BlenderNation is a news site covering the Blender 3D software, with community projects, add-ons, production stories and release news.
HN links it for Blender add-ons, behind-the-scenes projects, and examples of games and animation made with Blender.
Before I got into web development I was involved in several open source blender projects, usually as a modeler (someone who creates the 3d objects, then passes them on to people who color animate and process them). I have used both maya3d (the oracle of the 3d modeling, powerful, industry grade software with a cost prohibiting casual experimentation) and blender, in addition to several other programs in limited amount.
Blender is everything that is right about the open source community.
The feature list is very comparable to commercial applications (which usually run > $500)
http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/features/
The community(s) are great, super helpful, nice, and diverse.
http://www.blender.org/community/user-community/
http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/
http://www.blendernation.com/
(and many more, in other languages)
But one of the most important, and as far as I know, unique things about blender and the community are the open movie projects.
The Blender Foundation establishes clear and detailed roadmaps for features (something many open source projects struggle for). Then they take a small group of some of the best artists and programmers from the community, and pay them to create a open source project using the current goals in the roadmap. The most recent was Project Durian, which created the short CG film "Sintel" with a focus on developing blenders renderer to do high res (4k) renders, and the animation system to allow for crowds and complex…
For those unfamiliar with Blender's versioning, the major number is effectively meaningless. The 8 is effectively the major number and the 2 the minor.
Anyway the big items in this release IMHO are:
- preliminary support for the Pixar USD format ( https://graphics.pixar.com/usd/docs/index.html ) which is gaining large traction in film studios, gradually in game engines and is the format of choice for Apple's AR ecosystem
- coming in line with the VFX reference platform ( https://vfxplatform.com/ )
The combination of both which means that Blender will be easier to integrate in existing pipelines rather than being a very interesting curiosity for large studios with preexisting pipelines.
Blender is certainly very powerful, and with the 2.8x releases, I think they're really opening up appeal to a larger set of artists and studios.
Just recently been talking to some large studios that are actively considering adding it to their toolset.
An overview of some of the major features in this release with accompanying videos can be found here : https://www.blendernation.com/2020/02/14/the-five-key-features-in-blender-2-82/
If you're in 3D animation/modeling/whatever and have a little bit of experience, Blender has a pretty stable simulation of Boids that is lots of fun to play around with. It's been built-in into Blender since... For as long as I remember, and it has lots of properties you can play around with, and you can also make the boids be rigid bodies as well so they can interact with other elements in your scene.
Some links if you want to try it out:
- https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/physics/particles/emitter/physics/boids.html
- https://www.blendernation.com/2019/07/06/how-to-use-boids-in-blender-2-8/
- https://www.blendernation.com/2008/01/05/simulating-flocks-herds-and-swarms-using-experimental-blender-boids-particles/
- http://feeblemind.tuxfamily.org/blog/index.php?post/2007/12/28/106-setting-a-prey-predator-relationship-using-boids-particles
I certainly hope all the people who signed that letter are safe and sound. Autodesk can come down pretty hard on their critics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-sgk
https://www.blendernation.com/2014/10/28/blender-conference-ton-talks-about-autodesk-ceiling-crashes/
>Blender Conference: Ton talks about Autodesk, ceiling crashes
>While Ton was talking about Autodesk during the Blender Conference, part of the ceiling of the Balie came crashing down, hitting him on the head. So remember folks: Autodesk is watching! ;-)
>Here's a picture of Ton after the event:
https://media.blendernation.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Ton-after-ceiling-crash.jpeg
Looks like a yes, but it was hard to find this example: https://www.blendernation.com/2020/10/23/behind-the-scenes-fps-game-made-with-blender-and-godot/
All other 3d games I found made with Godot look like they came from the 90s. 2d capabilities look great though. There's probably also some selection bias, it's probably not the first choice for most who want to make a 3d fps.
A senior lighting artist on the film mentions a few difficulties in the comments below.
- motion blur render times. (They patched Cycles to use Embree as its ray engine to solve this)
- memory consumption
- lack of UDIM
- clunky compositor
https://www.blendernation.com/2018/08/20/next-gen-blender-production-by-tangent-animation-soon-on-netflix/#comment-769061