Transition to Blender?

Forum for users who have migrated or are migrating to Blender
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Mathaeus
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Re: Transition to Blender?

Post by Mathaeus » 12 Sep 2014, 15:22

luceric wrote: If it were about software shopping for individuals.. *Thousands* of individuals have been producing cg shorts for two decades. Look at this short, one out of thousands, made by one guy in Max and http://vimeo.com/78514936. Every year there are tons of shorts presented at siggraph. Getting on the Blender bandwagon, or waiting for some other app to catch up to X, when you already have a mature app in your hands in my opinion can be an excuse for setting the clock back and having some more reasons to not get work done.
Of course, personal project, not tied to deadline, able to adapt to possibilities, this could be done by anything. For example this one is created with Hash Animation Master, 2009. So we can put Hash into pool, too.
But, for me, it's not that linear - I am creating around 1-2 pics yearly, in this category - but really not only to create a nice image. Actually picture is more an excuse for small investment into future. To learn something new, try what I didn't tried yet, so on. How many details I've added to some model, that's last thing. I'd try to follow conventions of particular internet place, but nothing more than that, honestly.
Now, if software has no future, because there is absolutely clear, explicit announcement of developer - then, no way to use Softimage for any personal project, anymore. Simple as that.
That's me. From what I heard, for some people there's additional motivation of writing the tutorials for money, where picture or movie is a sort of advertising - so really not good idea to sell the training related to EOL-ed software, actually it's never been good idea to write for software with small user base. While Blender, as widely adopted software, *is* good idea. For some others, there's advantage of open source renderer, which can be installed anywhere without zero licensing costs. And who know what are all that motivations...
Last edited by Mathaeus on 12 Sep 2014, 16:09, edited 2 times in total.

julius
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Re: Transition to Blender?

Post by julius » 12 Sep 2014, 15:26

In my opinion, there is a major problem : GPU rendering is the future, and it will be usable for heavy productions with high memory video cadrs next year or so... And softimage won't have access to.

Make third pary renderers (chaorsgroup, octane, redshift...) maintain there plugins for SI up to date, and I stick with it for ever.

luceric
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Re: Transition to Blender?

Post by luceric » 12 Sep 2014, 18:09

Hirazi Blue wrote:I do think you have a somewhat limited view of hobbyism. I for one do not necessarily recognize myself in picture you paint.
fair enough. I can only think from my point of view, I guess. I've always been learning X (music, programming, softimage, video editing, etc) to do some project Y.

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druitre
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Re: Transition to Blender?

Post by druitre » 22 Sep 2014, 10:47

julius wrote:In my opinion, there is a major problem : GPU rendering is the future, and it will be usable for heavy productions with high memory video cadrs next year or so... And softimage won't have access to.
Do you mean Softimage won't have access to the new cards or to the software? In the case of Redshift, I wouldn't worry about that - the creators have expressed their debt to the SI community as being the decisive force for their success. They are very much disinclined to ignore Softimage in future updates.

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wireframex
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Re: Transition to Blender?

Post by wireframex » 22 Sep 2014, 13:43

I use some GEForce Titan with Redshift for Softimage without any pb here.

Don't forget RS is "the" GPU render you can use not only the RAM of GFX card !!!

Redshift uses an out-of-core architecture for geometry and textures, allowing you to render massive scenes that would otherwise never fit in video memory.

A common problem with GPU renderers is that they are limited by the available VRAM on the video card – that is they can only render scenes where the geometry and/or textures fit entirely in video memory. This poses a problem for rendering large scenes with many millions of polygons and gigabytes of textures.

With Redshift, you can render scenes with tens of millions of polygons and a virtually unlimited number of textures with off-the-shelf hardware.
"without mastery, power is nothing" - Softimage Addict User
CPU 3990x 128 Threads / 2 x 3090 RTX - 24 Go / 96 Go memory

julius
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Re: Transition to Blender?

Post by julius » 22 Sep 2014, 20:01

I was talking about plugin's updates.

I didn't know about redshift. It's a very good news... But for how much time ?

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Draise
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Re: Transition to Blender?

Post by Draise » 23 Sep 2014, 19:33

Up to you I suppose. :-B

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Nizar
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Re: Transition to Blender?

Post by Nizar » 27 Oct 2014, 16:11

Happy Blender user and supporter, no need autodesk any more. Learn blender mean two week of pain, after this all work fine and smooth and this is sixth month where blender help me to pay bills. Some problem here and there, but zbrush+ blender done the work decently, my clients don't notice the difference when I used Softimage for the some job, no need subscription so I can buy a better hardware next year (with three high end VGA ) and Blender foundation making a great effort and will see great release in a near future. Yes, the future is really bright outside ADSK umbrella.

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Grims
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Re: Transition to Blender?

Post by Grims » 27 Oct 2014, 19:30

Nizar wrote:Happy Blender user and supporter, no need autodesk any more. Learn blender mean two week of pain, after this all work fine and smooth and this is sixth month where blender help me to pay bills. Some problem here and there, but zbrush+ blender done the work decently, my clients don't notice the difference when I used Softimage for the some job, no need subscription so I can buy a better hardware next year (with three high end VGA ) and Blender foundation making a great effort and will see great release in a near future. Yes, the future is really bright outside ADSK umbrella.
Hey Nizar,

Taking your recent experience with Blender, what do you consider to be its strongest and weakest points?
The Future is Gloomy!

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MauricioPC
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Re: Transition to Blender?

Post by MauricioPC » 28 Oct 2014, 10:15

Be careful when you transition to Blender ... Autodesk may be watching!

** it's a joke


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Nizar
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Re: Transition to Blender?

Post by Nizar » 28 Oct 2014, 11:28

Grims wrote:
Nizar wrote:Happy Blender user and supporter, no need autodesk any more. Learn blender mean two week of pain, after this all work fine and smooth and this is sixth month where blender help me to pay bills. Some problem here and there, but zbrush+ blender done the work decently, my clients don't notice the difference when I used Softimage for the some job, no need subscription so I can buy a better hardware next year (with three high end VGA ) and Blender foundation making a great effort and will see great release in a near future. Yes, the future is really bright outside ADSK umbrella.
Hey Nizar,

Taking your recent experience with Blender, what do you consider to be its strongest and weakest points?
I want to clarify that my experience, like everything else, it is purely subjective. I working into statue/action figures (3d printing) field, and sometime doing some rendering and really short and simple animation.

What I do in blender: hard surface modelling, basic rigging for pose the character, some turn around rendering or some very basic animation with few deformer.
What I don't like (in particular compared with XSI) :
- Not so strong viewport (but is better than modo viewport and in general handle well my models)
- No edit for two or more object at some (actually an addon solve this problem, but the workflow is worse)
- Sometime GoZ for blender had some strange result
- The history stack is only a modifier stack. I was not a fan of history stack, but sometime I complain this lack...
- Need lot of customization for fit your basic habits. This is really annoying when you try to modify shourtcuts (blender have shourtcut everywhere) because blender don't give you any signal tell you "this chourtcut is already taken or in use", so you must doing a lot of tentative, XIS with his visual representation is light years ahead. ATM I found a nice solution for navigation, and this, with some compromise, fit well with my habit.
- Handles... near useless in blender, not two axis constraint, for two axis constraint you need to "eliminate" the unwanted axis pressing shift+ x,y or z during move or scale. This is a problem when you are not in global mode, but in normal or local mode (must guess the right axis and press two the combo). A bad design IMO.
- Z is the vertical axis! Why!?

What I like
- After XSI and Silo, Blender is for me the more fast modeller ever tried. REally fast, really nice and with a lot of nice tools. IMO more fast and organic and with more consistence than modo.
- Rock solid stability!
- Free, but I pay a monthly donation and also participated to Gooseberry project.
- Free or commercial addon for anything. About commercial you can easily live without, but some free are really essential to me (Like material mit)
- A real bright future. Blender Foundation work constantly and they try to solve some of the issue and lack blender actual have. The new viewport project seems come to life.
- Lot of tutorials and very good community. You have a doubt? Need to post on blender artist and will receive a lot of help.
- I found two bug in blender during my work (one an annoying error when use individual origin). Reported the bugs this was solved the day after.
- Rigify is the most simple and fast (more simple than gear) auto rigging system I ever used. I'm not a rigger or animator, for my basic need this solution is quite perfect.
- Integrated sculpt and dynatopo. I sculpt in zbrush, but blender sculpt is really nice and time to time I prefer doing some task directly in blender without any boring import export operation in zbrush.
- Sometime zbrush had some bad time and crashing in some dynamesh/boolean operation. Blender is more slow, but don't crash and doing ever the job.
- Cycles: nice, fast, simple. I like it and seems better with every release. My next machine will have three VGA, and I can brought it (I already have one) thanks to the open software and not subscription
- With almost every release all the software and not only few part of it (excluding the internal game engine) have improvement and optimization.

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Grims
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Re: Transition to Blender?

Post by Grims » 28 Oct 2014, 13:42

Thank you very much Nizar for taking time and posting your personal experience. I think it was very useful... at least for me!
The Future is Gloomy!

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Draise
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Re: Transition to Blender?

Post by Draise » 28 Oct 2014, 16:45

Very nice review. Thanks. ;;)

NNois
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Re: Transition to Blender?

Post by NNois » 06 Nov 2014, 12:28

hi,
I have a question, i saw some really cool addons tagged as "node editors".
How do they plug this into blender, is it a pieces of code using a very deep integration in blender, like for example being a shematic representation of the scene graph, or is it piece of code just on top of other things simply automatising tasks ? Hope it's clear

Noël

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csaez
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Re: Transition to Blender?

Post by csaez » 06 Nov 2014, 16:43

NNois wrote:hi,
I have a question, i saw some really cool addons tagged as "node editors".
How do they plug this into blender, is it a pieces of code using a very deep integration in blender, like for example being a shematic representation of the scene graph, or is it piece of code just on top of other things simply automatising tasks ? Hope it's clear

Noël
It's a patch.

Blender is not just free of charge, it's also open source! so developers can go as deep as they need to implement new features or try new ideas, in cases like this they usually work in another branch (you need a special build to try this out) until things get stable and changes are merged into the mainstream version.

Not all aditions work this way, Blender has an addon mechanism as most DCCs, but for deep changes devs can go directly to the source code.

Cheers!

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Mathaeus
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Re: Transition to Blender?

Post by Mathaeus » 08 Nov 2014, 14:44

NNois wrote:hi,
I have a question, i saw some really cool addons tagged as "node editors".
How do they plug this into blender, is it a pieces of code using a very deep integration in blender, like for example being a shematic representation of the scene graph, or is it piece of code just on top of other things simply automatising tasks ? Hope it's clear

Noël
Just to put it less abstract. "Node editor" is a Blender window, which is a host for Cycles renderer nodes, or nodes that belongs to Blender compositor, and so on, depending on mode. Most likely, these nodes *are* very very close to their engines, maybe too much close. There were complaints in time of initial Cycles development, that shading nodes are usable only for Cycles and not for other renderers. Compositing nodes, were switched to multi threading, one by one, maybe there is still some node around which is still single threaded. There were reports about slower rendering in case of using the node groups (shader compound in SI), so maybe even node groups are part of Cycles, somehow.

Regarding addons for Blender, I do not remember anything in last ten years, structured as some exe and dll, related exclusively to Blender, that is, compiled against some Blender API ( could be wrong, anyway). Probably 90% of Blender addons are based on Python, rest are patches of entire app. Best known patches, perhaps are integrations with V-Ray or Octane - and these two are only rendering 'plugins', having a comparable power to what we consider as rendering plugin for SI, for example.
Other custom builds are available at graphical org.

"Patch practice" is not new, seems to be usual for open source, good old POV-Ray had a good number of unofficial versions in 90s. But there is obvious disadvantage - no way use two or more 'patches' in one session. If you want 'custom split normals' build, to work with V-Ray, you have to compile your own custom build, that integrates these two. From my small experience, various strange things could happen with these custom builds, practically you have to check out for literally everything, is it rewired or not.

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