Blender releases their Oscar winning version tool
285 comments
·March 27, 2025EMIRELADERO
greenknight
I have been working in the CG / 3D industry for quite some time... when i first started about 15 years ago... Maya was the default... everyone knew it, it was THE default. That being said we have been on blender since 2.5 days.
I was talking to someone on the weekend, and found out they were studying animation... i was like oh so youre using Maya? they were like whats maya?
There has been a massive shift. I think there was a new era brought about when 2.8 was released. With it, they really pushed their dev fund, which helped them to get better, which made them bigger, which got them more donations, which made them get better. Cyclical loop.
Im excited to see where they go next.
CobrastanJorji
There's a great lesson here. People will want to use what they learned, and if they can't learn on your software, they won't be inclined to try it later. It doesn't really matter for the first five years or so of your company, and that's longer than most startups exist, but once you're #1, you need to start thinking about the pipeline of new people. There's not a lot of motivation for individual employees (even CEOs) to think this way because they probably won't be in the role by the time it matters, but it's important.
Would Blender have taken off as fast if Maya had a free tier? I doubt it.
ryanjshaw
Whenever I encounter an interesting non-niche new technology with "contact us for a demo/pricing" language, I bounce.
When a new project comes along and we need to make a technology decision we will, as a matter of due diligence, reach out to all the relevant vendors. But there is an "existing experience in team" evaluation criteria for these technology decisions, and the "contact us" vendors fail miserably there - their tech needs to be extra impressive to overcome that hurdle.
rolandog
Yes. I highly recommend watching this video [0] — "For-Profit (Creative) Software" by EndVertex — about how some essential programs price out regular people with their insane licensing models... In turn making people's skills nontransferable.
baq
> People will want to use what they learned, and if they can't learn on your software, they won't be inclined to try it later.
This is why Microsoft never seriously pursued piracy of Windows and this is also why Windows was never a market leader on servers. This is why Postgres won databases even though it’s clearly an inferior product to Oracle, MSSQL and DB2. This is why CUDA is the defacto standard in GPGPU. This is why every saas business must have a free tier. Etc.
tobr
On topic, this excellent video essay (?) that’s been making the rounds recently[1]. Highly recommended.
1: ”For-Profit (Creative) Software” by EndVertex https://youtu.be/I4mdMMu-3fc
_fizz_buzz_
I think this is also one of the reasons that KiCad is making such in-roads into the electronics industry. For 90% of companies it does all the stuff you need and hobbyist can afford it and learn it and experiment with it.
flohofwoe
Autodesk tried that from time to time. AFAIK as a student you can still get a free Maya, and there also was a very cheap (but massively stripped down) version for indie game devs. But there was always one or another string attached.
IMHO what really killed Maya wasn't necessarily Blender itself, but Autodesk's strategy of first becoming a defacto monopolist in the area of commercial 3D software and then tightening the subscription screws on their existing users. Of course that strategy doesn't work when there's a free alternative to migrate to.
stevage
That's why a lot of companies like this offer big education discounts, so that university students get to use it for free and get hooked.
swiftcoder
> Would Blender have taken off as fast if Maya had a free tier? I doubt it.
Maya's own success was heavily based around a cheap license for students. IIRC it was only about $100, as opposed to nearly a grand for the professional license.
xmprt
I remember hearing about Maya when I was studying in college. It's was so expensive and essentially unobtainable unless you were in the industry. Blender has democratized 3D modeling and animation so much.
Cthulhu_
Everyone I heard about that did graphics or 3d modeling as a non-pro pirated the software. In hindsight, these companies priced themselves out of the market, because you can't compete with free. And they underestimated hobbyists.
Keyframe
I would argue it was Amiga and PC (windows NT) that did that due to affordability of the machines and rampant piracy. I worked with 9.5 versions of software (Poweranimator) that later became next iteration of it called Maya 1.0. Poweranimator, later Maya, and Softimage (retroactively called SI|3D since there was XSI later) were the golden standard. One for animation (Softimage) the other for everything else. Prices were similar. This is mid to late 90's - ~$15k for base software and then around the same for each of the modules like Kinemation and Dynamation. You'd run up, with discounts, to like 30-40k in 90's bucks without SGI machine itself. You were basically facing a $100k investment per workstation if it were Indigo2 or later Octane. To top it off, there were things like IFFS from Autodesk like Flame which were ~3-5 as much. On the other hand you had an Amiga with Lightwave or Cinema4D or later Windows NT box with 3dsmax which were, everything accounted for, ~2-8k all around. Blender started out on SGI btw.
I've exited the space since, since it's a crap and nasty business, but kept it as a hobby. Personally, I've had a lot of problems getting into Blender over the years, especially since the great UI consolidation of all of major 3D apps in early 2000's. Blender was just different, but not Zbrush different. There was just something off with it that made my muscle memory angry. Somewhat like Gimp. However, recently that has changed. Revamp of few key areas in Blender made it actually quite easy to get into it and knowledge of all the other apps over the years made it a one-week transition.
I still prefer animation in Maya though. It's an old friend, after all. We'll see until when.
larusso
For me 20 years ago there was also the fight between Maya and Max. But yes Maya was the standard. Our company switched also to blender which would have been crazy 10 years ago. It’s an awesome story for Blender and it community and of course the people given their heart and some into this software.
0xbs0d
I started doing 3D on the Amiga so I grew up using for the most part Lightwave and later moved to Softimage (until those cunts at Autodesk killed it). I also managed to get a copy of Maya 1.0 beta (it was 0.9x something) from a friend that had friends at a big studio.
I remember how everyone was very into 3DSMax for the longest time. Then everyone was into Maya. Briefly some people even switched to Modo.
Blender has come a long way from v2.x where some people started to use it. It's brilliant seeing how many people have adopted it. I also noticed a strange shift in knowledge. Like something has been lost in translation. Many 3D concepts are getting rediscovered today by a generation that never heard of 3DSMax, LW, SI, etc. It's a fascinating.
noduerme
No love for Cinema4D? I don't do 3D professionally, but I've played with it since the 90s (Strata 3D, Infini-D, RenderMan, Playmation). I've subbed in as an artist on some motion graphics projects here and there. I've never found anything as comfortable as Cinema4D, to me. For software with such a vast number of options, Maxon makes the UI somehow fairly comfortable. And every time I've tried to play with Blender, it seems extremely daunting.
brulard
25 years ago as a teenager, having no access to hi-end software, I downloaded manual for Cinema 4D and read it start to end. I used imagine 3D on my Amiga at that time. It took minutes just for the preview of the material to render. Few years later when finally got a pirated copy of Cinema 4D I found myself understanding the software quite well just from the manual and until today I find the interface very nice and user friendly. I'm glad current Blender is quite similar in this regard.
dagw
I used to work in the field and Cinema4D seemed to be the go to tool for just about every solo freelancer in the business. Yet I basically never saw it at any studio I ever ran across.
yobbo
Maya was always pirated by amateurs. The reason it fell out of fashion is probably because torrenting/pirating stopped being seen as "appropriate" for amateurs or learners.
Vespasian
Obviously Autodesk is massive beyond Maya and animation.
Do you expect this to influence their profits significantly? If yes when?
Did they already "react" to Blender (e.g. by speeding up development)?
raincole
Autodesk changed their pricing model in 2019 (added an indie tier). That was their reaction to the competition.
Besides that, Maya did get quite some animation features lately. But in the end Blender has got "good enough and free" state and there is nothing Maya can do about that.
That being said, Maya isn't going away anytime soon. There are just way too many Python scripts called Maya API in the industry.
mistercheph
No matter how large the lead may be today, autodesk (and next-in-line Adobe) are case studies in why OSS will always win given enough time because although OSS can suffer from many chronic and debilitating diseases, they rarely catch the fatal ones that plague commercial software development.
Yes, the OSS development structure leads to projects that lag behind proprietary solutions for amounts of time that are measured in decades, but nobody will ever have to re-write GIMP from scratch because the market had a bad hair day and somebody got acquired by a sovereign wealth fund that gets bored and runs the project into the ground. That doesn't change anything about the fact that e.g. GIMP, or freeCAD suck today, but someone(s) will almost certainly still be carrying those torches in 50 years, or the torches of superior FOSS competitors. And in the next 50 years, Adobe and Autodesk will almost certainly suffer total death or become skeleton crews that only service legacy clients, and when that happens, all of the collective human talent that went into building those tools and human experience into mastering their use will burn up into the screaming void while GIMP chugs along, putting out a release candidate for their GTK4 port.
edanm
> Do you expect this to influence their profits significantly? If yes when?
(Context - former Autodesk employee, though obviously all views here are my own, and I'm not commenting on anything I had any involvement in or direct knowledge of - only publicly available information.)
Look up where Autodesk's profits come from sometime, and you'll see that 3d animation is close to meaningless to Autodesks's bottom line, at least in terms of direct profits. I just asked ChatGPT and assuming it's accurate (I haven't double checked but it fits with what I vaguely remember), the Media & Entertainment product families, which include 3ds Max, Maya etc, make up only 5% of total revenue, as opposed to: Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) (48% of revenue), AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT (25% of revenue) and Manufacturing (MFG) (20% of revenue).
n3storm
Looking at you Adobe (¬⤙¬ )
mnky9800n
The palaeontologists on the floor above mine have posters everywhere about using blender to study dinosaur locomotion. I think they do 3d scans of fossil bones and the. Try to recreate musculature. Blender is everywhere.
TimByte
It's not just the software's power, it's the culture around it
raxxorraxor
Blender has a setting for industry standard hotkeys. I hope we see a time when other software gives us a Blender setting.
aldanor
I was also surprised to discover there's basic Blender classes for 10 year old kids as an introduction to the field and they can pick it up quite well
pram
I've been learning Blender to make reference objects for my drawings, so this is definitely true. It's simultaneously pretty easy to learn the basics, and also extremely daunting because of the breadth of the features lol.
whatever1
Question why photo never had OS software of commercial caliber? Only GIMP comes to mind which was never even close to the commercial folks
lrem
There’s Darktable which is a pretty good alternative to Lightroom. When I looked into it a couple years back, a friend with Darktable was able to get the same results as I with Lightroom, with the same amount of effort. But when I tried, well… The effort to re-learn was too big, cheaper to just keep paying Apple. I imagine now they lag on AI features too.
omnimus
Darktable pretty messed up ux thanks to mismanagement, lack of direction and hobby programmers that often leave the project. (there is even someone trying to fix it with a fork https://https://ansel.photos/).
imhoguy
Lightroom is made by Adobe, not Apple.
Here I would like to also mention RawTherapee, also open-source, together with Darktable (with is more newb friendly) they are great software worth to spread.
mschuster91
Adobe for a loong time (up until CS6) didn't give a fuck about piracy. Everyone with an interest in media when I was in school had a keygen and learned Photoshop, some even started small solo businesses with a pirated version until they had enough money to buy the actual thing.
On top of that, developing for photo, video and audio is hard due to all the maths involved. The amount of brains capable of that wizardry is finite, the amount of brains able to do open source work in that field is even less, and other FOSS projects compete heavily for these brains.
bbatha
I think the difficulty of media programming is overstated. It’s UX that kills the free alternatives. In the photo space Gimp, dark table, and rawtherapee often have more features than their commercial counterparts. For instance content aware fill was in gimp nearly a year before it appeared in photoshop. However this is often to their detriment of the software. Look at darktable, it’s a mess of visual algorithms and sliders that have names directly taken from the papers they implement and it’s a mess.
hmmokidk
There is a large measure of truth to this.
Also saw a non techie casually mention using Gimp.
These tools are reaching more people, slowly but surely.
tmaly
My 10 year old daughter went through the popular Blender Donut tutorial.
She also loves to watch some of the short anime made with Blender based on some Roblox games.
Open source is amazing on this aspect.
marcodiego
Although I've never contributed with Blender, I felt proud when I saw "made with Blender" in the credits.
Blender is a jewel of the FLOSS movement and a history and behavior that must be mimicked by many other projects.
Looking forward to more successes like this.
keyle
I remember using Blender when everyone was saying how terrible of a UX it was.
They've turned it around and it's become a default-first for many artists.
Open source of not, it of course helps, that the competition charges absolutely mind-bogglingly high amounts of money, for a similar offer.
blooalien
> I remember using Blender when everyone was saying how terrible of a UX it was.
I remember those days too, and I also remember that once I actually adapted to how Blender worked, it turned out it was superior in many ways to other 3D software of that time period. The workflow was just too different for a lotta folks to adapt to. Fast forward a couple major version numbers, and Blender's mostly kept everything that was great about how it worked, and managed to cater in many ways to those who could not adapt to how different it was. It's been so much ongoing massive improvement without all the usual destruction of everything that it was already doing right that we so often see.
whstl
IMO doing a redesign that improves things without pissing off old users is probably the hardest thing those projects can do.
I've seen FAANG companies messing this up so much that it makes it 10x more impressive that an open source project managed to do it.
danielbln
I used it heavily in 2006 and the UX learning curve was certainly a steep wall, but once broken through it became quite intuitive, even back then where everything looked like a Space Shuttle cockpit.
agumonkey
UX and math wise they're regularly pushing their limits in serious ways
I don't know what ingredient made their community so vibrant but it's worth writing it down
throwup238
> I don't know what ingredient made their community so vibrant but it's worth writing it down
The way I remember it, they got huge industry buy in and tons of sponsorships after price hikes for Maya and 3DS Max.
DonHopkins
Ton Roosendaal's leadership abilities, ambitious vision, technical skills, and simply being a really great guy, has inspire many other amazing people to join and support the project and work really hard on it.
reactordev
It’s far from perfect but it’s miles from where it was. It still has some quirks I’d like to see closed up. Side tool panels vs side bar properties panels is confusing to new users who are looking for their “thing”. Texture painting needs some TLC but it’s usable. All in all, Blender 4 is a completely different animal than Blender 2 and you can tell. Grease pencil is a game changer. Sculpting too. You don’t need anything but Blender (maybe Krita).
I switched from 3DSMax to Blender and I’ll never go back. Rigify still makes tons of shapes (max has a bipedal model to represent the bones) but it’s finally one-click rigged. Very rarely do I need to modify weights or get into the weeds of the rig.
DonHopkins
It kicks Biped right between the Bip01 L Thigh and Bip01 R Thigh, where the Daylight System doesn't shine!
mattl
Blender was proprietary and ultimately purchased and released under the GPL.
Is that the solution to other creative tools? Identifying other cross platform capable proprietary software that can be purchased and relicensed.
progmetaldev
Probably not at this point in time. Back when Blender was released, I think there was less reliance on third party libraries (in general), but especially those that would complicate releasing the software as open source later. I don't think this was as much a conscious decision as it was about making sure you had full rights to the code you used back when Blender was started and open-sourced.
Now so many projects take on dependencies that require NDA and proprietary licenses, it's unlikely that this type of creative tool would see the light of day after being closed-source. I can't imagine any industry leading creative tools not getting to market more quickly by purchasing software that gives them an edge for the operating system they are running in. I hope that I'm completely wrong, and possibly there is someone out there that is using software that is easy to rewrite, or replace, if the license doesn't allow open-sourcing.
I was in classes in the early 2000's with people taking multimedia courses, and Blender was just starting to become more well known. The school I went to taught 3DS Max and Maya, which had their own learning curve. I think 3D rendering is just difficult from a UI/UX place, and Blender got in at the right place at the right time. I was in software development, but my friends that had their heart into 3D rendering said Blender was a bit different, but not so challenging as moving between Photoshop and GIMP. That's not anything against GIMP, just a point of comparison, I think GIMP is fine the way it is and haven't been able to follow the UI of Photoshop since CS2 era.
schoen
Also historically true of OpenOffice.
shadowgovt
Thing is... UX is terrible everywhere in the 3D editing space. That's not even criticism of Blender as far as I can tell!
ardupper
Perhaps it’s high time to admit that nobody has a great solution for 3D editing quite yet :P
CyberDildonics
This could not be further from the truth. Different programs have interfaces that are better for certain tasks, but Houdini, Maya and Softimage XSI have all had fantastic interfaces for the most part. Software like that should be used as the benchmark other UIs are compared to. I don't know anything other software that comes close.
emkoemko
no i think that award goes to zbrush... the most backwards non intuitive UX/UI ever made
philsnow
How has Blender succeeded here where Gimp failed? Is there some unsung heroic person who has imbued Blender with a sense of taste?
M4v3R
Gimp refused to change their ways and still does, that’s why no one outside of a handful of enthusiasts use it. People have complained for years that their UI is too complicated, clunky, not intuitive, etc. and Gimp basically ignored all this feedback (to be fair there were attempts at changing this but ultimately not much changed).
Even just recently they’ve released a major 3.0 version and I thought “oh maybe they’ve finally addressed the UI issues” but nope, not much changed on that front, they still have stuff like “GEGL operation” front and center in the menus for basic functions.
Blender on the other hand reimagined their whole UI in version 2.8 and kept refining it later, even though there was friction in the community about it (since power users like the old UI) but thankfully they pulled it off and now they’re reaping the rewards for it.
DonHopkins
One example is that Blender embraced the use of pie menus, and Gimp ignored them. The Gimp team is just not open to outside ideas, and gets really annoyed when users of other tools request features from those tools that Gimp refuses to support, and reacts by digging in deeper and clinging to their bad design decisions out of frustration and spite. A really sad culture of NIH and 4Q2.
In general and with many other things, Gimp could have been so much better and easier to use, but they systematically and spitefully ignored their user's needs and requests about so many things, while Blender did just the opposite, listened to users and improve the user interface and mouse bindings, instead of being stubborn and parochial about it.
Ton is heroically tasteful but not unsung: the community rightfully adores him! (But not Autodesk.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-sgk
Master Blender Pie Menus for Faster Workflow!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1fwxQi50FY
Enable Pie Menus in Blender 2.9 - Blender Tutorial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-7Hmpt9UmA
Create your own Pie Menu in Blender | Pie Menus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41fXtvzJ3Ik
Blender - Pie Menu Editor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4DoESgzAfI
Extending Blender Pie Menus with Custom Operators using Python
chambers
I dug into this out of curiosity a few years ago. I thought 2.8 UI redesign was all thanks to Ton, but it turned out it wasn’t.
Ton was actually against a UI overhaul for decades. There’s a video where power-users and Ton were vocally dismissing the need for a better UI, using GIMP-like arguments. There was at least one failed UI redesign in the early 2010s which I think Ton was quite involved with.
But something happened, the nature of which I don’t know. Then, Ton became hands-off and allowed the UI overhaul to take place, which I recalled made actual UX designers work with engineers.
My memory is foggy and I don’t have sources readily available. But I’m hoping someone will fill in the gaps or correct my understanding of events long past.
brulard
There were 3 major open source graphics projects: - Gimp for 2D raster - Inkscape for 2D vector - Blender for 3D
At some time 10-20 years ago they all were powerful, but being hold back by a bad UI. Blender turned it all around with their UI overhaul some years ago. Inkscape seems to be doing some correct steps now toward that, although it is still hard to use (at least for new users). Gimp seem to be moving the slowest.
preciousoo
Taking the feedback about UI seriously was probably huge
numpad0
I think the real answer is in credits section of fund.blender.org. Sizeable contributions at scale of $1m as well as corporate user feedbacks started flowing into it ~2019.
sbuk
Not defending anyone here, and I don’t disagree that the commercial products are hugely expensive, but it’s better now than it was at the turn of the century. Licenses cost in the tens of thousands per seat, rendering software was similarly expensive and rarely included. To add insult to injury, artists needed high powered workstations that also cost tens of thousands! Blender has definitely had an influence on the status quo.
tonetegeatinst
Is their a central place where other open source people or just programmers in general can get a breakdown on how they improved the UI/UX?
somat
I don't want to be too mean, The blender team has done a lot to make good solid UI improvements over the years. However as a long time casual user (since 1.7 minor projects once or twice per year) My take away was that the blender UI was always good, however it was a professional UI designed for professional use and had gathered a reputation as hard to use over the years. So the "Big UI change to make it easier to use" was mostly, wait for the rest of the industry to catch up, give it a dark mode, and most importantly, loudly issue a press release "we made the UI easier to use" to make people believe.
But snark aside, my guess is that the main UI "improvement" was to make it slower, add a classical menu system to help ease you through hotkey hell. See, If I had to describe blenders UI in one blurb it would be "101 button mouse". Very quick, and fine control and less a steep learning curve than a learning cliff.
jampekka
The major overhaul was Blender 2.8.
You can see a brief overviews of changes in the release notes: https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-80/
It may be a bit hard to appreciate how much it changed (got better) if you havent experienced pre 2.8 Blender. If you want, you can try it out: https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-79/
psygn89
Not exactly what you asked for but this video has a little bit of everything Blender UI/UX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJRO5wFTEc8&t=1067s
doctorpangloss
They added the Maya / Unity style camera control scheme and keymap in 2.8 (2019). This was the moment people said it was good and coincided with a huge uptick in adoption. There wasn’t some big product development or innovation. Not that there needs to be.
culi
Blender and VLC are two amazing examples of the FLOSS tool not just being "the open-source alternative to ...". They are THE main tool
WD-42
And GPL at that, thank goodness.
ragebol
Same. I've only ever been a user in Blender and it pushed me to use Python as my first programming language since I could script Blender with it.
IIRC, I first started using it with version 2.32 when I was an early teen. I still have a .blend file somewhere with a textured model of a LOTR Fell beast/Nazgul, that I created painstakingly and cost me some exam points as I preferred 3D modelling to studying.
Good times
mattl
I made a live action movie, edited with Blender as a video editor.
It was great at the time, I’m sure has improved a lot in the last 8 years too.
Blender and Inkscape are some of the software listed in the credits.
progmetaldev
Inkscape makes so much more sense to me than Adobe Illustrator ever made. Maybe it's how I use it, or what I'm looking for as output, but I've been happy with Inkscape since around 2006/2007.
MBCook
I remember when it was open sourced.
Who would have ever thought at the time it would create and render a beautiful Oscar winning movie.
toblaroni
agreed, Blender is tremendous
echelon
Blender is amazing, and miles ahead of Gimp and other FOSS editors.
That said, I can't help but feel that all of the current generation of leading 3D software (Blender, Unreal, etc. ) is going to be replaced by something just around the corner. The progress in 3D AI is nothing short of phenomenal. It feels like soon nobody will ever have to worry about sculpting or retopologizing or rigging. An entirely new class of tool will take over.
It's not just 3D. It feels like the current generation of artistic tools (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) are about to be wholesale replaced with Gen AI tooling.
AI plugins (eg. the Krita plugin) are too steeped in the old world of editing. New tools will probably be AI native and prefer AI workflows for reaching the same coarse- and fine-grained outcomes.
I don't expect these tools to be used by the masses that are prompting AI slop like "50's Panavision Wes Anderson", but rather by working artists. Genuine Gen AI tools for artists.
I've been making short films on the weekends with Blender, ComfyUI, and a mix of custom software. The AI pieces are doing the heavy lifting, and my productivity is 10x what it was before Gen AI.
progmetaldev
I think it depends on how much control you feel you want to have over your output. AI tools are decent at rendering video, but for those that want full control over the process, I feel like it's going to be a long way to go. If AI is able to generate the full source files to allow things to be modified, then I would 100% agree with you that it's going to be a new age for artists. If you're dealing with raw generated video, or even a frame by frame rendered image, your control is much more limited than if you could shape and customize your models. For most, this is probably fine, but for those that want fine-grained control, there is a far path to go in order to get to that point.
telchior
What / who is the leading edge of 3D AI? I took a look into it last year and the best tools were still a very long away from producing usable results (couldn't keep tri count under control, spiderweb rigging, shape jank, etc).
babuloseo
https://github.com/ahujasid/blender-mcp something will definitely happen we will see what happens, 3D has always been tedious so any improvements in this space will be welcome.
UncleEntity
Same could be said about Fender and Gibson.
brcmthrowaway
Is the best OSS software Blender, Ghidra or Linux?
ants_everywhere
as wonderful as Linux is, it started as a Unix clone and a lot of its initial popularity can be attributed to providing a free version of something that used to cost money.
Blender and Ghidra were started from scratch and are considered top tier in their niches. So I feel a sense of community pride for them more than I do for Linux.
The question is flawed, though, because the best OSS software is obviously Emacs ;)
MBCook
Blender was open source software that was freed after the original developer couldn’t make money and, IIRC, was purchased by the community.
It did not start from scratch as OSS.
DonHopkins
I named my cat Emacs, and my neighbor's cat is named Blender! (However, they are mortal enemies.)
emkoemko
wait ain't Ghidra a NSA software? and Blender a clone of other 3d software that cost money?
pjc50
This is a real "daddy or chips" question, because they all do completely different things. Blender possibly best in terms of "compared to an expensive commercial product". Ghidra is incredibly powerful but has a weird look and feel. Linux is undoubtedly the most influential of those three, but if it had never been invented perhaps we'd be using a BSD instead?
"Best" in terms of "achievement by a single programmer (almost)" is Fabrice Bellard's ffmpeg and QEMU.
kadoban
Probably Linux if I had to pick one, partly because of how many tools were written for or on it and the ecosystem it's built up.
whoknowsidont
You mean GNU plus Linux?
null
babuloseo
to answer your question its probably git.
adgjlsfhk1
I think Git is probably the most "useful" but given how bad it is (despite how good it is), I have a hard time calling it the "best"
bawolff
If we are going to go infrastructure, i would say sqlite or curl.
g-b-r
his question wasn't "what's the worst software ever created" ;)
chrismorgan
> Blender 4.4 is all about stability. During the 2024–2025 northern hemisphere winter, Blender developers doubled down on quality and stability in a group effort called “Winter of Quality.”
Given the name choice “Winter of Quality”, I’m impressed at the rare cultural and geographical awareness that led to specifying “the 2024–2025 northern hemisphere winter” here.
zamalek
You get used to it. I didn't find it discriminatory or obnoxious. There are significantly bigger fish to fry. Source: was an African.
chrismorgan
Oh, I’m plenty used to it, being from Australia. It’s just so painfully common for northern-hemisphereans to use seasons or other vague cultural elements¹ to anchor things (southern-hemisphereans don’t really do it, in my experience), that it’s refreshing to find a case of people using it but being aware.
(These days I have a new difficulty: I moved to India last year, and although the seasons are closer to the northern temperate and sub-arctic seasons, they don’t match exactly.)
—⁂—
¹ I don’t count “Christmas” as this, because it’s a specific term for a particular time… well, apart from certain Eastern churches and Julian calendar users. I mean things like using “holiday” as a time of year, which completely baffled me in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23244207.
jb1991
I think you misinterpreted the comment you are replying to. It didn’t say anything about the phrase being discriminatory.
esperent
I also interpreted that as "Given the <bad> name choice...".
Although given how common phrases like "winter of x" and "summer of x" are in English, I can't imagine what the problem is.
Unless they think it's discrimination against people from the southern hemisphere?
zamalek
I completely misinterpreted it.
null
croemer
Editorialized title? I can neither find anything saying "Oscar" nor "Version Tool"
re
It's a confusingly jumbled title. I think it's supposed to mean something like "New version of Oscar-winning Blender software released" (which is still inaccurate—it wasn't Blender that won the Oscar, but an Oscar-winning film was made using it). It looks like this release celebrates that win by using art from the film for its splash image.
singularity2001
oh I was assuming it was tongue in cheeks praise for the outstanding visual presentation of the outstanding new release
gblargg
I thought it was a source code control system at first.
jeffhuys
I was looking for a new, shiny Git alternative from the Blender team or something. "Blender releases their Oscar-winning version tool" like, what?!
bool3max
Yeah the title truly makes no sense, how has it been up for 8 hours already?
babuloseo
more like I have been fasting and wanted to get something out haha.
skrebbel
Can someone explain the title to me? What does it mean to release a "version tool"? Or do they have a special version for Oscar winners which is now publicly released? Or is this just some extra tool you can put on top of regular Blender? I simply don't follow.
tomburgs
I don't think the title reflects the contents of the article. I believe a more accurate title would be "Blender, the tool behind an Oscar winning movie, releases a new version", because as far as I can tell the movie referenced that won the Oscar (Flow[0]), was using LTS version 3.6[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film) [1] https://www.blender.org/user-stories/making-flow-an-intervie...
juanpicardo
I think the title is just nonsense. It's only about the release of a new version of Blender, which was used to make Flow.
kaycey2022
Rather than a tool, the real people should be highlighted here. Blender’s success in the open source space is atypical. The difference is surely just a group of brilliant people who just happened to take interest and found about this project. Or maybe animation studios are incentivising blender development because of the high price of commercial alternatives. Or both. In any case the individual devs should be championed than just the group.
luqtas
it was from a guy with a considerable amount of money (and experience on Maya) compared to [most] people who use Blender daily...
open source is not atypical, i think. Linux basically runs more than half of the computers worldwide, 3D printing software is FOSS as far as i'm aware, Godot is one of the biggest Github projects, programming languages are open-source, novel techniques of sound synthesis are already surfing on stuff like Csound/SuperCollider (which both are decades old and FOSS), a bunch of atemporal FOSS text-editors on the hand of a bunch of developers developing closed-source stuff and the list goes on
gorbypark
Open source rules the hidden parts of nearly everything (servers, programming languages, etc). It's atypical for user facing software to be open source and "world class". Of course there are exceptions (like Blender, for example) but generally the commercial version of user facing software is more advanced/well liked/industry standard.
TimByte
It's rare, and it deserves more recognition than just, "Oh, cool, free 3D software."
milne-dev
I've noticed a trend lately with open source projects, notably Godot and Blender, having visually impressive release notes. I hope this trend continues.
p1necone
Dolphin and RPCS3 are also good examples of this.
Less visually impressive than these, but definitely more than the norm, and packed with deep dives into the development of certain features.
Gooblebrai
Yes, Godot goes in the same direction as Blender to become a very mainstream tool. Unity fucked up.
babuloseo
now I am going to look into godots notes.
raincole
It's just a gut feeling instead of a proper evaluation of different apps, but I always feel Blender and Houdini are made by developers who care, while other 3D packages are, well, not.
dsign
I really want to learn Houdini. Their pricing model is not even that bad (just 200 USD/year if you are indie), but even that is a hurdle when the alternative (Blender) is free and so good (or just plain better) for the 98% of what I want to do. Also, I do manage to crash Houdini more often than I manage to crash Blender, so there is that....
MrScruff
Different tools for different purposes. Blender is in the Maya paradigm, and doing pretty well in that. Houdini is more like a DSL for computer graphics and can end up being both the most low level and the most high level tool in the industry. There's no mystery about why the industry has mostly settled on Houdini + one other complimentary DCC.
fp64
Anything procedural works so much better in Houdini I find. I was excited about the geometry nodes in Blender and had some fun with them, but always hit a wall where things in Houdini are much better designed and much more powerful and flexible. But it's a steep learning curve and I forgot most things again because I don't really have to use it regularly.
I had the indie license for a while (purchased privately) and just making things shatter and explode was satisfaction enough. I did this mostly for learning and fun
pyinstallwoes
Touchdesigner too
danwills
I would love to check out touchdesigner some day, I'm a Houdini pipeline TD (and creative too) and Touch started as a fork of Houdini from quite some time ago specialised for real-time (and the real-time-ness of demoscene is one of my favourite things ever!) However iiuc Touch is Windows-only.
I wonder whether under wine it might benefit from the 'ntsync' thing that just got added to the Linux kernel (as a module) (Currently also on hn front-page) as long as there's a free training version of Touch I'll definitely check it out once the new kernel gets into Gentoo!
g-b-r
It's probably already been said in a thousand other discussions, but Flow is a really good movie, highly advised
Daub
The thing that animators are talking about is the fact that they eschewed a storyboard in favour of an animatic (an animatic being a motion sketch of the animation). This is the workflow we now recommend to our students.
This animatic can be found on YouTube.
dagw
Animatics in my experience have always been a thing, it's just they were normally created from the storyboards. At least on the movies I've been involved in (admittedly years ago), it really came down to the fact that the directors really didn't know how to use 3d animation software, so they drew the story boards by hand, like they'd been taught. I'm guessing today most animation students don't really learn to draw or storyboard like that, and we're probably seeing the end of the classic storyboard.
JBits
With examples ranging from Avatar the Last Airbender, to Castlevania, to Monty Oum (who also completely eschewed storyboards), I can't help but that reducing the over reliance on storyboards and focusing on the animation instead is a recurring theme among unusually successful animations/animators.
Flow's having an impact on animators seems great!
pjc50
What tools do you use for an animatic?
Daub
As the previous poster has implied, An animatic can evolve directly from a storyboard. The frames of the storyboard are placed directly on a timeline (e.g. premier) and sometimes given a few animations (e.g. zoom, pan etc) and annotations. As the animation progresses, rough 3D renders (sometimes called flip books) can be dropped onto this timeline. In this way, the final movie can evolve directly from the animatic.
What made Flow unusual is that they bypassed the storyboard almost entirely, which is unusual for a feature film. One rational is that the movie features significant and lengthy camera motion shots. Camera motion is very difficult to capture in a storyboard.
At a student level, another motivation for lessening the importance of the storyboard is that they require not insignificant drawing skills in order to do effectively. Even animation students cannot be guaranteed to draw well, and the number of student filmmakers who can draw is vanishingly small.
ks2048
Hidden towards the end of all the updates - now macOS Finder QuickLook can preview .blend files. Nice.
singularity2001
if only Finder and Blender could actually OPEN other 3d formats in blender without cumbersomely having to go through the import menu
contingencies
For feature length pieces, independent animation is an existential threat to the established film studios that will only grow. Meanwhile, a friend of mine works (very) high up in studio land CGI and recently estimated five years outlook before a total industry implosion due to AI tooling. Leaving the whole Youtube killed TV thing aside (small point!), there has never been a better time to be an aspiring video story teller.
TimByte
The gatekeepers are still around, but they don't hold the same power anymore
hermitcrab
In the v4.4 showreel video there is a cool rendering of an O'Neal cyclinder (or similar space habitat) at 1:30. Anyone know where that is from?
Aside from all the usual and well-deserved high praise I'm seeing, I feel like there's something more worth pointing out:
Blender has made 3D work much more "mainstream". I see many videos/pictures/tutorials with views in the millions(!), and much more overall interest in using the software. Not just the pretty visuals and talented people, but the whole program itself seems to be gaining traction with the more "normie" crowd.
That also made me realize something else: Blender is now the default for anything that's not extremely high-end/resource-intensive. If you ever hear about anyone doing any kind of 3D work, they're probably using Blender.
And this has creeped into the mainstream in a way only very established brands like Coca-Cola have. Nowadays, "Blender" might as well mean 3D photoshop/illustrator for most people.