Keep in mind that I’m not saying that it’s crap or anything. I intend on using Blender on my iPad when it comes out. I think it’d be excellent for modeling, sculpting, and painting textures.
…just not rendering. It can be done, but you’ll be waiting awhile to see the results.
One of the biggest downsides to using the iPad (or Macbook Air) is that you’re putting a sustained processing load on a machine with a passively cooled CPU. Even in a situation where the stats say you could finish a render in, say, 20 minutes, it’ll still likely take 40-50 minutes to finish, because it WILL throttle at some point, and the render won’t provide it enough time to cool itself down.
Do we know when this tablet interface is ready to use
Hm that depends a lot on what “ready to use” means. It’s already “ready to use” in the sense that Blender runs on tablets and you can use the sculpting tools.
But there are many things that are currently clunky. So “ready to use” I guess depends on how much clunky-ness you can tolerate lol.
Oh…that’s a little disappointing, but perhaps expected as I’m sure Blender would want to focus on the good ol’ PC version of the app to continue to be useful in at least small studio work (or younger generations who more comfortable using Blender at this point just because of the price just to learn Maya, let alone subscribe to Maya).
I am learning Prisma3D in the meantime on the side, though. Even the free-with-ads version is surprisingly capable for low-poly cartoon animation, and any initial gripes I had when first making stuff with it start to go away as I realize it’s not the app’s fault, it’s just that I am inexperienced and still learning as I go (like with any art/animation software, Blender included). For instance, I thought it was impossible to do facial animations combined with the automatic human IK rig, but it turns out I can at least add bones to a character’s face after the fact in a somewhat-hidden “Rig Edit” menu, which alone makes Prisma3D far more useful than just 3D animation practice away from my computer.
Speaking of Prisma3D, it will be interesting if an eventual Blender iPad app learns from mobile-native apps like that to ensure it is genuinely useful and intuitive on a tablet without a keyboard, as opposed to how, technically, you can download and use a mobile version of Blender right now on the Steam Deck via the Desktop Mode, but it is super cumbersome because the current Blender UI is not made for tiny 800p screens or for use with an Xbox-like controller at all.
Most desktop-to-iPad apps I’ve used so far, like Affinity Photo and Designer, feel rather cumbersome compared to using apps designed exclusively for mobile in the first place, like ProCreate or Vectormotion. Will Blender iPad change that when it finally comes out, or will I just stick with native iPad apps like Prisma3D, Nomad and Valence3D while doing the final animations and renders on the computer version of Blender?
Advertising in a DCC app, how does that work since the usual interstitial model for games would not fit well? I know of the concept of limited freeware, but nothing that you could once find on PC (back when most FOSS solutions did not even include a UI) came with any of the typical F2P mechanics adjusted for productivity suites.
Prisma3D starts with the “Made with Unity” splash screen, so for all intents and purposes it is a “game” made in Unity. Unity is partially infamous these days by how easy it is to integrate Unity Ads into whatever application or game you make, and in Prisma3D’s case that means it plays long ads for Pokemon Go, flash-in-the-pan AI apps (as if someone industrious/dumb enough like me to even attempt 3D rigging and animation on mobile devices would not be insulted by an ad saying I shouldn’t even have to work to make my animations), and vaguely-disturbing “YouTube Kids content farm”-type ads where the pre-rendered CGi in the ad is not representative of how the game looks or even plays at all–whenever I start up a new project, whenever I close out and save that new project, whenever I attempt to export an OBJ of the model I made (the import/export tools in Prisma3D simply don’t seem to work at all, btw), and, of course, whenever I render out the video, defeating the purpose of using a real-time game engine as its main rendering engine (otherwise-instantaneous video rendering).
Luckily for me, I have long figured out the workaround to such annoying app ads, in that I simply switch my device to “Airplane” mode, cutting off all access to Internet and cellular networks. The app overall runs even faster and smoother (especially the real-time rendering) without heavy, unoptimized ads loading in every time I open/close a scene or render, similar to how a lot of my PS4-era games, like Metal Gear Solid V and Bloodborne, seemed to run smoother without Internet allowing either games to ping servers (or however this online stuff works) and make me wait, depending on my Internet speed at the moment. I still occasionally leave Prisma3D connected to the Internet when I have tons of free time, though, in hopes the ad revenue will give the dev(s) enough money to add in the much-requested feature of allowing me to subdivide my models at render time, so I no longer have to settle for the blocky low-poly look that only really appeals to people who grew up with the PS1, Saturn and N64 game console generation.
Another alternative, of course, is the dreaded “monthly subscription” (no one-time payments here, naturally), where besides getting rid of the obnoxious ads without taking the extra step of switching to “Airplane” mode first, I believe you get some more pre-made models to play with, get to have a bit more control over the HDRi environment lighting, and of course get rid of the “Prisma3D” watermark on the bottom-right of every render. I don’t bother with that because if the app developer couldn’t even be bothered to pay for Unity Pro or something just to get rid of the “Made With Unity” splash screen, then why should I pay just to get rid of the “Prisma3D” watermark? I believe that watermark helps temper audience expectations, too–like, it shows the video is clearly not an attempt at professional animation in Blender, it’s just a silly experimental cartoon made on my phone whenever I was bored and not in the mood to play video games instead.
Speaking of such, I’ve looked for articles and videos concerning that tablet demo, but I can’t seem to find any. Do you have any links you can provide?
Until the developer decides the app. needs to make sure it can phone home for it to be usable (which is the case with a lot of mobile games). Perhaps Blender or at least a version of it will be available by then.
From my experience with mobile, it has become a platform known for apps. from indies and small studios being every bit as aggressive in monetization as the ones from the billion-dollar corporations, at least if they are in the ‘free’ category. You really want to seek out apps. you pay for if you do not want to deal with the trickery and false advertising that is commonplace.
There are some recordings of the demo they gave at SIGGRAPH like this one here: https://youtu.be/IPzuB52tjXw?si=_a4msGTnOUVsMv8Y&t=960
Note that this is not some hidden build. The code and instructions on how to build it is public.
Yea those are just early mock ups. Nothing of that sort has been implemented yet. But some smaller changes have already made their way into Blender. Like keeping menus open until you click away.
I understand, but Prisma3D basically has no competition right now (at least when it comes to 3D animation apps on iOS devices) and the previous paid animation app I used, Morphin, which set me back around $40/45(!!) for a one-time purchase, had far, far, less features and got a frankly disastrous update that deleted my models and animations entirely, with no way to get them working again by re-importing or anything because it would just delete them again.
That was last summer when I deleted Morphin in frustration, though, perhaps it’s all better now, but I think an overpriced one-time-purchase app that is not even stable enough to seriously try to learn to use is the greater of the two evils, honestly. I can always make more money, but I can’t make back the time I lost attempting to try to learn unstable software that should never be used even for hobbyist work.
More on topic, it will be interesting how Blender will approach monetization of their app considering that making and distributing an app for iPad’s App Store is a notoriously complicated and therefore expensive proposition. There is no way, unless Apple as a corporation seriously changes its tune on FOSS software when it comes out years later, that Blender iPad can get away with being fully free without ads or microtransactions.
It would probably be more like the iPad implementation of Godot Engine (Xodot), where it costs money up-front, but hopefully not $40+ like Morphin, something more sensible for software that more or less costs nothing (outside of the inevitable urge to give at least $5 a month to the Blender Foundation) like a one-time purchase of $10-15.
