH we will see the caveats of UE5 when it’s released, but while is amazing and astonishing and it’s evolution is superb, there are many things that will still be not easy to UE5 and that require preparation of assets and other things.
We’ll see where all this goes.
But of course I agree with the idea that says the render engines are converging and in the end we will work with real time render engines without all the real time export caveats we have right now, the mixture of rasterization and raytracing is super powerful, and NeRF is magnificent too, so the destination is clear, render engines must adapt and improve towards that target, at least give the option, or they will be ditched sooner than later 🙂
Yep, but try getting the Blender fanbase to understand that… they are just fighting against the big bad corp and not being productive or mature.
Man really, what are you saying? You keep saying “inmature” while saying things that properly represent what you keep saying.
One thing is how Autodesk is behaving with their customers, which is bad, a different thing is that Blender users have something against corporations in general, some do, some don’t.
Do you think there are no max users against corporations? because I know a few.
Igor, please stop writing, you embarrass yourself.
Stop being a dumb fanboy about promising tech demos you saw on youtube or software that work well with your 100k poly scenes, and be more respectful about the actual tech that are for REAL used to make today’s big projects.
The Dinosaur Arnold, the Prehistoric Photorealistic Renderman then are what make 95 percents of the big movies today…
Igor knows better than the people who make millions dollars projects everyone talk about about how to do things the good way because he saw it on youtube, and we compute images for hours instead of seconds with marmoset because we are too stupid…. of course.
Movies is one small part of the 3d industry in general, one of the most acclaimed and visible, but a small part.
Arnold and Renderman are great for big productions, no doubt about it.
For Visualization or Motion Graphics? Using Arnold is not a good idea, too slow to be profitable, even with the gpu implementation, it’s super slow.
Do you work in the feature film industry?
I hope you know that UE4 Virtual Production pipeline is starting to become important in feature film production for Disney, and the test bed for it was The Mandalorian, are you sure about what you are saying?
Some things need offline renderers yet, some other things don’t.
I write here my opinion. If you would like to hear only your opinion, go and talk to yourself. This is a board/forum, where people write and exchange opinions.
You have no monopoly over freedom of speech and thinking.
I told you what I think of your … old-school comparisons, that is my opinion. I wrote you Arnold is used in Movies (which are only a part of whole CG Industry) and you repeat and use it in your post as your own argument. This is and outdated demagogic trick. In best case this means you have no other, better argument.
Instead of going personal, write me how do you see Arnold in 5 years? In a pincer between Realtime engines and Vray/Corona/Other.
Heck, today was in CGP an article about an awesome realtime-rendering in browser. Go check it. Project it in 5 years. Think. And then write.
Do not attack my person, attack my facts.
Igor I’m worried, something is broken in the matrix… you and I agree too much in this situation… hahaha
Yes, we should stop it, before we start sending love messages to each other. Or before Mr. Damm finds out we have settled this tactical defense together, as conspirators. 😀
True, true… don’t worry… no one hear us XD
I promise I won’t get used to it hahahah 🙂
“We have already predicted that if a developer has not ported his plugin to Blender till 2022, they he has in the future no valuable asset in his portfolio.”
Total nonsense, and you’re extremely biased. Anyway, the only huge “disrupter” here is going to be UE4, because if you’ve been following the development the last 5 years, you know they are on the right track.
Not “total nonsense”, but necessity. You see, in U4 you can visualize and interact. But you still need to create stuff for it. You can not model, sculpt, bake, unwrap, paint textures, rig etc in U4 (or if you can please tell me how you design a 3D-soldier, rig, his weapon etc – i am really curios)
For this tasks, you need something like May, Blender, Zbrush.
And for this tools, there are still hundreds of tools and plugins that need to be developed.
Now, if we sell a plugin to our AD customer (we are AD and Adobe developer, you can click on my signature), and i get for each sale 3 mails “do you have it for Blender?”, the situation turns into a serious scenario I have described above.
That’s interesting information.
Man Igor I used your plugins all the time!
FlatIron saved my a** almost 10 years ago baking stuff from V-ray in this huge project and your customer support was great.
I didn’t make the connection!, so glad to see you guys are still in business!
Hi Animatect!
thanks man, i remember you of course 🙂 you can still use them even now (if you are still on 3dsMax), we have perpetual licenses and Flatiron is now available in Version 2.40; all customers, even after 12 years, can download the free updates and upgrades from their customer login area.
FlatIron has grown a bit in the last years, from artist tool to more industrial automation; it baked scenes from StarWars to the latest AR Exhibitions on Siggraph. But it is still heavily used in small studios, mainly for mobile games and VR.
Last time I checked, FlatIron was still able of rendering full scene texture bakes even with BRAZIL renderer, the code was not removed (if you still have it somewhere in your backups)!
We have been working for two last years programming new software and designing new methods to support 3d artists. I just few weeks you will be able to download something even more powerful 😉 You will see it here on CGP soon.
thanks!
Nice!, We switched to Houdini and Blender some time ago we barely use 3dSmax anymore, all our custom the custom tools have been ported to blender by now, but as soon as you start making Blender plugins I’m in!
@ mkdo, yeah people like that are better ignored. I am disappointed at myself for even replying.
“We have already predicted that if a developer has not ported his plugin to Blender till 2022″ that really doesn’t sound like someone sane anyway.
Ok, then why do you answer?
No disrespect Juang, but I’ve been to your website and seen the type of work you do and you definitely doesn’t required paid software for that, so it makes sense for you.
But I need to agree with others that you are too defensive. You mentioned sculpting, the guy said he does more realistic and not cartoony like Pablo. But you can’t accept that, so you ask to have a look at his portfolio as there’s a lot of “intricate” cloth sculpting.
Well I checked and the only one that caught my eye he used Marvelous Designer.
Take it easy my friend, Blender is growing and making an impact. I’m learning on the side as well. Just enjoy the moment but stop with the evangelism. This is the main reason why I don’t follow any Blender forum. Cheers!
Can you tell me what is the website you have visited?
In a different order of things.
What evangelism?
I’m explaining things about the cloth brush, and at the same time I’m telling him that I understand that Blender and it’s sculpt toolset may not be enough for what he needs, and even if it’s enough, he does not have to use blender at all, I understand he may be happy with his current toolset and workflow of Zbrush and Max.
where is the evangelism there?
Still waiting what website did you analyze to understand what kind of projects don’t need from paid software, I assume that you say so because you assume that those projects you saw were too simple.
Eeehm…Quiksilver renderer? Art Renderer? Amateur Renderers?
Wow, sculpting in blender is so far behind compared to zbrush…You maybe dont feel it, but it like 10 levels below…
So? Zbrush is specialized sculpting software while Blender is a general DCC software. Its sculpting may be 10 levels below Zbrush, but still at least 10 levels above any other DCC out there with integrated sculpting toolset.
Furthermore there are quite a few high profile industry artists who are now Blender users, and do even sculpting in Blender, while they used to do sculpting in Zbrush previously, and they manage to get the job done just fine.
Here’s the Artstation’s artworks search for Zbrush, ranked top to bottom by likes:
https://www.artstation.com/search?q=zbrush&sort_by=likes
And here’s the same for Blender:
https://www.artstation.com/search?q=blender&sort_by=likes
Quality of those results seems more or less comparable.
I thought this was a smart point, then I clicked your links…
It is not really comparable, right? The zbrush sculpts are clearly better in my opinion and also some of the good blender sculpts, when you click them, zbrush was used anyways. I agree with your basic point, which is that a great artist can make great things with anything, but based on the links you provided zbrush sculpting still creates much more better looking art.
Having said that, I am no sculpter and I hate zbrush UI. Blenders capabilities for sculpting are very exiting, also because of its combination with regular polygon editing, animation, grease-pencil, scripting and shading. That is something that zbrush could never do and it is something that will results in very innovative workflows yet to be discovered.
WoW, sculpting features in Max did not exist…sculpting features in Maya did not exist…animation features did not exist in zbrush…true renderer in zbrush did not exist…
Really, dude?
Autodesk uses Mudbox for sculpting I use Zbrush.
Max Indie absolutely puts Blender out of business. Blender main selling point is that it is free. Max indie is roughly $5 per week. If you are a serious artist and you can’t cough up $5 per week for your craft, you’re not a serious 3d Artist. You can no longer show up at a studio and say you only know Blender because you could not afford Autodesk. Why waste you time learning Blender when you can learn Maya at $5 per week with an indie license.
Autodesk is a stupid company that made a smart move with the indie license.
Blender main selling point is not that it’s free, but if you see it this way, ok, for you that’s the main selling point.
Now… Max price has NEVER been the problem, if you don’t understand that, then IMHO you clearly don’t understand the problem with Autodesk (not with Max)
Without understanding the problem it’s not possible to understand either why Max Indie is not going to solve the problem no matter the price.
Actually I do think Max price is the problem.
A lot of Archviz (huge industry) is still dependent on 3dsmax plugins and libraries. A transition to another DCC comes with lots of pain. A worldwide Max indie release would definitely keep a lot of users onboard.
I don’t understand why the Blender foundation isn’t targeting the Archviz industry more. Even Ton himself mentioned it’s a huge industry. It feels like a missed opportunity.
It is huge indeed, viz dwarfs entertainment industry by a huge margin, but the point is not so much max as the asset and plugin sphere around it, which is slowly moving.
I know a lot of architects that learn SketchUp un one Month.Autodesk survive thanks to Revit…in architectural world.
Well, maybe not the Blender Foundation, but we actaully do, we’ve been working into archviz sector with Blender for around 4 years already, and we’ve replaced all the big plugins we used to use in Max,in fact we have a course and a webinar talking about this, and some arch/viz studios are already doing the change, but as you say, it’s a painful transition, and the studio MUST be sure that they want to do the transition, I always insist on this, they SHOULD NOT embrace Blender if they are not sure it will help them in their daily job, no matter the price or the plugins or the process I show them.
The Blender Institute focus in what they focus, but Blender is not only maintained by the B.I., it’s a group effort between the B.I. and many studios, artists and developers, it’s a very different thing from 3dsmax, were you just sit and wait to see what Autodesk will bring to the table.
With that said, there are some things that I always remark, it’s hard to compete in the archviz world if you need to work with things like the revit live link, this is something that will NEVER happen, because Autodesk won’t allow anyone to go near their REVIT file format, but it’s something possible with things like “Blender BIM”
And in the end, the ArchViz market is the BIG REALM of 3dsmax, and this is not going to change anytime soon, and there are also some weird “enforcements, like CGArchitect refusing (or to said it better, ignoring our requests) to add Blender or LuxCore as tags in their galleries, so when we upload a picture we cannot properly tag it, and our picture cannot be found by software, and you won’t ever know who is working with Blender in the CGArchitect gallery, because there is no way to know it.
Not sure why they do this, but it’s “dirty” IMHO, I hope I’m wrong and they have an explanation to ignore all the times we’ve tried to contact them about this issue. 🙂
Blender’s main selling point is indeed that it is free. Charge $5 a week for Blender and see how many users cjppse ot pver MAx indie.
OK, that’s your point of view, but do you use Blender at all in actual projects?
I mean, do you know blender enough so you can actually evaluate it?
Because no studio puts in value the fact that Blender is free, much more things come into play than just that it’s free, as I said, paying for the software has never been the problem, nor the price.
Well, learning blender is a good idea for a few reasons, mainly that your investment is protected, nobody is going to pull a Softimage/XSI move from under your feet, but also because the trend points that way, go back a couple of years and see if you can find a blender thread with 50 comments let alone being the most commented posts on the site.
Do you have absolute confidence that the indie license is going to be there after you have invested heavily on building a pipeline?
As a last point , and I realize this is absolutely circumstantial, go around Maya based artists youtube channels and you’ll notice a trend, people will often have some recent blender-curious videos, it is not a metric by any means, but I find it curious, we use Maya at the Studio for some projects so some of the guys follow Maya channels.
It is also worth mentioning that all artists at the studio come from Maya or Max background and usually present some resistance to using Blender, but without exception every one of them prefers Blender after a few weeks of training. Again highly circumstantial and not a metric at all (probably there’s some group bias involved there).
I dont think you can consider anything for granted anywhere. What happen with the game engine in blender few years ago? What happened with the companies that build over it? For sure its not the same as in a commercial software nowadays, you can keep using the old version and keep building yourself over it… but if you are a small boutique the result will be the same, you will be forced to look somewhere else.
When he says granted is because you have the ability to access your files no matter the version they were done with, because you can access old versions of blender whenever you want, and you don’t have to pay a company to access your work 🙂
That’s the “granted” he refers too, of course any software can die or be killed, like softimage, I have old softimage scenes that I would like to access, but I can’t because Softimage was removed from my subscription at some point, and I cannot access it, even when I had a perpetual license, no matter what I do.
Juang3D,
If you have old Softimage XSI scenes with models that you’d like to export, please create a technical support case from your Autodesk account, put my name in it, and I’ll see what I can do about exporting your data and/or checking into a Softimage license for you. 😊
Thanks for that Jon, I appreciate your willing to help 🙂
I had to recreate those scenes by hand already, so I’m right now not in the need to export them anymore, in the future I may be, so I’ll write the case anyways, because I may be in the same position in the future.
Hey Eloi, other than what Juan answer which is true, there is also something to say about precedent, we cannot say what will happen but we can certainly say what has happen and derive some future behavior, enticing people to switch to Indie to crank the prices up and force everyone to pay more to get revenue for the next quarter is completely in character for Autodesk so it is more of an educated than a wild guess, we can also talk about what I think should be obvious, the driving force for Autodesk’s decisions is exclusively next quarter profits (which more often than not is at odds with the base best interests) I really don’t want to talk about this vs that so my point is not about Max or Maya vs Blender, It’s about Autodesk itself which keeps behaving as the monopoly it yearns to be.
A last note: the point when I left Max (a software that I absolutely loved) was when I realized that Autodesk was going to universitys to pedal Maya and trash max, I imagine this had something to do with Max having that unlimited render nodes deal with Mental Ray and Autodesk wanting convert Max as much as possible into a viz tool, which is less demanding to maintain. This kind of behaviour speaks volumes about the mindset of the company and should not be ignored or swiped under the rug if they start to “care” about their base again.
So…i model Max…export my work to mudbox…re import in max…vray heheh for rendering.
A good workflow for 2000’s…but we are now in 2020.
I have been using 3ds since ms-dos…tried mudbox when It was an amateur program, maya, zbrush since 2.0…
Max IS slow…sorry, but if you press m for materiales you could go to the kitchen and make a coffe.
Now i use Blender and zbrush. I can make explosions…while in Max IS the fire effect for vpost.
Sorry, but IS ridicolous.yeah..its free..free for the people Who didn’t care it’s profesión.