Blender apps

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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Medium and long-term list

  • Blender Apps (unknown yet, we lack resources for it).

How about just cancelling that idea, now.

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That would be a shame in my opinion. The idea has a lot of potential.

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It sounds like the cancelled Game Engine - “Wouldn’t it be neat if…”, except for productivity application instead of purely games.

The Game Engine was a fail, and Apps has all likelihood of being the same result.

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Lots of ideas have a lot of potential but they have a medium sized and and are trying to do:

  • 3D DCC
  • 2D sketch animation DCC
  • Video Editor
  • Platform for custom 3D apps
  • 3D tracking software
  • 3D compositing software
  • Procedural generation software

They can’t do all that with the size of the team they have, and clearly there are some entries in this list that have much higher priority than others. I would say platform for custom 3D apps is at the very bottom, right under the video editor.

I don’t think anyone ever wanted Blender apps. It just seems like a wet dream of someone on the dev team, but not really anything any user ever requested.

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I have a very different view at this.

Blender Apps would allow highly specialized workflows. Those could be to make it easier for beginners, or to really push things for professionals. Some of them might also be very nicely suited for tablets.
First, that’s a fantastic chance become more user friendly, but also to have more developers on board who might heavily specialize on one of those apps only.

Edit:

A lot of users asked for Blender on tablets, which isn’t really a thing as far as I know. But Blender Apps might be well suited for this.

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Might? Do you think the tablet users want better tablet support in Blender, or some completely different app that’s a gimped version of Blender for tablets?

And when it comes to efficiently spending limited development resources, do you think that spinning off whole separate app with unique, tablet optimized UI and unique feature (sub)set and then maintaining that app alongside regular Blender development (which would still not have a proper tablet support) would be a better solution than a project to simply make current Blender more tablet friendly?

Or imagine you are a user who uses both. Keyboard/Mouse for regular modeling and let’s say tablet for Grease Pencil and Sculpting. Would you like to stay in one app or constantly, for every task you are about to do, have to make a decision between Blender with poor tablet support, or some other app that has better tablet support but is lacking many Blender features?

Then you may ask “Why would that other app lack any Blender features? Why would it not just have all the same features?” And the answer to that question would be “Yes, that would be just Blender, with improved tablet support, not some new “App” on some new “Blender Platform”.”

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Blender Apps does not mean they would spend time to implement many apps. They would provide ways to do so. And if you want to provide this, you are unavoidably going to face usability issues in Blender as well.

Sure, it takes additional time and it is a risk. But in my view, it is a reasonable one. Blender is one of the applications where this makes sense in my opinion. I see it as a chance.

Edit:
Again, there is a chance that some users start to create a Blender App and find ways to configure way more elegantly, which could be transferred to Blender.
It might also serve as a development test environment to try different ways to interact with Blender. I see a lot of potential to improve the usability of Blender like that.

If there are good ways to support those features on tables, it is likely easier to explore the potential, without having to think about consistency in Blender as a whole all the time.
But, there is also the potential to find better ways of interacting on tables, which could be used in other areas.

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What is the largest reason, that anyone codes an app for a tablet? Access to a market with millions of users, and the potential revenue that comes with it by selling your App. Blender licensing basically makes that a non-starter.

Let’s go with development environment, and talk about the C++ API - something that iPad developers are used to having. There’s not one, and a high desire by Blender to not have one.

From their blog:

"As an architect, I want to send a client a project so that they can navigate around and experience it by themselves.”

Really? You don’t sit with the client during the presentation, and have a verbal discussion to address their concerns and maintain control over that meeting?

And you want to convert/import all your CAD files into Blender (App), go through all that hell, send them an App with 120GB of asset data so that they can walk down a virtual hallway? Only on a computer that meets the software requirements, of course.

Let’s acknowledge that Blender’s attitude for their own existing API is “Oh, it has to break? Ok, break it.” So some developer decides they want to make an Architect Walkthough App, spends a few months doing this, and when Apps v2 comes out - sorry, your code broke. Redo all that stuff.

Finally, the obvious: Blender doesn’t run on iPads and Android tablets. “But if it DID, it would so cool!” But it doesn’t.

Blender is great at what it does, but that doesn’t make it a great foundational development platform for the rest of the world’s (non-DCC creating) userbase.

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There have been attempts to bring Blender to tablets. I have seen people getting it to run, but obviously, it was essentially unusable, because it is not designed for tablets.
So far, there has been no reason to make sure Blender runs on tablets, because it would have been an unreasonable effort to ensure the usability.
If there were Blender Apps, there would be a reason to making it run on tablets. And this feels like one of the tasks that some tinkering developer who isn’t involved in Blender development might pick up. Just like making Blender Apps specifically for tablets.

Sure, there is a risk it might not be used. But, there is also a massive chance.

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The (completely understandable) gravesite of the Blender Game Engine is a good indication of how much widespread adoption Apps will have.

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In the game engine, you couldn’t use most of Blender’s functionality. You could not reuse the Blender workflows for a game if you wanted, … .
It is very different. Blender Apps are not primarily intended for games.

Edit: This is my last reply, because it feels to off-topic.

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feels like “now that we know how we really want to architect this thing, all that code from 12 years ago clearly would benefit from a refactor. If we refactor it like this and like that, not only will it be easier to understand, but it will be easy for anyone with basic dev skills to fork blender and rip out a bunch of stuff they don’t need and build small purpose built 3d viewer and interactive kiosk apps with it”.

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I think it qualifies as the ‘interactive mode’ they promised long ago.

(it is important to keep your dev-promises)

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The interactive mode promised was rather “simulation nodes” but not just for animated movie, but also usable with external game physics engines.
We are very far from it.

Blender Apps was rather mentioned in Blender 101 project : modify Blender UI to only keep pertinent controls for an intuitive app with a very narrow purpose.
I remember a Blender Conference talk about an app dedicated to customization of pizza models, made with old game engine. What could be done, nowadays, with geometry nodes + a fancy UI.

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IIRC blender apps was an evolution of the idea behind the promised custom editor/area.

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Keeping promises indeed is important. But here we are not talking of raising a child or establishing a relationship.
In our Blender context i think it is better to honestly break a promise, rather than sticking to it even if it is unhealthy for the development of the project

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Efficent physics simulation with input is good for game development as well as for baking and rendering offline,

This cake is for all.

We are pretty close to it now,
We need more fine grain depsgraph recalc built onto nodes, to be able to partially reevaluate a tree, and keep using cached structures.

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Interesting discussion about apps…
I’m working in a car design studio and we are using Blender for more and more purposes. (Modeling, visualization, creating animations for presentations, etc.)
I got a request to think about how could we use Blender instead of VREDtoGo. (Which is essentially a VR player for executives to check design models without a full featured viewer or modeling software.)
The VtoGo files are huge (complete cars) and there are problems to fit them in to the VRAM of the executive’s laptops.
It’s kind of an app combined with the actual car data in one file.

Based on the experience with this, I personally don’t think that apps are such a good idea. I’ m still researching how we could create a similar experience with Blender using Add-ons, but instead of an app I would rather wish to have more control over Blender and it’s interface from inside and from external programs.
In a corporate content, it might be easier to use a power workstation running Blender and “streaming” it’s view to a laptop or tablet then to try to create and keep up to date an app. Especially if you want to keep up with the development pace of Blender.

So, from my point of view there is a demand for a “dumbed down viewer” version of Blender but I would rather have it as part of Blender’s feature set instead of a separate app.

Just my 2 cents…

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Yes, and yes. There are so many ways that artists would enjoy Blender being improved in the software within the current userbase than spending 100s of hours on “now make it something that non-users can use more easily.”

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you may want to look at converting to gaussian splats *

https://twitter.com/janusch_patas/status/1742317323988488289

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