It’s complete per the developer definition of the word, as in “regardless if it works or not, it’s in there now.”
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there’s a partially functional prototype that’s been worked on for a long time
Sure
Completed are:
- Vulkan
- UV Sync
- Node tree integrations in compositor
- Shape key improvements
Although some tasks/PRs were created for some additional extra work, all originally set-out goals are completed.
In very active development:
- Hair dynamics (work ongoing on lists, solver prototype, and closures/bundles)
- Project setup (work ongoing on initial UI in preferences and file structure)
- Remote Asset Libraries (work ongoing on stuff little beyond me)
In active development:
- Story tools (polishing the design & prototype)
- Mipmapping (I don’t follow render module so I don’t know what’s happening exactly but per module meeting notes work is ongoing)
Not actively developed:
- NPR (after finalizing design I think actual development was postponed, because Clement is working on hair curves rendering for time being)
- Overrides (Bastien currently working on asset packing for 5.0 so that we can ship essential assets, like geonodes modifiers and compositing setups)
- Layered sculpting (Sean still working on general fixing and refactoring on sculpt code)
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Great news, I think this can bring more users and it is better for educational purposes, Godot and Krita have a tablet version too, what the users will see is a small rework of the interface and I’m not against that tbh, other than that the biggest problem seems to be the android version that it will come later, I’ve followed the devtalk thread a bit and it seems that it will be harder to port blender 4x to android.
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Hum, I think it’s not because we might not use it that it’s not going to be useful !
Beside, being in this community since a long time, a lot of BF risky moves always creates these kind of very skeptical reactions. In the long run things always settle and most of the time they do the right move.
When they decided to completely rewrite the core to go from 2.49 to 2.5 some people were very against every possible decisions back then. Just like when they moved from 2.79 to 2.8…
Those changes weren’t easy and it took more time and energy than expected but at the end of the day that was the right thing to do.
Now while those big changes monopolized the whole dev team, this looks like a side projects that is likely to have nearly any impact on regular user’s life…
Ongoing projects will keep going , and we might completely forget about blender on tablets if we like.
My point is, there is nothing to loose here, it’s not a big risk :
If it turns out to be a complete failure and a waste of time they’ll stop supporting tablets and we’ll move on !
If it turns out that it’s in fact useful then it’s a step forward !
In any case I’m sure this will come with improvements in many areas like UI or performances.
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Very true. If the BF had always shot down anything which caused an anxious outcry in the community at first, we most certainly wouldn’t even have sculpting.
I guess we would have Cycles, iirc there was an overwhelmingly positive reception of that particular plan at the time, generally speaking (which is not to say there weren’t some weirdos lobbying to bring BI back).
And while I have no use for Blender on mobile devices and I personally consider touch- or multi-touch interfaces a kind of nonsense on a broader level, and I couldn’t care much less about this whole project, I’m really getting tired of this whole old “if they didn’t spend waste their precious resources on X, they’d make progress on Y so much faster. Y is what everybody (me) wants!” song.
Grow up folks.
greetings, Kologe
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What’s worse, it sounds like typical corpo-speak similar to the likes of Adobe.
Edit: Also, why Apple? If there is one ecosystem that is the opposite of what Blender stands for it’s Apple ecosystem…
I wish this would be reincarnated instead of stuff like support for walled gardens: https://code.blender.org/2022/02/layered-textures-design/
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maybe this is bringing in some more points of the Blender 101 abandoned project.
- a massively simplified Blender
- will strip down the interface to the bare minimum.
https://code.blender.org/2016/12/the-blender-101-project-and-you/
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AskNK just posted a video about this. Mostly, he goes over the blog post, but he does show an interesting video of two of the Blender crew (Pablo, and some other guy) using Blender with the classic interface on the iPad.
This shouldn’t come as any real surprise, given that modern iPads are just Macbook Airs without a keyboard, but it’s still neat to see. It also backs up my uneducated theory that the largest majority of the work of porting it over to iPadOS will be interface related.
NK also goes over a few other bits and bobs showing why it’d be a good fit that makes sense.
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Because it is easy to port I suppose, anyhow you have a volunteer working on an android port too, yes it is the 3.6 and he will not be able to add the ui template for tablets till he manages to work with the current version, the developper is also working on multi-touch support and you can use the touchview addon too.
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Can it run Crysis?
That wasn’t a great idea 9 years ago, either.
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Yes ! application templates didn’t worked well, yet there is a lot of potential !
Now that blender is getting more and more playful maybe it soon their time to shine !
I tried to make some of them for specialized workflows. Like a template for rigging with more specific tools… Kinda like what we can already do tabs on steroids …
Anyway at some point I moved on, but for sure we didn’t even scratched the surface of it !
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Layered texture design please. And better baking.
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I’ve wanted Blender on Android for years
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Yeah of course ! just consider that those are two very different project, it’s not because they finally ditch the tablet work than those projects would be made instead… However as someone pointed out, more tablet could imply later more focus on paint / sculpt so maybe that could resurrect the layered texture project.
That would probably ask for a lot of heavy internal work to make it work , so maybe they wait that current heavy work settle a bit and also probably the right people to be able to pull that out 
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Feels like a blender-for-ipad project that isn’t funded yet, shouldn’t have to exist in order to layered texturing to be worth attention…
Heck, I’d rather just see layered texturing funded.
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More like he didn’t like to follow development procedures and objected to being told to contribute in the way that works with Blender Development reviews of code. Lots of things had to be redone when Eager was on the job afterward to port the stuff to Main, and that could’ve been avoided had Dobarro been a little less isolationist in his workings.
He decided to go on his own, and it was a shock to the main community of users.
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Sometimes, I get the impression that the BF would become more than happy to rebrand to “The Blender corporation” and turn Blender into rental-only software if not for the GPL license, though they are still pretty far from becoming like the NFL here in the states in terms of abusing the non-profit status.
Now I would be tempted to say that Blender is approaching the point of the big forking event that eventually befalls the majority of FOSS projects after a time (ie. something far more substantial than soft forks like BforArtists), if not for the fact that there are communities outside of BA that appear to be showing big support for this. They are currently running at more than 2 million dollars a year from the dev. fund so this may not be as much of a burden on other developments compared to a few years ago.
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Yeah of course, it’s not like all the paint stuff depends on Ipad…
I think it’s just that Ipad stuff is nearly there, at least they shown a proof of concept working… Now I suppose it’s just about making that better and working on the interaction stuff.
Layered texture I think if we had to choose between both everyone would agree that it’s better. But it’s just us that put it like a choice has to be done between both where in fact there isn’t such a choice to make in the first place. This just gives false impression that they take arbitrary choice that no-one would agree with.
On the other hand layered for that to work as expected is a huge task with a lot of open questions, at least to me it appears like making eevee-next + grease pencil v3 in project’s size.
Since the goal is to have some materials that are baked under the hood . And render engines don’t have texture cache yet so even if that was there it wouldn’t work … Maybe… I say maybe … they currently work on texture caching (cycles / eevee) / mip-mapping also because it’s part of the requirements for such a system in order to avoid having the memory full after adding a few layers on a couples of materials…
Anyway, layered texture is a very long and risky project so it’s likely to take time and incremental steps. Blender on Ipad looks like a low hanging fruit / low risk project so it’s understandable they try it. Anyway I’m sure layered texture is still considered but maybe it’s too early to speak about it…
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Yes. Multilayer EXR is already a prototype for how to handle it, but open it up to .ora or .xcf and a proper node to access the layers while also showing them in a layer dialog in the materials tab.
I really would look forward to something that allowed you to contain as .ora but then access the layers independently like we have in a group of image nodes. Could be epic.
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