I really appreciate this project. Who knows if it will become a viable standard, but I like that there's at least an effort to work on something open and interoperable with a bit more structure than just plain text. The small amount of structure and ceremony adds boatloads of utility.
I don't use Blender, so my admiration is from a distance but: Wow - what an impressive project. At least if I understand it correctly, this is a real pro-level piece of free and open software that's equivalent to thousands and thousands of dollars in closed-source commercial software.
Its history is also one of perseverance. Blender was never a runaway success story, but rather a matter of becoming a little better every day and eventually getting a recognition for that.
> Blender was never a runaway success story, but rather a matter of becoming a little better every day
Also some extreme ups and downs along the way, almost succumbing at some point(s) and more along the way. It's a miracle it survived, a miracle performed by Ton Roosendaal most likely.
It's not just incredibly powerful software, it's also incredibly fun and intuitive to use (once the UI has clicked with you).
There are still some areas where commercial competitors got edge, but Blender covers a wider base, is the more complete/universal software already. Lot's of people prefer Blender's UI. It's also rapidly developing, the competition is not. I am pretty sure it will become industry standard at some point. Maybe not for the big studios, who invested millions into custom pipelines, but anything up and coming.
> I am pretty sure it will become industry standard at some point.
I remember people saying this in 2004.
Blender is widely used in "the industry" (whatever that industry is). What is has really accomplished in terms of "the industry standard" has, from my POV, been preventing a proprietary system from becoming the standard. That's what happened in the DAW space, where ProTools was the industry standard, and it has taken 20 years to get to the point where that hegemony is no longer as solid as it once was (thanks, Ableton!)
There are several different choices for all the things Blender does, but the existence of a FLOSS tool that does them (and does them well) prevents any of the proprietary ones from being "the one".
You are right, Blender doesn't just serve one industry.
I had the movie industry in mind, because it demands the largest set of Blender's features. I believe Maya still has/had the edge in animation and particle stuff. Though, AFAIK the main reason is integration and custom tooling built on it, which makes switching to Blender less tempting than sticking up with license fees... which are rather negligible compared to overall operating costs.
I believe, Blender is creeping in with smaller studios, especially anime/cartoon kinda stuff.
I think one of Blender's biggest assets is its wide creative tool set. There is even a useful video editor included. Honestly, it's not far off from being the swiss army knife of digital creative work, a creative operating system. Maybe we get a DAW too at some point :D
Anyway, I think that's why Blender will dominate. Anyone starting out got everything they need for "free" (with a consistent UI you only have to learn once), but they still won't outgrow the software professionally either, now. That's totally unique.
For the DAW tool, just run Blender on top of JACK/Pipewire and use Ardour to get sample-accurate synchronization between the two, and all the features of both, without compromise.
I really hope a similar revolution comes to photo and video editing. While there are plenty of really good FOSS video editors (including the one blender has), none of them are truly professional level. For photo editing, the GIMP is pretty much there, but it's old and crusty and maintained by a handful of people
I have a vague recollection that twenty years ago GIMP paid some designers to come up with a great UI, but once the design was ready, GIMP was like "nah we don't like that" and kept their bad UI.
I do image stuff so rarely that GIMP is fine because it's free. But its UI is so bad. I don't know about now, but I remember a few years ago someone pointed out that GIMP had over a million dollars in a Bitcoin wallet and hadn't touched any of it in like a decade.
Gimp still has a lot of good features that I find myself crawling back for, on bigger projects. But Pinta has that good ol' fashioned Paint.NET feel to it that a lot of people still strive for.
I use blender constantly to make things for 3d printing and I haven’t spent a cent on it or any plugins I use for it.
So for anyone on the fence about picking up blender and reading this comment above, no it doesn’t require hundreds of dollars of plugins to be useful. Not for every use case.
Same - I make most of my living from Blender and I occassionally use 1 or 2 paid add-ons. With the recent improvements to the compositor and the editor, it has even replaced the last piece of Adobe software I was using - After Effects - very nice feeling. I donate to Blender after every paid job too.
Indeed, geometry nodes are revolutionary in some ways, and volumetric displacement brushes are magic.
The issue is Blender has been in perpetual Beta for decades. Every update something breaks, moves, permutes, or goes missing. It is chaos incarnate in some ways. =3
Every use-case differs. I like Blender even when they break my hobby projects every update.
OpenScad and FreeCad also works for 3D cad files. However, many people that own 3D printers will never sculpt, re-mesh, or cad up their own objects. =3
FreeCAD is great if someone mainly wants to print functional, usable parts. That’s totally valid and honestly even more powerful than Blender for that use case. Autodesk Fusion (prev. Fusion 360) is also a popular option.
I use blender because I also like to do a lot of 3d printed art, and as you mentioned, that sculpt tooling is one of many fantastic tools for that purpose.
Also LLMs know a lot about Blender, making it very easy to describe what I want to do, and then get a walk through of how to do it with Blender.
LLM are sometimes good at organizing the awful documentation for Blenders ever permuting API, but will not help you get better creatively. If you are interested in geometry nodes, than this channel offers a lot =3
There is no such thing as "free" unless the original author released files under CC0 or Public domain. The rest of the ecosystem is a legal minefield even for kids kit-bashing a project for fun.
We spent around $3k conducting a survey of the Blender ecosystem for a game dev project about 2 years ago, and continue to monitor the situation every update. A rather sobering experience in some ways.
Would recommend Poly Haven as the plugin is not required to access their free assets, but it is usually a good idea to support people that make things easier for everyone. =3
I’ve regularly used an M1 Max, M4 Pro, and M5 Max. They all get pretty loud when driving local LLMs. “Jet-engine” would be hyperbolic, but it’s definitely noisy.
Is it really? A 9B model is equivalent? Honest question, as I haven't spent that much time with the 9B variant or Flash 2.5. But that seems like a pretty bold claim for such a small model. I assumed Flash 2.5 was considerably larger, but maybe I'm wrong?
Second this, they keep getting performance upgrades too. Z Lab had been publishing dflash addons and boosting their tgen 2-3x. I'm looking at doing comparative evals right now
Same, but the front is important for airflow in the Framework Desktop, so I don't think covering it with an e-ink screen would work. But maybe with some space between the screen and the fan intake?
Yeah, it might need some kind of a riser to prevent airflow restriction. Of course, I suppose it depends on how many squares you cover.
The other idea I keep noodling about is creating modular gears and perhaps using a servo for a really cool dial indicator instead, but alas, it hasn't made it further than my ideas bin.
In my opinion - not yet. The local models are getting better all the time, but still aren't quite reliable enough. Also, hardware prices are absurd right now. Once the hardware market settles down and there's a little more progress on local models, maybe in a year or two, I expect things will be a bit different.
I'm running a Strix Halo with 128GB of RAM. It's fun to play with, but the real frontier models are just way better.
Yeah same here. Isn’t it weird, thet i used to be a lot more excited about space travel however, as I grow older I am excited about things more closer to me. Still curious, but focus has shifted from great for humanity to will make my life easier.
Just feels more closer and impactful (to me).
The fact that he's so anti-immigration as an immigrant himself is so odd. My rather negative interpretation is he doesn't consider himself to be an immigrant which screams white supremacy.
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