Good to see Wes doing a tutorial for Blender!
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Is all fun and games… Until Blender developers start working on the new “Texture Node Editor” again.
https://devtalk.blender.org/search?q=texture%20node%20editor
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Well you don’t care, ok, I get that. But:
If you rewatch that (beyond the cheering-phase and the sponsor-logos in the background), can you sincerely tell me Ton Roosendaal doesn’t care?
This is sure true, just two things:
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We’re artists. A little romanticism is pretty much part of the game, isn’t it?
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Talk about romanticism: Look at the very wording the very same mainstream shareholder-run corporations us romanticist starving artists are critical of use themselves all the time in their marketing and PR-blabber.
The thread over here about Sketchfab sold to Epic Games reproduces the choice of words used on the Sketchfab-blog: Sketchfab is joining the Epic Games family (bold typeface added by me for emphasis).
That’s the kind of wording they all use. Always.
joins the Epic Games family
joins the Adobe family
joins the Autodesk family
Family.
Those corporate entities have no semantic connection whatsoever with what we call a family. At least to no greater extend than Charles Manson’s sect did (which he called family too).
I hope noone among us bought any of their family menbers or is willing to sell them, if they see fit, after all.
But family sounds like home, sweet home, sounds like being there and caring for oneanother etc.
That is romanticism in it’s purest and most machiavellian, phoniest form.
greetings, Kologe
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So where would you place the Blender Cloud then?
It’s a paid sub, but it’s run by the BF… 
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I don’t see anything really sinister here. Adobe has a new tool used in the creation of 3D assets, a not insubstantial number of Blender users create 3D assets, may find their tool useful and subscribe. What’s the simplest, most cost effective way to bring this to the attention of Blender users?
But like anybody visiting Barcelona, hold on tight to your wallet…
Apologies Spanish Blender users, but still sore at having my pocket picked while admiring the wonderful architecture. @apoclypse, I assure you I care, not caring about your software freedoms may turn out very short-sighted indeed. It is these values that have gifted you with Blender.
I would place this under “backhoe rentals”. It in no way restricts my freedom if I use it. It only provides an advantage. I can easily go elsewhere with my project and lose little to no work. I am not locked in.
I don’t believe that. We’re not some impressionable teenagers (well, some of us are, that’s fine), we’re supposed to be a little more responsible in our thinking. “Romanticism” is an extremely dangerous thing (and I’ve come to have strong opinions on that).
No need to be a cold soulless machine, but it’s important to maintain some kind of mental hygiene. Otherwise one might find themselves part of a mob that destroyed someone’s life, in some fanatical “justice” group or in a full-fledged revolution.
Heh, English is not my first language (and I don’t get much practice in it), but I always thought “family” is a purely technical term. Meaning something like, uh, an array of things. With absolutely no subtext to that. 
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I really hate for this to get lost in the cross fire.
This is actually huge. To be able to bring stock animations into Blender like this and re target to a Blender control rig is really useful for a lot of things where you don’t need to spend time animating, such as background characters, or even foreground stuff in some cases. Cloth Tests etc.
If they are going to continue to develop this it will be interesting to see if there is an interest to expand the feature set.
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So, can anyone actually download this addon? All I get are four boxes chasing each other. Its been the same for nearly 2 days. I can download the Mixamo addon on the same page.
I’m an Algorithmic, sorry Adobe 
, subscriber and have been for a few years so I don’t have a problem with Adobe supporting Blender.
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I had no joy whatsoever using FireFox, in fact, it came up with an error. But I used Chrome and had no problems.
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It’s fun to think you’re “doing it for the art”, but there are a lot of artists and designers that just want to get their sh** done and don’t care what it’s done in - as long as they can do it and the client is happy, that’s all that matters.
@Kologe actually has a point here. In America at least, the word “family” has been largely adopted by corporations to emotionally manipulate employees into loyalty to the company (although, they would say “inspire”). It absolutely can mean a group of things, like “Adobe’s family of software products”, but more often than not it’s the first one.
Personally, I’m all for tech companies - specifically media tech companies - backing the BF. I walk the line between “industry standard” apps/pipelines and Blender at work and there are some serious pain points. The more we talk with these industry players, the more we all benefit. And, I trust that Ton knows what he’s doing and will always do what’s best for Blender regardless of who is giving the BF money because that’s what he’s always done.
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Yeah this has come along just at the right time for a big project I’m working on - previously I had to choose either a character with mixamo animations, and only being able to animate using the skeleton itself if I wanted to modify the animations, or a rigify version for ease of manually animating.
The rig it generates from the rigged mixamo characters seems really good too, I’m failing to see a downside to using it vs rigify, at least for humanoid characters, obviously.
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People I don’t know personally or that even I don’t know that well, especially, I try not to assume I understand the complexities and nuances of that person’s opinion.
'nuff said on that.
But I think it is worth pointing out that there is in fact a Blender community that is extremely diverse in values, age and everything else.
And something that means a heck of a lot to me is that Blender continues to grow in a meaningful way and truly be an option at the professional level.
I don’t agree this can happen, and I don’t think it will happen, in the way I want to see it happen if the Blender Foundation or its community at large shuns contribution from Adobe, Autodesk, Amazon, Google or whoever.
And I don’t think I need to justify it any further than that. Blender is free and open source for everyone. That is what comes with the package.
The future I want to see is a world in which Blender really is in fact a FOSS powerhouse that can absolutely with no question live side by side with professional tools. Then and only then will Blender become a true FOSS alternative for everyone.
And I strongly believe that some of the opinions expressed by people who see these kinds of things as a negative impact for Blender and the FOSS way of living are not healthy in the long run for either cause.
And because Blender is here for everyone I should have right to express my opinion on what I think an
“FOSS value” is.
And for me, screaming success for Blender, playing well with all of the large tech companies and competitors is absolutely a part of that vision.
Because I see FOSS as something literally everyone should be able to be a part of. Not just a small niche group of people. Blender has the potential to make that happen as far as 3D CC apps are concerned.
This kind of change on the market will have a profound effect on how we use software in the future - for everyone. But unless it grows and competes we will never see that day.
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Wow interesting. I was just having a conversation with the rigger and animator on my team and we were discussing the plus and minus points of using BlenRig5/6.
It has been my assumption that the contrrol rig for the mixamo stuff would not be a suitable replacement for something as complex as BlenRig or Rigify.
That still might be true, but I will look into it further.
I am neither a Rigger nor Animator (but I dabble in both), so take everything I say with a grain (or shovel) of salt.
I found the Maya workflow of turning a Mixamo skeleton into an HIK rig very useful, for pose correction and simple additional animations or variations of them.
The HIK rig could be better, but I think this is how a proper workflow with mocap data should look like.
Its very simple and effective - so much so that I could produce (decent) results with it in 20 minutes after first touching it.
Do you have any experience with it?
This is a question for everybody who has some insight:
How does the Adobe Addon compare?
Is it a simple plug and play/fire and forget workflow?
How comfortable is the Rig itself?
Also I don’t have experience with BlenRig, but the best rig I ever had the pleasure to work with in Blender is undoubtedly the Mr.Mannequin Rig by Jim Kroovy. Its purpose is for UE4, but It can be used in Blender itself.
Unfortunately it is restricted to the proportions of the 2 UE4 mannequins, but if somebody would build an Auto-Rig system that can be adapted to all kinds of character proportions and then spits out a rig like this… 
This what I think a proper rig should look like.
It made me aware of the fact that a mediocre or bad rig cripples the ability of the animator and turn animating into an ugly endeavour, while a great rig elevates it to pure pleasure. The amount of control, ease of use, flexibility and speed totally spoiled me, I feel disgust to even think about using an inferior Rig after having that experience. 
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One of the main reasons I started using Maya waa so that using MotionBuilder would be more fluent.
I have not used HIK in Maya that much because Mocap editing is so inferior to MotionBuilder in too many key areas. But still the HIK system even in Maya is better than anything else I have ever seen.
To be fair they have improved Maya in this area. And they have not admitted to the defeat of MotionBulder at all even when it seemed this was going to happen. However I am not aware of them actually bringing Maya up to the same level yet. So who knows.
But all this to say the bar is pretty high if you are going to impress me with a Mocap workflow and I don’t expect Blender to come close.
But just being able to acess a mocap library with a controll rig that you can retarget to in a Blender with ease is a huge step forward.
Add the Non Linear Editor to tweek the animation additively on top of that is getting us 50% there.
From there the devil is in the details.
The HIK rig is not really suitable for hand animation. Great at tweaking Mocap.
BlenRig is of the best I have seen for hand animation in Blender and we had investigated the options about a year ago and this is what we decided on.
This contoll rig from Mixamo I am not expecting to be good enough for hand animation. Would be wonderful of it worked for both.
I will report when I have tried it all out.
But I don’t expect it to complete with MotionBuilder just yet.
Having anything working reasonably well in Blender is welcome at this point.
I do stick to my values. I want Blender to be a professional tool that works in professional pipeline. That’s the extent of my “values”. I don’t put my identity in software. It’s just a tool. If tomorrow Softimage XSI’s source code was OSS by Autodesk I’d drop Blender like a hot potato.
Nobody is trashing the community but the community is not willing to fund Blender to get them to the level they needed to be. That’s fact. The BF tried, with the Open movies, Blender Cloud, Blender Fund and while they had enough funding to get somewhere they could only do so much. At some point you have to make the choice to only cater to your small audience and never grow or if you want the big prize go outside of community even if that means alienating them. It’s just really that simple.
If it weren’t for the corporate funding Linux would still be some interesting project a handful would pass around on an obscure forum, just like Hurd. Instead Linux has been used to expand what companies can do. All the way from Keyboard workstations (Akai MPC, Korg Khronos), to set top boxes to allowing maker communities like Raspberry Pi to thrive. That doesn’t sound like the Linux Foundation is “long gone”. It sounds like a vibrant and strong community driven project that has the resources to propel Linux forward.
So please stop with the whole “values” zealotry. I don’t care about OSS “values” especially when the germ of those values comes from someone like Richard Stallman.
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Yeah, and now it’s in space. So I can’t see that corporate funding is a bad thing.
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Fine, as long as Adobe does not force BF to distribute a default Flash add-on for Blender. Basically Flash extension for Internet browsers made Internet unsafe for millions of people for decades.
Every time a big company joins the Blender development fund it’s the same type of complaining… every time
Facebook, Nvidia, Amazon and now Adobe. the BF needs corporate funding to achieve it’s goals, those companies also offer to work with the BF devs to implement their products to better work with Blender. (AMD, Nvidia, Adobe)
No-one has the power to take over and make Blender Closed-source… even Ton doesnt have that power.
These companies main goal is to sell more products, investing a small amount of money (for them) to improve sales is a easy decision. and add to that the free PR. “Wow, company X is such a nice company for donating so much money to Blender… Now i want to show my appriciation, i’ll buy their product!”
/rant
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