Bforartists is a complete, free and opensource 3D suite to create CG content. It offers you the full 3D art pipeline to create game graphics, pre-rendered movies and stills. From modeling, sculpting, texturing, rigging, animation, rendering, up to post processing.
Bforartists stands for “Be For Artists”. A reminder to develop for the user, not the programmer.
Bforartists is a fork of the popular open source 3D software Blender. Developed by some 3D enthusiasts to make Blender even better.
The primary goal of the Bforartists fork is to deliver a refined graphical UI and a better usability to Blender. This means a complete switch in the usage philosophy away from the hotkey centered UX towards a user friendly, discoverable and intuitive graphical UI.
Bforartists is fully compatible with the Blender files and addons. Every feature that works in Blender should also work in Bforartists. Also, every release is always up to date with the newest Blender version. The toolset is the same. Where we differ the most is the GUI and the handling of UX.
Try it out for free. You can switch from Blender to Bforartists to Blender without problems. You won’t lose anything
Features
An new default keymap, reduced to a minimal and necessary hotkey layout with 3D navigation that can be exclusively done by mouse.
Cleaned up User Interface. Lots of unnecessary double, triple or even more identical menu entries are combined, removed and/or exposed.
Extended User Interface. Many tools that were formerly hotkey only have a menu entry now.
Rearranged User Interface. Some things are better accessible now, some less frequent operators are no-longer in the way anymore.
Improved default settings.
Colored Iconography with silhuette, color coding, form and detail consistently placed everywhere.
A configurable toolbar with icon buttons.
A pinnable tool shelf with the header based tools, exposed at a top-level in panels.
Tabs in the toolshelf.
A node add toolshelf for quick point and click
Improved default workspace layouts.
Left aligned checkboxes and text where possible.
Indented titles for properties.
Better and more tooltips.
Better contrast on a readable standard theme.
Some extra add-ons to improve usability, like the reset 3D View add-on, Brush Panels or the Set Dimensions add-on with which you can scale in world coordinates in edit mode.
And lots of extra small details: like not so many delete confirm dialogs, quick editor toggles, scene management in the outliner, and more.
and all the latest from the Blender master weekly!
But the code is just half of the show. Another important bit are the non code things.
The target audience for Bforartists are hobbyists and indie developers coming in from other software. Blender tries to target Blender professionals. That’s a completely different audience and development target.
We also have an extended GUI reference manual. The Blender manual is unsearchable in big parts, has an odd structure mixing user experience with GUI, and still relies heavily on the Blender keymap to name a few flaws. This makes it nearly unusable as a reference for users. And that’s why we have rewritten it. With the tools, editors and operators in mind, not only the hotkeys. We also removed UX tips and tricks to keep it minimal and GUI orientated.
This is now a week old, as there is a known bug with the F3 operator search - but it contains some hotfixes from Blender and 63 new tasks from us! Current Devbuild has the fix.
Bforartists 3 Version 3.2.1 is a maintenance release. It comes with the changes from Blender 3.2.1 with the usual changes to keep Bforartists consistent and compatible with the latest from Blender.
This release also includes two new painting modes for the Bforartists Brush Panels addon for the toolshelf – select your paint brushes with one point and click. Now in Vertex, Texture Paint and Weight Paint modes (activate the addon in the Preferences).
Splashscreen is kindly provided by Sean
Thank you!
Have fun with the new version. Enjoy Bforartists :4759_blush_sweet: :logo:
Bforartists 3 Version 3.2.2 is a maintenance release. It comes with the changes from Blender 3.2.2 with the usual changes to keep Bforartists consistent and compatible with the latest from Blender.
This release also contains the first iteration of a default asset library (as an addon) and polish in the brush panels addon.
We’ve been working hard to keep up with Blender and get their new features in with the GUI philosophy of Bforartists. We might have a couple things in store in the 3.4 release too, including activating the default asset library on first use.
It’s here, finally! Bforartists 3.6.0 with everything fun from Blender 3.6.0 and the experimental fun from Blender 4.0.0! With 50 additional bug fixes, tasks and updates, this comes with some exciting goodies. Download freely, have fun, play today.
These are only some quick updates happening over this week, on top of the C to C++ migration from Blender 4.0.0, we have updated some features from Blender to the latest of Bforartists.
Did you know you can add legacy annotation layers and delete keyframes directly from an operator/hotkey? I didn’t! This is why we exposed these to the GUI in all relevant editors, with documentation.
We also updated the hotkeys to reflect the correct annotation operator instead of the grease pencil operators.
It’s here! A maintenance and bugfix release. This one comes with the changes from Blender 3.6.1 with the usual updating and changes to keep Bforartists consistent and compatible with the latest from Blender, which would be Blender 4.0.0.
What’s new:
30 fixes
Blender 3.6.1 + 4.0.0 features
New Geometry Nodes Repeat Zone
New Add as Instance toggle in Asset Browser, and more
Mac builds coming soon
Splashscreen kindly provided by Quackers
Have fun with the new version. Enjoy Bforartists
Draise, Iyad, Reiner, Blenux, Sean and the rest of the team.
Let’s do some comparisons with Blender. In the 3D View header in the Object Types Visibility panel: we have left aligned labels for legibility (no eye zig zag) and added icon visual queues. We also made the order of toggles consistent with the outliner toggles. vs:orange_heart:
One of the biggest differences between Bforartists and Blender is the tabbed toolshelf - a fully customizable experience. Now all your common header operators are exposed to a top level, in tabs, in panels that you can pin, re-order, expand to 3 columns and enjoy.
Bforartists 3 Version 3.6.2 is maintenance and bugfix release. This release comes with stability, updates and the latest from Blender, with additional love from us.
This version has and additional 21 tasks and bug fixes from us everything from Blender 3.6.2 and 4.0.0 development.
Splashscreen is kindly provided by Quackers
Thanks again for all your art, work and support! And a very special thank you to the developers maintaining this.
Draise, Reiner, Iyad, Blenux, Sean and the rest of the Team
Yeah, it has the Blender 4.0.0 features, so yes, light linking is working in cycles in this release - and the color picker also. This fork… kinda “unfortunately” gets the main trunk features before official Blender releases.
Ok. Sorry. I am a bit confused. I downloaded the 4.0 alpha from the official Blender site and it doesn’t seem to have the light linking. I am not sure if it has been moved to 4.1? It only exist in the experimental branch so I was wondering if your fork had it added.
So the fork only has features of Blender’s official releases which is currently 3.6.2 so it currently doesn’t have light linking but will do when 4.0 is released, right?
Using the color picker outside blender is pretty cool, I don’t think Blender has that yet even in 4.0. You guys added that feature yourselves to BforArtist.
If you download Bforartiss 3.6.2 it should have the 4.0.0 features from the blender main trunk (experimental as they say, but it’s the main branch). The color picker is also in the Blender main, so it’s an added perk to the coming future! It may not work in linux yet though.
This version of Bforartists has light linking already.
Download
Release Notes:
Sourcecode:
vs:orange_heart: