There have been a lot of these (they're basically always dogfooding the next one, i believe). Is there something special about Big Buck Bunny and Wing It?

dooooooo dooo dooooo, doooooooo doooo doooooooo doooo

There's a new Wile E Coyote movie coming. It was scrapped initially but due to backlash from fans, it was revived today.

You're welcome :) I would totally watch it if they created an animated series out of it.

My favourite Blender Studio short: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cMxraX_5RE

I'm a noob and I when kid asked me for help with Halloween costume I dug in making each triangle by hand, moving each vertex by hand, basically huge slow pain. Then I found the "remesh" button and the push/pull tools which felt like a superpower.

> Brooooo how do you even. I wish I had that time it takes to get this good at Blender. I might actually end up releasing some solid indie games.

Keep in mind that the Blender Open Movies are made by professionals who've been doing what they been doing for a long time, and there is a whole team making those, with roles specific to the area.

I don't think you could single-handedly create something like that at the same timescale as they created it. They basically have made a proper studio at this point and they're fine-tuning the workflows and processes of Blender by doing these movies.

So don't feel bad if you never would be able to create this alone, it is a team effort after all.

If you want an actual answer, you don't do it by yourself. I counted 50+ people credited. But if you want to start to play a part in doing it, basically just learn a lot of math. My gf is a technical director at a large animation studio and she got in by being an expert in linear algebra and spending a ton of time studying animation textbooks/tutorials/etc.

That said, the market is evaporating. Almost everything has moved ~to India~ [e: abroad] and there are barely any jobs left in USA, and those that do exist are being fought for by the many folks who have been recently laid off stateside. Sounds familiar...

Having been a trader, regular guest on coding and Protracker parties, yep those were the days.

I guess shadertoy and similar are where the Demoscene spirit lives on.

I've started teaching my (homeschooled, 10yo) son Python, and he's been briefly exposed to some 3D software (including Blender).

I'm curious: how do you imagine this working? Can you name a few examples of the learning possibilities that you have in mind?

The content reel was uploaded to their PeerTube[1]; I don't see the other two videos on there yet, though.

Edit: The node tool introduction is now also live[2]!

[1] https://video.blender.org/w/ni4S8WYzVG9kqQ6mDjnY1s [2] https://video.blender.org/w/hyq7PB9uaUUKkjwSENxid5

Blender is on peertube: https://video.blender.org/videos/local?s=1

Blender only became successful well after it was made open source.

As a commercial project it was a failure. It only became successful due to two decades of open-source development, and the willingness of its users to invest in it - even if only to stimulate the development of a competitor to expensive proprietary software.

Blender only became an even remotely viable option in 2011, after being open-source for 9 years. Its popularity only really started in 2019 after a massive UI rework made it actually nice to use. This and related changes led to Blender receiving a $1.2M grant in 2019, leading to other companies re-evaluating it and awarding even more grants.

If anything, compared to today's successes its initial proprietary development should be seen as nothing more than a historical curiosity.

Most of this is technically true but not really relevant, and no, this is not what makes it stand out.

Very little of what constitutes modern Blender came from NeoGeo/NaN. The original software was uncompetitive and unremarkable. In fact, Blender had to change most of its original UI conventions to feel less alien for CGI professionals. (because the original paradigm was from the ancient times before the commonplace UI conventions)

What made it stand out in the open-source community is devs using it for actually creating something (best investment!), positioning it at the intersection of interests of non-competing companies that need to get shit done, and also attracting a massive army of game modders.

Interesting but the special part about blender is the open source part, they managed to keep it alive, revamp the UI fully and bring on new and hard features on a regular basis. I don't remember another foss project of that kind.

Wasn't the user interface fundamentally changed after the open source release because it was so cumbersome to use?

This is an innocent misrepresentation of Blender's development history. While nothing you've said is false, Blender has been open source for more than 2 decades. It began that portion of its life as something of a mess, with a truly Byzantine user interface that made even trivial tasks troublesome, and lacking a vast majority of the features it's now known for. Getting it to its contemporary state was a long and painful process, including at least two major front-end overhauls and who-knows-how-many under-the-hood, and a commendable (though not unimpugnable) humility from developers who (finally) found the wherewithal to put the user experience before FOSS dogma or their own ambitions.

That's what separates it from most open source projects: not that it started as a commercial product, but because its designers and developers stowed their egos and worked diligently on creating a solid piece of software (and documentation and community and support) for a long, long time. In this way, it surpasses even many of its commercial contemporaries, which are driven by a profit motive to become increasingly paywalled and enshitified.

Rolling your own UI in openGL is very doable and can make a lot of sense for any application that will require non standard custom widgets. Use your preferred truetype rendering library to generate your text textures, blender uses freetype I think. Widgets can all be done with vectors and gradients, start with functions that create primitives such as rounded boxes or different line types and build from there.

Well, they basically wrote their own GUI toolkit. And IMO a very good one, with tiling windows and everything is nicely scaleable. I especially like the command search with space and little things like dragging over a column of checkboxes to toggle them all.

If your choices are Motif or the Athena toolkit, rolling your own UI is an understandable choice.

They're actually porting everything over to Vulkan now. That, and Apple devs are also working on maintaining and developing a Metal backend.

when the whole application is OpenGL it makes perfect sense. Just like how the interface to managing sql databases is done using SQL tables.

I hate so much how it breaks many conventions. For example, when you right click, the menu opens onPress instead of onRelease.

I wish they had at least a setting to change that.

> So it's slow, bloated, and crashes regularly?

I think Adobe has really improved the last decade or so in this regard.

Blender is really amazing and just seems to get more powerful every year.

Also, it won't shut up about it's couple AI utilities.

Wow, very similar story here. In highschool, I think I messed up a week of exams because I was too busy modeling a Fellbeast/nazgul from LoTR in Blender. I still have the model somewhere, copied over in 20 years of USB sticks and external HDDs.

Learned python for use in blender, am a software dev in robotics now, using a lot of python.

Is the €134k/mo figure including all corporate sponsors? Approximating that as one developer salary per month then what they've continued to accomplish is still very impressive.

When you compare it to GIMP, it's night and day. Not only is Blender open source, it is professional software.

That was literally over 20 years ago. The majority of Blender's development has taken place while it was open-source; most of the features it's known for did not exist in the commercial version.

> Gimp never had investors write off €4.5M of development on it.

Notably, there is literally nothing stopping other Open Source projects from being given grants of millions of dollars other than social convention.

We saw this with Godot after Unity. There's a coordination problem here, but we all mostly recognize that many of these fundamental tools would be better if we all collectively put our resources into an Open tool that is focused on serving the community rather than exploiting it.

It's just that without shocking events that prompt the bigger players to say, "you know what, heck this, let's just fund a good tool", it's very tough to get people to make that kind of investment, even though it would very likely be better for them and in the long-run more cost effective for them if they did.

I would argue that the majority of Blender's development (both architecturally and in terms of cost) happened after its commercial origins. But Blender continued to get investment because the community was invested in building a usable tool that wouldn't force them to deal with the crap of the other commercial products in the 3D industry.

Haven't used it in ages, but Blender did not feel like an Adobe product when it was first open sourced. IIRC its UI was considered notoriously unintuitive.

With selling it as OSS, they only wrote off 4.4M euros. So given the situation it was still a better option for investors.

Looks like that really is the Blender 4.0 release.

But there's still absolutely no mention of it on the official blog:

https://code.blender.org

Nor of the RC1 being available at some point before.

WTF? :( :( :(

...but it is because there is no release yet.