Mac: M3 - *Hardware accelerated RT (Part 1)

You haven’t spent enough time in Blender addon threads where people bemoan $6 price tags. $100 a year is grand larceny to some Blender users! :rofl:

1 Like

Not for blender. Blender need to pay Microsoft store as well.

You’re going to go app stores only if you’re forced to, for instance, if Apple locks its machines (or MS, considering the new crypto modules)

Who’s charging $6 for an addon? That’s money I could use to buy HAMBURGERS! Do these people want me to starve? I THINK THEY DO!

3 Likes

The BF already pays as the Blender apps is notarized. Which requires a developer account if I’m not mistaken. In the grand scheme of things $100 a year is nothing compared the operating costs the BF has. There is not cost put your apps on the AppStore (though if Epic has their way where Apple can’t make revenue on the App Store, you can bet Apple will get their money some way and that may mean pushing the cost to developers directly).

You know my parents used to earn the equivalent of $20 a month. Today there are also areas where people earn very little by ‘western standards’ and Blender has a lot of loyal users there too. Nevertheless, to say that 100$ is a ‘cost’ for the Blender Institute is a complete absurd.

I’ve worked as an UI designer on 2 fairly popular apps (both available in the iOS and the macOS app stores);

  1. Even people with 10+ years of Mac dev experience can spend weeks trying to get their app updates approved because the review process suddenly decided to reject without proper explanation. As a Blender user, I’d rather see that time spent on Blender itself.

  2. Millions of users? Nah. A couple thousand, sure, but those would be users who already know about blender and where to get it. The App Store is not a magic bullet to get new users, unless you are going to the WWDC and network with Apple engineers and hope the atore will feature your app.

Not to mention idiot 1 star reviews, support requests, etc. If Blender would be sold at a “pro app” price the effort would be worth it, perhaps.

4 Likes

Perhaps you are right. Unfortunately, we will probably never know.

That matches my experience. We had to do separate builds of Poser Debut to comply with the App Store restrictions, it took quite some work and in the end we didn’t see significant benefit in sales figures. It’s not a magic bullet for success.

Either way, that debate is futile since Blender will forever remain GPL licensed and therefore locked out. Accept that Blender will not be in the Mac App Store (and not in the iPad App Store either) and move on.

It’s not that the App Store would prohibit the GPL license - it does not make any such restrictions on licensing. It’s that the GPL requires all distribution of the software to follow its exact rules, and the way the App Store handles signatures and ownership verification violates that part. This is nothing you can fix by begging Tim Cook (or Ton) for an exception.

4 Likes

Is anyone else having issues with Ambient Occlusion in Eevee? I’m running a M1 Mac Mini with 16 GB of ram and using the ARM 2.93 version of Blender. The first image shows the Ambient Occlusion pass in the viewport. The second shows the pass in Eevee. My settings are included.

All my old files and new files look botched up in various ways and I’m not sure the rendering problems are ambient occlusion only. I haven’t tried any other versions of Blender on the new Mac just yet. Thoughts?

I’ve noticed Eevee shading issues with Blender on the Mac. I too think it’s with AO. AO will be there when opening the file on Windows but gone when opened on my Mac.

Im assuming this has to do with the OGL shader discrepancy and hopefully gets resolved with the Vulcan update.

Wow. That’s a real bummer and damn near a show stopper. I’m surprised others hadn’t mentioned it on this long thread. Maybe I missed it. I was having some issues with Eevee on my Intel Mac using 2.92 and hoped the upgrade would solve it. It solved some but created others. I’m noticing that 2.92 opens on the M! and AO might be a bit less borked. I’ll have to test some more.

This maybe an M1 thing only, but I haven’t tried lately. Eevee is really good and I feel really comfortable with the settings to get the look I want. It’s just with my animations there is still a lot of background flickering, and little “gotchas” that are still too distracting.
I’ve been using cycles a lot more lately but look to be back on board with Eevee once the improvements have been implemented.

I love me some Eevee especially with the SSG build (Windows/Linux only) it’s just that it’s not quite there yet. :grin:

I vaguely recall reading that 0451’s SSG build was being rolled into the master build. Is this correct, or do I have some wires crossed?

I just checked a file I use for checking Eevee and I noticed the “contact” AO issue I was having is gone on my M1 :slight_smile: .
Now I’m just waiting on the other enhancements.

Yes, but not 0451’s exact actual build. From the blog post it looks like the SSG feature for the Blender 3.1 Eevee update is inspired by 0451’s build.
It’s still pretty cool knowing your Eevee build had the developer thinking, “Man that’s pretty freaking awesome! I need to get something like that working in Master.” And I’m sure there are going to be some take aways from 0451’s build.

1 Like

As much work as he’s put into it, and is probably the one person who has the most experience with SSGI and Eevee on the Blender scene, they should consider signing him on as a part time developer.

1 Like

So 0451 is a person? God speed to him/her/them.

EDIT: So what version of Blender are you using? You’re expecting improvements in 3.0 or 3.1?

Yes :grin:.
I’m using the latest official 3.0 ARM build for the M1.
I know people are hesitant to jump from 2.9x being that once you open and save a file on 3.0 it can have serious issues if trying to open it again on 2.9x or below. So if a project was started on 2.9 and you think you’ll need to use 2.9 again then I would wait.
BF said this is by design, too many changes are being implemented in 3.0.

There is an official 2.9 ARM build though, if you’re curious. It just won’t have the 3.0 improvements.

Eevee’s rewrite is being pushed back to 3.1, and will probably be a little more to see patches with the Molten VK versions for Macs.

That’s what the rumors say, but we don’t know for a fact.

1 Like