I think especially since the UI overhaul in Blender 2.8 the project has been on a steep upwards trajectory. The software was always amazing, especially since it was free and open source, but the new UI and all subsequent improvements really put Blender on the map as a serious tool and not just an alternative for when you don't have money for the big players.
It's a self-reinforcing loop. Once a FLOSS tool becomes good enough, it'll start to attract professional users, who are willing to invest in it, which makes it even better. And it is quite hard for commercial players to compete with free.
But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who like writing new flashy features, but are awful at UX, and making sure all the small kinks are worked out.
So most FLOSS software gets stuck in a "death by a thousand papercuts" scenario, where it has enough features to technically be usable but it is painful enough to use that no professional would ever adopt it.
Blender got out of it. I really hope more projects will follow their example.
For those of us who've used microsoft teams, jira, servicenow, salesforce, or basically any insanely popular (in the commercial if not upvote sense) products, it's unclear what is being compared to with these tired claims.
I think the blender secret sauce is their artistic projects.
Put a bunch of artists in the same room as the developers and have them produce a work.
It ferments this amazing combination of aggressive QA testing(the artists) and top tier technical support(the developers) while focusing on real problems(the work) that really brings out the best possible product. The GIMP project would probably be better off if they invested in a couple of rounds of this.
I think blender always had an amazing, ahead of it's time interface. It did lean overly hard on knowing the hot keys, probably a product of it being an in house tool but the opensource versions have worn a lot of those rough edges off(menus to provide clues) while keeping that same super smooth workflow core.
Part of what makes this so much of an issue is that in FOSS projects, the things that get worked on tend to either be low-hanging fruit and/or a personal peeve of one of the engineers. Everything else is at high risk of falling through the cracks and being ignored or forgotten.
It’s kind of the open source counterpart of how in proprietary software, some types of bugs tend to get perpetually kicked down the road to make room for development of features that are perceived to be of higher likelihood of increasing revenue.
In theory, FOSS projects have more agency to correct this class of problem than their proprietary analogues do because they’re not subject to the same economic pressures. This however requires leadership with a strong vision for the project and soft skills to unify and motivate contributors to work on not-so-sexy bits, and this type of individual is rare in that space.
> But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who like writing new flashy features, but are awful at UX, and making sure all the small kinks are worked out.
That is what product managers are for; someone to lead the product's direction, ensure quality control, and to instill taste. That requires being able to say when a feature is poorly implemented or outright bad and unnecessary -- it's not always just kinks. The problem is that this collides with the collaborative ethos of open source software. But when it's not done it's the users who suffer.
FLOSS software is often made people who are interested in the thing being done. The UI to do it is something that can be fixed "later". But later is always later. There's always another feature to implement before you can sit down and really fix that UI.
> But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who [...] are awful at UX
Doesn't UX depend on the target user and product? To take vi or emacs as examples, they have incredibly steep learning curves, but I think many of their users would consider their UXes to be very good.
The hard UX challenge is making a product that can satisfy novice users and power users at the same time. Here I agree that developers most likely have a tendency to develop for their own tastes.
IMO, products like Outlook used to good at satisfying most people out-of-the-box, but have become less good with recent releases.
For Blender I agree. I don't feel like gIMP ever hit that moment. Blender appears to be serious competitor to 3DSMax/Maya/Houdini etc. gIMP does not appear to be a serious competitor to Photoshop even after they shipped v3
It might sound weird, but I think the key factor is the rise of Youtube.
There is unbelievable amount of Blender content on Youtube. Like, probably more than all the other DCCs (Maya, 3DsMax, Houdini, Modo, etc...) combined[0]. It's beyond the DCC for hobbyists. I've seen people who think it's the only DCC. A few years ago, I met an 2D artist who started integrating 3D workflow and he genuinely didn't know the existence of Maya.
[0] I have no data to back this up. It's just my guess.
The people that use Maya have been using Maya since the days of it being the only thing available. When you have students as young as junior high school getting active in computers and graphics, they have no money. Using myself as an example, I was a frequent user of newsgroups like a.b.m.a. to find the software to learn how to use. Now that I'm a "professional" by earning money with software I "borrowed" while learning, I now pay for all of it.
Now that tools like Blender, Resolve, etc are all available for FREE, it's a no brainer why the younger folks entering into the scene are using them. Hook them while they are young, they'll use it for life. On top of that you can add any converts, once you have a features worthy, as everyone likes free. With places like Reddit and YouTube, you can even forgo support and crowdsource it.
>I think especially since the UI overhaul in Blender 2.8 the project has been on a steep upwards trajectory.
100% agreed. I know a lot of people don't like that but sometimes I feel that FOSS projects are intentionally sabotaging themselves by ignoring industry standard options/conventions and instead they are following open source ideas just to be different. UI/UX is the main symptom of that. Blender could move forward and wish others could too.
Krita is another example of a good project
CAD is the next frontier where we need a "Blender moment"
We have to keep in mind though that many open source projects started as something that someone wanted and then made. It probably worked just like that person wanted and then it grew. Maybe it is because they weren't too versed in UI/UX design.
Another thing is that many classic open source projects don't have a "I want to grow my user base" mindset. Why would they. It's not like they get paid.
Big overhauls also always have the risk of alienating current users. I learned Blender on the pre 2.8 UI and because I use it rarely I still sometimes struggle with the new shortcuts.
Blender clearly benefited from the change but the real spirit of open source is: you don't like it then help fix it.
The problem with (3D) CAD I've heard is that the Open CASCADE CAD kernel is a huge mess. So as much as they update and fix FreeCAD (and they've made a lot of good progress, but it's still very rough around the edges) they're always going to be hampered by that. And making a new CAD kernel is a massive undertaking.
The Blender project is the model I hope FreeCAD can eventually follow. Like digital animation, the 3D digital design field has a pretty rough selection of tools and the UI on all of them leaves a lot to be desired. FreeCAD has been on an upward trajectory in the past couple years as more people lean into the project out of frustration over increasingly hostile pricing from the commercial solutions. KiCAD has seen incredible advances since CERN started pouring resources into it, I'm sure Netflix money is going to help Blender. Now to get some large engineering shop to consider FreeCAD as their exit path to Siemens/et al...
Unfortunately it’ll be a lot harder for CAD because of all of the other lock in like PLM/ERP integration. A good PLM is half the product. I know a good amount of companies that do not use solidworks because their PLM is absolutely crappy (but I haven’t been a MechE for a couple years now so things could have changed)
To be fair animated 3D modeling is a complex task so the UI can only get so simple. Even commercial tools require training and have challenging interfaces.
Another example is Gimp. People like to bag on it for having a terrible interface, but when they say Photoshop is so much better I have to wonder what magical version they are using. For me the differences between the two are marginal, but that may be because I learned how to use Gimp first and have to hunt around Photoshop's interface more.
> To be fair animated 3D modeling is a complex task so the UI can only get so simple
The interface doesn't have to be simple. What it should be is conforming to established UI patterns and conventions. Blender used to be incredibly unintuitive even to people who had never used any other 3D modeler before.
Some complexity is of course an inherent part of the domain, and you can never truly get around it. At best you can stick to sensible defaults for the basic user and initially hide the most complicated parts until they are needed.
On the other hand: there is no reason whatsoever something as trivial as drawing a circle has to be as complicated as launching a rocket in GIMP. It certainly doesn't lack the technological scaffolding, and UX-wise people would already be ecstatic if they just cloned how 30-year-old version of Microsoft Paint did it. So why doesn't it have a Circle Tool yet, despite the massive amount of requests for it? The only possible explanation left seems to be an active disdain towards basic non-technical people: the UI is hard to use because they want it to be hard to use.
This is my perspective as well. I've been a big FOSS junkie and, in ~2015 or so, Blender had a repute similar to GIMP. (A free, worse version of proprietary tools).
By the time I picked Blender up in 2016 (before 2.8!) it felt pretty mature, but I used it (still) because it was the one that was free and which worked on Linux.
The time and energy I put into learning Blender feels like an investment that has paid off amazing dividends.
(I'd also picked up Godot at the same time, with much the same story of elation on its adoption rate).
The negative example of Blender is Inkscape. I've used Inkscape in ~2015. I picked it up again in 2025. Surprisingly, it feels even slower and more unstable than a decade ago. I start thinking it's an app that will never reach a mature state.
Version 5 was kinda-sorta usable - but buggy and painful. In practice everyone would tell you to just download the nightly build of version 6 instead, as the UX improvements were massive. It became a genuine joy to use, and with the death of EAGLE the no-brainer choice for every hobbyist.
Since then development has raced ahead, with regularly scheduled released chock-full of both small quality-of-life improvements and new features focused on professional use. It's still a tier behind the likes of Altium, but these days KiCad is a very solid choice for everything but the most high-end PCBs.
It is definitely good enough to build your small consumer business electronics business around, which means there are suddenly a lot of potential users willing to throw a few bucks at it to solve the remaining small papercuts and missing features they run into.
That shows the importance of listening to users. I too tried to learn Blender before the UI overhaul, but with prior 3ds max experience, Blender was infuriatingly counterintuitive; for example, it used the right mouse button instead of the left to select objects. Felt like those deliberately annoying demo pages that make you select phone numbers from drop-downs and click on moving buttons to submit forms.
The context was also weirdly random, probably with some logic for longtime Blender users but just weirdly random.
The usual context for modelling, [[[ Mode(model/uv/anim) -> Object/Mesh selection -> Face/Line/Vertex selection ]]] that is found [[[ (top-to-bottom)-(left-to-right) ]]] since Blender 2.8 and most other programs used to be placed [[[ middle of screen-top of screen-middle of screen ]]], just an insane order and that stuff was actually defended by Blender-die-hards (that probably used keybindings for these context switches anyhow).
There is still things placed "weirdly", but once we got past that it became immensly better (and not rage-quit worthy).
I remember when Blender first forked from NeoGeo's old code: it was clunky, alien and just plain weird. But even then the slashdot crowd was remarking about how snappy the UI was, once they figured out how to use it.
Other open source projects should take note. It seems like UX is a complete afterthought for most and any suggestions for QoL improvements are met with hostility by the small fervent community telling everyone to go fork themselves.
Where are all of the open source UI/UX peeps? Why do they not exist? Why are so many devs accepting of the open source concept and yet apparently no UI types are by comparison? The number of open source UI peeps rounds to zero.
What is it about design/artsy types that makes working on open source anathema where coders will do it just for the lulz?
It's not that UI/UX people don't want to contribute, it's that the coders have to be convinced that UI/UX matters enough to start including designers' contributions. The type of people making FOSS stuff also tend to be the people who prioritize code, make "good enough" interfaces, and see UI/UX work as fluff. This is thankfully less true today than it was in the past, but it's always been part of my experience around FOSS.
Almost no one is being paid to make desktop apps any longer. And the UI/X discipline did not make it to the web for whatever reason. The last gasps became designers and settled on more padding, rounded corners, and hidden scrollbars. Most of which are pretty but counterproductive. Dead discipline except for very large products.
There's also the 2024 film Flow. Really delightful movie, and is impressively rendered using Eevee (Blender's real-time renderer) and not Cycles (Blender's path-traced renderer).
I loved Coffee Run and the BCON24 Identity. Brilliant stuff. When it comes to Blender itself the only regret I have is that they ended support for Intel Macs but I understand it's a burden to support older platforms.
For anyone who happens to have an Intel Mac and is discouraged, Blender 4.5 is the LTS version and is still supported until at least 2027, and Blender is accepting patches that improve support.
Personally, I'd love to see some more focus on game-dev workflows. The game asset pipeline still feels janky: texture painting exists, but not great, and baking textures/previewing results or baking from high poly to low poly involves a lot of manual node fiddling and rewiring. Export/iterate/build/test cycles are also pretty painful still.
Yes I think there's still a lot of potential upside.
But check out this collaboration between Blender and Godot https://godotengine.org/showcase/dogwalk/ I could imagine that in the not too distant future we might really have a completely open tools stack for making up to AA games (minus console SDKs which always are under NDA I guess).
Anyone know why Netflix doesn’t respond to their job site? I applied to several positions where I’m an exact match, with a decade of VFX and another decade of internet company experience in LA. Never heard a single word in response from them, for years. Reqs stay open a long time as well. What are they doing? Are they ghost jobs? They don’t even respond with a “no” form letter. (Lately their site is broken at the verify email stage, pin post returns 403.)
Companies don't take down listings for many reasons: make it look like they have more money to expand than they actually have, slow down the job seeker so their competition moves just slightly slower, there's no benefit in taking it down, if someone is actually reading the applications maybe an exceptional applicant will come that fits for another role in the company, drive up costs for the competition (hey boss everyone is hiring for my role so give me a raise), etc. [edit: gram mer and spolling]
This is great, but they should give more. I would love to see million dollar donations from every major tech company. It's nothing to them, and Blender is fundamentally changing the way we make digital media.
I really like Blender and it's an amazing product, but I can't get over the standard Blender keymap. The "industry compatible" workflow is more sane, but then I have to translate tutorials from the Blender keymap to the industry compatible controls, and they're not always 1:1
Meta are paying $30k per year, which is crazy really, when you think how much Blender has assisted in getting content onto their platform. Nvidia is better at $120k, but again, think how many graphics card buys Blender cycles has driven.
I think especially since the UI overhaul in Blender 2.8 the project has been on a steep upwards trajectory. The software was always amazing, especially since it was free and open source, but the new UI and all subsequent improvements really put Blender on the map as a serious tool and not just an alternative for when you don't have money for the big players.
It's a self-reinforcing loop. Once a FLOSS tool becomes good enough, it'll start to attract professional users, who are willing to invest in it, which makes it even better. And it is quite hard for commercial players to compete with free.
But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who like writing new flashy features, but are awful at UX, and making sure all the small kinks are worked out.
So most FLOSS software gets stuck in a "death by a thousand papercuts" scenario, where it has enough features to technically be usable but it is painful enough to use that no professional would ever adopt it.
Blender got out of it. I really hope more projects will follow their example.
> but are awful at UX
This is such a weird trope.
For those of us who've used microsoft teams, jira, servicenow, salesforce, or basically any insanely popular (in the commercial if not upvote sense) products, it's unclear what is being compared to with these tired claims.
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I think the blender secret sauce is their artistic projects.
Put a bunch of artists in the same room as the developers and have them produce a work.
It ferments this amazing combination of aggressive QA testing(the artists) and top tier technical support(the developers) while focusing on real problems(the work) that really brings out the best possible product. The GIMP project would probably be better off if they invested in a couple of rounds of this.
I think blender always had an amazing, ahead of it's time interface. It did lean overly hard on knowing the hot keys, probably a product of it being an in house tool but the opensource versions have worn a lot of those rough edges off(menus to provide clues) while keeping that same super smooth workflow core.
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Part of what makes this so much of an issue is that in FOSS projects, the things that get worked on tend to either be low-hanging fruit and/or a personal peeve of one of the engineers. Everything else is at high risk of falling through the cracks and being ignored or forgotten.
It’s kind of the open source counterpart of how in proprietary software, some types of bugs tend to get perpetually kicked down the road to make room for development of features that are perceived to be of higher likelihood of increasing revenue.
In theory, FOSS projects have more agency to correct this class of problem than their proprietary analogues do because they’re not subject to the same economic pressures. This however requires leadership with a strong vision for the project and soft skills to unify and motivate contributors to work on not-so-sexy bits, and this type of individual is rare in that space.
> But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who like writing new flashy features, but are awful at UX, and making sure all the small kinks are worked out.
That is what product managers are for; someone to lead the product's direction, ensure quality control, and to instill taste. That requires being able to say when a feature is poorly implemented or outright bad and unnecessary -- it's not always just kinks. The problem is that this collides with the collaborative ethos of open source software. But when it's not done it's the users who suffer.
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I think it's an issue of "what matters".
FLOSS software is often made people who are interested in the thing being done. The UI to do it is something that can be fixed "later". But later is always later. There's always another feature to implement before you can sit down and really fix that UI.
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We should consider public funding for open source projects.
Creating something for the benefit of humanity is great and all but ultimately, programmers need to eat.
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> But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who [...] are awful at UX
Doesn't UX depend on the target user and product? To take vi or emacs as examples, they have incredibly steep learning curves, but I think many of their users would consider their UXes to be very good.
The hard UX challenge is making a product that can satisfy novice users and power users at the same time. Here I agree that developers most likely have a tendency to develop for their own tastes.
IMO, products like Outlook used to good at satisfying most people out-of-the-box, but have become less good with recent releases.
For Blender I agree. I don't feel like gIMP ever hit that moment. Blender appears to be serious competitor to 3DSMax/Maya/Houdini etc. gIMP does not appear to be a serious competitor to Photoshop even after they shipped v3
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It might sound weird, but I think the key factor is the rise of Youtube.
There is unbelievable amount of Blender content on Youtube. Like, probably more than all the other DCCs (Maya, 3DsMax, Houdini, Modo, etc...) combined[0]. It's beyond the DCC for hobbyists. I've seen people who think it's the only DCC. A few years ago, I met an 2D artist who started integrating 3D workflow and he genuinely didn't know the existence of Maya.
[0] I have no data to back this up. It's just my guess.
The people that use Maya have been using Maya since the days of it being the only thing available. When you have students as young as junior high school getting active in computers and graphics, they have no money. Using myself as an example, I was a frequent user of newsgroups like a.b.m.a. to find the software to learn how to use. Now that I'm a "professional" by earning money with software I "borrowed" while learning, I now pay for all of it.
Now that tools like Blender, Resolve, etc are all available for FREE, it's a no brainer why the younger folks entering into the scene are using them. Hook them while they are young, they'll use it for life. On top of that you can add any converts, once you have a features worthy, as everyone likes free. With places like Reddit and YouTube, you can even forgo support and crowdsource it.
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>I think especially since the UI overhaul in Blender 2.8 the project has been on a steep upwards trajectory.
100% agreed. I know a lot of people don't like that but sometimes I feel that FOSS projects are intentionally sabotaging themselves by ignoring industry standard options/conventions and instead they are following open source ideas just to be different. UI/UX is the main symptom of that. Blender could move forward and wish others could too.
Krita is another example of a good project
CAD is the next frontier where we need a "Blender moment"
We have to keep in mind though that many open source projects started as something that someone wanted and then made. It probably worked just like that person wanted and then it grew. Maybe it is because they weren't too versed in UI/UX design.
Another thing is that many classic open source projects don't have a "I want to grow my user base" mindset. Why would they. It's not like they get paid.
Big overhauls also always have the risk of alienating current users. I learned Blender on the pre 2.8 UI and because I use it rarely I still sometimes struggle with the new shortcuts.
Blender clearly benefited from the change but the real spirit of open source is: you don't like it then help fix it.
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The problem with (3D) CAD I've heard is that the Open CASCADE CAD kernel is a huge mess. So as much as they update and fix FreeCAD (and they've made a lot of good progress, but it's still very rough around the edges) they're always going to be hampered by that. And making a new CAD kernel is a massive undertaking.
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The Blender project is the model I hope FreeCAD can eventually follow. Like digital animation, the 3D digital design field has a pretty rough selection of tools and the UI on all of them leaves a lot to be desired. FreeCAD has been on an upward trajectory in the past couple years as more people lean into the project out of frustration over increasingly hostile pricing from the commercial solutions. KiCAD has seen incredible advances since CERN started pouring resources into it, I'm sure Netflix money is going to help Blender. Now to get some large engineering shop to consider FreeCAD as their exit path to Siemens/et al...
Unfortunately it’ll be a lot harder for CAD because of all of the other lock in like PLM/ERP integration. A good PLM is half the product. I know a good amount of companies that do not use solidworks because their PLM is absolutely crappy (but I haven’t been a MechE for a couple years now so things could have changed)
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To be fair animated 3D modeling is a complex task so the UI can only get so simple. Even commercial tools require training and have challenging interfaces.
Another example is Gimp. People like to bag on it for having a terrible interface, but when they say Photoshop is so much better I have to wonder what magical version they are using. For me the differences between the two are marginal, but that may be because I learned how to use Gimp first and have to hunt around Photoshop's interface more.
> To be fair animated 3D modeling is a complex task so the UI can only get so simple
The interface doesn't have to be simple. What it should be is conforming to established UI patterns and conventions. Blender used to be incredibly unintuitive even to people who had never used any other 3D modeler before.
Some complexity is of course an inherent part of the domain, and you can never truly get around it. At best you can stick to sensible defaults for the basic user and initially hide the most complicated parts until they are needed.
On the other hand: there is no reason whatsoever something as trivial as drawing a circle has to be as complicated as launching a rocket in GIMP. It certainly doesn't lack the technological scaffolding, and UX-wise people would already be ecstatic if they just cloned how 30-year-old version of Microsoft Paint did it. So why doesn't it have a Circle Tool yet, despite the massive amount of requests for it? The only possible explanation left seems to be an active disdain towards basic non-technical people: the UI is hard to use because they want it to be hard to use.
GIMP fought against single window mode for ages despite the majority of people wanting it.
This is my perspective as well. I've been a big FOSS junkie and, in ~2015 or so, Blender had a repute similar to GIMP. (A free, worse version of proprietary tools).
By the time I picked Blender up in 2016 (before 2.8!) it felt pretty mature, but I used it (still) because it was the one that was free and which worked on Linux.
The time and energy I put into learning Blender feels like an investment that has paid off amazing dividends.
(I'd also picked up Godot at the same time, with much the same story of elation on its adoption rate).
The negative example of Blender is Inkscape. I've used Inkscape in ~2015. I picked it up again in 2025. Surprisingly, it feels even slower and more unstable than a decade ago. I start thinking it's an app that will never reach a mature state.
It's the same with KiCad!
Version 5 was kinda-sorta usable - but buggy and painful. In practice everyone would tell you to just download the nightly build of version 6 instead, as the UX improvements were massive. It became a genuine joy to use, and with the death of EAGLE the no-brainer choice for every hobbyist.
Since then development has raced ahead, with regularly scheduled released chock-full of both small quality-of-life improvements and new features focused on professional use. It's still a tier behind the likes of Altium, but these days KiCad is a very solid choice for everything but the most high-end PCBs.
It is definitely good enough to build your small consumer business electronics business around, which means there are suddenly a lot of potential users willing to throw a few bucks at it to solve the remaining small papercuts and missing features they run into.
That shows the importance of listening to users. I too tried to learn Blender before the UI overhaul, but with prior 3ds max experience, Blender was infuriatingly counterintuitive; for example, it used the right mouse button instead of the left to select objects. Felt like those deliberately annoying demo pages that make you select phone numbers from drop-downs and click on moving buttons to submit forms.
The context was also weirdly random, probably with some logic for longtime Blender users but just weirdly random.
The usual context for modelling, [[[ Mode(model/uv/anim) -> Object/Mesh selection -> Face/Line/Vertex selection ]]] that is found [[[ (top-to-bottom)-(left-to-right) ]]] since Blender 2.8 and most other programs used to be placed [[[ middle of screen-top of screen-middle of screen ]]], just an insane order and that stuff was actually defended by Blender-die-hards (that probably used keybindings for these context switches anyhow).
There is still things placed "weirdly", but once we got past that it became immensly better (and not rage-quit worthy).
I remember when Blender first forked from NeoGeo's old code: it was clunky, alien and just plain weird. But even then the slashdot crowd was remarking about how snappy the UI was, once they figured out how to use it.
Not disagreeing but it's crazy 2.8 was going on 7 years ago. That's 1 less year than from the release of HTML to 9/11.
It'd be like saying "Man the internet has been on such an upwards trajectory since HTML" in 2000 ;D
Other open source projects should take note. It seems like UX is a complete afterthought for most and any suggestions for QoL improvements are met with hostility by the small fervent community telling everyone to go fork themselves.
Somewhat relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/
Where are all of the open source UI/UX peeps? Why do they not exist? Why are so many devs accepting of the open source concept and yet apparently no UI types are by comparison? The number of open source UI peeps rounds to zero.
What is it about design/artsy types that makes working on open source anathema where coders will do it just for the lulz?
It's not that UI/UX people don't want to contribute, it's that the coders have to be convinced that UI/UX matters enough to start including designers' contributions. The type of people making FOSS stuff also tend to be the people who prioritize code, make "good enough" interfaces, and see UI/UX work as fluff. This is thankfully less true today than it was in the past, but it's always been part of my experience around FOSS.
2 replies →
Almost no one is being paid to make desktop apps any longer. And the UI/X discipline did not make it to the web for whatever reason. The last gasps became designers and settled on more padding, rounded corners, and hidden scrollbars. Most of which are pretty but counterproductive. Dead discipline except for very large products.
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Brilliant. Some of the animations that are put as showcases on the Blender site are absolutely phenomenal. This one https://studio.blender.org/projects/spring/
particularly is my all time favorite.
There's also the 2024 film Flow. Really delightful movie, and is impressively rendered using Eevee (Blender's real-time renderer) and not Cycles (Blender's path-traced renderer).
I loved Coffee Run and the BCON24 Identity. Brilliant stuff. When it comes to Blender itself the only regret I have is that they ended support for Intel Macs but I understand it's a burden to support older platforms.
For anyone who happens to have an Intel Mac and is discouraged, Blender 4.5 is the LTS version and is still supported until at least 2027, and Blender is accepting patches that improve support.
https://devtalk.blender.org/t/deprecation-and-removal-of-mac...
Very cool news.
Personally, I'd love to see some more focus on game-dev workflows. The game asset pipeline still feels janky: texture painting exists, but not great, and baking textures/previewing results or baking from high poly to low poly involves a lot of manual node fiddling and rewiring. Export/iterate/build/test cycles are also pretty painful still.
Yes I think there's still a lot of potential upside.
But check out this collaboration between Blender and Godot https://godotengine.org/showcase/dogwalk/ I could imagine that in the not too distant future we might really have a completely open tools stack for making up to AA games (minus console SDKs which always are under NDA I guess).
Anyone know why Netflix doesn’t respond to their job site? I applied to several positions where I’m an exact match, with a decade of VFX and another decade of internet company experience in LA. Never heard a single word in response from them, for years. Reqs stay open a long time as well. What are they doing? Are they ghost jobs? They don’t even respond with a “no” form letter. (Lately their site is broken at the verify email stage, pin post returns 403.)
Simply they don't bother taking down the advertisement once hired.
It's the lowest priority of job for the hiring team and the role is normally forgotten about once the hire has been onboarded.
I worked for an animation studio and they didn't take down roles.
Companies don't take down listings for many reasons: make it look like they have more money to expand than they actually have, slow down the job seeker so their competition moves just slightly slower, there's no benefit in taking it down, if someone is actually reading the applications maybe an exceptional applicant will come that fits for another role in the company, drive up costs for the competition (hey boss everyone is hiring for my role so give me a raise), etc. [edit: gram mer and spolling]
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If someone is wondering who the Aras guy is https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@aras/115971315481385360
Nesnausk! He made some pretty sweet demos too (as in demoscene).
Eg https://m.pouet.net/prod.php?which=86463
How does it compare to Maya these days?
Blender still needs about 130 hours of course projects to become useful, but is a lot better in >5 due to better color handling and geometry nodes.
Maya is frozen in time, and that is not necessarily a bad thing...
Great video on getting 3D render preview speeds up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0GW8Na5CIE
Geometry nodes tutorials:
https://www.youtube.com/@TheDucky3D/videos
Blender still needs plugins to be functional for content:
https://tinynocky.gumroad.com/l/tinyeye
https://sanctus.gumroad.com/l/SLibrary
https://flipfluids.gumroad.com/l/flipfluids
https://artell.gumroad.com/l/auto-rig-pro
https://bartoszstyperek.gumroad.com/l/ahwvli
https://polyhaven.com/plugins/blender
https://extensions.blender.org/add-ons/mpfb/
Recommended training (Some artists like it, and some don't ymmv):
1. (A) Complete Blender Creator: Learn 3D Modelling for Beginners
https://www.udemy.com/course/blendertutorial/
* Basics of low-poly design in blender
2. (B+) Blender Animation & Rigging: Bring Your Creations To Life
https://www.udemy.com/course/blender-animation-rigging/
* Some more practice rigging
* Export to game engine teaser
3. (B) The Ultimate Blender 3D Sculpting Course
https://www.udemy.com/course/blender-3d-sculpting-course/
* Sculpting, Retopology, and VDM brushes
* a few outdated examples, and annoying instruction style
* basic anatomy
* covers several workflows
* Instructor is inexperienced
4. (A+) The Ultimate Blender 3D Simulations, Physics & Particles
https://www.udemy.com/course/blender-simulations-physics-par...
* Shader/Texture basics
* Geometry node basics
* Boid sprites
* Hair and physics simulation
* Camera FX, and post-render filters
* Focused on Blender v4.3
* Instructions on how to export your assets to Unity 3D and Unreal game engines
This is great, but they should give more. I would love to see million dollar donations from every major tech company. It's nothing to them, and Blender is fundamentally changing the way we make digital media.
Blender's UX evolution (2.8+, asset browser, USD) shows FLOSS can compete when funded right, Netflix's €240k push helps. Curious if Animal Logic shared their hybrid Maya/Houdini/Blender pipeline details?
<3 Blender is a treasure and must be protected.
I really like Blender and it's an amazing product, but I can't get over the standard Blender keymap. The "industry compatible" workflow is more sane, but then I have to translate tutorials from the Blender keymap to the industry compatible controls, and they're not always 1:1
That is indeed an unfortunate personal problem.
No it isn't. Many, if not most, people in the industry use Maya.
"industry compatible"? You mean Maya keybinds ?
Blender's limited support for the Universal Scene Description format is an immediate showstopper for most medium size to large studios.
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Blender has an input keymap for people who use Maya, yes. It's called "Industry Compatible". So yes, Maya keybinds.
We might see a transition of stable market toolware from subscription to open source yet
I wonder if devs leverage LLMs can catch up to the big boys in surprising speed. Netflix isn’t dumb
Blender's code is far beyond current LLM's abilities. Maybe in a few years... we'll see.
How does that translate into real cash?
well, what happens is netflix gives blender real cash. and thats the entirety of the translation
It's quite a bit of money, but a lot less than the equivalent Maya licenses. It would be great if more studios did this:
$240k "Press release, tech blogpost, dedicated product manager for your area" https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/
Meta are paying $30k per year, which is crazy really, when you think how much Blender has assisted in getting content onto their platform. Nvidia is better at $120k, but again, think how many graphics card buys Blender cycles has driven.
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