Blender 2.93 LTS released
The Blender Foundation has announced the release of Blender 2.93 LTS, the latest version in its Long Term Support initiative.
New features include the addition of 22 new nodes to the Geometry Nodes Editor; the ability to create, edit and expand masks in the sculpting toolset; create stylised grease pencil lines around 3d objects; a rewritten interpolate operator; new import-export options for Grease Pencil, including the ability to import SVGs and export vectors and PDFs; a new Grease Pencil fill tool that faster and more precise; improved volumetrics, AO, and depth of field in Eevee; a new persistent data setting in cycles that improves times for re-renders; plus much more.
To see details of all the new features, please visit the Blender website.
Great!
Here are the features
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnnMFJ3iWH0&t=1s
Yep, this video should be added to the article, as it has lot more of substantial information 🙂
I think they actually added it, administrators are very good updating missing info 🙂
Yup, awesome. CGPress is IMO currently the best CG news site on the internet 🙂
I’m curious, really am, has anyone around here had the chance to face to face ask a 3ds max developer why the situation of Autodesk products are what they are compared to the “competition”. I want to see a one on one interview or some insider telling us what a daily job at Autodesk in 3ds max department or Maya or the sandwich department is like.
Anyone has a clue? CGpress can we get an interview maybe someone knows someone?
When I see some features, like in maya the HUD that allows you to change the values of the latest applied node, but the field are too small to write the value inside it…. I really wonder if someone at AD give the tiniest fu*k about their job.
I think the dev department at AD M&E is rotten with established, lazy, arrogant dev who think that because they work on the industry standard for the past 2 decades, they have nothing to worry about.
Also, AD is a big corpo, not a medium sized company with passionate founders and employees.
Their goals fit in spreadsheets and if the figures are good enough, then the software is good enough. Period. Not their problem the artist who do extra hours in total stress to get their job done.
Just go in the AD forum, when a feature is broken or badly designed, their is a staff that gives horrible advices to get the stuff done, and years later it’s still the only way. A company is dead when nobody cares, but when those companies are as big a AD, there is a inertia, that makes the product survive a few more years.
But no to forget that Blender, even if it has shinny new features, has a lot of rotten code and terrible workflows in it, and the title of best cg software is still not deserved at all. They need to keep the efforts and fix the errors from the past. Also, they need to study the competition a bit more because many things are done the Blender way and it’s not necessarily the smart way.
Future will tell.
Agree with your comment in general, not just the Autodesk part, I would lower the tone in respect to Blender (I mean just the rotten expression) but I get your point and I agree.
There is a fundamental difference, Blender team and the whole Blender Institute care a lot about the software and about the users.
I won’t defend Blender as “the best cg software”, I always said that it depends on the user and the needs, for us it is the best, but for many other it’s not 🙂
However there is a thing that cannot be done, and it’s this:
“they need to study the competition a bit more”
And this cannot be done because if Blender does that it could be in very big trouble, since EVERYTHING is under a patent for Adesk things (or Adobe or whatever other company), even the screenshots (when you do a screenshot you are using their copyrighted material), and if you analyse their workflows, their UI or the way of doing things you would be breaking their copyright.
So Blender devs can hear users asking for workflows and ways of doing things as long as they don’t refer to other softwares.
Is it silly?
Yes it is.
Has there been some trouble in the past regarding this possible situation?
Sadly yes it has.
That’s why there is a ban in every official Blender forum (like devtalk or developer.blender.org) for every picture or reference to any other software.
That does not mean that we users cannot try to explain what we need without referring to any other user, that involves doing very detailed explanations with examples that cannot be done with other softwares and without mentioning other softwares terminology, it’s not a matter of sectarianism or not wanting to see outside, it’s a matter of real danger with companies like Adesk.
In the end Blender is improving many workflows, and I agree that many more can be improved, but for that we, the users, are responsible to properly communicating the needs and of participating in the testing and design process of our tool 🙂
edit and undo performance. blender just sucks, and you just too amateur to notice.
and i always thought only amateurs use the undo function. Thanks for the clarification.
Edit mode is being improved right now, as we speak.
Undo performance… it was a problem, it’s not a problem right now, there can be some corner cases or specific situation where an undo can take 3 or 5 seconds, but as I say, it’s a corner case.
Anyways, if it’s not valid for you, ok, don’t use it, is simple 🙂
I agree, those AD people are really terrible. They will defend their softwares not by making them better but by constraining the competition with threats… lame attitude.
However studying the competition mean simply, learn how the competition softwares work (it can be done totally legally), and from that experience, improve Blender flaws and obsolete workflows.
When they did their new spreadsheet editor, that was CLEARLY inspired by Houdini, so when they want they can.
I think (and may be wrong) that he means giving more weight to standarize the software to the industry needs, which is something that has been getting better but still lacks, for example, for our studio the proper integration of USD would be amazing to have, or something as simple as; the reduction of passes on cycles…. why?, we would much rather have some flexibility than everything diffuse combined on a single pass, this sort of thing is baffling sometimes, on the other hand there is just so much opportunity and room to grow that the user base is always to the brim with excitement, we are constantly at the studio talking about what is here and stuff to come with such anticipation that it feels like max on 2008.
Lastly I hope that now that we have attributes on blender, there is some propper transfering of attributes from and to Houdini, this would be a godsend!!
Regarding USD.
Yes, USD proper implementation and a hydra delegate are both very important and being worked on, supervised by the Cycles dev team plus work by Tangent Animation and Nvidia themselves, because they want Blender to work with Omniverse.
Regarding the render passes, right now it would be a good momento to do a deep explanation about what you mean, I don`t fully get what you say, what passes do you refer and what’s the flexibility you mean?
There is an idea, but nothing is being done right now until Cycles-X is fully on master, to implement LPE and possible other things, but for the time being it’s just a possibility, do you mean that?
Yeah sure, I don’t know what would make this time and place good for a deep explanation but no problem, we used to have sss passes separate from diffuse and now we don’t, this seemed a bit arbitrary and when brecth was asked about it he said basically that this is the way it is now, this is something I find he has done in several ocations and seem to respond to motivations different from standardizing the software, but since I feel the place for this discussion would actually be devtalk I digress.
Regarding USD that is great to hear! Can you please send a Couple of links for me to follow? I would really appreciate it, everything I’ve found has to do either with the AMD effort which is cool but problematic with render farms or hcycles or some thread that dies out or a blog with some vague proposals, If there are open discussions about proper implementations son we can do things like build layouts in Solaris and render them from blender I would really want to follow!!
Yes, I can give you specially a link that you will enjoy (if you can watch it because you have to register for free, but I’m not sure if the registration is open):
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/on-demand/session/gtcspring21-s31984/
And yes, there is something regarding Solaris and a new standalone version of cycles that will work as a hydra delegate 🙂
Nice!, Thank you, there is some info there that I didn’t have, and they are addressing a bunch of the problems we are having, still, having a hydra viewport would be really useful, and would solve automatically the integration of other render engines, which is one of the biggest requests from new adopters and would be adopters, and this is not mentioning the fact that although it would tie up some developers meanwhile it is being integrated, on the long term I would assume that it would free up resources since it’s maintained by other groups. But I don’t see this level of integration happening anytime soon, I hope I’m wrong.
I think the Hydra viewport is there, somewhere, will see.
I agree with you, that would solve a lot of trouble for many many things.
I hope we can see related things to this sooner rather than later 🙂
Agreed
Jaung3d- You seem to be saying Blender can copy other software as along as no one admits they are copying other software. The problem here is if Blender catches up with that other software, where does the future innovation come from?
Creating is one thing. Reverse engineering is something else all together.
3D software capabilities aren’t one dimensional axis. It’s not just mesh editing performance. Blender may be catching up in couple of dimensions to other 3D software (UI/UX, Mesh Editing performance) but in many others it’s actually other way around. Most of other major 3D DCC software packages are not anywhere near Blender in terms of the realtime viewport capabilities, sculpting toolset (unless it’s specialized sculpting app) or built in (non 3rd-party) renderer capabilities and performance.
So I have no clue how do you conclude there’s no innovation. In fact other software is desperately trying to catch up with Blender in the area of realtime viewport capabilities where Blender certainly innovated a lot.
The only way I can understand your comments here is looking at them as opinions of a person who has only fuzzy idea of what Blender is, never really used it, never paid close attention to it, and does not have sufficient pool of experience with multiple 3D software packages to make an educated guess.
If you understand that that means that you have not understood what I explained or that I explained it in the wrong way.
An idea is an idea, what cannot be copied is the execution of the idea, let me explain:
Idea: Real time viewport that can interpret and show shaders as close as possible as in the main render engine
Max Execution: We will improve the shader piepline of the viewport and we will match the real time shader code as much as possible with the algos used by Arnold
Blender Execution: we will develop an entirely new viewport that is based on modern PBR algos and features and that will be able to interpret shaders as accurately as we can in comparison to what cycles deliver
The idea is the same one, the execution perspective is different.
Can you say that max “copied” SketchUp with the new Extrude?
I don’t think so, there is an idea behind and the max team executed it, the same idea was present in the Blender community and there were two implementation, the first one was great but had some flaws, the second one was not understood by the developer and it’s a bad implementation, in fact it provoked a major change in the way development implements new features.
Again, one idea, two different implementations.
You can create a box in several phases:
1.- Click in one place, create the basis
2.- move the mouse to define the height
3.- click to confirm
Max has worked this way since ALWAYS, Maya implemented this way of creating primitives a while ago (a big “while” ago), and now Blender heard their users and implemented also that workflow.
The idea? the same one
The code and implementation? Custom one
Real Flow is using flip fluids for it’s not liquid simulation system.
Some time after it BiFrost is a new simulation system based on FLIP (or the previous one that was acquired by Autodesk)
Is Autodesk (or Naiad) copying Real Flow?
I don’t think so, there is a technique out there, open source, an investigation, that everyone can use, Real Flow sees it and makes an implementation, then the Naiad team also likes it and makes a different implementation.
We are not talking here about reverse engineering, that would be figure out how the implementation was done and copying it, we are talking about ideas, from devs or users, then a description of the idea and the devs have to figure out how to do the implementation, not try to understand how was it implemented in other softwares.
That does not mean that users prefer a workflow and describe that workflow to devs, but precisely the idea of not mentioning or using references to other packages is to have a “personal” view of the feature, of how should it work and what features should it have.
Are not people asking for “standarization” ? that means ideas that people like to have to work in 3D, and in many situations that means workflows that will be similar in different packages, there is no reverse engineering there, there is a different implementation of the same idea.
I hope you get what I mean, otherwise, I assume you can think that Cinema4D has copie a lot of things from max, or that Max has copied a lot of things from Maya, or Maya from Max or C4D, or modo and a long etc…
From time to time there are AMAs with 3dsmax devs directly, like this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/3dsmax/comments/jjwrlz/ama_announcement_autodesk_development_team/?ref=share&ref_source=link
There you can ask your questions.
I think you will be informed about when those AMAs will take place when you follow the official 3dsmax facebook site or subscribe to the newsletter or news on Autodesks website.
You can also join the beta, where you have direct contact to the devs.
I have a little of an idea of how they work. I think they do a good job and they are very passionated. I personally think they are a little too less, so dev team could be bigger in my eyes, even if I don’t know the true number of developers who are actually working on it. Its more a feeling than a fact.
Any news about performance in editPoly mode and in subdiv modifier?
Edit Mode is being improved right now.
https://code.blender.org/2021/05/mesh-editing-optimization-initial-steps/
SubSurf performance is a different part that will be improved too.
A lot of this discussion comparing and breaking down how one product compares to another has been about for years. The more I think about it, it relates to the ongoing to debates in the music sector. So many people are creators today, having the tools to do similar jobs but they always hit copyright brickwalls. In music this is a critical issue, since educators cannot educate comparatively and properly. The average person benefits, and learns better, where no walls exist. Visualization needs to adjust to this reality and to develop limited use categories, like music, so some folks can share visuals and info with a view to really building knowledge that people need to fully embrace the market and trends. Otherwise, it’s a limited picture.
what on earth are you on about man? is this one of those AI generated texts?
look, its about tribalism, plain and simple.
people get emotionally and financially invested into A and when B turns up, they feel insecure and need to defend their A. marvel vs dc, sony vs xbox, pepsi vs coke, shit is old as time itself.
in this context however, there is a special aspect to it all which makes it even more nonsensical and idiotic when it comes to blender:
when people come at autodesk, they do so mostly from the perspective of an (ex)customer, frustrated by the fuckery they endured from adsk side for years and decades even. being salty about it is their right (after tens of thousands invested ie thrown away) so they criticise autodesk on these messageboards. we had some absolute legends of 3ds max be vocal here and seen them denounce adsk.
but the more smooth brained 3ds max users see this and feel personally attacked (stupid) and have the need to retaliate (more stupid) so then you see these jabs towards blender that just come off juvenile.(most stupid)
however there is no equivalence at play here. blender is free, you can try it right away. dont like it, jog on. all is good. no loss.
whereas autodesk demands their pound of flesh and have proven they only care about the quarterly results and the investors. this has been the case for decades but has gotten so brazen its infact criminal.(the three year ‘permanent’ license limit). also when there is a pricetag on something, its normal to analyze value for money and be critical of it (or praise it ofcourse)
not saying blender is above criticism but in that case do come with something valid not “neeewbs” and “amatur” and “meh” nonsense, making yourself look like and idiot in process. i mean its just pathetic.
i dont mind it though, infact i do get a few laughs out of it.
but then you think, jesus people like that actually exist.
and then its kind of sad.
so to cap the rant off. blenders importance is also control over your IP (maybe that is what you were referring to). with autodesk, they hold the keys. and yes democratization is key to growth.
Well said. I couldn’t agree more.
fistbump slebro.
You are accusing 3ds max users of throwing jabs that come across as juvenile in a post where you call people stupid and all sorts of idiots. Needlessly aggressive and diluting your arguments.
plot twist – am a 3ds max user.
and i understand, you see “3ds max” and “stupid” in the same sentence, get triggered and cant read the meaning past it.
there is nothing aggressive about the post, its entirely objective and on point. and the point isnt 3ds max bad – blender good. i just took it as an example because it seemed to be most prominent one.
the idiocy isnt being a user of 3ds max (obviously), but having the need to defend your team “A”.
they are fking tools man, not a soccer club your grandpa used to cheer for. no need to feel attacked when someone has something bad to say about it (see proctor below) and then need to retaliate.
but the broader point is that the blender fanboy-ism can be slightly justified by the larger picture of it being free and liberating the 3d medium. and it truly does, regardless of how one may think the feature set compares to other packages.(which it does, favorably)
whereas other packages are products which utmost purpose isnt being the best in class, or being best value for money, but to squeeze most money out of its users. all of the big players are clearly not interested in quality but locking their userbase in and keeping them locked it.
thats the whole gist of it man, get it please.
again, go to youtube, find something about max features, below, surprise, blender fanboys. Why there are no max users trolling undeer blender videos? People started trollling blender in RESPONSE to evangelical fanboys.
right..and last monday some old hag with autodesk t-shirt ran up to me and kicked me in the nuts. i will take my revenge here, whenever i see autodesk mentioned.
grow the fuck up.
sadly my growth stopped like 15 years ago, child:D
Ahahaaaa, are You blind? GO to whatever video, post, news about max and all You see it’s teenage blender users commenting how 3ds sucks and blender is the best. Nobody has nothing to frustrated max users. It’s blender fanboys spreading their “knowledge” that provoke this stupid wars. Funniest part is, 90% of them have no idea about max, or 3d graphics at all. Portfolios filled with super beginner stuff and lots of confidence.
glad you found the post hilarious, im funny like that.
point by point:
this is my favorite blog and i see every post. mostly the 3ds max threads are filled with one-liners, some droll some troll. how you manage to get the biometric data on the posters from that one sentence is beyond me.
however, you will find that users that post more often do know their shit inside out. yes, juan is not the blender evangelist anymore, he is the blender inquisition (insert monty python meme) but the man drops real info and knowledge regularly here – like it or hate it.
as far as the provoking part goes, well that is it right there: nobody is provoking you man.
in fact nobody gives a fuck what you use. this war exists only in your head hence the need to “get back at someone”.
the saddest part of it all is that you are white-knighting for a company that sees you solely a cash generating node and that spends more time thinking about how to get squeeze more money out of you than they do about the software they make. this part isnt up for debate.
remember softimage? remember mudbox? once the numbers are low, its bye-bye, no fucks given. the corporate entity will cut the parts that atrophy, done. spreadsheets are the real product.
you do you though, its all good.
but since you keep harping about those damn amateur blender users, i would be ecstatic if you would show a tiny bit of what you do. im here all day.
Hey, thanks for the title, I like it! hahaha
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKQ_sQKBASM
🙂 cheers man.
welll, i’ll can’t show my work, i like to stay anonimus, but. Definately, i can show disregarding comments from noob blender users. Reeeealy easyyyy. I can show You comments where precious blender users accuse Elou Andaluz of lying about blender performance,becouse,he is ofcourse paid autodesk troll. Want to see?Hmm?
Really man, you do you, nobody is forcing you to use anything, if comments trigger you, don’t read them, it’s not hard, nobody cares what you use, be happy 🙂
Only the Geometry nodes update alone its pretty impressive! They keep adding more and more functionalities.
I hope they improve soon alembic I/O . Its great we can now manipulate attributes in a low level in GN, but if we have no way to load attributes from alembic coming from a simulation inside blender or outside blender… then limits some of the great possibilities we could have.
I agree, now that we have attributes in blender and houdini can write attributes to Alembic I think having the ability to read them would be fantastic, although to be frank I think blender’s Alembic management still leaves a lot to be desired, I’m sure it will improve soon enough
I have good news about what you mention 🙂
https://developer.blender.org/D11591