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[oahda]

I love Blender. Used it for a while before I had to use Maya in school, and I just couldn't learn to like it. It felt so incredibly outdated and clunky when compared to Blender despite being industry standard. That's my main selling point for Blender: it feels so modern. I'm sure Max and Maya run circles around Blender in many specialised areas, but for plain old modelling I prefer Blender so much more.

The shortcuts for almost everything in Blender makes stuff so incredibly efficient once you learn them, and the ease at which you can specify an axis or an exact number without letting go of the keyboard makes symmetry so immensely easy. And before you know the shortcuts, you can always just hit space and search for the thing you want, which is still more efficient than navigating dropdowns. And the fact that menus always remember the last item you picked makes repetitive tasks really manageable.

Blender does look scary when you first step into it. There are so many buttons everywhere. I always called it a spaceship. But most of those buttons are safely ignored until you know what they do and you need them. Of course the curve is slightly higher if you're stepping into it learning not just Blender itself, but also 3D modelling in general for the first time. I had great success following the wikibook Noob to pro all those years ago (tho I'd admittedly dabbled with other software like Milkshape (anybody remember that‽) before then).

[Garthy]

Thankyou everyone for sharing your experiences with Blender. It seems like so much has changed since I last used it. I did *not* hear this sort of praise for it back in the early days.

I've just been browsing the Blender site and it looks like a completely different tool than the one I last used. :D

I'll be sure to check out tutorials when learning to use it, thanks for the tips and resources.

I just discovered that apparently Blender is also used for 3D printing, something I've just started looking at. Wow. :O

> Milkshape (anybody remember that‽)

Oh, yes. I'd purchased a license for it and was experimenting with it when I was considering adding a sixth game to E.V.E. Paradox. It was relatively easy to use and I'd written some code to convert from its simple export format (memory fuzzy here on details) to a format my engine could use. That sixth game was never completed but my intention was to use it to create the simple models that I needed for that game.

[oahda]

Yeah, Blender is quite the multitool! Also has a game engine and a video editor.

[BorisTheBrave]

If you used blender before 2.50, they completely overhauled the UI. It's night and day. Though it's still not super as everyone above noted.

They're getting close to the next major overhaul of the UI, lots more "on-screen" interactive widgets rather than looking like a spreadsheet of buttons and sliders, which I think will help quite a bit.

I used to think blender was the best thing since sliced bread, but if you look at professional, specialized, tools it's generally a step behind. But that is still an amazing achievement for an OS project, Blender has an incredible range of stuff it supports, which other projects rarely strive for.

[gimymblert]

Though I would like to know what are the things other tools do better, generally things people told me was just them not knowing blender enough. I do know there is some miss, I think the normal baking isn't top tier, but then there is dedicated tool to that, the texture tools isn't photoshop, but that's still handy to accelerate the workflow by preparing and fixing texture, the game engine is lagging hard in ease of use but then it's functional. But modeling specific stuff? I would like to know!

[BorisTheBrave]

But modeling specific stuff? I would like to know!

Blender is still very oriented around polygon modelling. Its sculpting support is pretty limited. Watch a few tutorials on ZBrush or Mudbox for comparison.

Ditto non-destructive modelling which (apparently?) is all the rage these days.

Blender's workflow around rendering is still limited. There's no real integration between Blender and, say, UDK. I gather other tools let you preview game assets using the same shaders etc they would actually use in the game. Important if you are an artist painting textures (and also why texture painting in the modeller is important). See the "Principled" shader coming soon, which is meant to remedy this.

And, as everyone says, the UI is just meh. The shortcuts are reasonably laid out these days, but still nothings discoverable. It's non-visual, which is not good for artists. Basically, the UI is 50% designed by programmers and 50% constrained by the limited way operators can be implemented.

Operators are way less flexible than in other products, because they are pretty much all just a bunch of sliders and check buttons. Compare with ZBrush, where operations have a number of other options which are common between operations, such as how they interact with polygroups, normals, and so on. That means once you've mastered those concepts, *every* operator becomes more powerful to you. Many more operators have on-screen widgets, which are nice, and shows each operator has been really looked after to maximize usability.

For all its flaws, Blender rapidly improves year on year, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to indie devs.

[gimymblert]

Okay I understood, I didn't thought about zbrush, but lightwave, max and maya lol. Which is what people compare to it and generally it seems to bog down to "it's not integrated in professional pipeline because tradition".

[oahda]

Stumbled across a relevant tweet. https://twitter.com/tonroosendaal/status/561926895458328576

[oahda]

New Unity finally updated to C# 6.0!

[gimymblert]

So is the new terrain system revealed?
have they finally done nested prefabs?
Can the size of fonts be changed to be legible on 2k and 4k screens?

I haven't watched the unite europe 2017 video yet, I don't know what's new -_-'

[oahda]

No idea. I only watched one presentation which was on the cinemachine and timeline (very nice) as well as some performance/parallel stuff which was neat too, but beyond that I have some catching up to do. Also this: https://twitter.com/cubed2D/status/884824027176587264

There are probably complete release notes somewhere.

[gimymblert]

Also this: https://twitter.com/cubed2D/status/884824027176587264

whoaa

[ProgramGamer]

I suspect that this is Hearthstone tech that they decided to integrate into Unity.

No real proof or hint that it's the case, it just seems like something that would be really useful to a company making a card game in Unity, and maybe Blizz wanted to be generous.

[oahda]

Lots more uses for sprite masks than card!

[ProgramGamer]

Agreed! It was just baseless conjecture after all 

[oahda]

Some more news: https://twitter.com/CiroContns/status/884855131598139395

[gimymblert]

Some more news: https://twitter.com/CiroContns/status/884855131598139395

Can you make objects move at different physics timescale ?

It does have some gotchas though: for instance you advance the simulation for all objects rather than "per-object".

oh

[Richard Kain]

I'm already thinking of a few things that I could do with those sprite masks. Things that I had been wanting to do, but hadn't figured out how to make them properly happen. I once wrote a custom shader in order to get a similar "card" structure, so that wasn't the first place my head was going, though I can definitely see the utility there.

For someone like me, who has always had an interest in machinima, this Unity update is going to be huge. The camera/sequence editing is a huge boon, allowing for visual manipulation of timed sequences of events instead of having to script them all out manually. Makes things easier on the editing process, and easier for some trial-and-error. A very welcome addition. This update will make Unity a lot more viable as an engine for point-and-click adventure games. (a genre that frequently required scripted sequences)

For the time being, I won't be retargeting on the new version. Never a good idea to rush to support the new version on an in-progress project. All sorts of problems you can run into there. Using an older but more stable and familiar version of a software platform is usually the way to go. However, I will be installing the new version, and using it as a testing environment for some of the Assets I'm working on. That's just sensible.

[gimymblert]

I'm working on a machinima system for my game too, lol
All these update will allow me to focus on teh core component though, digital puppetry.

[Garthy]

Recently achieved a major milestone in a project I've been working on. Quite satisfying to get there as I've been working toward it for a while.

http://www.entropicsoftware.com/aie/sat/overview.html