Blender Discussion

[jbacus]

You don’t have to search Quora to find me talking about Blender. I was using it before we built the first version of SketchUp. Most folks seem to have forgotten Blender’s origin story, which is pretty unique in the world of software development. Apart from the Linux kernel, Blender is one of the largest, most complex and longest-living FOSS projects in history.

I know it is temp[ting to imagine a titanic battle between SketchUp and Blender, but I really don’t see it that way. Ton Rosendaal is a hero for the work he has done in Blender for so many years, and I think it is really satisfying to see it finally beginning to get the respect and attention the project has always deserved.

Here’s what I have said on the subject in these forums in the past.

@jbacus

I think it is great to consider alternative tools to SketchUp for whatever work you do. I don’t really consider Blender a competing product to SketchUp any more than I think of 3DSMax or Maya in that way. Blender is designed to appeal to the same folks who like those big DCC applications. Of course, being free ( gratis as well as libre ) helps to open it to a wider community than Autodesk will sustain with the tools they sell.

I definitely have a soft spot in my heart for Blender and I always have. Not to brag, but my first experience with Blender was version 1.23 running on an SGI Indigo 2 that I bought (used, cheap) on eBay. I remember having to build it from souce myself, but I could be wrong about that. Somewhere deep in my library is also a copy of Ton Roosendaal’s original Blender manual; graphically beautiful from the height of the ‘deconstructivist’ phase of late-90’s graphic design. More than a little opaque from a learning perspective, unfortunately, but still… beautiful.

Blender is such a unique project in the FOSS community, both in the scope of its aspiration and its longevity in the community. Ton should be sainted for the labor he has put into it over the years. For those who don’t know the history, it is documented here in great detail .

SketchUp’s great strength, I think, remains the simplicity with which hard-surface models like buildings and furniture can be made in it. We all stretch the tools we love in unexpected ways, but at its heart, this is what SketchUp is really best at doing. We aren’t likely to implement a full particle system into it any time in the near future, so you’re going to have to look somewhere else if that is critical to your work.

No creative person should be satisfied knowing or using only a single tool, particularly not if their happiness or livelihood is bound to that tool. Rather, I think you should learn as many different tools as you can, then figure out how to stitch them all together into a unique process that meets your unique needs. You’ll spend an uncomfortable amount of time faffing about with importers and exporters (“why can’t there just be a universal file format?” is a subject for a longer thread than this one…) but in the end you’ll be in a better place.

So, from my perspective at least, this has been a great thread to read.

john
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I still stand by these statements, with maybe only one edit. I bought that Indigo 2 in (probably) 1996, primarily with the intention of running Lightwave on it. When I found Blender, an open source project no less, I was pretty excited. And when builds for Intel-based Linux distros became widely available, it opened 3D modeling, rendering and animation to a much wider potential audience than Maya, Max, Lightwave of Softimage ever could.

John
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