Blender has a next gen performance level. It opens up in half a sec and has no trouble running a full featured character at frame rates we couldn't imagine with a single envelope operator in any old fashionned classic dccs.
It can load scenes 10x faster than xsi or maya. It has very powerfull rigging and animation tools. NLA workflow is incredibly simple. Any animator could use it without any TD assitance to store clips etc. The SDK accessibility of each object is the most straight forward approach I've ever seeen. Just switch your outliner to "Datablocks" mode and you'll have a scripting access overlay display on each single object you drag your mouse over.. Beautiful. The interface is very smart when as soon as you set your preferences to select with LMB instead of RMB. At the beginning I started buidling and saving custom layouts and quickly figured out that it was completely useless. As the interface layout is being saved with the current workspace ( each .blend file can contain serveral scenes ) it's designed to be part of the workflow. Splitting and merging views is actually so easy that the software layout blends smoothly in your workflow. When you open a scene it comes with an interface layout that's part of the working context. Referencing is incredible. You do that using file>link. When I first double clicked on the .blend I wanted as a reference, it opened a list of contents within the file opener window to let me chose what part of it I wanted to link on. Which means that you can have an asset shading scene with several lights and cameras where you just pick up the materials you need. Of course, this kind of referencing needs attention but I beleive that's the way to go. Here's actually what bothers me the most about blender though: - A non negociable Z up axis instead of Y. Makes it very difficult to integrate within any existing pipeline. Every character you import would lie on the ground. Ridiculous. Z up is for CAD, animation uses Z for depth. This Z up issue is what keeps blender out of most studios that have an eye on it. I talked to Ton Roosendaal at siggraph 2012 about what feels to me like a gravel blocking the whole river and his laconic answer made me guess he and the foundation had no special will to adapt in order to get in the mainstream market. It's opensource though, so may be there's a way to get around this. - A kinematic engine that I still haven't figured out. I may have missed something but I could never rely on actual transforms values.It seems that the values displayed in the transforms channels are actually offsets and not local transforms but I still have trouble understanding where these offsets comes from. I would really appreciate any hint about this. Compared to maya, the list is microscopic... On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 3:43 PM, Leendert A. Hartog <hirazib...@live.nl>wrote: > Talk is, however, relatively cheap... The community obviously is willing > to participate, but what happens when the ideas are being presented to > their chairman Ton Roosendaal? There is a reason, why the Blender UI has > always been as quirky as it was... > > Dan Yargici schreef op 10-3-2014 15:34: > > There is a thread on BlenderArtists.org where people are submitting >> mockups and the like where there are some really nice suggestions (and a >> few terrible ones). Hopefully the right ones will filter through. >> >> http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?298932- >> Blender-UI-Mockups-and-Ideas-Requested >> >> DAN >> >> > > -- > > Leendert A. Hartog - Softimage hobbyist > AKA Hirazi Blue - Administrator @, NOT the owner of si-community.com > > >
