Wanted to ask if there is an apex cloth plugin for Blender and if there isn’t,is Blender in talks with Nvidia for one?
Please, for the love of $DEITY, stop with the anti-gpl trolling.
nicely done harley!..
maybe someone can get an addon to import “marvelous designer 2” cloth to blender… if their license isnt too restrictive 
It is true though, so what should he have said instead?
Marvelous Designer 2 can export a series of .obj files, there is a script (made by Atom unless I’m mistaken) that imports .obj sequences into blender.
There is also point cache and MDD support.
Probably not link “Blender’s License” to “Why the GPL Sucks”? It’s not as if the Nvidia license is BSD…
I should probably have checked the link before I commented yeah 
It was a joke. However, by “stop” you must mean that I have been trolling before. I haven’t. The GPL is trolling me.
You’ve posted this article before, but the article doesn’t get any less blindsighted over time. It’s nice that it at least somewhat acknowledges the linguistic problem.
It then goes on to praise copyleft as the discriminating factor of the GPL. However, copyleft is not the discriminating factor of the GPL, that’s why there are so many copyleft licenses that are not the GPL.
What sets the GPL apart is its virality and the outright refusal to cooperate with “non-free” software in a direct way. That’s where most of the criticism comes from, in the first place.
I just quickly grabbed that link as a counterpoint to yours so I could make my own (joke) post. I didn’t actually think about it too much. I just thought it would bookend nicely with your comment and Uncle’s response. Mine was meant to give a chuckle, not make offense.
O well…this is sad cause APEX and physx plugins are free for 3dsmax and Maya users and gives very good results.I guess Blender being open source comes with its disadvantages as well but I am wondering,if Opensubdivs devs could come up with a way to make theirs available for Blender users,why can’t Nvidia do the same?Blender has actually helped them sell more gpu cards since Cycles came out.
Unfortunately that’s wishful thinking, that is not how a corporation works.
Nvidia generates a lot of turnover with their mobile chips, also a lot with their gaming cards bought by actual gamers, not Blender users using them for GPGPU computing, and finally the industrial customers buying Quadros and Teslas on europallets.
In the fiscal year 2012 they had over 4 billion USD turnover.
If you assume that 5.000 Blender users (which is a high count IMO) bought an Nvidia card that year for an average of 300 USD, that’d be 1.5 million USD - or, 0.0375% of their turnover and most likely even less of their profit.
The question now is, how much was their actual profit out of the 1.5 million. And that’s the maximum amount of money they would be willing to invest back - else it would be a loss.
A corporation does nothing out of the good of their heart. At the end of the calculations the benefits for the company, be it financial, reputational or whatever have to outweigh the investment.
Sure, they could come up with versuions of PhysX/APEX being GPL compliant - but who’s gonna pay for the development and what are the benefits for nvidia?
I think you underestimate the cost of softwaredevelopment. 1.5 million doesn’t buy you much in the corporate world.
I am certain the linux drivers, which are not bad at all, could be a lot better and address issues they had with x.org for years for instance if nvidia would put more money in the development. But I guess that’d be the point where their investment would not be profitable anymore.
That said, I see nothing completely wrong with “Bullet Physics”, especially as they do their best already to have all rigid body physics fully OpenCL accelerated with version 3.x…
if Opensubdivs devs could come up with a way to make theirs available for Blender users,why can’t Nvidia do the same?
It would require them to completely open-source their physics engine, which would allow all competitors to implement PhysX support for themselves. PhysX already doesn’t cost anything, the point of it is to provide exclusive features for the customers of their GPUs.
OpenSubdiv already was open-source (just not the kind that the GPL likes) and Pixar wouldn’t have profited off it, anyway.