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Re:Blender Conference 2020 by Animats on Tuesday October 27, 2020 @07:41PM (#24913344)
"Crazy speed"? Blender was a commercial product in 1995. It went open source in 2002 after the vendor went bust. It had the UI from hell. It took another 15 years to crawl out of that pit. Finally, it has an adequate user interface.
Re:Blender Conference 2020 by philsnow on Tuesday October 27, 2020 @08:17PM (#24913570)
Do you have any idea how hard it is for an open source project to _improve_ UX? Designers don't flock to open source the same way that engineers do.
Re:Blender Conference 2020 by atoav on Wednesday October 28, 2020 @03:15AM (#24916108)
Yes crazy speed. I use this thing since roughly 10 years, and used 3Dsmax and Maya before and parallel to using Blender (I work as a freelancer in the field).

Blender had more and bigger updates at a faster pace than any of the programs I used in the past decade. This includes commercial software as well.

And surprisingly there was never a single update that broke something for me or that. Most of the time it was more like: "Remember that thing that took you half a week to render? That now got 10% faster, because magic".

The commercial past of Blender doesn't really play that big of a role other than the very efficient binary file format it gave us.

Re:Blender Conference 2020 by Animats on Wednesday October 28, 2020 @02:33PM (#24922432)
"And surprisingly there was never a single update that broke something for me"

Blender's usual problem is "where did they hide that feature in this update?" Questions on that come up in the forums often. In the 2.8x series, visibility of an object is controlled by three different checkboxes in different places, all of which have to be on. Importing older Blender files sometimes resulted in some of them being off.

Re:Blender Conference 2020 by Shish2k on Tuesday October 27, 2020 @08:23PM (#24913601)
Look at how much the GIMP has improved in the same timeframe :)