Why does Blender lack such basic functionality?

General Forums Blender Development Discussion
#1

It’s so stupid that ALL MIGHT Blender lacks of such basic functionality like:

  1. Render object in front of everything (X-Ray), some say that it’s possible with composing, but c’mon, not very proper solution. more like crutch;
  2. Highlight object in render, for example: add material slot, that would be on top of all materials and animate it’s transparency, but, this this transparency won’t make object transparent, but rather make material itself transparent in relation to other materials in stack;
  3. Make quick outline of object for render, like in viewport when selecting object, but for render (Freestyle sucks, it’s a damn mess, which also takes additional time for rendering);
  4. Make object transparent in render - NOT making it’s material transparent, but rather make every single object transparent personally, because scene could share objects with same materials, and i need to make only ONE of them transparent.

I need to make presentation video, but turns out - Blender is NOT intended for making presentation videos and things like that, because it have 0% functionality for this

#2
  1. All the above can be done with compositing / freestyle
  2. If a functionality is not available instantly, it doesn’t mean blender can’t provide it. It is a rather a sign that few people need it so you need to figure it out for yourself. If there would be a function for all and every single special case, the software would be overloaded and other people would complain about the “stupid” overloaded UI.
  3. You are free to contribute a solution to the community in case you miss something.
  4. Curb your emotions
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#3

Composing/freestyle sucks - both are slow in all meanings

#4

Welcome to the modo forum …

#5

1 - Perhaps I’m not understanding, but if you want an object to render in front of everything else, why not simply…move it…in front of everything else?

2 - You can do this with nodes I think, pretty easily. All you’d need is a mix shader, with an emission node plugged in to one of the slots, and then animate the factor from 0-1 to turn the emission on or off…right?

3 - Yeah, freestyle. I don’t know why you don’t like it. Perhaps you’ve not read the documentation for it? It can be a little intensive, I’ll give it that.

4 - What do you mean by transparent? Like…glass? Or completely invisible. If the latter, you can toggle visibility, and animate that I believe…

Might help if you give examples. I’m assuming other software offers everything you’ve listed above?

4 Likes
#6

Have you checked the object hiding selections?
Eye icon hides the object in the scene
Camera icon hides the object in rendering

Hideouts
Hideouts642×922 58.8 KB

There’s holdout too (the arrow on the right) maybe it’s what you’re looking for?
HTH

1 Like
#7

If you want a quick outline of an object, that works in realtime and isn’t complicated, use this free add-on: https://gumroad.com/l/ZmTIT

As for 2 and 4- how do you make something transparent without making it transparent? I know that might sound sarcastic, but I’m genuinely confused. Objects aren’t “transparent in relation to other materials”, in Blender or any other software, they are transparent in relation to everything else on the screen and the blending mode.

3 Likes
#8

I don’t think these things are “lack of functionality” – more like, lack of knowledge of how Blender works. Not trying to be difficult, but the folks here have offered solutions and we will all continue to help in any way that we can.

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#9

well… have you even taken the time to learn how to use composting/freestyle or are you just coming off of Maya or whatever and expecting a free open source 3d application to work the exact same and be an exact copy of the product you know better? Blender can do everything that you need it to do, but some of it takes a little bit of time to understand how to do that. It’s not going to be the exact same thing you have used before.

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#10

Sooo stupid, cursed developers ! I’m mailing them a box full of cockroaches right now !

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#11

Freestyle does have issues, but it is set to (largely) be replaced by a new system once known as LANPR.

As of now, there is an effort to convert it from a standalone system to its final form as a part of the Grease Pencil feature set. It won’t be in 2.92 though.

#12

Typical of free open source crowd: it’s all about ideology, not the software quality. A proof of that is, as soon as you lay bare the inadequacy of their product to them, they launch a counter-attack: tell you to ‘curb your emotions’ and sneer about your ‘lack of knowledge.’
I’ve coped my share of flack when I got frustrated by the blatant refusal to support the Apple platforms and Metal 2–even though the AMD, whose Pro Render does just that, is now one of the BF’s sponsors, and to talk about being ‘unable to afford’ anything, while boasting the support of AMD, NVidia, Intel, and what not, sounds downright hypocritical to me (yes, I know: Curb Your Emotions).
Blender is amateur, and will always be so. But then again: it’s free, and maybe we shouldn’t count the gift horse’s teeth. Wanna go professional, go Maya, that’s all.

#13

*Screencapped for future reference.

1 Like
#14

Here is the right place to request features:

You open a new entry with clear examples/mockup of what you want, in addition to explaining practical uses and benefits. You do not mention or share screenshots of other software, if you do then developers may not be able to incorporate the feature for legal reasons.

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#15

Clear reaction of what “industry standard” does to the nerves, right, anarchymedes?
I only replied to this because your conduct is only a reflection of how toxic enviro and tools have clouded your vision. Open source tools mean collaboration and improvement.
If you’re not coding, sit and ask professionally. I pity this thread.

#16

Software ideology and fanboyism being toxic is something many of us agree with, but you shouldn’t expect to try a new software with the expectation that it is a lookalike of your old one.

To open Blender thinking it will be a copy of Maya is the wrong way to begin your evaluation, Blender is not supposed to work like Maya, Maya’s way of doing things is not the only viable choice for people who want to get serious with CG. Blender is doing some things differently because the devs. believe there are better ways of doing things than the legacy standards and workflows a lot of studios like to have around.

To note, even Autodesk has adopted paradigms that required a certain level of retraining (ie. PBR, path traced render engines, ect…). Every DCC app. has different workflows that a new person needs to give a fair shake to so he can do an accurate evaluation.

8 Likes
#17

So…barging in the front door, screaming “THIS SUCKS,” is supposed to be greeted with hugs and gentle caresses - otherwise it’s “ideology over quality.”

Perhaps if the approach were more along the lines of “hey, I can’t figure out how to do this with Blender, is it supported” wouldn’t raise the “toxic fanboyism” pitchforks.

Treat others as you’d have them treat you. No, I take that back. Be better.

7 Likes
#18

I don’t disagree with that, but the principle of commercial software development is the same as that of any service industry: Customer is Always Right. Even if it’s a comparatively small percentage of customers, if it’s possible at all to keep them satisfied without much stress, any business will do so.
For example, as I said earlier, for BF to support Mac and Metal in Cycles—when the AMD’s Pro Render Blender plugin does just that, and AMD is one of the sponsors—will not be too much; yet they repeatedly keep finding the excuses not to do so. There are million ways to make us, the Mac user, happy: if they can’t afford hiring a Metal developer to maintain such code (which I personally find hard to believe—but let’s leave it at that), there are incentives to be offered to other small software companies, for example; there is the well-known Blender Market where the commercial eCycles optimised for CUDA is being sold (and I remember its author coping flack here, too)—so, why not, say, Cycles of Metal as well? And finally, there remains Apple themselves: their own engineers and designers use Blender, as I saw in many WWDC videos, and maybe—just maybe! —they could use a marketing initiative promoting their beloved Metal.
Yet none of this is being considered; instead, the fanboy counter-attacks are being launched. If anything, this only serves to show very clearly the advantages of the commercial software, including the support service, over the ‘loose and fair’ — and sometimes irresponsible—free open source.

#19

And how do you suppose two opposing views of how a tool or feature should work be handled? You can’t say both sides are right, because agreeing with one side mandates disagreement with the other.

In addition, if Autodesk and the other commercial vendors had the amount of zeal for listening that you think they have, they wouldn’t have people migrating from their software to Blender. In fact, they would be gaining customers and Blender would never have gained the critical mass needed to make the 2.8 project possible (as it would be little more than a stepping stone to Maya or Max). If Autodesk was listening for instance, they would still have permanent licensing with little DRM attached. Read up on CGSociety and other forums and see if the Autodesk sections are all smiles and praise.

That is not to say BA is all praise either, we press the BF all the time to fix the application’s weak points, but it should be said that the apparent difficulty to get the devs. to address certain issues is not just a FOSS thing.

4 Likes
#20

This is so dang unfair. They’ve chosen to work towards vulkan which means that in the future apple users will still be able to run blender. It looks like a lot of apple users just assume that means performance will be bad because vulkan will have to run on top of metal. At least hold your judgement until after the vulkan conversion work is done.

Yes, they could hire developers to work on a metal implementation of blender, but the foundation has finite resources even when you consider the bump it has gotten in recent years. Doing that would prevent them from hiring other developers who could work on other aspects of blender (they probably wouldn’t have been able to hire pablo to work on the sculpt module if they tried that).

Yes, so at the very least there is a chance an outside developer will work on a metal backend for cycles. As a matter of fact, months ago someone mentioned an outside developer had a thread on devtalk where they were looking for advice on how to build a metal backend for cycles.

I don’t get why that means the foundation should be obligated to fund metal implementation of blender or cycles. If anything that shows that apple sees the value blender has on their platform, but chooses to do nothing to ensure it continues to work well there anyway.

Apple is a trillion dollar company, they have the man power and resources to fund a metal implementation of whatever. The blender foundation on the other hand begs for scraps. It’s a non-profit that is kept alive by charity, not profit. They are the ones who’ve had the rug pulled from under them when apple deprecated openGL (which works fine on every other platform). If apple truly does use blender / cares about its blender users, then they should be the ones to ensure metal gets implemented in blender.

9 Likes