Planetside Software Forums

http://helmer.sfe.se/ (http://helmer.sfe.se/)
cool!!

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/08/01/linux-preloads-rocket-per-cent

It's like the Titanic - Mac/Windows. Supposedly unsinkable. Linux is vastly superior now and any software that doesn't run on it is in a bad position.

http://badvista.fsf.org/what-s-wrong-with-microsoft-windows-vista

I've been checking out Blender regularly. It gets volumetrics soon. This is just one of many features coming:

http://farsthary.wordpress.com/

The space navigator works in Blender:

http://www.3dconnexion.com/solutions/blender.php

You can get numerous builds that will fly on your system:

http://www.graphicall.org/builds/index.php

This is while Autodesk buys XSI. They already have Maya, 3D Max, Mudbox and others. Eliminate the competition, slow down development, charge rip off prices. Help destroy the proprietary software model.

Roll on Blender.

man that guy has alot of money and no life ::)

From what he says he is using it for work.

He used DrQueue. You can use this with Blender and build a giant render farm at affordable costs which would just be impossible with other software and operating systems.

Impossible with other software? Giant render farms? Sounds like a challenge. :P

I'm going to check Blender out again. 

I've been messing with Blender for years and I'm glad I did because I know how to use and I will be using it.

This is the software I'm going to use:

Blender
3D Coat
TG2
Mojoworld
Gimp
Inkscape
Artrage
Lightzone

Then maybe another renderer. It depends what happens with Blender's internal renderer.

The one app not on this list (yet) was the one that cost me the most (Modo) which is a pathetic state of affairs.

Blender running on a 64 bit 8 core Ubuntu machine. That's the future and it will be cool. I might use Modo if they sort out animation which is what they should have been doing instead of the other jack of all trades master of none stuff they've put in there.

Look at that list then check out the equivalent apps that "pros" use and on Mac/Winblows then work out the cost difference. Best to spend that on hardware because those free and sensibly priced apps are in actual fact superior in many respects.

Cinepaint is another useful app since it handles higher bit images than Gimp.

Blender has the most inscrutable and unusable user interface I have ever seen since I began using computers in 1983.

No problem, if Blender is the future then I'll have to find myself a different hobby...

Bye :(

Nobody explains why the Blender UI is supposed to be so bad. There are some issues with the standard boxes that are designed to be able to be arranged horizontal. This means they can't be very tall and arranged nicely in a more convenient vertical fashion. The next Blender may chance that scenario. Otherwise the Blender UI is one of the best. Learn how to use it. It is the fastest app to use once you do this. It started as an in house app that was very keyboard command centric. This actually makes it very good. A key command for everything.

I guess its just the learning curve of such a different UI, people used to (and still do;)) say the same about Terragen.
Richard

TG2 certainly isn't easy but that's the nature of the app.

Blender doesn't conform to bad ideas but this is good.

Learn key commands. Apps that have key commands for everything are the best. For example Blender didn't used to have a universal manipulator.

S - size
G - grab to move
R - rotate

X,Y and Z after those constrain to axis. Then Ctrl snaps movement Ctrl+Shift snaps smaller.

Ctrl+ up arrow maximizes the window the mouse is hovering over. Hovering over a window join gives you options on changing the window arrangement.

Window headers can be removed or changed in position - right click on the header.

Windows sets can be made stored and easily accessed. There is a key command for absolutely everything.

It's easy. Learn it properly! Many apps are UI disasters with buttons everywhere and no key commands or pop up options.

M - another important one gives you an option of which layer to move the selected object to. I could go on and on. This is FAST. Other apps are nightmares.

Blender renders:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=110066

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=138379

This is cool stuff.

Quote from: efflux on November 21, 2008, 07:47:30 PM
Nobody explains why the Blender UI is supposed to be so bad. There are some issues with the standard boxes that are designed to be able to be arranged horizontal. This means they can't be very tall and arranged nicely in a more convenient vertical fashion. The next Blender may chance that scenario. Otherwise the Blender UI is one of the best. Learn how to use it. It is the fastest app to use once you do this. It started as an in house app that was very keyboard command centric. This actually makes it very good. A key command for everything.

Recently I had a haha!!! moment in which I realized why Blender UI sucks so egregiously.

For example, when you use a text editor, you mainly use the keyboard and from time to time the mouse; when instead you use a painting program, you move/click the mouse (or a tablet if you are pro) and from time to time type. These are just two examples; if you examine ANY of the programs you use you will see that in NO case you are requiered to continuosly use BOTH the mouse AND the keyboard; Blender forces you to do so.

For Blender to become usable for non-penguinistas it would be required that its developer settled once for all whether it is a keyboard OR mouse/tablet centric app and then fix the UI accordingly (something that I read on Blender forums developers are coldly determined NOT to do).

Bye...

P.S.: if you watch videos of pros working, you will see that they have high-end tablets and the "typing" emulation is reduced to minimum (I think that they do not go beyond giving names for files and elements of the scene)... are they all idiots?

I'm going to write some kind of tutorials for Blender at some stage. I can see Blender is a problem to start on and that is because of poor documentation for new users. I found it difficult to start with because of this but it wasn't the app. You'll read some "getting started" guide but still be wondering about things because they left stuff out.

However I see no bad logic in how Blender actually works. For example take a new Modo user. First thing they will find is that they can't navigate the model without using icon controls or reading the manual to find the mouse + keyboard commands. Blender rotates around the model with middle mouse button. Control+MMB zooms in and out and Shift+MMB moves horizontal and vertical. You can find these without reading any manual. Try finding the correct commands in Modo for the very first thing you will want to do! Also, why do all these apps have little icons for creating boxes spheres etc, an icon for every tool - so much it is sometimes on separate tabs like Modo. That is ludicrous. Space bar in Blender brings up menus with every basic action including creating your initial shapes. Do we need an icon to tell people what extrude does. No, it is ridiculous and creates an extremely messy UI but I think it has other side effects - it stops people from using key commands. Tools can still be on a menu without buttons everywhere and the menu can tell you the command. To me this is a logical way to design an app that keeps a simple UI and allows you to learn a key command. Key commands are much faster than having a heavy UI that will have to be so heavy you end up navigating different tabs for operations.

Key commands have to be learned of course. Eventually computers with have visual feedback of some sort like the ipod touch screens then the button you press has a label telling you what it does. In that case it would all become easier. It depends on how this gets implemented though. It's not so easy as an ipod because touching our screen will not really be very cool. What we need is a separate pad with buttons like a keyboard. Until computers change in this respect, you ave to use key commands to get the fastest work flow.

One thing that is not good in Blender is the layout of material and texture controls. This is due to the problems of the boxes all being the same size to fit horizontal. It is not so easy to set up materials and there is no preview of your saved materials. One thing to add to this though is that Blender is a very powerful procedural texturer. It has tons of fractals.

two main things fall short in Blender compared to other apps. It's renderer needs to be better. For example it needs some kind of GI but you do have the option of using other integrated renderers. The other thing is that it doesn't have micro poly displacement. If you need the actual mesh to be displaced you have to bump up subdivision on whatever object at render time.

Here is a Blender screenshot of the gen3 tree thing I posted on another thread. You just adjust the UI as you go along for whatever project - it is that easy. Notice how the render appears in another pane not another separate window but you can do it both ways if you want. This is actually the image editor. You can bring images into here, have your render here and then edit, paint and composite stuff here and link it to an outside editor such as Gimp. I removed the header since I was just looking at render results in this pane. You can select a small area to render if you wish. You even have a little "real time" render box which can be dragged around the 3D view.

Maya, 3D Max, XSI etc etc. No thanks! They are DISASTER UIs.

I just looked into this. Very interesting.

When Blender got it's present UI it was totally different and superior to any other app. Of course according to the people who were locked into multi $1000 software it was no good. A year later Modo appears with very similar UI designs. Brad Peebler "marketing guy" for Luxology claims that they looked at UIs from other apps but in no uncertain terms Blender was not one of them yet Blender at the time was the app with the revolutionary UI. This is pure BS.

Quote from: efflux on November 23, 2008, 10:05:07 AM
I'm going to write some kind of tutorials for Blender at some stage.

If you plan to do so to convert me, please spare yourself a useless task. More than one year ago I decided to stop wasting money and time on that pile of crap called Blender.

Currently I am happily using Hexagon 2.5, SketchUp 6 and Wings3D and I plan to thoroughly check trueSpace 7.6 during Christmas holidays.

Should come the day in which I will feel that I am ready to go beyond those apps, my sight is already pointed towards Lightwave and/or Modo... just to show you how deep, wide and unbridgeable is the chasm between penguinistas tastes and everybodies' else...

Bye!!!

I'd like to see those tutorials...

Just one person abandoning the software isn't reason enough for me. My brother uses it daily to create his Myst ages, and I'm still impressed by his work with this app.

Latego.

Wings 3D is a cool app I'll definitely agree on that. It is very simple and easy to use. It requires a bit of learning but once done Wings is cool to use.

A also have Hexagon which was good but buggy. I never upgraded it. Maybe it's better now.

One thing about Blender is that the features are not just push button get results. To give you an example it has an array modifier. I've been wondering how to use this to array trees. This tool is quite simple at the moment. So you wonder how to do more complex things with it rather than just array in one direction. So you find that the arrays can be arranged at vertices on another polygon or curve. I also think you can array stuff using particles but haven't tested yet. The power is there, you have to find it.

As for Blender's UI which get regularly slated. This is how it works at base level.

You have panels, all resizable and arranged in any way you want. How do you achieve this. Hover the mouse over the joins. That's it!!! You make your workspace whatever you like. Right mouse click gives you options to split the window etc depending on the context of how that window links with another. You can also remove the window header from this mouse click - the part that contains all the contextual menus and controls that you may want to hide. This header also has a list of all available window types but a key command can choose that anyway so often you need nothing but the content of that window. Also, if you choose to join windows you can move the mouse over each window and an arrow appears showing you which window will take over the space of another.

That's it, the basics of the Blender windowing system. This could not be any easier! Modo fan boys can go on about how Blender supposedly copied Modo (impossible) but they can not give you a description of a few lines on how to deal with Modo's windows.

The next version of Blender is going to have a very very useful feature in it's UI. Any parameter in the UI that has been key framed for animation will indicate that it has been key framed. Modo currently has this. Trouble is, Modo has virtually no animation features yet compared to Blender at least for character animation.

The problem with push buttons get results applications is that the power is diminished. This is why TG2 is so vastly superior to the previous version. You have lots of control in the nodes.

In Blender fur is generated with the particles system. You can choose a particles system for fur but you don't simply click a button and get fur. That way the particles system can be very creatively used for numerous things. Also, Blenders procedural texturing is very powerful. For example in Modo (I'm comparing Modo a lot because it is the most similar app) you have a few simple options like "cell" but cell is voronoi fractal. Why the hell not call it that and give the user all the parameters for adjusting that fractal properly.