Blender 5.2 LTS

https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-2/

by makizar • 8 days ago

419 190 8 days ago

I don't use Blender, so my admiration is from a distance but: Wow - what an impressive project. At least if I understand it correctly, this is a real pro-level piece of free and open software that's equivalent to thousands and thousands of dollars in closed-source commercial software.

keyle• 4 days ago

Yes, it's had a lot of money put through it since its early days, with quirky shortcuts and quirky features.

Imagine if they made Gimp good, this would be what blender became in 3D.

They've done it right, with a foundation and it appears to run like clockwork. Feature wise it now rivals with some pretty expensive alternatives.

Open source; can win!

Joel_Mckay• 3 days ago

https://krita.org/en/

It is also free. =3

KPGv22• 3 days ago

Imagine if they made Gimp good,

I have a vague recollection that twenty years ago GIMP paid some designers to come up with a great UI, but once the design was ready, GIMP was like "nah we don't like that" and kept their bad UI.

I do image stuff so rarely that GIMP is fine because it's free. But its UI is so bad. I don't know about now, but I remember a few years ago someone pointed out that GIMP had over a million dollars in a Bitcoin wallet and hadn't touched any of it in like a decade.

sakjur• 3 days ago

Its history is also one of perseverance. Blender was never a runaway success story, but rather a matter of becoming a little better every day and eventually getting a recognition for that.

embedding-shape5• 3 days ago

Blender was never a runaway success story, but rather a matter of becoming a little better every day

Also some extreme ups and downs along the way, almost succumbing at some point(s) and more along the way. It's a miracle it survived, a miracle performed by Ton Roosendaal most likely.

jijijijij3• 3 days ago

It's not just incredibly powerful software, it's also incredibly fun and intuitive to use (once the UI has clicked with you).

There are still some areas where commercial competitors got edge, but Blender covers a wider base, is the more complete/universal software already. Lot's of people prefer Blender's UI. It's also rapidly developing, the competition is not. I am pretty sure it will become industry standard at some point. Maybe not for the big studios, who invested millions into custom pipelines, but anything up and coming.

Role model FOSS project for sure.

PaulDavisThe1st2• 3 days ago

I am pretty sure it will become industry standard at some point.

I remember people saying this in 2004.

Blender is widely used in "the industry" (whatever that industry is). What is has really accomplished in terms of "the industry standard" has, from my POV, been preventing a proprietary system from becoming the standard. That's what happened in the DAW space, where ProTools was the industry standard, and it has taken 20 years to get to the point where that hegemony is no longer as solid as it once was (thanks, Ableton!)

There are several different choices for all the things Blender does, but the existence of a FLOSS tool that does them (and does them well) prevents any of the proprietary ones from being "the one".

ColdStream2• 3 days ago

Yes, but open source will never work!!!

That is 1000 proof pure distilled sarcasm.

janc_• 3 days ago

The Oscar-winning animated feature movie “Flow” was made with Blender.

mghackerlady8• 2 days ago

I really hope a similar revolution comes to photo and video editing. While there are plenty of really good FOSS video editors (including the one blender has), none of them are truly professional level. For photo editing, the GIMP is pretty much there, but it's old and crusty and maintained by a handful of people

unshavedyak• 8 days ago

For those of you who get value out of Blender please consider donating: https://fund.blender.org/ :)

It's a wonderful project. Even small amounts help. Thanks!

cheschire2• 3 days ago

Done. I was feeling bad for saying how often I used blender without paying a cent not 20 seconds earlier in this very thread. Then I saw your message.

The fact that Apple Pay is an option made it take only another 20 seconds for me to throw some money at a great project.

jijijijij3• 3 days ago

Thanks for the Apple pay hint. That was just what I needed to get me over the mental threshold. It's been literally two clicks.

jambalaya8• 3 days ago

One of my adopted "kids" I taught years ago picked this up at 17. He is 26, now. He "borrowed" the software to start (fair enough; it was a friend's license and not used at the same time), and didn't pay for a copy of Blender until he had a career path in mind and used Blender regularly.

A monthly thing makes no sense; just letting hobbyists dabble until they are in a place to pay used to be a lot more normal. They ought to make the entry for paying a bit less heartburn-inducing, though.

_zamorano_• 3 days ago

Donated. Never used Blender and most likely never will, but to see such professional software going on and facing the big corporations gives me faith.

rafaelmn• 4 days ago

404 link ?

pcdavid• 4 days ago

https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-2/

IshKebab• 3 days ago

The demo reel for this release is seriously impressive. The video editor is also starting to get good. Still pretty buggy though.

LoganDark• 3 days ago

URL is now https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-2/

cheschire2• 3 days ago

If you’re getting a 404 from OP’s link, the URL was updated on their site:

https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-2/

Hopefully a mod sees this.

dang• 3 days ago

Changed from https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-2-lts/ above. Thanks!

maqp• 3 days ago

What's the ideal route for someone familiar with 3ds Max to learn Blender? I feel a bit stuck with my proprietary skillset.

embedding-shape5• 3 days ago

Do tiny projects in Blender and just trudge through the horrible experience of having to look up a bunch of stuff. I also moved from 3ds Max to Blender, but back in the Blender 2.7 days, I'm sure it's easier today.

Basically take whatever you'd do in 3ds Max normally, commit to doing in in Blender and prepare to Google/Ask an LLM "I can do X in 3ds Max 2025, how can I do the same or equivalent in Blender 5.2?" A LOT. Nothing beats practice :)

Gigachad2• 3 days ago

IMO it’s probably better to start following at least one tutorial video which will walk you through most of the common actions and UI.

wildpeaks• 3 days ago

I wish Autodesk had a Creative Cloud equivalent: imagine a 50€ / month subscription that gives access to all Autodesk apps, it would have sold like hotcakes.

By remaining expensive proprietary tools, they lost the new generations of developers who learned 3D with Blender and Houdini Apprentice and who will naturally continue to use them once they become professionals, so the customer base will keep shrinking.

tayo42• 3 days ago

Do people use autodesks products like that?

I think people just pirate all this stuff anyway. I'm kind of surprised about the casualness (and often encouragement)of using cracked software in 3d communities.

azalemeth• 3 days ago

I "grew up" using Cinema 4D. Likewise I just find that the UI of blender is for whatever reason _incredibly_ not intuitive for me. I also don't really like the fact that everything is a youtube video nowadays; I guess it's easier to monetise for the kind people who make tutorials but when I learnt 3D modelling as a teenager (in ~2005 with a desire for 3D printing!) C4D just intuitively "clicked" and they had a lot of hugely detailed, technical information with a lot of physics in it. One of my dad's friends had a license for it, and I was somehow able to just internalise its various primitives and object based workflow.

I've tried many times to get to grips with Blender but for whatever reason I've found doing the simplest things very tiring. If there's a big, illustrated PDF manual out there for a recent version, I'd love to know of a link to it...or even better yet a conversion guide from C4D (!)

jqbd• 3 days ago

Maybe you're biased by children's ease of learning - neural plasticity?

wpm2• 3 days ago

Maybe this'll get me torched but one of the more useful things I've had an LLM do is generate a little tutorial for Blender. Though I'm coming in with zero 3D modeling experience, and the tutorial was for the basics, what I got (and this was with a local quantized Qwen, I'm sure the big boys would've done a better job) was fairly workable.

My issue was yes, it's always a YouTube video, and also always for shit I didn't want to do. I don't want to make a donut. I don't want to model a coffee cup, I want to make something else.

It was full of little errors here and there (the human crafted ones are too because the Blender UI changes so often), but since it had gotten me started and "in" the UI I could usually figure it out myself or use a search engine to find what I was looking for.

yukIttEft• 3 days ago

I'm the same. What helps me is Blender MCP. Then you can ask it how to do things and it will either do it or explain how to do it.

https://www.blender.org/lab/mcp-server/

pierrec• 3 days ago

I also spent a while looking for non-video resources recently. This one is a couple of versions behind but I don't think it's outdated: https://studio.blender.org/training/blender-fundamentals-45-...

The official manual is more readable than you'd think. It actually switches back and forth between "tutorial" and "reference" style. The intro sections are often in tutorial style and the detailed sub-sections are more reference style. It worked well for me for intros to specific topics. https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/index.html

netruk44• 3 days ago

Many people start learning blender with the donut tutorial. It’s pretty famous.

It’s a general beginner tutorial, but blender can be so weird that many skills don’t transfer (like how you move the camera in the viewport).

The tutorial takes you through pretty much everything you need to know to get started with blender. Modeling, texturing, painting, modifiers, compositing, geometry nodes, and rendering. You can skip the parts that seem familiar, since you already know 3DS Max.

BadBadJellyBean3• 3 days ago

I think you need to start learning a lot of things from scratch. They are just very different programs with different concepts and layouts. You can sure transfer some things over but I think it might be best to just start from scratch, skip through the parts you feel familiar with. Try some beginner tutorials like the donut to get some overview and then learn how you learn new stuff. Just maybe try to not to think of it as 3ds Max but different. Blender is a very different experience and not looking it as a migration but a new tool might ease the frustrations.

Geee2• 3 days ago

I used to use 3ds Max and I find the Blender's UI really terrible after years of occasional use. It's very unintuitive and you'll have to learn everything from tutorials / reading Blender forums. It seems to have many annoying quirks, which make me angry every time I use it.

homarp2• 3 days ago

how did you learn 3ds Max?

_carbyau_• 3 days ago

When I started on 3.2 there was a series of 3-5 minute videos covering the absolute basics of the interface, voice by some european (nordic?) guy.(Maybe CGboost 2.8 series?)

Were the concepts basic? Yup. But watching a 5 minute video on 1.5x speed gets through it pretty quick and covers some edge cases for the topic at hand, which can be surprising even at a basic level.

THEN MOST IMPORTANTLY you need to practice using the keyboard shortcut keys which are pretty essential to feeling like a native in Blender.

After the first X number of videos, if you can predict what is coming.. well, then you are bored and you are ready to step onto the next thing and explore that instead.

(edit: stick to points rather than rave on)

embedding-shape5• 3 days ago

Node-powered physics

Ah man, been waiting so long for this, finally! The integration with sound to geometry nodes is also great and will be a lot of fun for music videos.

Every day Blender inches closer to Houdini, and I for one am very happy about it :)

Really like the polished changelog notes they've done for quite some time as well, used to be a huge hassle to actually understand what changed and it's a breeze now.

tecleandor• 3 days ago

An Animusic revival? :)

sm-silversight2• 3 days ago

Blender inches closer to Houdini

Yeah but the distance is crossing the atlantic. I saw this as a blender user who glimpsed houdini a bit.

Damn that's a cool program.

embedding-shape5• 3 days ago

Yeah but the distance is crossing the atlantic

Indeed, a far way to go. But I also remember discussing the Blender UI/UX with people back in 2.5 days, and we were all like "Yeah, the UI is something else, but it is what it is, maybe some day" and look at it now, it's a night and day difference. I have no doubt in Blender's ability to continue iterating over decades to reach something amazing, they've already proven this clearly :)

CooCooCaCha• 3 days ago

I’ve been learning houdini recently, and I have to agree.

In terms of nodes and simulation, Houdini is still lightyears ahead of blender. I say this as someone who loves blender and views the programs as complementary. But still, I was shocked at how deep Houdini is.

With that said, learning Houdini is an unrelenting gauntlet. Blender isn’t exactly easy to learn but it’s a walk in the park compared to Houdini. Even something as simple as creating a material and assigning it to an object is an exercise in frustration.

zuInnp2• 3 days ago

I am using Blender since my Master thesis in 2017. It is impressive how much has happened. Also giving some money to them because they don't get that much donations (if you compare it to Thunderbird for example).

p-e-w• 3 days ago

Wait, Thunderbird is getting more donations than Blender?

I was under the impression that Thunderbird is on life support, while Blender is everywhere.

wccrawford• 3 days ago

A quick AI Google search and some fact-checking later, and yeah. At least as of 2 years ago, Thunderbird was getting 3x the contributions that Blender was.

It just goes to show you how badly managed Thunderbird is, since Blender is doing so much more with the money. I'm more and more disappointed with Mozilla all the time.

Jaxan• 3 days ago

Market size is different: everyone needs a mail client, but not everyone needs 3d modelling.

zuInnp2• 3 days ago

At one of last Blender conferences, the founder (and at that time CEO) gave some insights about funding and compared it to Thunderbird. https://youtu.be/VZ5022VaMmA?si=m1hD9wEQ16s8Zu3b&t=1297 ;

Fore More recent numbers: In 2024[1] (last info I found), Blender had 3.1m € in donations (600k more than the year before) and Thunderbird had around 9m € [2].

I kind of get it, Blender is way more niche than Thunderbird, but imagine what they could do with even more money.

[1] https://download.blender.org/foundation/Blender-Foundation-A... on page 76 [2] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-... I did the money conversion based on today's exchange rates

viccis• 3 days ago

I started pre-1.8, in the C-key era. Haven't used it in many years so looking at it every now and then is genuinely shocking to me how much it's progressed. I remember a family member who worked at a triple A game dev studio giving me a tour and when I talked to the 3D modeler guys there and told them I used Blender they stifled a chuckle. To be fair, it was a very rudimentary tool back with UI flows invented by and for aliens. And now it's used all over the place in both amateur and professional settings.

KPGv22• 3 days ago

Yes, I remember fumblefutzign around in 2000 or 2001, and I can't believe its current state. I'm a writer, not an artist, so I doubt I'll ever get back into it, but I'm so happy to see where it's at.

kdheiwns• 3 days ago

The most impressive thing about Blender is how it feels like early 2000s-era creative software. And I mean that in a good way (blender was actually awful back then, but it's great now)

It opens instantly on my computer. It's fast. It's lightweight to the point my fans don't even spin up no matter what I do. It's customizable. It does everything I want to do and it never gets in the way of me trying to do my job. Meanwhile Photoshop these days randomly shows fucking popups about features and begs me to use its cloud scam, it's slower than it was 20 years ago without offering significantly better features, and the UI has somehow gotten worse when it was fine before. Blender does everything right. All I want is someone to take Blender's design philosophy and make a 2D image editor for desktop. Or hell, everything. I'm sick of bloat and BS in every damn app these days.

dominick-cc• 3 days ago

I have an older version of affinity photo that feels like this, but the new ones use cloud features I don't want so I don't upgrade

BostonFern• 3 days ago

It’s not open-source, but I enjoy using Affinity, especially the updated version after it was acquired by Canva.

pilgrim0• 3 days ago

Blender does open in a blink, it is scary how good it is. I share the exact same perception as yourself. In comparison, sometimes I need to use Fusion 360, and its performance is abysmal. I wish I could do parametric design in blender

tjoff2• 3 days ago

CAD Sketcher add-on adds parametric design to blender. Haven't used it but probably not ready for real use.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92QmjS-xDaI https://hlorus.github.io/CAD_Sketcher/

Though people are so eager to be locked into Fusion 360 I will never understand. Especially when Freecad is so much better than it used to be.

cosmic_cheese3• 3 days ago

IMO, Adobe suite peaked somewhere around CS1/CS2 (which ran happily on my single core 2Ghz iMac G5) and it’s been downhill ever since. A variant of CS2 that’d been feature frozen (aside from smaller technical improvements like wide gamut support) and ruthlessly optimized and bug-fixed up until present day would be vastly preferable to the trainwreck that is CC.

-0_0-• 3 days ago

As a kid with no cash but a lot of passion, I spent months cobbling together a fully working version of Photoshop 7 (pre-CS days) from various files extracted from free demo and upgrade installers. Technically did nothing illegal and ran that single version for a good 18 years across various PCs, eventually powering a large media company's output with it (in fact there's a very good chance anyone reading this will have seen some of my Photoshop work given the reach of that company).

The main reason I never upgraded was that it was FAST, and until Adobe started rolling out AI features around 2020 there were almost no notable additions made to Photoshop other than new versions seemingly getting slower and arguably uglier. To this day I'll still occasionally boot up the old Photoshop 7 if I don't need to use content-aware fill, and I'll marvel at how zippy it feels.

mghackerlady8• 2 days ago

I feel like a project to make an adobe CS competitor, limited in scope to those early versions like CS1 or 2, could really get off the ground. I suspect for 99% of users, things added since the CS1/CS2 days aren't really used enough that not having them becomes a dealbreaker

robertoandred3• 3 days ago

I wouldn’t call Blender’s UI particularly great either. The assumption that you have three mouse buttons and a separate number pad is pretty crazy.

tredre32• 3 days ago

Three buttons mice have been the standard for well over 20 years. I'll give you that when blender was first released, three button mice were not common.

Those assumptions are only crazy if you're an Apple user or a laptop user who uses a touchpad to 3d model.

ben-schaaf• 3 days ago

Blender has multiple options for emulating a middle mouse button. I can use blender just fine on my laptop with a touchpad.

As for the numpad you can use the tilde key or alt+drag to switch views. There's also a handy gizmo.

mghackerlady8• 2 days ago

Those are, and at the time of blenders creation were, assumptions that should be made for workstations. Things objectively work better with more buttons

lobo_tuerto• 3 days ago

Look at that wow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqfLYIJMv7I

simonw2• 3 days ago

Thanks for that link, I really enjoyed that. I had no idea quite how varied the work people were creating with Blender was these days.

dmsehuang2• 3 days ago

holy. this is a pretty cool video. I am learning how to use AI to vibe coding blender videos and this is like very good!

gchamonlive2• 3 days ago

How well do agents interact with blender? Do they modify files directly or through an API/mcp?

arijun• 3 days ago

Yeah, their sizzle reel is pretty incredible. I wish they had a hyperlinked version of the credits, so many clips I would want to see the whole source for.

baisampayans• 3 days ago

This on a M5 Max machine with 40 core GPU and 48GB ram is pretty fast. Preview cycles directly on the canvas without much delay. Can't say the same on my older M1 Ultra machine. Blender has come a long way and is very impressive how it is evolving in such a good way.

jonhohle• 3 days ago

I worked on a short this past year, primarily on an M1 Pro 32GB. This was mostly compositing a single visible model into a scene and modeling shadowcatchers, lighting, holdouts, etc. Modeling was typically fast, but I was surprised at what tanked render times and how there was little ability to debug what that was. A modifier here, a filter in the compositing graph there, and something that started as a 10s/frame render jumped to multiple minutes with no way to easily identify the culprit other than a binary search through half a dozen configuration panels.

That and the lack of easy portability (say modeling on my Mac and then handing off to a more powerful (or less utilized) desktop for rendering), made the learning curve steep.

I’m a novice and barely got the things done that I wanted to do, but was happy with the output. Maybe I’ll do more in the future, but finding tutorials for beginners for the latest interface was also challenging.

brcmthrowaway• 3 days ago

There's got to be a profile tool somewhere right?

mixmastamyk2• 3 days ago

Can’t render a scene from a command line? Should be doable for anything running on Unix. Need to have the assets available however.

bob1029• 3 days ago

Nothing feels better than mastering a specific workflow in Blender. After using visual studio all day, it's like a breath of fresh air to click through a scene and have the tool respond like it actually cares about UX.

agumonkey6• 3 days ago

I've always been confused how all the CGI world is helping you get into flow with complex data while IDEs felt so heavy and glitchy.

amelius• 3 days ago

Nothing feels better than mastering a specific workflow in Blender.

But nothing feels lousier than coming back after a few months and finding out that you've forgotten how the workflow goes.

kroaton2• 3 days ago

And that's when you learn Houdini and open up a workflow from 2008 and it still works the same, despite SideFX pushing out an insane amount of features every release (look at their SneakPeaks).

ksec• 3 days ago

Slightly Off topic: For those working inside the industry, Is the professional space still dominated by 3D Studio Max and Maya?

I just checked Lightwave 3D and Cinema 4D is still getting updated. Just found out Zbush got bought by Cinema 4D. And Foundry decided to wind down development of Modo. A lot of these names were big in late 90s and early 00s. I am wondering if everything is still pretty much the same.

Speaking of 3D Modelling software I am still pissed the whole CGtalk forum got deleted and decades of community knowledge wasn't even backed up or sold.

jayd16• 3 days ago

I wish Blender was more popular but for the game industry I still think Maya and even Houdini are more common in my circles.

That said, Blender is respected. I think it'll get there but still has to battle through momentum.

lvl1552• 3 days ago

It’d pretty much Houdini plus render engine of your choice. Blender will eventually get there especially if someone rolls out an AI module.

dagmx• 3 days ago

The commercial Autodesk apps still dominate, as do Maxon apps like C4D for motion graphics and zbrush for sculpting.

The big problems are that license cost doesn’t outweigh the pain points. In production I can get support from Autodesk for specific bugs without rediverting my production resources to fixing it.

Blender has no C++ API and even the Python api is not stable version to version. Studios live by maximizing their competitive advantage and that takes the form of extending the DCCs with custom pipelines and high performance plugins. With blender I’d have to maintain a full fork.

Also blender’s ghost UI system is significantly worse than Qt. It also means I can’t share the Qt tools I built for the rest of the apps with blender.

And while Ton was still CEO he heavily told studios he didn’t want their business. He believed blender shouldn’t be part of a pipeline but be the whole pipeline. These were his explicit words in a presentation blender gave at SIGGRAPH.

For background, I was a lead engineer in the film industry and still am quite involved with industry development while also contributing to blenders code base. My partner also works for one of the big animation studios.

I think blender is great and it’s seeing adoption professionally but there’s a lot of fundamental things that need solving before it displaces the current status quo DCCs.

maccard4• 3 days ago

Games are still almost completely maya. At a studio I worked in, we had a handful of people who used blender but would export to maya because of all the tooling we had for maya.

agumonkey6• 3 days ago

was this all builtin maya features or a lot of commercial extensions for game artists ?

doublerabbit• 3 days ago

Nuke, Fusion and Houdini are the de-facto for animation and still very heavily used.

I've worked in the animation and currently the VFX realm.

mghackerlady8• 2 days ago

I know games at least are still predominantly done in Maya. That's starting to change, with newcomers having learnt blender and anything indie-adjacent using blender for years, but large AAA studios have used Maya for so long switching still isn't worth it

lvl1552• 3 days ago

Even if you never use Blender, I highly recommend you to donate to the organization if you happen to donate to non-profit tech organizations/projects.

aitchnyu• 3 days ago

As a Python fan, the mention of a node-based physics engine was a jumpscare.

jokoon• 3 days ago

Blender is certainly a great software, but there are still remains of bad UI choices, for example how zooming works

https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/644/why-does-the...

They improved the UI already, but maybe they could improve it a little bit more. And this is not the only frustration, I constantly have to ask around for little things like that.

Also important to know, but late blender versions don't support old GPU, which is a bit sad: I can't use late blender version on my old thinkpad which only has a graphics chipset.

neonmagenta• 3 days ago

Blender is one of the most infuriatingly un-intuitive UIs I've ever experienced. It's always having to be used with it in one screen, a myriad of guides/forums/etc on the other.

kilpikaarna• 3 days ago

Do you have a preferred 3D (polygon) modelling/graphics tool where you feel like you don't need to keep up guides and forums?

I've been hearing this complaint since Blender 2.48 twenty years ago, where it might've had some merit. But even then you could still pick it up in at most a few weeks with focused study, and the biggest non-intuitive (in terms of adherence to things like OS guidelines etc) and Blender-specific features and workflows remain the same to this day, and the interface overall is remarkably consistent and effective once you get used to it.

The only thing I can see that comes close to doing the same thing in terms of a general/integrative/swiss-army-knife-of 3D content creation suite are to this day Autodesk Maya and 3ds max, and maybe increasingly UE and Unity. I wouldn't exactly say you can just "intuitively" click around in any of those and high-quality results come out by default. Other software may be better at specific things and perhaps offer a more focused UI for some subset of tasks, sure, but at that point you're using the wrong tool sticking with Blender.

But in basically all cases, as soon as you're doing anything moderately complex, you're constantly referring to the manual/LLMs/tutorial videos. This stuff is just difficult, man, and most of the difficulty is even orthogonal to the software itself!

swordsith• 2 days ago

I'd bet your issues with blender could be fixed with configuration or rebuilding the program with older graphics renderers available, it being open source makes alot of the preference issues with blender resolvable imo.

raincole3• 3 days ago

As someone who spent quite some time (>1000hr) in Houdini, I really wonder what's the secret behind Blender's rendering engines and why SideFX failed to catch up. Cycles are so much faster than Karma on my machine. Eevee can get impressive results in real time while Houdini's real time viewport is bare bone.

agumonkey6• 3 days ago

Interesting, maybe major customers are insisting on other features ?

raincole3• 3 days ago

I suppose that's the main reason as Houdini's real customers are those who can afford huge render farms. Even before Karma, Houdini's renderer (Mantra) wasn't known for its speed.

That's quite a bummer for me, an indie user. With the foundation Houdini has established, they probably could've released a real time viewport composition before Blender. But at the end of the day it doesn't make a lot of business sense for SideFX to care about users like me.

swerner• 3 days ago

Cycles is getting direct code contributions from all major hardware vendors.

greenknight2• 3 days ago

The thing is, Cycles is fully open sourced... so there is no real secret behind it!

kroaton2• 3 days ago

They've been investing heavily into this over the last 2 releases, but it's just that SideFX is a really small company. I think they have 50 people or so right now. Karma is way more accurate than Cycles, but slow. Karma XPU is a mixed bag.

summarity2• 3 days ago

The question is why don’t they integrate cycles? I mean I have a random app for home planning on macOS and even that comes with Cycles as the rendering engine. Can’t be that hard.

socalgal23• 3 days ago

I love that Blender exists and I donate to it at a high-ish $$$ level monthly.

That said, I can't help but feel something is wrong with 3D asset creation in that becoming an expert at Blender or 3DSMax, Maya or literally any other 3D creation software, it's a multi-month if not multi-year project. There are 1000s upon 1000s of options buried all over in nested upon nested options.

Maybe AI will solve this. You ask for or sketch what you want and it does the 3000 steps to create it for you.

There just has to be a better way than what we have now. It (3d asset creation) practially hasn't changed much since ~1995. If you compare 3DSMax 1995 to Blender, with few execptions, you'll find them very recognizable. Yes, there are amazing features that have been added but still. It's quite a slog to get good at, not just artistic good, that's a whole extra level of training, I just mean good at knowing where and how to use the software.

I wish I had an idea for how to make it easier.

uncivilized3• 3 days ago

Why does it have to be easier? It’s like asking for soccer to be easier so you can play in the World Cup.

pilaf• 3 days ago

Soccer is hard because it's competitive though. Kicking a ball around and putting it between two posts is easy enough, but it gets hard as soon as you have someone trying to do the same in the opposite direction better than you.

Tools should be as easy as they can afford to be without making serious compromises. I have no idea how much room Blender has for becoming easier, but if there is any it should be taken.

another-dave• 3 days ago

that feels like the opposite analogy though - filleting a fish to the precision of a Michelin starred kitchen might be hard, but knives in general are easy to use, even for a beginner.

bigyabai2• 3 days ago

One benefit of Blender is that it does lean pretty hard into separating distinct workflows. When you're using it on a team, you can teach people one tab at a time, and let them explore sculpting or texturing if that's their skillset.

It did take me ~5 years to get comfortable with the majority of Blender's features, but I made decent contributions to a small project before then. Solo stuff is much harder since you have to play the one-man-band by yourself.

kg• 3 days ago

It (3d asset creation) practially hasn't changed much since ~1995.

I don't think this is strictly true, not only are there new approaches to modeling like mudbox and such, but the nature of the assets people are creating is meaningfully different in 2026 than it was in 1995. The polycounts are orders of magnitude higher, the way you texture and shade the models is different, etc.

And then the actual hardware being used to render the finished assets is very different - it's much faster, it has dedicated acceleration for rasterization and ray/path tracing, etc. Fewer compromises are necessary to deliver your 3D assets to the viewer than back in 1995 and it's cheaper to deliver them.

It's true that a lot of the fundamentals haven't changed though. I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

10000truths2• 3 days ago

A lot of those options are necessary complexity, not incidental. 3D modeling and animation are just very complex series of tasks, you can't condense the options much without sacrificing functionality for some critical workflow. The only way to satisfy both:

a) Having lots of options

b) Making those options discoverable for beginners

is with some kind of nested categorization scheme. Any UI you create to render that will naturally converge onto a high-fan-out tree-like menu.

sysguest• 2 days ago

well if you looked at blender 2 days, UI was really "user-hostile" level difficult/un-intuitive

I think about blender 4? there was a big UI overhaul here

socalgal23• 2 days ago

A lot of those options are necessary complexity, not incidental.

I believe this is false. I believe we just haven't figure out how to do it. I know it's not the same but if you give a sculpture a piece of clay they do not need 10000 options to mold it. Even a carpenter or wood smith don't need that many options.

I'm not saying I have the answer. I learned 3DSMax in 1995 and write extensive plugins for both 3DSMax and Maya (and PowerAnimator). I think someone just hasnt't figured out the better way and eventually they will.

mohamedkoubaa• 3 days ago

A future where everything is very easy to learn is kind of dystopian

ColdStream2• 3 days ago

I think it is more an attempt at a difficult task. Easy to pickup the basics but having lots of room to grow.

diamondtea2• 3 days ago

As both a Photoshop and Blender expert (used both professionally for many years), almost all of it is heuristic/technique (memorizing what/where things are) not unlike learning kitchen utensils and the locations of the drawers they’re in.

So it’s

1) knowing what you even need to do in the first place to make the sphere, or swap the texture, or delete the lights, or etc.

2) where that tool is and how it works

Then later you can get into hotkeys and what your workspace looks like, and you can develop more of a command of things. Just start very goal oriented and pretend you’re staying in an Airbnb in a foreign country - you just need to figure out how the stuff works and where they are.

Hope that helps! Oh yeah and then there’s the typical OS level menus like saving, exporting - you probably natively know how to do that stuff already. So you can also use Blender to convert say glb to fbx and so-on, while making little edits you might need.

Be obsessed with your project so you have to use these things.

Animats• 3 days ago

almost all of it is heuristic/technique (memorizing what/where things are) not unlike learning kitchen utensils and the locations of the drawers they’re in.

Then, in the next release, they move.

Yesterday's Blender experience: for some reason, mouse pans stopped working. Zoom and orbit still worked, but pan didn't. No idea why. Had to quit and restart.

scotty79• 3 days ago

not unlike learning kitchen utensils and the locations of the drawers they’re in.

The problem is it's someone else's very messy kitchen where nothing is where you expect it to be.

It matters where things are. Photoshop vs Fireworks, CAD vs Sketch-Up.

The problem with this software is that you can't make it yours when you enter it.

I think AI will solve this, by searching where the utensils are and putting them where it is convenient for you specifically.

jamesfinlayson2• 3 days ago

I'm glad it's not just me - I do game modding in my spare time and I figured out how to use Hammer to make maps - it took a day or two but I figured it out.

I wanted to make some models too but when I downloaded Blender and looked at a tutorial to create a cube and I just thought... why is this so complicated? It looks easier now (I was probably looking at doing it close to 20 years ago) but back then it seemed crazy that there was a long tutorial just to create a cube.

I played with a simpler modelling program called Anim8or (https://www.anim8or.com/) and it was quite nice to use though - I could create shapes and drag the vertices and it all seemed quite intuitive.

arvinsim• 3 days ago

I created a whole Counterstrike map back in the day in a few days.

Meanwhile, I can't get anything substantially done in Blender in a week. I just gave up.

orbital-decay• 3 days ago

If you compare 3DSMax 1995 to Blender, with few execptions, you'll find them very recognizable.

Workflows from 1995 have basically nothing in common with modern ones, everything is completely different and specialized in a lot of ways.

alightsoul• 3 days ago

There's already ai models that create 3d assets

bs94• 3 days ago

Why does it take a year for the cow to produce a calf?

Why cant it just spontaneously generate it as soon as the egg and sperm meet?

Take the Same question but replace calf with priest, surgeon, weather forecaster, chartered accountant, musician, chef etc. What is going on in these processes that requires so much time?

yowlingcat• 3 days ago

My guess is that there's probably a missing abstraction layer in the 3d editors somewhere. I am pretty bullish on AIs ability to solve this problem, even just based on existing image to 3d models like TRELLIS and HY3D. They work pretty darn well and take a lot of the burden out of not just modeling, but texturing and uv unwrapping.

That being said, I have a correlate here for music production and you could definitely make a lot of the same arguments about it, and they'd be true -- really high learning curve to make something halfway decent even assuming you have the taste part sorted. Some of it is the ability to just creatively think in another language once you become fluent in it.

I think AI can give you leverage when it does stuff you could actually do it manually yourself because you can manually evaluate it and correct it competently. The hard part is how would you evaluate work that is beyond your current competence level?

If that isn't easy, if it's incompressible relative to your current skill level, then that's the very human part that will always be a bottleneck. And that's fascinating to me because if there were better AI tools for music production when I picked it up a few decades ago, I don't know that I would have developed the same fundamentals.

What will fundamentals look like in a post-agentic world? If a lot of the manual gruntwork disappears or is more heavily abstracted, I believe that will matter a lot more.

raincole3• 3 days ago

It (3d asset creation) practially hasn't changed much since ~1995.

I disagree. In the past ~20 years, more and more 3D assets have been created as very high-poly models and high-res textures first (via sculpting, photogrammetry and baking) and the optimization process was pushed to much later stages. I'm quite sure it was not the case in 1995.

It's just like programming. We do have better tools and abstraction layers. But Jevons paradox got us.

Or perhaps I don't understand how things were done in 1995 as much as I believe?

dgently7• 18 hours ago

in 3d we have "blinns law", someone else probably has a better definition but basically it says that we keep adding complexity and details to a scene until it takes about an hour to render a frame. that being about as long as any artist is willing to wait to see their work. so even though a computer today could render toy story 1 in faster than real time, toy story 5 probably rendered per frame as about the same amount of time as toy story 1.

throw0101d• 2 days ago

There are 1000s upon 1000s of options buried all over in nested upon nested options.

As the old saying: everyone needs just 20% of the features, but it's a different 20% for teach individual.

Farfignoggen• 11 hours ago

Blender SYCL Back End question, is there any potential there to get Polaris and Vega iGPUs/dGPUs working for GPU accelerated Cycles rendering via SYCL? And so AMD's abandoned Polaris and Vega for ROCm/HIP support but what about SYCL and that Accelerator ecosystem that's more cross platform in the same manner that OpenCL once was with regards to GPU compute!

Blender 5.2 LTS

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