Yes there are a lot of advantages for a studio to use open source, you made a lot of valid points !
I’ve mostly experienced small studio environment, so really it’s me speculating on what has been said, and it would be great to have the POV of someone really concerned about that.
For sure a studio can work with GPL projects and keep their work for themselves if they like.
But what append if someone decide to take that code and make it public ? How much the studio is protected in that case ?
What if they need to share their tools with another studio for a project ? nothing prevent that other studio to do whatever they want with these tools right ?
My bet is that these big studios are soo much afraid of any leakage, issues or loosing control over their work, that if there is any possible doubt they’ll prefer avoid that road and stick with what everyone is using.
I suspect that if they want to use blender, a lot of people has to approve that decision and probably not only technical people, but a whole range of heads in the company, production, legal, IT … That dynamic makes really difficult to do some changes. Unless every other companies is doing the same, if every studio is doing something then it’s quite easy to convince people who don’t really understand the big picture …
But I’m pretty sure it’s not the only reason why studio stick with maya, shotgun…
First since the vast majority of company use the same tools it’s much easier for studios to share works. It’s a whole ecosystem…
And I’m sure blender isn’t able to handle huge scenes as easily as maya or houdini. A avatar 2 shot in blender ? … sounds difficult, but it’s slowly getting there.
And as said, even if they would switch to blender, they’ll have to find an army of CG sup, TA, TD that can work with blender. In the end, I think there is so little benefit for a big studio to make the move. Unlike small / medium ones, or individuals.
I think its more a relic of 1080p monitor era than a conscious decision.
If the rest of the UI scales properly that could also be a omission, and can be reported as a bug before posting here.
You mean 1024x768 monitor era?
I wouldn’t call it a bug per se, since the color picker is one of those rare pop up windows that Blender has and you know these are special.
Which is part of my criticism, they shouldn’t be special in that they can’t be scaled.
That is great to hear, maybe I should have kept my mouth shut for a while longer, but the contrast to Houdini made it suddenly very noticeable and me very grumpy.
Oh, now that is a good question for a lawyer. If I do not want my plugin to be published at all, and some employee decides to publish it nevertheless, would it still count as published in the sense of the license? Naturally, the employee will get fired and sued for any real and imaginary damage, but the code would be in the wild anyway. – Similar with the “shared tools” question; can I ensure with a non-disclosure agreement that tools I “lend” to other studios are not getting “out there”? Does it already count as publishing when the other studio gets it, even if it’s not yet publicly accessible?
Although, I don’t think that’s the issue here; these tools would always be just add-ons to the actual working tools like Blender itself, and never the actual product, so it doesn’t make too much sense to protect them beyond maybe code obfuscation; many tools may even be standalones and not Blender plugins so the GPL doesn’t apply.
Your observations about the inertia of studios are probably much closer to the true reason, which is most likely a mix of individual arguments, and is unlikely to even be the same for each studio. We do see a wider adoption of Blender in studios anyway.
Of course it is normal. That’s exactly why there are LTS versions. Not to mention developers are very conservative when breaking API compatibility. They only allow it to happen in major versions (3, 4…)
Indeed ! Keep in mind that I’m just speculating here !
To me if people really want blender in their (big)studio solutions can be found,
But I’m pretty sure there are too many factors (objective and subjective) that makes it really difficult for blender to be a good option as a main DCC for them. Maybe that will come, maybe not…
On the other hand, I’m pretty sure this can become a really good tool for smaller studios, or clever teams that can build their pipeline around blender. I’m pretty sure we’ll see more of that in the future.
And maybe that’s what will make blender being more adopted by big companies eventually…
Size is the most important factor for me but I also would really like to have these 3 sets of sliders all visible at once.
When using Houdini I make use of all 3 of them and it feels very fluent to have all this control (separated).
Especially when using a graphic tablet as input device.
I usually make the window even wider so that I have really granular control.
A lot of people are still on 1080p by the way. For starters, the difference between HD and 4K is less dramatic than the move up from standard definition (except on very large monitors). Secondly, the hardware you need to create high quality, high detail content that holds up in 4K is still fairly expensive, especially with today’s GPU prices. Sure, you can always try that GeForce now thing Nvidia is trying to position as an alternative to GPU ownership, but nothing beats actually having the card in your box.
Regarding the discussion on proprietary addons, last I checked the whole point of FSF licenses is to essentially promote a free culture that ends the sale of software itself as a form of commerce (with the money being made by things like tech. support instead). Personally, I would rather not be a position where I am dependent on third-part software to get critical functionality in Blender, there are just too many stories out there of people being burned when the vendor goes out of business or calls it quits after looking at the state of the parent software.
But wait, the GPL never says you could not sell the software itself. That is true, but since you also give away the source code, it will all end up with the vast majority of people using the software for free anyway.
My bad, I thought API compatibility breaking was reserved for major versions. I guess I was thinking of forward/backwards compatibility. Thanks for the correction
I mentioned what happened.
But developers announced in their code blog, that with Blender 4.0 will start a new release cycle of 4 months.
They precised.
The goal is to have:
A new LTS release every year, supported for two years (just as it is currently, but released around the same time of the year).
A major version and breaking release every 2 years (3.0, 4.0, 5.0…).
So, you are not wrong. That is what is planned for upcoming years.
There is a developer working UVs since 3 months.
I have not seen any mention about a rejection of SLIM algorithm in his reports.
I have not seen any mention of an integration of it, neither.
Last update of patch is dated of October of last year.
Since gitea migration, there is only one task that has been created on workboard dedicated to UV Editing.
New site is not reflecting developers ambitions, yet.
Old site have been archived, specifically, to avoid to lost old work.
Chris pointed out that algorithm should take into account the fact user could try to unwrap degenerate geometry.
And Lukas replied that he did not see a solution to that.
That looks like an issue. But that does not mean the idea is dead.
In what official source did you see that was abandoned ?
I may be cynical but just based off occam’s razor alone when blender does not acknowledge something as a task it ends up just living in a void indefinitely.
Now you could argue that this time may be different and it could, but just based off the history of this patch alone i have doubts.
The fact they had already left this patch to rot for so long and a fucking plugin dev had to step in to try get it merged is proof alone.
Here’s one thing I sometimes run into that really bugs me:
When you move the cursor to selected with an edit mode selection, it uses the average position of the vertices instead of the bounding box centre. Personally I find this extremely unintuitive, but perhaps it’s just me?
I have a feeling that it uses this method for finding the centre in a few other places too, and also offers a method to use bounding box centre, but from what I can tell, not when placing the cursor.
I’m not using Blender these days for much more than mesh tweaks and blockout geometry, so I’m not sure how much of annoyance this is when you are using it more seriously.
This is extremely useful, if you know how to use it. You can use it to find the center point of an arc, find the median between two points, position the cursor exactly in the middle of a limb for bone placement… I love this feature
I guess you are right. I guess I just want the option to use bbox sometimes without having to select the vertices individually to get the actual centre. If I select a face and move the cursor to it, it seems weird to get the face centre as weighted by the vertices around it.
