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Well, I guess AMD fanboys won’t like this one 😉
https://twitter.com/AMD/status/1187023786429665282
Wow. This is impressive. This is coming from a user of fully-paid DCC apps for over a decade.
Blender may well be the future.
Change my mind.
Definitely gaining traction and has lots of uses, however, it’s still some ways of Houdini’s toolset or now Maya (+Max in the future) with Board (I’m including what’s coming as well with that statement.) But no reason to not use Blender on tasks it excels at since it’s free. This is good news.
Well, Bifrost graph may be very useful for many things, as Houdini is very useful for many things, but there are many situations were Bifrost graph or Houdini are totally useless… and there are some studios that will never touch those two.
Bifrost graph is great, but why do an arch&viz artist want Bifrost graph for? apart of some vfx or small particle effects that in the arch&viz case can be done in many different things…
… and one can answer that saying “procedural modelling”, and the answer is yes, up to some extend, but is that really the main reason to choose a software? no IMHO, Maya is not good for arch&viz for many reasons (mainly that Autodesk don’t want it to be good for arch&viz) if we compare it with 3ds max for example, but in 3ds max you have Forest Pack and Rail Clone, or you can go further and you have Thinking Particles, one of the most beloved plugins byt vfx artists… will Bifrost graph kill those three plugins? Is Autodesk aiming to kill Cebas and their master particle plugin? I doubt it, so there are quite a big number of use cases were Bifrost graph is a “cool to have thing” but not a “must a have” thing, and in those cases it won’t be a “something that cannot be replaced with any other thing” thing, in the same way as Houdini is not used in many studios, and it’s used in others, but the adoption of houdini outside of the VFX realm can give an idea of how Bifrost graph could affect all this.
With all that said, that’s not a reason either to use or not use Blender, it’s just that I don’t think Bifrost graph would be such a decisive matter in many industries/markets/project realms.
Also, I don’t think that any studio should limit themeselves to a one piece of software, the best combo IMHO, even if something similar to Bifrost graph appear in Blender, is Blender + Houdini when needed.
Regarding the whats coming, I sincerely have high hopes, but I don’t entirely know what’s coming, Particle Nodes is growing as a powerful and steady base for a bright future, but that does not guarantee that bright future, personally I still have to see how things goes, and it will take time to settle and cover all the areas, won’t be a 4 months release cycle feature, the great thing is that we can test it and publicly help the developers to improve it as they develop, and that’s an awesome thing 🙂
I think it`s rather obvious what Bifrost Board really is about and what it will become.
@Juan – Not the first time I’ve heard in some situations Houdini is totally useless… Outside of direct modeling by interacting in the viewport (which SideFX has mentioned they are working on developing further) and maybe sculpting (as VDB is a bit too chunky to be sculpting with in Houdini), in what situations is Houdini “useless” assuming the user has some Python knowledge and may be using a third party render engine?
I find that without Python in Houdini, there are challenges with batch manipulation of many, many separate objects due to how Houdini handles geometry. In my experience all of these larger challenges can be handled with a small bit of Python scripting.
Outside of that, I haven’t experienced getting “stuck” in Houdini facing a situation that renders it totally useless, yet. So I’m curious what to watch out for down the road. That being said, I wouldn’t bring Houdini into a studio environment with a bunch of a entry level artists without staffing a TD that can write up general Python for tools and pipeline for the artists.
Yes, Houdini alone has some tool-holes and workflow-holes, that’s why I say blender+houdini, the main tool,is Blender, while houdini is used just for it’s powerful areas, not as the main tool 🙂
And anyways, I agree, any studio with juniors need a proper TD to guide them and help them, even if those juniors studied Houdini, an student experience has nothing to do with actual production experience, and any TD should know Python, I totally agree.
Just a clarification, I keep hearing “Board” this days… Board was during the beta days, the official name is “Bifrost Graph” Just to try not confuse new people.
And yeah, Blender its free, there is no reason to dont use it! Im using it now for the camera tracking for example that works quite well.
Ok, Noted adn fixed in my message 🙂 Bifrost Graph.
Please do. I worked on LW/Maya/3DS Max, even modo and Cinema for a while. Blender beats them in productivity value for most applications. Simple as that. The only thing I am missing for 3DS Max are really well implemented 2D shape tools. The only big 3d package I love and which still develops nicely is Houdini.
Agree, 3DS MAX spline editing is top notch! It works so well with AI files too. If VRAY were ever ported to Blender, it would be a great thing.
VRay for Blender already exists for many years, in a special “build” that’s true, but it exists. https://www.chaosgroup.com/vray/blender
That’s true, but I don’t even think the build is up to date, also the custom build route is the worst one in the Blender ecosystem, it’s a bad decision, will see how RedShift solves this, I have the feeling that they took a much better route 🙂
One example is that they don’t even support Blender 2.8, and since it’s a custom build it’s very complex to fix that problem, with the add-on route, being clever and using parts of the add-on in C++, that should not be a problem, or at least not a super big one like it is right now, I’m not even sure if the want to update it to 2.8.
When i went to Siggraph this year i talked to the Redshift Rep at Siggraph and he showed me a early build of Redshift for Blender. I asked him when it would be release he said sometime next year but its does exist which is nice knowing there working on it.
Yep, I know the dev of the Blender version, I just will say that they are doings things right 🙂
Also, recent news came to me saying that ChaosGroup was looking for a Blender dev for Vray… will see what happens 🙂
There is no commercial “Block-Buster” Renderer for Blender because of the GPL.
The Jujutsu ChaosGroup did with Vray was a commendable R&D, unfortunately there is/was no interest for such spin-off. Vray is Vray only if is fast, compatible and up-to-date. The last Vray was for Blender 2.79. The same goes for Renderman.
Redshift is again a GPU renderer, i think we have enough GPU toys for Blender. It will be probably bypassed and smuggled through a complex network of python adapters and converters to avoid lawyers and source-code publishing, which eventually makes it, just as the old as Vray-Compile, a clumsy solution no one will seriously use.
What is needed are solid, able to cope with a heavy workload and rich-featured CPU/GPU solutions: Vray, Arnold, Corona, etc.
Now, someone will send me Artstation link to some great character done in Blender. This is awesome. Yet nobody can impress any customer today with object-turntable. If you want to work in Cinema/Games/Product Design, you need, for example, to load a kit-bash city and render it for your matte-painting.
If you want to know how good is Blender for it (and i use it on daily basis) – load a sample-kit from kitbash.com and try to rotate and move single geometries in the view-port or to render dozens of them in a convenient way. Enjoy the creepy and ultra-slow performance.
This is why we still need a robust, production proven, market-leading solution (until Cycles matures).
I am, again, for adding a special API to blender for commercial renderers, to avoid lawyers and GPL.
Now that the Blender Foundation is so close to hiring 20 devs, I believe they’ll dedicate a lot of resources to developing Cycles/Eevee at a much faster pace.