I am just wondering, is such a consistent plugging allowed on HN? To me it lowers the quality of the discussion and their posts are often voted to the top on all Blender related posts.
I think it's cool what doctoboggan has done with Blender, I feel it's okay to mention it in every Blender thread, but he should actually post a fresh comment.
And then it's up to us users if we feel it's become a bit stale. Downvoting exists.
Smart play, as it feels organic until you pull back the veneer.
Blender as a professional tool till has a steep learning curve, as all professional tools have. This is not a negative at all, as some has been led to believe.
There is a difference in "Hard to master" VS "Hard to get started with". GIMP is both at the time, and Blender used to be the same, but now Blender is easier to get started with than before, but as with any professional tool, it's still hard to master as the area is difficult (3D modelling, animation, simulations and more), not because the tool itself. Luckily, mastering 3DS Max, Maya, Blender, Cinema4D or any other 3D suite makes it easy to master the others, as it's mostly the UI/UX that is different between them, not the concepts themselves.
> I have an un-related hobby where I often have to edit video. In the past I've used iMovie just because it comes on my machine, but I've been meaning to try out Blender. I've heard some good things about its editing capabilities.
You're probably better off using something else unless you're using Blender heavily in your process already. It's nice that the UX of general Blender translates to the video editor so when you're deep into modelling and just need some quick video edit it's fast to do it without too much context switching. But for larger video jobs, you're better off using a dedicated video editing tool like Resolve, as it's still miles ahead of the competition.
I distinctly remember how incredible it was when Big Buck Bunny was released with all assets and project files freely available. I learnt so much from that, and wouldn’t be surprised if it was a catalyst that led to many, many people gaining the skills and drive to produce new creative works. I hope Blender continues to inspire and enable many future generations of creators.
This year, I’m giving it another try with the infamous Doughnut tutorial and I’m very impressed. Once I got a general idea on the thing, I’m able to navigate the interface and figure out how to do stuff without too much effort. It’s incredibly powerful piece of software(it has scripting and visual programming capabilities) with a very healthy community.
Oh an my Macbook Air M1 is more than enough to get it going. Disney doesn’t need to get scared just yet but having access to such a powerful software on such a portable device makes you feel powerful.
You can also create in blender and then import into unreal.
Both creating ML-enhanced content creation and editing tools of course, but also synthesizing images, videos, 2D and 3D content for ML training.
For example, you can use using GPU-accelerated ray tracing and procedural character animation in photorealistic environments to train body tracking and pose estimation networks, since you get the precise "ground truth" and pixel-perfect semantic segmentation for free without enlisting Mechanical Turk to tediously and unreliably annotate millions of video frames.
And you can use randomization and retexturing to plug in different body types, skin tones, hair styles, clothing, etc, to train it to work with diverse sets of people, in a wide range of environments, camera angles, and lighting conditions.
BlenderAI : Artificial Intelligence in Blender:
https://download.blender.org/documentation/bc2008/BlenderAI....
Blender for AI Devs, pt. 1: Overview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtRxC9HPGd0
Blender pipeline to generate images for deep learning (BlenderProc) - Maximilian Denninger:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AvY_iS6xQA
>Using blender to generate realistic images for ML training:
>This is a two parts talk. It is based on the papers "3D Scene Reconstruction from a Single Viewport" presented at ECCV 2020 and the "BlenderProc" paper. The speaker is the main author of both papers. This is the recording of part 2.
>Recording of part 1:
>References to everything covered in the talk:
https://www.reddit.com/r/2D3DAI/comments/jbkjdy/references_f...
>Lecture abstract: We present BlenderProc, which is a modular procedural pipeline, helping in generating real looking images for the training of convolutional neural networks. These can be used in a variety of use cases including segmentation, depth, normal and pose estimation and many others. A key feature of our extension of blender is the simple to use modular pipeline, which was designed to be easily extendable. By offering standard modules, which cover a variety of scenarios, we provide a starting point on which new modules can be created.
>arxiv:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01911
>git:
For me that's always been the issue. They change the UI all the time, which means 90% of the tutorials out in the wild are invalid in various different ways.
After that, Blender makes it easy to manage concurrent versions, so it's fine to just download and run additional versions if you're feature-chasing from a new tutorial or looking for a bug fix.
Blender is a lot of people's first modal, process oriented software, and it does require a different mindset than working in other tools where menus and windows are all available from one interface. I'd still argue the amount of conceptual mastery and memorization needed for each is basically the same.
The repo doesn't have much context: https://github.com/nytimes/rd-blender-docker
Edit: They have writeups here: https://rd.nytimes.com/research/3d-web-technology
Its also completely scriptable in python. I used blender on google cloud platform for my startup (https://lulimjewelry.com) where I digitally engrave my customers fingerprints on a piece of jewelry and then 3d print it for them. I build the pipeline in blender on the backend using NYT's blender docker containers. Everything can run headless (although headless rendering with Eevee was a pain to set up).
I have an un-related hobby where I often have to edit video. In the past I've used iMovie just because it comes on my machine, but I've been meaning to try out Blender. I've heard some good things about its editing capabilities.