Yes it’s the licensing issue. I have had experiance of it too. Both independantly and working at studios in house. I once even had a quite fiercely worded physical posted letter after I had stopped a mantanence sub on a permanent license telling me I could no longer run older versions but that I would have to stay with last version I installed. Also that I could be visited and checked up on to see if I was complying.
For most of the bigger commercial apps it does seem very hard if not impossible to run older versions alongside newer ones. Certianly it is not often possible to run several different versions concurrently as most of us do with Blender. This for me was the greatest feedom of Blender. The freedom from licensing stress.
Not every company enforces this though. It’s different for different apps and companys.
Yeah, that’s partly my fear, that one will have to fully re-generate the rig, in order to update the UI script, etc and hope it all comes together and still fully works. In theory it should, but…
Just as well I’ve kept the meta-rig the whole time and any additions/adjustments I made sure to do to the meta-rig and re-generate. So it should work with little pain, but won’t know till final release and full test.
Oh, I didn’t mean you can install any old software on any new OS
BTW, RE: Bone Layers are now Bones Collections - i’m still in the first 5 mins with playing with that, but so far it feels like a major improvement. WAY faster and easier to show/hide elements of the rig, and know what you’re showing and hiding.
I once got to experience this while at an internship. Autodesk demanded to check all of our company PCs like they were some sort of secret police. It’s honestly nuts how invasive they are. One of many reasons I despise Autodesk products and services.
I heard of that happening at least once or twice many(!) years ago; it seems like they only went that far, when they had a pretty major reason to believe that a company was engaging in “sketchy license practices.”
Like, an architecture firm with 80 designers … yet oddly, only 2 actual CAD licenses.
It is an overall calm release that brings some feature that I was very looking forward to, like AgX and Principled v2. Node tools are a great surprise that probably will impact my workflow the most. The little UI improvements are welcome, even if I find Inter to be a hideous font (I always use Fira Sans anyway).
I was hoping to see Eevee Next, but well, if it isn’t ready it isn’t ready. I also hope that the next release will bring Material X. The continuing work on USD is quite encouraging. And right, Blender now supports Hydra!
I’m quite sad that some things I consider fundamental have seen no improvements and will likely not see any in the near future. The UV editor has seen no changes (I wonder if a new grant will be given to its dev), sculpt mode seems quite defunct, not to mention texturing. All things that are important to both hobbyists and professionals, that have no free alternatives, and that are not at all there.
In the immortal words of Francis Ewan Urquhart from House of Cards" You might very well think that; I couldn’t possibly comment, "
It’s so often these less showy workflow and foundational developments rather that new original feature developments that can make such a big difference longer term. For me when Alembic support became useable and stable it was a massive game changer in terms of where and how I could use Blender. It also turned out to be a bit of a life saver in the early part of the pandemic where we suddenly had to re pivot everything and work from home.
I have faith in the direction of 4. I get the idea it’s building strong robust foundations for the future and for good things to come.
If it is anything like Cycles X, then the really good stuff will come in the next few releases.
Cycles X initially was not much to write home about (for those who did not have RTX cards) save for the return of non-tiled rendering and faster viewport rendering. The next couple of years brought a large number of sampling and shading upgrades (though please note that AgX is technically not tied to Cycles as that is a different area).
I think part of the Blender Foundation’s philosophy is to maintain a healthy 3rd party add-on base that can solve issues that might be specific to some users. When it comes to UV’s for instance there are many add-on solutions that are very reasonably priced.
Ah, indeed, ZenUV to the rescue (or at least that’s what I use)!
But I’m not sure that is their philosophy. I know that the amount of python API breaking changes that each release brings has been quite infuriating for add-on developers. I’ve also seen Pablo in the Monday community streams saying that sometimes some areas are more attractive for people to build add-ons for, as opposed to contribute directly to Blender, and that he naturally wished more people directly contributed. I guess the number of add-ons is more of a byproduct of Blender’s open nature and limitations.
However, add-ons can only do so much. They’re slow and they rely on the quality of the underlying foundations. For UVs, installing certain add-ons makes it okay. For things such as sculpting or texturing, no add-on will ever manage to compensate the antiquate or incomplete systems they are built upon. Such things must be part of Blender’s native codebase.
I hope 4.x will be a cycle where the manpower and the time to work on such things will be found
Yeah, same. I still use loads of them, but before forcing Blender to do things it isn’t actually good at doing, if I can afford it, I always prefer to use tools that are actually made for that purpose.
However, Blender’s philosophical aim, I think, is being the most complete opensource 3d creative tool for artists, notwithstanding their status of professional or hobbyist. Right now, many parts of a 3d creative pipeline are almost precluded to someone who does not buy expensive software. I hope that is eventually addressed
If it is convenient to do so, any chance we could see a render with Filmic/old principled vs Agx/New principled? For now I’m assuming these are in fact improvements, but I’d love to see a comparison if it’s not too much trouble to do so.
Infuriating?
Quite infuriating even?
Aren’t we blowing this out of proportion a bit now?
If they sell addons, I guess they can be bothered. It’s like a low two digit number of api-changes per release and three months inbetween releases.
Poor addon developers. Why is the world so gruesome to them?
It’s not the end of the world, but it is a huge pain, especially when you don’t realize an update broke your add-on and you wake up to a bunch of emails from angry customers
