Blender and the Rabbids

https://www.blender.org/user-stories/blender-and-the-rabbids/

by Tomte • 5 years ago

333 92 5 years ago

aliasEli• 5 years ago

Blender is a very good piece of software. The main problem I usually have with it is finding documentation. Although the official documentation is fairly good, Blender is a huge program, and it can be hard to find the info you need. Also the documentation is not always up-to-date.

valine• 5 years ago

Between the official documentation, blender stack exchange, and YouTube I've never had a problem finding what I need.

mkl95• 5 years ago

This is a common issue in large free software projects. For instance Godot has hired some contractors specifically to write documentation.

Personally I usually end up using Youtube when I need to do something with Blender.

prox3• 5 years ago

Youtube is best I found. Just find tutorial for your area of interest and do the basic tutorial a couple of times till you get fluent in it.

fullstop• 5 years ago

My daughter likes to play around in Blender and is getting decent at it. Her issue with YouTube tutorials is that a lot of them are for older versions of Blender and they are different enough that the workflow has changed.

sowbug• 5 years ago

I stumbled across Ian Hubert's Blender-focused channel (https://youtube.com/c/mrdodobird) even though I have no interest in CGI production. His one-minute lazy tutorials are fun to watch and funny. My favorite: https://youtu.be/imkSdlbXB_U

stoicjumbotron• 5 years ago

If you're talking about the actual documentation as opposed to the API documentation, then I beg to differ. The Blender documentation is fairly up-to date with each release (stable) and in some cases even the alpha ones.

On the other hand, I found the API documentation to be lacking and I had to visit the Blender stack exchange multiple times to see any examples or the usage of most of the APIs.

bogwog• 5 years ago

The API is the worst part of Blender.

* Almost every release introduces some breaking changes

* The documentation that you find online is almost always out of date

* Most error messages give you very little feedback to figure out the problem

* Most of the existing operators/scripts are implemented in C/C++ and are built into blender. So when you encounter a useless error message (extremely common), your only option is to clone the full Blender source tree and start searching for that particular operator

* Many functions/operators are dependent on the editor state. For example: the only way to pass an input to an operator is to change the currently selected object, and you have to make sure the editor is in the correct mode (object/edit/pose/etc). All of these things are visible to the user, so you better revert any changes you made once your script completes to avoid interrupting their workflow/annoying them.

But the built-in Python console with tab completion is excellent. Even though the API has all those problems, having an interactive REPL to figure things out is great. If the API were more stable, documented, and less clunky with the editor state stuff, creating extensions for Blender would be an awesome experience.

aidos2• 5 years ago

While I think the documentation is pretty good, something like Blender is really hard to find your way around initially as a layman.

I’ve found YouTube tutorials to be the best way so far but, My God, they’re slow going. Don’t get me wrong BlenderGuru has done incredible work. I just really struggle with video as a long form learning medium.

Does anyone have a good (non video) resource for getting into Blender? I know my way around a bit, but would love to get deeper into it. I recall an article on HN in the past that walked through the controls from a coders perspective (vim like control). Something along those lines.

blooalien11• 5 years ago

Blender documentation is more useful once you know Blender well enough to even know what to look for, but in all honesty I've found that it's far more effective to just search your Blender question on YouTube and watch a video from BlenderGuru or CG Cookie or one of the many other fantastic tutorial creators out there. :)

whatever_dude• 5 years ago

Ditto. I use Blender at an amateur level from time to time and I feel that every time I want to do something that i know is possible and I look it up, the official documentation mentions menus or UI items that don't exist anymore so I have to figure it out myself.

Popegaf• 5 years ago

I find it great that they're using Blender, but

This episode is named Rabbids Invasion: Mission to Mars and it will be released at the end of the summer on France Television and on Netflix worldwide in 2022

3-6 months between releases? I get that it's a licensing issue - France Television probably knows more people will watch it on Netflix than on their own network - but this is just asking for piracy.

opencl• 5 years ago

It's entirely possible that the slowness is on Netflix's end, especially if they're doing the English dub themselves. They frequently take 6+ months to release English versions of anime they license.

smoldesu3• 5 years ago

this is just asking for piracy

If you're desperate enough for entertainment to pirate the... checks notes Rabbids Invasion: Mission to Mars special, I think you deserve to watch it.

Zababa• 5 years ago

France Television is the French national public service for television, so it'll probably be free to watch.

marcodiego• 5 years ago

TLDR:

Conclusion

This production on Blender was a great experience for us. We were able to integrate the application into our in-house pipeline and connect it to the other applications quite easily thanks to the strength of the Python API. In spite of some features that would need some maturity we had the confirmation that Blender is production ready and comes with tools that can really push up our way of working in terms of creativity.

Springtime• 5 years ago

Their comment just prior about what they saw as a lack of guides for workflows in a studio environment is worth noting, too, as they felt that could be expanded upon for helping Blender reach more. Though frankly the article isn't that long a read anyway.

hashhar• 5 years ago

Nice to see more professional commercial projects picking up Blender. It helps to see what are the things missing or suboptimal for "expert" users of the system.

Blender and OBS Studio are very good examples of FOSS software that are the best at what they do and can easily offer competition to even the commercial alternatives.

Most of all their design and UI language is consistent - something very rarely seen in FOSS software.

And they have incredible depth of features 90% of which are overkill for the casual user but the experts sure do appreciate them.

And the best part is the well-thought of extensibility and API story. Both of them have a very good community of plugins and extensions which add very useful features without feeling out of place.

blooalien11• 5 years ago

I first learned 3D graphics on Lightwave 3D on Commodore Amiga ages ago, and since then have tried many other 3D applications, many of which (like Lightwave) cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

True Fact: Blender beats every single one of them hands down in every way that I can think of. :)

regularfry• 5 years ago

Funny, there are UI affordances I remember from Lightwave 8 and 9 that I still miss when I'm using Blender. Capability-wise the set of functionality is streets ahead (although if I could find a reasonable approximation to LWCad I'd be deliriously happy), but the UI just doesn't click as nicely for me.

rjzzleep• 5 years ago

Isn't the reason why 3DSMax is so popular(or at least was haven't followed this in decades) because of the abundance of plugins?

I never used any of these enough to understand what the advanced differences were, but 3DSMax definitely seems easier to use than Softimage and Maya. I'd assume one of the reasons why softimage died was precisely for that reason.

jtxt5• 5 years ago

There are ways it's not better over other tools, but many of those are being addressed, because it's a strong open source project with increasing resources.

Maya has a one up on the character animation tools, with addons like Studio Library for a pose library, though now Blender 3.0 in October(ish) will have a very similar feature. And there's others like lattice in the graph editor that Blender does not have yet.

Houdini is awesome for node based procedural animation and simulation, now Blender has Geometry Nodes, as a step in that direction...

plufz• 5 years ago

But does it really beat every single one? I’m a blender user myself and really like it but I was under the impression that most professionals use Maya. And I guessed for some reason?

animal531• 5 years ago

I have one big problem with Blender, and that's all the upgrades its been through.

As a result when you're trying to figure out how to do something you can't just google a youtube video because inevitably it'll be of a different version. So you'll see a guy telling you, "now click the little x button" etc.

Of course in your updated version the x button has long since been replaced by something else.

raxxorrax2• 5 years ago

I think in most cases it is relatively easy to find the button in the new version, there are exceptions though. Hotkeys didn't change for ages I think.

But I would still recommend to use the version of Blender from the tutorial. If you get familiar with the rendering pipeline, you will find those buttons more easily.

raxxorrax2• 5 years ago

Blender has become so awesome in the latest versions. I think switching from other software is quite easy, even if some things work differently. It also has an industry standard preset for hotkeys...

I use it as an amateur, but there are really good tutorials that allow you to render high quality scenes in a day or two.

I use the occasional 3D model on a website, and the pipeline from our industry CAD software to the web with an short detour through Blender works flawlessly.

robomartin• 5 years ago

It wasn't clear from the article whether or not the released their Shot Manger plugin as FOSS or kept it an internal tool. I found a plugin called "Shot Manager" but it seems to have been authored by an unrelated Australian company (although some of the features sound very similar).

I am not saying they are obligated to release their custom tools. It would just be very interesting if they did. I am not in this space at all other than my kids are learning Blender and love it.

Tangent: Completely unrelated to this, I am truly hoping that a large company takes interest in KiCAD and helps push development to the "production ready" stage that Blender seems to have achieved. The EDA market is in serious need of a solid FOSS tool that isn't driven by the latest shinny thing companies go after.

To be clear, KiCAD is absolutely fantastic and I am looking forward to version 6.0. We are planning on migrating our work from Altium Designer to KiCAD, likely starting around the end of this year. I'm sick and tired of what has been happening with Altium and the other tools are just as bad or worse.

the__alchemist• 5 years ago

And something suitable for (non-EDA) CAD would be great. KiCad's surface area is small enough that its rough edges can be worked around. FreeCad's isn't.

smoldesu3• 5 years ago

One of the biggest problems I have with professional software (eg. Bitwig, Ableton Live, Sony Vegas) is that I lose interest in learning how they work after the initial learning curve. All of those programs have a featureset that can be fully explored and understood in a few weeks, or perhaps months for the more complicated stuff.

I have been using Blender for 6 years, and still have seen less than half of the features. It's not for lack of searching, but Blender's density is hugely under-appreciated in the industry. If you're a creative or artist in any capacity, Blender has features that you can take advantage of right away.

Familiar with NLEs? Hop into the video splicer and play around!

Comfortable mesh editing? Stay in the modelling view!

Wanna get your hands dirty? Sculpting is just a tab away!

Perhaps the most impressive part of Blender is that it's provided for free, in a tiny download, with a deeply caring userbase that maintains it. Here's to another decade of Blender releases!

chacha2• 5 years ago

The industry doesn't appreciated that blender can mesh edit and sculpt? What can it do that their existing software can't?

justinclift2• 5 years ago

Maybe 2D vector animation?

knolan3• 5 years ago

It’s a real jack of all trades, instead of moving media from package to package, such as animating something in Maya and combining with a camera track in After Effects, you can do it all in Blender.

With the recent Eevee real time renderer you get a common material pipeline with Cycles.

Add the exceptional 2D animation tools, and rapid improvements in sculpting and the speed increases of CyclesX to the mix and you’ve got one of the most capable pieces of software going.

mkr-hn• 5 years ago

I can see the others, but Ableton Live has M4L. You can do pretty much anything in it. Get a license for the full Max and you can do anything in it.

noobermin• 5 years ago

Blender has gone from being a tool professionals scoffed at to one that professionals are stressing over themselves to learn by binging tutorials. It is quite the sight, I remember in 2008 wanting to get into game development and being poopooed on forums from picking up blender and instead pirating maya instead. I obviously dropped the idea completely because of it.

Idk, I think there might be a larger lesson somewhere in there but regardless it's amazing to see the shift that has occurred.

a1371• 5 years ago

The larger lesson might be that most people see a product's status and not its momentum?

cthalupa3• 5 years ago

I'm a daily blender user, but I'm a daily modern blender user - the pace of development is rapid, but 13 years ago, you might very well have been painting yourself in a corner if you wanted to do 3d work in the games industry and learned it instead of maya or max

brewtide• 5 years ago

holds true for people, too.

edanm• 5 years ago

You can't use momentum if you want to get work done today.

Blender's advancement has been an amazing thing to watch, and it is deserving of enormous praise. Today it is afaict a really legit option for learning 3d.

That doesn't mean that saying it was a bad idea to use it 13 years ago wasn't correct.

lvl100• 5 years ago

Blender is a great tool beyond typical 3D applications largely due to its Python scripting and ability to run it headless.

open-source-ux• 5 years ago

An example of what a single person can achieve in Blender - the work of Ian Hubert. This is a split-screen comparison of a green screen shoot and the final video rendered using Blender. Seriously impressive:

VFX Breakdown - Dynamo Dream Teaser:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFJ_THGj72U

If you prefer watching the teaser in full screen, it's here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG31WSioSxk

chrisseaton• 5 years ago

How is Blender managing to reposition the camera from a 2D recording (at 30s)? Is it building a 3D model completely automatically from the 2D source?

mrspeaker• 5 years ago

That's Ian Hubert magic - he explains it in this (very entertaining) video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxD6H3ri8RI

adammenges• 5 years ago

Blender is insanely great, and honestly one of the best fully open source software projects out there. The only thing I wish from it is Apple M1 support. Personally, I’m just not sure I’m going to own a big desktop computer with an Nvidia gpu ever again.

smoldesu3• 5 years ago

This would be a lot easier if MacOS supported a graphics API other than Metal. As it stands, I doubt many people are excited to reverse-engineer a nigh-undocumented iGPU to patch in support for features that it's overarching API doesn't support in the first place (eg. true RT, proper SIMD optimizations, etc.)

arp242• 5 years ago

It looks like M1 support was added in 2.93, released last month. It's not super-clear from the release notes (in fact, it's not explicitly mentioned at all), but the requirements are listed as requiring "macOS Version 10.13 or newer for Intel processors on supported hardware. Version 11.0 for Arm-based processors (Apple Silicon)." You can download binaries for "Apple Silicon" as well.

TheNewAndy• 5 years ago

I have 2.93 and it is native Apple Silicon. Your wish is granted.

slezyr• 5 years ago

Never mind the other answers. GPU rendering is not supported on macOS. Generally CPU rendering is quite slow.

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/cycles/gpu_...

doctoboggan3• 5 years ago

I have a small startup that sells custom 3D printed jewelry (https://lulimjewelry.com)

I use blender and the blender python API to automatically generate 3D models from my customers engraving images.

It’s a great piece of software. Highly capable and the scripting interface is great. You can pop up a window that shows the python command for every action you are doing in the GUInso it’s easy to automate anything you can do manually.

syntaxing• 5 years ago

I remember you posting on another post! Did you ever manage to figure out how to use ML to clean up the prints?

Also, can you point me towards how to see the python command for everything you do in the GUI?

doctoboggan3• 5 years ago

I had some success running this model[0] but I think the training data doesn't sufficiently capture the variety of inputs my customers give me. I don't currently have nearly enough training data to retrain the model.

[0] https://towardsdatascience.com/fingerprint-denoising-and-inp...

To see the python commands add a Scripting > Info window to your workspace. I like to change the animation timeline in the "Layout" tab to a Scripting Info section.

To do this hover over the Editor Type tab in the top left of the timeline area (should be a clock icon). Select the Info type under Scripting.

You can also turn on python commands in tooltips in the blender settings.

2fast4you• 5 years ago

Very cool!

Did you look at tools like OpenSCAD before choosing Blender?

doctoboggan3• 5 years ago

I did initially try to tackle this problem by constructing procedural solid models, but that solution wasn't sufficiently general.

I ultimately went with blender's displacement modifier, which works by using a UV mapped bitmap image that displaces the model's vertices as a function of the pixel intensity. This workflow adapts well to arbitrary geometry and customer images.

Blender and the Rabbids

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