hi guys, what do you think are the biggest weaknesses of blender?
for which areas of application do you not use blender in your pipeline?
I started to use substance programs for texturing and have to say that this is much more fun than with blender. I wonder if there are any other programs that I can use to close gaps in blender.
I think the biggest one is no C++ API for plugin developers? If I worked in VFX industry, I would’ve used Houdini due to its proceduralism and up-to-date VFX tools
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Skies. I used to use Eon Vue when doing mostly nature/landscape/environment images. It has a sophisticated atmosphere (sky) capability and the rendered sky always matches the lighting in the scene because it’s using just a sun and ambient light from the sky. Now that I’m only using Blender I use either a huge HDRI so that the background is sharp enough, or else find a sky photo to match my lighting from Nishita or similar and that requires a fairly large library of sky photos. I’ve tried a couple of sky addons but they don’t come close to Vue.
Here’s an example. I’d struggle to do this in Blender.
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I am going to list what Blender’s strengths and weaknesses are from my perspective (I’m a generalist working alone, I also know Maya and Zbrush, though it has been a few years).
Blender’s strengths:
-Blender has very strong modelling capabilities. This is helped further by having sculpting integrated directly in the software (but dedicated sculpting apps do it better).
-Blender can do the entire pipeline from start to finish, including camera tracking and video editing. To my knowledge, no other software really does that.
-2 renderers that are mostly compatible.
-Efficient to use once you know the shortcuts. Possible to do all transforms without using gizmos. (though, that also means a possibly steeper learning curve).
Blender’s weaknesses:
-The UV editor is old and lacks functions that other 3D softwares have.
-Texture painting and baking are heavily in need of an update (it seems like one is coming though).
-The anim curves editor is a bit clunky.
-Physics simulations are largely outdated and some of them are not being actively developped or debugged.
-The particle system is old and is in need of either improvements or redoing.
-Both renderers lack light linking, which is usually considered a basic feature of a 3D software.
-Blender has features that are implemented, but just barely, like nurbs and metaballs.
-The compositor has poor performance and lacks features (though, it’s an advantage that Blender has one at all, that’s not common).
-The import/export function needs improvements (especially the ability to handle multiple files at once).
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@gotanidea VFX is a good point. I haven’t warmed up with blender yet. also the plug-ins that are available are more comfortable but do not make a particularly performant impression.
@anon12677551 I haven’t quite understood the point with the sky yet. how exactly do you mean that? are you dissatisfied with the result of the lighting? or are you interested in the performance of large HDRISs?
@etn249 the weaknesses you mentioned I can sign just like that.
some addons solve the problems. think that’s also part of blender politics. if blender could do everything, the addon/community ecosystem would be destroyed.
but for me there are also points: - rendering (here I now use e-cycles)
- texturing, the normal things are okay, but texture paint is a disaster, here I will probably go completely on substance programs soon and that led me to the problem with the UVs, for this I will also need a solution.
-and then VFX… but learning houdini is also a mammoth task.
I would say rendering has some good and some bad.
When you know all the tricks to optimize Cycles, it’s actually pretty fast for a path tracer, and I’m just talking about regular Cycles. Also, it has a good number of nodes and the ability to make complex materials.
However, Cycles struggles in specific lighting situations, like caustics, scenes with lots of small lights or scenes lit mostly by indirect lighting. There are experimental features (path guiding, many lights sampling) that could be added at some point and help with these problems.
Also, render layers are a weakness. They don’t allow the user to override enough settings between different render passes.
I have to agree here. But, I have found a way to use it in my workflow where its poor performance doesn’t really matter. I use texture painting not as a way to make the texture directly, but rather as a way to make masks for mixing between different textures or materials.
There are plans right now to improve the texture workflow. Also, the next movie by Blender studio seems to have a goal of testing realistic texturing and sculpting, so this may prompt some improvements on that side too.
The biggest weakness for me are the unusable particles.
Fortunately I think Geo Nodes will be very good base to use for the new particle nodes that will hopefully be implemented soonish.
Main blender weaknesses are IMHO 2 things:
-
unwrapping
UV edition lacks of better packing, texture aspect-ratio handling and texture-zone unwrapping -
python
The frog wanting to grow as big as the cow… Blender API is dramatically inaccessible and python is just a joke in a matter of performance. From my point of view, blender will become ‘serious’ when it leaves this joking language and offer C, C++ or C# API.
Happy blending 
Clouds are an important part of most landscape images. Vue gives total control over type, density, distribution, etc. And because they are rendered as part of the scene there is no mismatch between the lighting on the clouds and the lighting on the rest of the scene, as there may be if you use photographic sky backgrounds. To use an HDRI both for lighting and background sky it needs to be at least 16k to be sharp enough, and that takes up a lot of VRAM. In both cases you’re limited to what sky background or HDRI is available.
Blender has a developer now who is tackling this issue (with several new features committed in the last couple of weeks).
The devs. are also on the case here, the old system does not see updates because it is going to be removed and replaced with a new system based on everything-nodes.
Blender has seen improvements in this area in the past year, I/O used to be close to unusable without third-party addons, but now you can at least export working meshes and scenes in a decent timeframe.
Unfortunately, the Blender devs. appear to be quite attached to Python still, even though the Python dev. team has long had a bad reputation in software circles (because the product long exhibited the old FOSS stereotypes of ignoring feedback and not caring about performance). The language at least allows you to automate simple tasks without needing a compiler (because if Blender had a C++ API with all the complexities you might as well just submit patches to the tracker).
Then there’s the new genre of addons which are basically custom modifiers made with Geometry Nodes (which unlike Python gives users a pile of non-destructive modeling features).
Now as far as things go with Blender vs. other software, at least we are finally at the point where there is no longer a cringe factor (because Blender can actually compare to the commercial offerings in certain areas now).
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Don’t get me wrong here, while I have some critisism fo Blender in this thread, it’s still my software of choice.
I was aware that these improvements are being worked on, though I am not going to declare victory until they are in, because lots of features in Blender take months or years to be complete or sometimes get dropped before completion.
Also, I have to mention that even if a feature is outdated, it still is a feature and can still be of use. The UV and curve editors absolutely do get the job done, though they could be a bit more convenient.
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I’m pretty sure that the devs and Ton (?) have said that there will never be a C, or C++ API built in to Blender. They have their reasons, but I’m not sure I agree with them.
All is not lost with Python though. If you need more calculating speed, you can use modules like NumPy or Pandas (I know that NumPy is included with the imbedded Python). Both of those modules are compiled C/C++ code with a Python wrapper (or API) so they run almost as fast as pure C/C++ code. There is still some overhead as they are called from the interpreted Python.
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Adding to blender a C/C++/C# API aside python would be a great choice for all !
Just like do other apps like unity3D ( with java and C# and formerly BOO )
I also red that there would be no chance ever that a C API comes in blender ( wich is strange as blender is a C-written app^^ )
Having an immature language API that changes very often like python does might look like an error or at least a bad choice. As a comparison, gcc is nowadays able to compile a 25 years old C source code with all todays features. If libs changed, the API remains the same. A 32 bits float calculus gives the same result today as 25 years ago, even if it is now made in the FPU instead of beeing emulated, and it’s unconceivable a language forces a 64bits system to be upgraded to another 64bits system for incompatibility issues. this sounds more like some lie than an evolution reason.
I also heard about Cython, a C wrapper for python but am not sure blender can handle it…
Happy blending !
EDIT: oh and as said @etn249 blender is also my software of choice !!! 
To be fair, a DCC like Cinema4D offers a C++ API, but with every new release plugins need to be recompiled for that new version.
And it’s had a negative impact on plugin developers - in particular the non-commercial ones. There are now less free plugins available for C4d compared to only 10 years ago. And fewer plugin developers.
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Cycles is not great for shots that need to be as realistic as possible (doesn’t hold a candle to something like Arnold or Vray for cinema-quality shots).
Physics is rudimentary. Deformation, soft bodies, fracturing, need pretty substantial rethinking. Perhaps it will improve when they move the physics engine to a node-based system.
Gaseous/Fluid sims are basically unusable for anything larger scale than a couple of meters.
Viewport performance could use some TLC (I think they’re working on this).
Other than that, it’s great!
I managed to do that using Nishita or Hosek-Wilkie at background with procedural high altitude clouds and render that to HDRI, and then use Eevee to render atmosphere and lower altitude clouds. This way I got real volumetrics and cloud shadows to scenery.
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If you are talking about shaders, then I personally chalk that up to a lot of people just using the Principled Shader instead of putting something together with the building blocks (which the former did not actually have realism as the end goal, but Principled version 2 might take care of that once in). Then there’s tonemapping, these days I would encourage people to just replace the current color management folder with what is being cooked up in the Filmic version 2 thread (as the original Filmic actually saw changes to be more like generic sRGB when it was bundled with master).
I emphasize not using the Principled Shader for realism because it does not even have proper shading to depict rough materials (on top of other issues like not being energy conserving). Building your own is a bit more complex, but it should pay off.
Now I am also aware of people talking about weaknesses in the way Cycles does bumpmaps, but you can avoid issues if you keep the distance value at a low value like 0.1 and insert the texture into the height socket instead (there were screenshots of people doing it the other way around).
Let me ask you this, what other render engines have you worked with?
Mainly a little Luxrender before Cycles came along, but I do not believe the BF is as incompetent with rendering technology as some in the professional circles think they are, especially not in recent years when they started tackling badly needed things like better color transforms and better sampling strategies (even to the point where they now have a dedicated Cycles engineer in part to tackle such subjects).
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The biggest pain to me working with Blender has got to be the performance. Subsurface … It is ridiculous.
Aside from that, the way it follows the concept of releasing BETAs all the time instead of a clean stable arse version. When people submit a bug, it is no longer relevant the next week or day, as the next release has replaced the previous one… together with the bug existing. For example the issue with UDIM materials, naming conflicts, partly packed resources. Ugh!
BUT, I have seen other devs doing way worse. One thinks you can finally run your project file without downloading and replacing stuff with new BETA state crap… and sure enough over night fixes roll in for stuff that somehow ends up breaking other stuff that previously worked.
Btw … Substance Painter is a blessing! Blender and Substance painter, is all I ever need. The ultimate combo!
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