Doubts about Blender 2.5

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
#1

Hi! I have a few doubts regarding Blender 2.5 and I thought it would be a good idea to create a thread dedicated only for this. So it’s easier to find things in one place avoiding asking the same questions over and over and especially leave the topic about blender updates more focused.

Despite the amazing progress on 2.5, I still have two main concerns about it. Two targets for 2.5 and AFAIK, for Durian, were multiple object editing for dealing with complex scenes and object History. Up to now I haven’t seen anything about those two things that, unfortunately, for me are the most important ones together with the realtime feedback (that is already working). What is the status/plans for those things?

Some few other questions:

1-The work being done by Jashka on particles will be included into Blender 2.5?
2-The new point cache is only for particles or cloth/meshes too?
3-Will this point cache system be compatible with Autodesk products like Maya or Max?

I have A LOT of interest about particularly number 3 because it would greatly help us here to introduce Blender in our pipeline. I believe in the near future Softimage will adopt the same caching format too and then all Autodesk products will share a single format for point caching. This would be particularly useful for Blender as it’s renderer is not quite up to the pair with the options available in those packages.

Regards,
Jr.

#2

yes these are already laied out the biggest problem is how to display multiple object data at the same time, like modifier stack’s ,nodes, constraints etc etc

Some few other questions:

1-The work being done by Jashka on particles will be included into Blender 2.5?
2-The new point cache is only for particles or cloth/meshes too?
3-Will this point cache system be compatible with Autodesk products like Maya or Max?

all of jahka’s work is in 2.5 atm and will always be put in 2.5 as he is not working from a branch, pointcache is a global system encompassing all systems that need a caching of points, eg smoke, cloth, softbodies, discussions have been held on exporting cache files to other formats

I have A LOT of interest about particularly number 3 because it would greatly help us here to introduce Blender in our pipeline. I believe in the near future Softimage will adopt the same caching format too and then all Autodesk products will share a single format for point caching. This would be particularly useful for Blender as it’s renderer is not quite up to the pair with the options available in those packages.

Regards,
Jr.
you do realise softimage is no longer around its now autodesk;)

#3

  1. its Jahka & I do believe hes contributing directly to trunk(so 2.5).

  2. particles for sure, and as I’ve understood, for any other viable physics in due time,
    but I’m not entirely sure, would be cool if Jahka could elaborate! :slight_smile:
    Unaware about mesh/shapes support.

  3. Don’t know, but would like to hope so… :slight_smile:

#4

sharing cache is unlikely, especially since the physics systems are storing more then just points in it now AFAIK.

If its important to support some cache format like MDD it could perhaps be added as a modifier.

#5

I agree about the editing of multiple objects. Unfortunately I don’t that’s going to happen, we are already almost in October and there has been very little mention about his target. The most interesting to me was the object history.

Another gripe I have right now is the interface layout is fugly and damn right incoherent. I’m no talking about the widgets or text, those are fine. I’m talking about the actual layout that for some reason has been adopted. I was kind of hoping the layout would be more in line with what William showed in his papers and in-fact that is how I laid out my Blender install. The right hand panel is all smooshed together and can hardly fit any content in it, the button are on the bottom which makes very little sense to me since they are basically tabs. I’d rather the outliner not be placed in the panel at all. I also don’t liek the way the buttons panel just goes off to infinity at the bottom (since blender doesn’t have a status bar), I usually delineate it by extending the timeline panel all the across from left to right. I don’t know if the devs plan on changing the layout in the future or not but the current one is unintuitive and rather cluttered, imo. Luckily these things are really easy to change so no biggy but new users should be introduced to something beautiful and functional from the get go.

#6

damn man, absolutely same opinion & preference here,
from outliner down to the timeline, spot on. :slight_smile:

#7

Given the massive amount of changes that are taking place, I don’t think panel layout is even on the radar yet. The panel contents are going to be in continual flux as new subsystems are integrated and old ones ripped out, so there’s really no point for devs to worry about that for now. I seriously doubt that will get much serious attention till the end of the 2.5 development series. (i.e. till about a year from now)

#8

Wow! Someone actually agreed with me. I was prepared to break out some pics and charts showing why exactly I don’t like the current layout since I basically got a slap on the wrist by someone here last time I brought it up.

#9

See this week’s minutes. There’s probably going to be 4 or so “builds” of 2.5, each release containing more functionality, as we rebuild this beast.

#10

Thank you all for the answers. I understand it’s a pretty complicated matter to insert multiple object editing and history on a program that wasn’t originally designed with those things in mind.

I’ve been using Cinema 4D for a week now, and I’m pretty impressed of how well designed it’s interface is. It tackles many things Blender 2.5 would like to, and some more. I think it’s the best reference for Blender, together with XSI, on how to deal with multiple object editing. The 3 main things that I like the most are:

1- It’s really simple and easy to edit multiple objects in C4D. There is no special interface for it, just select all the stuff you want to change, and go wherever you always go to change the desired properties. No need for special menus or tools.

2- Allows marking parameters. Similar to XSI, to mark parameters can be very useful, C4D is better in some aspects and XSI in others using this idea. In C4D to mark a parameter is useful to change all of them at once or for copy/paste a whole transform in one go for example. Holding Ctrl while editing we can slide the values in real time, similar to Maya. In XSI we can’t do that, but I love the method of inserting keys only on marked parameters, it’s really a clever way of inserting keys and avoid the need for creating filters and stuff.

3- Allows to open more than one project like opening multiple images in Photoshop for example. What I like about this is that it allows for copy/pasting between files. Incredibly handy. Although it’s not interface related anymore.

Unfortunately to implement this idea in Blender is not that simple, the modifier list complicate things a bit, as their order are important, if the user select many objects that shares similar modifiers at different stages in the stack, reordering them would not be reflected or not be supported at all. This doesn’t sound as a big deal at first as reordering multiple modifiers at random places in the stack seems not wise, if all selected objects share the same modifiers with different parameters just for randomization, it’s a case that one can try reordering things all at once. So how to deal with this is something that I don’t have any good idea. But I think the best path is to try to allow the user to select a bunch of objects and edit them in common places.

Yes and for this very reason I asked. Would be really helpful for Blender to support a cache format common to the 3 market leaders apps. The same goes for FBX, maybe it’s even the way to go.

Regards,
Jr.