I expect Blender just lost quite a few users and many more potential future users.
We’ve been waiting forever for better boolean and bevel.
7:00 Layer Based Material.
So there is a similar situation, I won’t call it limitation, a similar situation to Blender in that on the one hand you arrange things in the 3d space and on the other hand to get 2d assets to interact in a photoshop layer blending mode manner you have to make all of them work together in the 2d space of a single material/shader on an object in 3d space.
Where this is kicking Blender’s ass is they have added dedicated objects in the ui and in the code for this purpose and added more dedicated UI to give a photoshop-like layer interface AS WELL AS widgets in the 3d viewport for manipulating the 2d image on the uv map of the plane where they are doing this work.
Even Maya had widgets in the 3d viewport for manipulating 2d data on the UV map way back in the day.
Blender just doesn’t have the money to hire/pay people to build/maintain all the stuff that is needed to really compete in the long run in many different areas . The only option I see is if they made a die hard committment to working closely with addon devs to create the API of their dreams and make that their primary purpose over the animation studio.
Blender is currently working on something called a layered shader but it’s purpose/use-case is not this at all. I think it’s just for making it easier to use PBR based materials (base color + metalness + specular + normal map + displacement map) which is something I assume Unreal engine has had a streamlined tool for since a decade ago.
7:44 yeah doing all this on the surface of 1 polygon plane within 1 shader is the only way to do something like multiply blending mode of 1 picture on top of another picture. Same way in blender. All blender is missing is a UI panel intentionally designed to mimic photoshop.
8:10 up until Eevee Next to get transparency to work in the expected manner in blender required you to know that you need to go into the bowels of the material settings and pick one of 2 options that worked better or worse depending on how smooth or high contrast your masking image is.
Again, blender can do all of this “Layer Based Material” stuff, it just lacks the UI to make it user friendly. Blender has a good enough asset browser now.
9:00 Somebody tell me what this thing can’t do compared to Geometry Nodes. What little I can currently achieve on my own in Geometry Nodes seems possible. The most important thing I see here is that they have a dedicated object type for a specific purpose. We can’t even get Blender to rename “Empty” to “Reference Image” when we import a Reference Image.
I think it is awesome that we can have some kind alternative to Adobe After Effects finally!!! With proper 3D space.
I have been already using UE5 for 2D animation but this looks even better…
@thinsoldier Blender is great companion app to UE5 or Houdini. I don’t think that UE is competition to Blender. Many UE users are using Blender anyway.
But I agree, having the possibility to stay in one software is nice thing indeed.
Blender doesn’t need to be exactly like After Effect or Avalanche to be capable of doing some motion graphics.
A better support for typography in 3D and typography in Grease Pencil, would go a long way to unlock some crazy potential. This and also some more rendering options in EEVEE for instance (being able to “force” “Z layer order”, better masking options).
Motion graphics is all about typography manipulation and masks.
I did try to reproduce a few of the old “monster template” After Effect animations in Blender to see how far I could go with Blender, and there are a few stuff that can be done, this is 100% made with Blender and EEVEE:
It doesn’t make sense to do it in Blender. I did it once and took me 2-3 times longer than in After Effects.
Basically there is no possibility to do nested comps, pre-comps, relink vector data from external AI file, all effects have to be done directly in the camera… There are more cons than pros.
Rendering is slow compared to AE since AE has way better caching and multiframe rendering.
AE has been massively unstable and buggy for many people these last 12 months. Mac and PC. Audio not showing waveforms, memory errors, playback halting for no reason: the basics are failing. I’m on the AE Slack, where high end pro’s keep posting severe bugs on every update. As Adobe keeps adding shiny new features, bugs get patched and then fail again one version later. Some have been present for years. Still very little GPU usage and even multicore CPUs aren’t used to their full potential. That’s why many professionals are looking for reliable alternatives, like Cavalry, Blender or Unreal.
Blender is way better at “systems” than AE. AfterEffects doesn’t have anything like geometry nodes. There are add-ons, but most of them are slow when you start to have many clones. And they sometimes use a completely different UI which doesn’t play nice with other content (Stardust). A geometry nodes setup in Eevee runs in real-time, which AE often can’t even achieve once the content gets more complex.
Remember does 3D with C4D (different interface), its old and limited own renderer or its new photoreal slow renderer. Camera and object interfaces are sometimes clunky when working in 3D. And they don’t have any 3D object editing tools, so you need to jump back and fourth between apps…
all effects have to be done directly in the camera
7:44 yeah doing all this on the surface of 1 polygon plane within 1 shader is the only way to do something like multiply blending mode of 1 picture on top of another picture. Same way in blender. All blender is missing is a UI panel intentionally designed to mimic photoshop.
I also want alternative to AE. But can you do gausian blur in Blender? Make comp with layered matte? Use simple drop shadow? Import SVG and then simply relink / update modified SVG from external source? Quickly expose key frames without having to dug deep in the timeline?
Of course many things can be faked and workarounds can be found in Blender.
I have spent hours trying to use Blender as my go to tool for mograph with animated png textures, typo, mattes,… Animated materials were nightmare to manage.
Just simple fade in lettering with each glyph animated on its own axis is tedious task to do… I have been there. There is no possibility to animate each letter without braking it to separate meshes. And mograph in general is also a lot about text animation.
Regarding Eevee, yes it is real time but try to output 4K mograph with motion blur. After Effect and Media Encoder will still do it faster.
I am not rooting for AE, but so far it can do some specific things faster.
Sure: the right tool for the right job. I’ll never try to replace AE’s text animation tools with Blender! But if I want to show 200 colored circles on screen that respond to the proximity of another object, I’ll go with Blender these days.
I am looking forward to trying it / testing it. I hope it will not bug down Unreal further.
The effector tool seems interesting, possibility to do parametric geo animation without switching to Houdini or Geo nodes looks very inviting.
Also the 2D “layers” look interesting. I think will open up many new options. But let’s see once it becomes available also wondering what the pricing will be for VFX people
. The only option I see is if they made a die hard committment to working closely with addon devs to create the API of their dreams and make that their primary purpose over the animation studio.
also wondering what the pricing will be for VFX people 
