The State of Open Source 3D Modeling

gmueckl writes "Since Blender was released as open source in 2002, it has basically owned the open source 3D modeling scene. Its development has seen a massive push by both the community and supporting organizations. However, the program has been showing its age all along and efforts to improve on it have either been blocked or have failed in the past (note the dates). Authors of new modules are forced to jump through hoops to get their work glued onto the basic core, which still dates from the early 90s and has gone almost unchanged since. There are many other active projects out there like Art of illusion, K-3D, and Moonlight|3D. Each of them offers a modern, much saner, more coherent, and more powerful basic architecture and could match Blender in a couple of months' time with some extra manpower. So how come these projects don't get the level of support they deserve? How come developers are still willing to put up with such an arcane code base?"

because

they're stupid...that's why everyone does everything

It's there, and it works

As much as people may hate Blender, the main advantage of the program is that it is there, and that most things work. Some parts are even great. Personally I happen to like the poly-workflow, which is very fast. The main problem with blender for most users is that it takes a while to learn, but once it's learnt, it has a very effective workflow.

I think that the OP is very optimistic when he sais that it takes only a few months to port everything (and the kitchensink) to another app, that is just impossible, even with open code.

Re:It's there, and it works

I'm the main author of Moonlight|3D. Getting that program to where it is now is the result of many a long night of coding during the last couple of years. Some parts of that type of software really are hard to create. In that part you seem to have made the same experience. But I've also gained enough confidence in the basic design of that application (and learned many lessions from it, too) that I have a pretty good idea of what is possible. And I honestly believe that a project like K-3D can show a higher pace of development than Blender with equal manpower because the foundations are laid out properly. This is not a plug for my project. I am fairly certain that my program is not the one that takes on Blender if that ever happens. I know that I have made my share of (incredibly stupid) mistakes and correcting them will take a considerable amount of time.

Re:It's there, and it works

"But I've also gained enough confidence in the basic design of that application (and learned many lessions from it, too) that I have a pretty good idea of what is possible."

Pretty much every developer that has joined Blender has spent some time looking over the codebases of the other opensource 3D applications. Your claim of a month is absolutely ridiculous - even a year would be an insane time line. At a minimum you are looking at a requiring a similar sized developer base as Blender at least 3 years of full time development before any of the other 3D apps can even come close to Blenders functionality as of right now.

Here is a very brief list of what you need to approach the basic functionality that Blender has

Modeling tools - asside from Blender the only half reasonable polygon modeling tool available is Wings3D(which is written in Erlang). In addition to a strong core of standard polygon modeling tools Blender also has sculpt modeling, curve modeling, metaball modeling, NURBS, etc.

UV Unwrapping - wings has basic UV unwrapping - Blenders are considered one of the best implementations in the 3D industry. As far as I'm aware all of the apps you mention have at best very basic tools.

Texturing - Blender has full node based materials and texturing; Blender has 3D painting and texturing tools. To my knowledge none of the apps you propose have either of those features.

Basic animation - you need good rigging and skinning tools for character animation. You need cage deformation, hooks, a driver system etc. I think AOI has okay rigging but other than that?

Simulation - physics, particles, fluids, crowds, hair. Presumably some of the apps you list have very basic collision integrated? Some also might have very basic particles. The difference between where they are at, and where they would need to be to match Blenders current capabilities is tremendous.

Compositing - not crucial for a 3D application to have - but this is a powerful feature of Blender having an integrated compositor in its rendering pipeline.

Rendering - do any of the projects you list have multipass rendering even?

Scripting - Blenders API has been refactored a few times, this has caused some pain among scripters, but the API has been steadily maturing and is quite large and powerful.

Exporters and Importers - how many and how mature are exporters for any of your suggested programs? A fairly complete and mature exporter or importer can in itself represent numerous man years of effort.

Sequencer - again not crucial to meet the definition of a standard 3D animation suite - but again a powerful feature that is part of Blender.

Logic nodes and game engine - yet another feature that wouldn't be a strict requirement to become a reasonable competitor in the 3D animation suite space, but another tool that is an important part of Blender for part of our user base.

I get the impression that you have absolutely no idea how much time and effort it would take to become a serious competitor as a 3D animation suite. No disrespect but Moonlight 3D isn't even 1% of the way there, and yet in your estimation it would only take a month to 'catch up'.

LetterRip

Re:It's there, and it works

Right, learning Blender is no worse than learning Maya. Also, the interface is unique, but I wouldn't dare call it dated. Finally, I'll have to disagree with the jumping-through-hoops thing. A guy named Brecht has created a Sub Surface Scattering module, which will has been added to the 2.44 Release Candidates only 2 weeks after he began showing it off. - Avid user of Blender

Re:It's there, and it works

Frankly, the OP is full of shit. While blender development is a bit slow, they have made substantial progress. Recently (as in 2005) they rewrote the framework in order to allow 3dsmax-style widgets. They've added fluid simulation, scripting -- all kinds of stuff. They made an animated short, partly to see what features artists wanted, and partly to promote blender. This article is on par with the "BSD is dying" troll, except it's more like saying "Linux is dying", as Blender is easily the most advanced OSS modeler out there.

People like to bitch about the interface -- yes, it is confusing at first. But you have to use it for more than a few hours. Do the blender tutorial. After playing with blender, I took a class in 3dsmax -- seriously, once you learn the keystrokes for blender, you never want to go back. In this, it's comparable to vi or emacs.

Most likely, the OP got his nose bent out of joint because they wouldn't switch over to XML, so he decided to slander the project on slashdot.

Rewriting

I dont think blender code is that arcane, i know Tom was doing some rewriting, they are aware that the core needs updates and they are doing it, it just needs time. Game engine was coded again with a different engine, render path it hink got updated too.

Re:Rewriting

'it started to outgrow itself'

In what manner?

'Blender still suffers from that'

In what way does blender suffer?

'have a solid design which is able to grow'

In what way are the designs solid? What about the design of blender makes it less solid? Specifically what aspect of blender is unable to grow and what is the difference in these other applications that makes them able to grow?

'applications like Maya, Softimage and Houdini have demonstrated that'

In what manner?

'Comparing blender to all of those on a design level makes blender stand out as the toy.'

In what fashion?

Do you have any constructive criticism or is this entire post just a troll? Can you name any specific features, design constructs, or methods that are actually superior in these applications or do you just prefer in the interface in the commercial applications you learned in?

Re:Rewriting

All the programs I tend to point out are usually built around a scene representation that is more than just a simple scene graph. There is some serious parametrization going on at some level. In Maya, for instance, every operation that goes beyond tweaking the positions of some mesh vertices is stored as a separate node in the graph with parameters that can be altered after the fact. This provides a base for lots and lots of features: it's easy to animate node parameters if that should be desired. Art of Illusion for instance allows those nodes to be user-defined scripts (maybe Maya allows that, too - I don't know). YOu can go back and change things you did earlier without rebuilding the entire object if you find out that you made a mistake (e.g. if a revolved or lofted shape doesn't quite look like you want). If you know GEGL you could think of the design that I'm talking about as some sort of of 3D version of that approach. Every decent 3D modelling program that I've seen implements a variation of that, Blender being the big exception. If done right, this design is incredibly versatile and modular. Implementing a proper user interface on top may be a bit tough, though.

Re:Rewriting

gmueckl,

I'm sorry sir but you seriously mistaken,

"
Blender is a design that was never intended to grow into what it is now. Remember that it was an inhouse developement of an animation studio so the whole application was designed to get the job done that was at hand."

Perhaps you should read about Blenders actual history?

http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundati on/history/ [blender.org]

Blender was a rewrite of the inhouse design tool of neo-geo. The design of the rewrite was very forward looking. There were a few design errors, one such design error due to Blender being used inhouse is that the input design wasn't made easily customizable. This error is one that we are going to correct with Blender 2.50.

"But when the program itself was commercialized it started to outgrow itself. This was never anticipated and Blender still suffers from that."

It had been anticipated that Blender was to be commercialized. The technological and design foundations of Blender are pretty impressive. Blender has had some issues (all but a small handful of which have been addressed), but not anticipating commercialization is not one of them.

"The other applications that I pointed out have a solid design which is able to grow. Commercial applications like Maya, Softimage and Houdini have demonstrated that. Comparing blender to all of those on a design level makes blender stand out as the toy."

I suspect that you have close to zero knowledge about the designs of XSI, Maya, or Houdini similar to your close to zero knowledge of Blenders design.

Blender has been able to sustain absolutely ridiculous growth rates in its code base and functionality. Professional 3D artists find the pace of development eye popping/jaw dropping.

LetterRip

Showing age?

It's easy to pick on the XML bit (though I don't understand why XML is so awesome it has to be used), but that's a pretty small demerit compared to all the major feature enhancement Blender has attained over the past few years.

It's earned a fluid simulator. Particle effects have been dramatically improved, yafray integration was a huge improvement for rendering, materials can now be created with a node based system.. the list goes on and on. The feature enhancements that went into the latest point release is worth an essay all on their own:

http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/bl ender-243/ [blender.org]

Blender stays afloat because it's seeing active development and is already a mature platform. People are used to the interface (one that newbies hate, but veterans fall in love with), and it runs on all three of the major operating systems.

I don't think an aging codebase is a critical flaw. Too often people think redesigning the wheel is a panacea for repairing a kludgy system, without realizing that all code projects fall prey to this at some point in their life. Sure we could rewrite Blender.. but to what end? It'd take another 5 years to get where we are now.

Level of support

So how come these projects don't get the level of support they deserve?

Because the issue hasn't been posted to the front page of /. until now.

Blender changes over time

There have been huge changes to Blender over time. For example, the physics engine in the game engine was replaced with a much better one. The original poster is apparently wound up about some XML import/export thing, which is minor. You can write Blender import/export filters in Python, and many such filters exist.

Blender has some problems, but converting its files to an XML format isn't one of them.

Re:Blender changes over time

No, but it touches on an aspect of Blender that I happend to be familiar with at the time: the crufty file loading and saving code. All that XML stuff would have helped to sanitize that part of the code. The basic idea behind Blender's file format is not bad, but with all the changes that were made to Blender's data structures the strong ties between the file format and data structures led to long lists of hacks that were introduced to keep the program compatible with older versions. I picked that example for two reasons: it's documented and easy to get into. Many other issues are only discussed in IRC so there is no real record of them.

Another problem is Blenders old user interface code. It dates back quite some time and it surely has been updated time and again. But because it is a library that does everything by itself on top of OpenGL and thin wrappers around the actual windowing system it did not get proper support for multiple screens yet although this has been called for some time now. User interface translations are a similar topic which has been tried time and again and still isn't fully accomplished. Back in the days when Blender ran on SGI workstations the decision for an own UI toolkit made sense. But times change.

blender is here to stay.

I dont't see any open source competitor for blender any time soon.
blender already has quite a lot of features, not to mention game engine and other tools.
plug the fact that it's light weight, fast and cross platform. (while maintaining the same UI everywhere.)
blender may have some old cruft every here and there.
but it doesn't really bother me.

so what do these are "not yet here" apps offer me?

Re:blender is here to stay.

"Actually working on 64-bit platforms is nice. Reference"

Blender worked on 64 bit platforms, but it wasn't recommended since the output of the files wasn't guaranteed to be portable between 32 and 64 bit versions of Blender. For 2.44 being 64 bit clean again (it was for the majority of its history) was one of the goals.

"Also, I think it's a personal problem, but I haven't been able to get Blender to even work on my system."

Sounds like a bad opengl driver, you can try upgrading or downgrading your driver; turning down hardware accelleration; and turning off antialiasing - those tend to fix 99% of the common issues.

LetterRip

Doesn't matter

Well instead of trying to match Blender, maybe it would be a good idea for them do do everything right that Blender does wrong.

But it doesn't matter anyway. Basically, the hype and bullshit surrounding the 3d modeling app market is already so saturated and misinformed, it makes a SNES vs. Genesis debate in the cafeteria in the 6th grade look like a congressional fact finding comittee. Almost anyone involved in 3d modeling as a hobby develops their own ideas about what is good and what is bad for their way of working. Most of the time, Open Source modeling apps fall in the "bad" column.

It's obvious

Blender's UI is the Emacs of the 3D Modelling world, it's got a steep learning curve but when you get it(in the three or so years it'll take), boy will you be marginally productive.

Re:It's obvious

Blender's UI is the Emacs of the 3D Modelling world, it's got a steep learning curve but when you get it(in the three or so years it'll take), boy will you be marginally productive.

Actually it is the Vi of the 3D Modeling world; it has small footprint and a marginally steep learning curve, but when you get it (in three or so weeks) you will be amazed at what you can accomplish with relatively little effort.

you question isn't so much a question...

your question isn't so much a question as much as it is whinging... maya and lightwave and studiomax are also showing their age based on a mature code base, but consistency in the user experience, incorporating improvements into the base application without jepordizing usability are stilll very important. and just as these applications have improved over the years, so has blender. i haven't seen alot of improvements with AOI...

Blender probably "owns" the open source 3D graphical modeling scene because it's the most complete, full fledged, and the most mature of all the applications out there, with the exception of POVray. aside from blender(combined with yafray), the only other apps i use(and would consider recommending) would be wings3d(currently testing sunflow). typically i'll start with wings, import into blender, and use yafray for rendering. this combo seems to work well, wings is superior to blender in certain types of modelling. i don't think the other apps you mentioned play well with other apps, maybe that's the problem...

i've tried many of the OSS 3D apps out there(including AOI, have not tried k3d or moonlight thou) and the problem was often that the user interface was clumsy, the code was only available on one platform(i.e. moray), or the project was not mature enough for real work.

blender is'nt the easiest 3d app to work with, but then again 3d modelling in and of itself is not an easy task. since this discussion is about 3d modellers, it's important that an artist is able to navigate, switch tools, and move around an application in as smooth and fluid like as possible. it might seem like an oxymoron, but it is possible to do this in wings and blender(i never thought it would be). blender especially is a steep curve application, but once you get to know the most basic commands of edge/vector/face selection, creation and editing of primitives and vertices, things start moving quite well. there is a lot of thought that went into both blender and wings UI to make them easy to use. can you say that about k3d/aoi/moonlight?

you complain about the underlying architecture, but it's not the code that a user is interfacing with, and the interface is what is driving a highly graphical app like blender. it helps when architecture and UI are both well conceived.

does that answer your question(s)?

It's a pain.

Blender isn't well thought out - it's evolved. The user interface is still pretty terrible. Python scripting totally sucks - the interfaces change with every release (often in ways that break existing script), are very poorly documented and yet never seem to keep up with the functionality in the core package. The code base is a terrible mess. People I know who have wished to write significant additions to blender's core have found their work rejected.

But the problem is that it's just barely good enough - such that developers simply don't feel it worth the (not inconsiderable) effort to do something truly world-class to replace it. Artists eventually learn it's weirdnesses.

If blender mysteriously vanished overnight, we'd be in a terrible state for the next year - but what would emerge as a result would be a hundred times better.

Tricky.

Re:It's a pain.

Your correct in saying that a lot of things are a mess, however as a develoer, I can't agree with your asessment of our feelings about the state of the codebase. Right now we are currently working on several large-scale refactors of core portions of Blender's code-base. This isn't something that happens overnight though. We certainly want things to get better, but it has to be the right thing and the right time and for the right reasons. Otherwise we might end up with something worse than what we have now.

Cheers

What about Sauerbraten?

Yeah, it's not exactly a 3D modeling app, but you can pick it up with no prior experience and throw together a map of a building in an hour or so.

How about the state of 3D Parametric Modelling?

Well, all I can say is that Blender rocks. It has its unique UI, which is fine for me, but maybe instead of thinking about core code, how about making UI derivatives without messing with the functions? As I said, I like the UI but others may not. But what I think that is missing from the open-source scene is something so crucial, I can't do but wonder why it doesn't exist: an OPEN-SOURCE PARAMETRIC 3D MODELLER! Please!!!!! I'm an Industrial Designer and I'm obliged to have Microsuffer Winblowz just because of one single type of program. I wish I could go all OSS, but this is my main brake. So I ask you, Slashdotters! Who's willing to help and start a OSS Parametric Modelling program? (like Solidworks, Alibre, Pro/Engineer, etc.) Thank you for your attention!

Very True

This is a fairly timely post for me. A few weeks ago I was interested in creating some fairly simple 3D objects, the first piece of software I tried was Blender 3D. After about a night's work of playing around with Blender I still couldn't get it to do what I wanted it to. A few days later, I came across Art of Illusion, and within an hour I was able to create what I wanted. It may be that Blender may be better for the more experienced user but Art of Illusion was a lot more intuitive and productive for the casual user.

could match in a couple of months' time?

Disclaimer: I haven't actually looked at any of these codebases. BUT - this jumped out:

Each of them offers a modern, much saner, more coherent, and more powerful basic architecture and could match Blender in a couple of months' time with some extra manpower.

Here is the problem. Actually, there are several problems all tied up here.

• Each of them: great, there are three projects offering equivalent functionality, each hoping to supplant the current favorite? And which, pray thee, should an experienced developer contribute to? "Any of them"? --- bzzt, wrong answer. You're asking somebody to contribute when there is a 2 in 3 chance the contribution will be dead code when one of these emerges as a favorite? A born-into-money aristorcrat who doesn't have to make his own living can do that; the rest of us have more limited time and can't. Hint: companies pay product managers quite a bit to keep developers from doing wasted work, partly to avoid overhead but partly because wasting a developer's work is the fastest way to kill any enthusiasm. Picking one option (even if it's wrong) is better than indecisiveness. And if you truly think multiple options are the best, then find a way for them to coexist (pluggable rendering cores) instead of killing each other off.
• modern, much saner, more coherent, and more powerful: all of these are in the eye of the beholder. But here's an opportunity to defend yourself: if these new architectures are that much more powerful, it must be possible to implement the blender architecture with them. Which happens to be a sane migration path, instead of the throw-away-anything-old not-invented-here approach of an entirely new project. Blender is open source: fork it and insert the new architecture, instead of griping about how somebody else should do something better. (I know full well this isn't as simple as I'm making it out to sound. But you know full well these new architectures aren't unambiguously better than the old.)
• could match Blender in a couple of months' time: such a confident development-time prediction! Anyone with predictions that solid should be administrator of a project already! Now that I'm done being sarcastic, "a couple of months" is totally unrealistic. Every additional developer needs ~1 month to get up to speed on a new codebase (and understand what Blender does), another X months to implement the new functionality to match Blender, and 2X months to work the bugs out of the new functionality. Wine has been a few months from being usable for general apps for years; Gnome has been a few months and a few developers from being able to replace Windows for years; Windows has been a few months from being bug-free for a decade.

I don't mean to degrade the whole idea of finding something better than Blender. It's a fantastic goal, advances the state-of-the-art, and all sorts of other good things. I do dispute the misrepresentation of the ease with which it can be done: if it were even a tenth that easy, it would already be done.

Developers are willing to put up with the arcane code base because (1) it works, (2) it's Good Enough, which means anything newer has to overcome the training / usability barriers associated with switching, and (3) the newer options are not unambiguously "better". Remember: if app Bar (Blender) is already the standard, app Foo (these alternatives) not only has to be better for someone just starting, but also has to be better for an experienced user of Bar.

re:

Their main problem is the interface, which they are attempting to fix IIRC.
Just do the modeling with Wings 3D, or whatever you happen to like, and do the rest with Blender. It's a very capable piece of software.
And many artists use many applications to do their work, for example, they could use Modo for modeling, Lightwave for rendering, etc. So it would be perfectly normal if you use Wings for the modeling, some other application for animation, Blender for rendering, etc. This way, you are using the parts you think are better, or you are more comfortable with, from each application.

Re:

Indeed. I use modo and Silo for modeling hard surfaced objects, and rendering in modo or Maya (via Mental Ray). Then there's sculpting specific apps like Mudbox and ZBrush (which also does texturing).

You'll rarely, if ever, find a studio using one program. Certainely none of the bigger ones, and I don't even know of any smaller studios that rely on one piece of software for all their needs. For the hobbyist though, this isn't always a viable option due to the costs associated with some of the software.

Modeling especially, seems to be segmented. Model a base mesh in modo/Silo, bring it into ZBrush/Mudbox for sculpting, rebuilding topology in modo or Silo again, and then bringing it all together into Maya/XSI/3DS/LW/etc.

If you want to learn Blender..

Blender has a rather unintuitive interface and most of the documentation is not that great. Fortunately I came across this excellent tutorial [cdschools.org]. The file is a pdf. It took me about a month of evenings and weekends, but once I was through the tutorial I was quite comfortable with the interface. It is really amazing what you can do with Blender once you get over the learning curve.

There's hope for Inkscape

Inkscape is making moves toward 3d. Just being able to produce a wireframe in Inkscape would take much of the pain out of using Blender. http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Googles_Su mmer_Of_Code#3D_Tool [inkscape.org] IMHO Blender and the deranged robot of the same name have a lot in common.

My daughter just attended a seminar where the UI expert posited the three Es. Ease of use, ease of remembering and something else that translated as power. The way the presenter described it, you couldn't have all three. Bullroar. A good program is one that I can use intuitively. If I am going to use the program a lot, there are shortcuts available. For instance, my students can get something to work with menus and the mouse. I can do the same thing two or three times as fast from the keyboard. I guess the thing is that a decent program has more than one possible UI.

Wings 3D

If you want a nice natural intuitive modeler, look no further than Wings 3d:

Wings3D [wings3d.com]

It has some strange dependencies, but you might be able to find a precompiled version for your platform. (It's in Gentoo's portage for example).

choice

So it's not cool to have no choice? I thought we were against choice? Doesn't everyone want either KDE or Gnome to die?

Blender LOOKS better.

Call me shallow but Blender has a very nice website and that's why it gets more attention. The other three programs mentioned have crappy ones. Also I'm the last one to denounce Java but "Art of Illusion" is apparently in Java and the interface is not pretty. It's not even a matter of a native vs. non-native UI, because Blender doesn't use native widgets either. It just looks better.

Does anyone actually use Blender?

I used to think so, but when a friend of mine recently tried...

He is a graphics designer by trade and has Windows at home (he hates Macs, but has to deal with them, because every single designer shop in Germany uses them). He wanted to build something in 3D and tried to install the Windows version. It wouldn't even install due to some Python related problem (Python seems to be for the plugins, but why would it break the basic install anyways?). I tried to help him over the phone and he installed different versions of Python to no avail.

Then I advised him to try the previous version and it didn't work either. There was very little documentation on the web. He uses Windows XP and has nothing out of the ordinary running and uses standard hardware.

I guess not many people tried even installing the Windows version much less use it.

Good thing I use Debian. For most important stuff I need there are responsible maintainers that check the packages bevore uploading and respond to bug reports...

Module Authors

I love blender, but I do agree with the bit about people jumping through hoops to make any changes to it. I rewrote one of the import scripts because it only handled a tiny subset of the specifications for the file format it was supposed to import and I needed it to import more diverse forms of OFF files for my work. I posted my changes with example files for review and didn't hear back for months. When I finally did hear back they wanted me to create more example files to show them what the point of my changes were (which I felt I had pretty clearly displayed). I decided to forget about trying to get the changes into blender because I don't have the time to spend on convincing other people that it works. The code works perfectly for me (I use it almost every day) and the blender folks have access to it if they ever decide to take the time to sit down and review it but the whole process was pretty discouraging to me.

FragMotion

www.fragmotion.com

Description
fragMOTION is a powerful 3D modeller specifically intended for the creation and animation of characters. fragMOTION is intuitive and easy to use and contains many features that are only found in top of the line modellers. And if that's not enough for you, the event driven scripting system makes it a breeze for you to add your own features.
Notable Features

        * Load and edit multiple motions in the same workspace.
        * Merge any supported model file and extract only the desired portions of that file.
        * Paint textures directly on the surface of a model.
        * No set limit to the number of faces contained in a model.
        * Create sprite images from 3D content.
        * Keyframe editor that allows you to copy, paste and delete keyframes with ease.
        * Animate your character using Inverse Kinematics.
        * Support for up to 4 weighting values per vertex.
        * Selective subdivision of faces.
        * Unwrap arbitrary geometry into a plane and save the image into a texture.
        * View attached objects such as weapons and equipment.
        * Create your own plugins using LUA script or C++.
        * Customizable user interface allows you to edit the menus and toolbar. You can even create your own menu items or toolbuttons to run user-defined scripts.
        * Convenient splitter window allows you to customize the layout of your workspace.
        * Keyboard shortcuts that allow you to use tools without constantly switching modes.
        * Set background images into the viewer as a frame of reference.
        * Create user-defined classes with their own appearance, properties, methods and events.
        * Modify existing classes by adding user-defined properties, methods or events.
        * Create skeletons with up to 255 bones.
        * Full undo/redo.
        * And many more...

Projects need a commanding focus

Open source projects that succeed usually have a single purpose, and fill a niche. Because Blender does absolutely everything I can think of (it forgets to put sugar in my tea, tho), it's become complex. Complexity often shadows functionality - as things get more complex, they must be redesigned to make them functional. (imo, Gnome got it wrong and started to remove definable functionality rather than redesign input)...

There's a reason everyone takes Human centric computing modules now - they're useful!

If some of these other products started focusing on niche markets that are useful to its users - say, for example, game developers - they'd start to make an impact.

Take http://www.zootfly.com/tect.html [zootfly.com] for instance. Zootfly seem to have encompassed everything I need right now in a design and modelling tool - because its focused directly at computer games. To non-game developers, say animation modellers, it might not offer quite what they need, but at least it will lay a foundation for them to build on, or at least the community to react and copy.

Its funny - there's a trend-

Good Open Source code gets redesigned. Good Open Source code becomes a useful product. Becomes Successful. Expands and adds features. Becomes overwhelming. Is less functional at specific tasks than before/standalone projects. Some may say the linux Kernel is taking that path - but it's a lucky project, system-nucleolus-level implementation is very specific, and one can't avoid contributing to the kernel when adding low level features.

Look at ZBrush. It costs nearly £400? That's a lot of money for essentially a glorified 3D painting package. Sharp3D, an open source ZBrush-like tool (that I've yet to make work), is similar in respect, but needs more attention. Blender has texture baking and painting functions, but I don't know how to use blender, I just want something textured now, while I prototype. Blender's complete set of functionality is scaring me away!

I'd use Rhino3D (shareware) over blender at the moment, simply because I find it's stuck to its NURBS goal, and not gone to far off the niche mark.

Matt

Why is it always just the UI?

This is to all those people who claim that you just have to learn to use Blenders user interface: My question really was initially not that much about the user interface, but the user interface really is at the core of the problem, but not in the way you probably expect.

The alternative applications that I have pointed out are really designed for a job. They adhere to basic MVC patterns and whatever else you would expect from such a big application. These patterns really are a big advantage when it comes down to coding stuff. Blender on the other hand has a "user interface driven design", as Ton once said. And this term fits well: the user interface - and I almost literally mean the buttons on screen and whatever event handling that is attached to it - are the only glue that keeps everything together. So when you talk about the user interface you also talk about Blender's internals. There is not much of an abstraction between the user interface and the data that is manipulated. So the bottom line is that any change to Blender's user interface is a change to Blender's design.

Re:Why is it always just the UI?

The core of Blender is its database concept. The UI is exchangable and it will be refactored during the course of this year. You're right, blender is about UI, but what that really means is that there are some basic guidelines (e.g. non-overlapping, muscle memory) Here is a statement of a blender developer: "This may be shocking, but we kind of like the interface the way it is. You see, we have the source code. If we wanted it different, we would have changed it already. Could it be better? Sure. Will it evolve over time? Without a doubt! Though it seems unfamiliar, Blender's interface is based on principles from Jef Raskin's "The Humane Interface". There are other applications with a different user interface paradigm. I'm sure you can find one you like. "

Specialized subjects are harder for OS projects

IMHO, the problem is that specialized subjects (unless it's something directly related to systems software) are harder to get going in open source projects. Some domains, like computer algebra, operations research, visualization, etc., demand a domain knowledge that is not widely available. Being able to program in C/C++/C# or Java, etc., is not enough. A lot of programmers in the OS world know Unix. But knowing Unix does nothing for your, e.g., workflow, spreadsheet, or number-crunching software (scientific computing, BTW, is one very specialized area where you find good open source software, because it fulfills the needs of academics). Chances are, if you are specialized to that degree, you already have ties, or plan to have, with certain software houses or academic institutions. Or perhaps, you want to compete in the market with your own business (and this might have something to do with certain license choices, in particular the GPL).

In fact, if you look at it, there are quite a few domain-specific softwares that are lagging behind when compared to their proprietary counterparts.

Cooperation in some open source domains might also lag behind because of the lack of imagination of many OS tools. Look at the proprietary tools for Java, for instance and what they can achieve in terms of colaboration. I'm not a Java programmer, but to my knowledge there isn't anything like that in the OS world.

Licenses might have have something to do with it, also. I don't see why one specialist would want to contribute to another specialist's project, when there's even the possibility that this one releases the other's code contribution under a dual license (one proprietary, the other GPL). The solution is to reinvent the wheel and roll your own.

Professional roots

Dont forget that Blender came from professional roots. NeoGeo actually USED this software for their work, back when it was purely internal.

Most everyone else is coming from a hobbiest viewpoint. and are most always doomed to stay there, if they manage to survive at all.

Blender will remain on top...

Kdawson submitted some anti-Blender tirade written by gmueckl. Fair enough, the guy has a right to his opinion.
I want to check it out so I go to the never-changing site of AoI and look at the gallery. Well, maybe they keep their best stuff somewhere else....That stuff has been there forever.
Next I go to K-3D, fondly remembering the build-in tutorials in the 'old' K-3D, the one before the never-ending refactor. Site doesn't load.
Head over to Moonlight3D. Hey, I remember that from about 10 year ago! Sad story: guys write Moonlight (closed source) Later they come up with Moonlight Atelier. Loads better but still closed source. (Linuxgraphics.fr had a nice Moonlight section) They open source the old code base, lose interest in Atelier and that's it. End of story. OK, so some guys decide to try to revive the old codebase, did some hacks and changes. Project died. This seems to be the legacy. Go look at news. Hey! Who's that posting there? It's our old friend gmueckl! So the anti-Blender tirade looks like a serious bout of jealousy to me...
If that is the competition Blender has, I suspect it'll be on top for quite a bit longer.... Just compare development pace, feature set, support (2 modern Blender books with a third one on order), roadmap.

Just Buy Maya

If you want to get anywhere in the industry doing modeling, you need Maya. Don't waste time with anything else.

OpenSceneGraph and niches

There's the OpenSceneGraph project [openscenegraph.com]. Not all 3D is Blender/Maya, it really depends on what you want/need to do. If we stick to the title "3D modeling", I guess even some 3D game engines [sauerbraten.org] can fit in! :-)
"The OpenSceneGraph is an open source high performance 3D graphics toolkit, used by application developers in fields such as visual simulation, games, virtual reality, scientific visualization and modelling. Written entirely in Standard C++ and OpenGL it runs on all Windows platforms, OSX, GNU/Linux, IRIX, Solaris, HP-Ux, AIX and FreeBSD operating systems."

The submitter is a troll

As far as I can tell K3D and Moonlight haven't moved an inch in the last 5 years. They both look like students summer projects to me.
Blender has weedy parts in its codebase, everyone knows that. Any programm this complex and mature has those. But they are being replaced fast and thouroughly by a thriving core team lead by the founder of Blender. Blender runs out of the box on 7 plattforms and has a featureset that closely competes with current topline commercial tools. Try to catch up on that alone 'in a few months' Mr. Smartass. Blender is responisble for the recent price drops in the 3D tool industry alone and when it eventually fully supports Renderman yet some toolmakers are going to have to redo their businessmodel big time.

The usual UI bickering is bogus aswell. Apart from being just as hard to learn as any tool of same capabilities, blenders UI has been comletely OpenGL accelerated from the begining - one of the things it's unique in iirc. Blender's learning curve is steep, as with any high-end 3D tool without a stack of books. But with the amount of material and books available on the web for free nowadays makes this learning curve not nearly as hard as it was 5 years ago. The featureset is breathtaking and has commercial providers such as Newtek struggling to catch up in some areas (notice the recent addition of an improrved node editor to Lightwave 9 - nothing but a response to Blenders node editor). Sidenote: I own a professional licence of LW 8, a commercial licence of Blender (from the NaN days) *and* use Blender since back in the days of 1.8. I haven't updated to LW 9 for the very reason that Blender 2.43, a few little things aside, offers everything professional 3D needs. And then some - an full-blown integrated compositor for instance.

Blender is as mature and developed as any open source project could wish for. As *any* software project could wish for actually. Features and improvement are being added on a regular basis and it's fully backwards compliant with any blender file, and it's professional roots not only show but have become more and more visible.

Bottom line: The submitter of the above article either doesn't know what he is talking about or is a troll. Or both.

What?

Do you even use 3D programs? And how many have you used? I'm certified in 3d Studio Max, Lightwave, and Maya. I've taught each one for a number of years, and have used a host of others over a 20 yr period, and I find blender speedy and great. I've used it professionally in government projects for NASA and the Department of energy, plus several commercials. I've seen the other open source programs you listed, they are tinker toys compared to blender, and would not hold up to the weight of complex code being added to them. I think blender is too complex for you, stay with the free version of sketchup. Sorry for the flame, but it seems you don't have a lot of experience with 3d in general, and don't trash a program that can compete with software that is $3000 to $5000 and still be free. Blender is getting some much needed code rewrite thanks to Google's summer of code. I'm currently using a package that retails for $1600 and is missing some key basic elements, much the same way 3d studio max was when I stopped using it. Blender at least has all the basic features and controls you need.

3D Modeling versus 3d Acquisition

The raised issue is not completely unfounded, but focusing on a more particular sector of the modeling scene the field offer even less choices.
The current panorama of 3D modeling packages is quite tailored towards the needs of the majority of users (low and high poly modelers) and most of these packages offers less than satisfying experiences when used to manage the large unstructured meshes that come from 3D scanning technologies or used for rapid prototyping needs.
The meshes produced by these automatic technologies are typically huge (millions of triangles per object) and not organized into scene graphs; most modeling packages simply sit down on the specs of these objects. 3D scanning and rapid prototyping hardware is becoming more and more popular, devices very low priced are already on the market ( http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/ 05/144212 [slashdot.org] ) while on the software side there are almost no alternative to the high end commercial package in the 50k$ range (20 times the HW cost).

The only open source alternative on this sector of 3d modeling is Meshlab http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net].
Sorry for what could seem a shameless plug, but I would like to hear your comment on this side of 3D modeling scene.

Starting from scratch almost always wrong

The codebase of those from scratch projects is probably less complex because they do not yet implement the last 30% of complex functionality implemented by the codebase you inherited.

Requiring users to learn a new UI and new ways of doing things, not to mention each having a long list of missing functionality, will alienate your userbase and reduce funding.

Likely the codebase appears more complex to you than it is because you are inexperienced with it.

If the issue is the complexity of the plugin interface, instead of discarding thousands of man hours of value, you should be working toward refactoring around a modern, less complex plugin interface.

what about avoCADo 3D CAD?

Some guy has been working pretty hard on a new 3D solid modeling CAD program over the past few months called avoCADo. It is geared more towards 3D CAD engineering and design, but I thought it deserved mentioning. Does avoCADo have potential? or is it just another modeling program doomed to sinking in the sea of open source 3D apps? http://avocado-cad.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

Stupid question in parent post

"So how come these projects don't get the level of support they deserve? How come developers are still willing to put up with such an arcane code base?" Answer: For the same reason people use GNU/Linux instead of *BSD (the latter being much saner, more stable, etc). Go figure.

Blender architecture changes?

Blender could do with a move to a plug-in based architecture. This would enable partitioning the code base so that, say, the NURBS support could become a separate sub-project and could be developed independently of the main project. After all, Apache, Gimp, etc all use plugins successfully. Blender does have plugins but only for video effects.

The problem with XML support for Blender is validating the input. How is this proposed to be done?

There is no "Open Office" equivalent for 3d

Personally I think the better approach would be to copy what works, not try and come up with something totally new. 3d modeling needs the equivalent of Open Office, not some bizarro "we do it this way because it's better than Softimage/3ds/Maya" package.

Because so much of the "industry" (pick any you want) is tied to the Softimage/3ds/Maya wordl, I have to assume that the space of people without budgets/money is pretty full of pirated copies of 3ds Max, XSI, and Maya. It's not full of idealistic people using open source tools for love, but just people who really want to get something done.

Can't treat artists' tools like a checklist

I admit that I haven't tried Blender in a while, but my impression at the time was that the developers treated this project like a checklist. Does it have particles? Check. does it have a scripting language? Check, etc.

IMHO it's bad form to treat any piece of software as a checklist, but in my experience software engineers tend to drift towards this routine. Maybe it's the way they're trained at school? Professors give you credit if your assignment works because that's easy to judge; it's much harder to justify a lower score to a student on the basis that the professor *feels* it's not intuitive.

Too bad for the Blender team that their past sins are haunting them. Maybe I'll try it again someday, but once you leave an impression it's tough to change that.

Conflict of interest? Hit Piece?

The story submitter (gmueckl) also happenes to be the author of another peice of software (Moonlight 3d). He doesn't state this fact anywhere is the story, which in any other field of writing would be a serious breach of ethics.

Perhaps he's hoping to drive traffic to his empty user forum [moonlight3d.eu] which has all of 20 posts.

Gmueckl can say anything he wants about Blender, but he should do so with full discosure. I think this story should be amended to reflects the bias of the story submitter.

Trolling for points

gmueckl, who wrote "The State of Open Source 3D Modeling" should have called his rant "Why blender sucks". That he is one of the main developers behind moonlight|3d actually speeks louder than the entire article. This article is soooo obviously nothing more but a rant that it already hurts.

I use blender for 2+ years now and am fairly impressed with what you can achieve with it. Many people claim that blenders UI is crap. Don't really know why. Granted, it is not the usual windows UI. But does this really matter? To actually start being productive with any 3d tool you need a highly configurable ui. And in blender you can configure the ui to exactly show you whatever informations you want. For almost every action you can use shortcuts. This makes it incredibly fast to use. Yes, you have to actually learn them, but this happens whenever you want to achieve something new.

And although I pay my bills by developing software I do not care about flaws in the codebase, ugly architectures and stuff as long as the tool does what is required. And blender does this fairly good.

The development speed of blender is really amazing. Take a look at the new sculpting tools. They are incredible. During this 2+ years of using blender I had only a couple of crashes. And during this time many features were added. I guess that many parts of blender have already been rewritten.

Another really enjoyable part of blender is its community. Take a look at elysiun.com [slashdot.org]. One of the most supportive and effective communities in the open source world that I know of.

Take a look at blendernation.com [slashdot.org], a great source for blender news. There is even a magazine around: blender art magazine. Pretty nice.

Altogether the community around blender is one of the important driving forces behind blender.

Finally, judge the tools by what they have accomplished. Especially look at the art-galleries of the tools:

-k-3d: http://www.k-3d.org/wiki/Still_Gallery [k-3d.org]
-moonlight|3d: http://www.moonlight3d.eu/forum/ [moonlight3d.eu]
-art of illusion: http://www.artofillusion.org/artgallery [artofillusion.org]

Judge for yourself.

Yt,

Gunnar

Ayam3D (shameless plug)

one of my favorites, Ayam3D [ayam3d.org]

Sour grapes......

Sounds like a bunch of sour grapes to me. If you or anyone else thinks they can do better, have at it. Put up or shut up. Sure, there are apps that are better at one thing or another than Blender but is there anything else as complete as Blender that doesn't cost good money? I sure haven't seen it yet.

real blender heads

Dam i did not know the blenders code was that old....well i guess that means most of you new coders must really suck huh?.. i mean if blenders code is such pain how come with in the last 2 versions there has been a crap load of additions/improvements? Look ma dude if you cant program 2 bad, if you other users cant get a grasp on the UI then read the Docs it took me about 30 mins to do the ginger bread man. if any blebder programs are reading this DON'T CHANGE THE CODE on every computer even running from my usb drive its been fast and stable. Blender had been running good on old code, that more of an insult to newer program then it is to Blender.

Re:It would help even more...

...if the author included the correct URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/k3d/ [sourceforge.net]

I looked at K3D for a bit...one of the most awesome features I saw was the record/playback used for tutorials. The K3D interface, at the time, also needed some work. However, over the last couple of years, I see it has come quite a ways as well. I think there's room for both- they both use different approaches, and will appeal to different kinds of users. K3D needs something to boost its profile - Blender had the Orange project, as well is the rich history that went with going commercial, and then eventually being released as an open-source project after collecting donations from users over a very short period of time.

Blender also had quite the community - where's the K3D community? Where is that being nurtured/grown?

Re:The state of it ?

what does a mp3 encoder have do with this?

Re:Blender and stupid hot keys

Left hand on keyboard, right hand on mouse. If you know they keys for the most used commands, you get incredibly fast for the basic manipulations.

Re:Blender and stupid hot keys

If you lack the will to learn blenders interface and are not willing to pay for a pro' package you are going to lack the will to create anything good,

££££'s Maya or £££'s 3DMax will not give you motivation.

let the piss-taking commence [uklinux.net]

Re:Blender and stupid hot keys

I would disagree, you can't sit a grandma down and have her learn 3DS max in a few minutes, nor can you with Maya either. It's just a different interface. With each release more keyboard-only commands are now mapped to menu entries. If you watch "pro" users of 3DS max and Maya you'll notice they use keyboard shortcuts like crazy.

Re:Blender and stupid hot keys

Any modeler/artist worth their salt is using mostly key shortcuts - at least to enable a tool. It's simply too inefficient to use the mouse to perform an action. With there being more and more modeling tools than ever before, it can simply be too cluttered to have everything on screen, which means navigating through various tabs/menus/etc. In modo** and Maya, I'm enabling every tool I use with a click of a key, a mouse gesture, etc. That said, if Blender wants to appeal to more newbie hobbyists, it should have a decent GUI that'll let them get started. (Disclaimer, I haven't used Blender in years, so I'm saying this on what you said about the need to learn keyboard shortcuts)

**I'd like to see a freeware/OSS project take the approach Luxology is taking with modo. First, they baked out the modeler end of the app in the first release. Then in the second major release we got a render engine and texturing/painting tools (and of course refinements and improvements to the modeling end of things). Presumably, in the third major release we'll get animation (and other improvements to modeling and texturing and rendering). I personally like this approach because instead of stretching yourself too thin focusing on everything at once, you start off by getting the basics of each "component" right. This seems to be a result of their Nexus core, which from what I gather is a developmental platform, where they can "bake" out various versions of the program.

Re:Blender and stupid hot keys

you need to learn the "stupid" keyboard shortcut in any graphic app to get reasonably effecient. take any application open source or commercial, and you'll see that they all have keyboard equivelants to menu items. believe it or not blenders many shortcuts are fairly well organized.

yeah it's a hurdle, but if you want to be good at anything, you need to clear a few hurdles.

why is it flawed? because it takes effort to learn? come on...

Re:First Post

I do computer games development, and I usually use 3DS MAX.

I have attempted to use K3D and blender, and still play about with them. Blender is a nice looking interface, but it is daunting and has a tall learning curve. It uses massively complicated menus and certainly to someone who was taught on 3DS MAX a difficult interface and no foreseeable improvement to MAX from the get go. K3D, however, I liked. It has a simple interface, and its tree set-up for objects is a good way to edit and change objects settings. The only problem that I could see with this program was that the interface looked old and felt cluttered even on the 21inch screen I was using. I would hope that developers could look at K3D more and develop it further, as I believe it has the potential to rival 3DS MAX, Maya and Blender

Thanks,
Badspyro

Re:First Post

I learned on Max, too. I choked somewhat on Blender's interface at first, too. But then, Maya was no less difficult to learn. I can't argue about aging codebase. But I'll tell you it took me less time to learn Blender to a reasonable point than it did Max OR Maya. Though it does feel strange at first.
My main three complaints, as a new user, were that:

• Mouse gestures suck and should be disabled by default.
• Mouse gestures suck and there should be a WAY to disable them at all.
• The widgets are crude to the point of crying, and it's hard to manipulate things using them or get a bearing from them.

As far as 3d goes, it's very very powerful. As powerful as the commercial apps in most respects. Certainly, unless you're working for Pixar or Blizzard, it has everything you need, and then some. You tend to specialize in 3d work anyway, learning to model machines or humans, or monsters, or being an excellent animator, or kicking butt at textures and/or lighting. You tend to learn one method of modeling as your main method. And you most definitely get picky about which suite you're using. The point is, few people actually use more than the smallest subset of the suite to do their jobs. You don't really need 98% of what a 3D suite is capable of. And so, even though there are a few things you might not have in Blender that you have in Max or Maya, by the time you get to that point where you actually would feel the lack of them, you'll likely already have them. Blender is, after all, actively developed.
Honestly, the primary reason Blender doesn't have a larger following in the industry is momentum. Learning a 3D suite is a task comparable to learning another language. Most people don't have the time or will to do that.
For anyone wanting to learn 3D, brace your shoulders and push past the month or two it will take to feel comfortable with Blender. If you don't have what it takes to learn Blender, you're going nowhere in 3D anyway. And you'll find that, whiz-banginess aside, Blender can do what Max can do. And in my opinion, it's faster.

Re:Blender and stupid hot keys

ahem .... blender had all the annoying hot keys back when it was a pay-to-use app ... it was just as annoying back then, and it had nothing to do with Open Source, it has to do with being blender ... but enough people liked it and used it and depended on it that when its owners decided they had better things to do its users all chipped in and freed it ...

Re:Blender and stupid hot keys

You're assuming that a strange and different interface is flawed.

Typical whiner.

Re:Blender and stupid hot keys

If you use software as a tool in your work, engineering, modeling, etc, you know shortcuts are necessary, even gaming needs shortcuts to be efficient, your not gonna win on a multiplayer starcraft game using only your mouse.

Re:AoI IS cross-platform

AoI Works fine on Linux, Windows and Macs to my certain knowledge. The lead developer uses a Mac. I've been using it mostly on Linux for many years professionally, and its latest incarnation of the user interface is just so much easier to use - and teach new users with - than Blender. It is capable of producing massive renders, tens of thousands of pixels across or simply running off a quick animation preview.

Also, AoI produces and validates true 3D shapes. This is important, as shapes which merely look like they're 3D but in reality have a few klein bottles hidden within the mesh are impossible to print out on a 3D printer.

Finally, the AoI community is extremely helpful and responsive. For these reasons, we use AoI in the RepRap Project [reprap.org] to build objects for our Open Source 3D printer.

Vik :v)

Re:Blender is maturing, not shwing its age

I think the rant here should be, "Why aren't the Wings3d developers adding animation capability to their project?!"

Re:-1 Blatant plug :)

No he is not a Blender developer, anyone who signs up in the forums gets a gforge user account...

LetterRip

Re:Blender and stupid hot keys

Well, you obviously aren't a professional because all the professionals I know use keyboard shortcuts extensively. The mouse is only for moving stuff around and using the tools they've selected using a keyboard shortcut.

I'm sorry that Blender (or any other 3d modeling application) can't be easy for neophytes (or n00bs), but that's just how it is. If you don't like it, either learn the shortcuts or find a different hobby. Clicking on pretty widgets to kill time is not what professional graphic artists do...