Looking to get XSI

[-efbie-]

I have been with blender for about a year now and the feature list has skyrocketed.

? I think about 7% has been added the last 5 years.
In my perception development is getting slower and slower.
Sure we get a new interface (again) and some people think rad is better than deg, but from scratch till now the mayor development has not been in the last (opensource) years. My POV.

And that's quite logical, when a program is smaller you think it develops faster because for an equal amount of features added you increase much more the currrent feature set. As the times goes on the growth rate slows, but the quantity of features added each year grows.

Blender has come to a point where it is usable, and you can see it by the incredible growth of number of users.

A friend is a student in the Video Games industry, as such he had studied maya and 3Dmax. I showed him blender, he was interested, but didn't think it was useful for his job. Then he had to do a stage in a company, they were all using blender and wings... They told him that more and more small company are using blender. They aren't advertising it but blender is being more and more widely used. When i go at the library in my university I often see people using blender on their laptop. I find it quite amazing

[joeri]

A one man band (Ton) is easier to organize than an global open-source developers team.
I suppose it's hard to attract open-managers, leaving programmers and designers to do the organisation, although they do their best,...

I think alot of work has been put in making it possible to work on the code by more than a small group of people. And now that more people understand the code new features should be easier to be implement, if the right structure/plans are there. I'm not sure how much the BF wants to keep blender a one man band.

[bfvietnam]

Hey XSI has been around for a couple of decades, blender can maybe tout about a decade or so, but that would be pushing it.

That is downright false. XSI has only been around since 1999 (maybe 1998?). It was first released close to when Blender was made publicly available.

Softimage was available in 1996, I was in New Orleans when
Microsoft purchased the company.. Then later dropped it..
I went to the party Microsoft had at SIGGRAPH in 1996,
with the Vampire theme.. I also have the T-shirt that shows the
merging of Alias/Wavefront, which I've already given proof of..

XSI, Softimage.. What's the difference.. Wasn't Reboot entirely
animated with Softimage.. And BigIdea, Veggie Tales, switched to it from Lightwave.. Its used all over the place..

[bfvietnam]

Its not so bad as Blender's requirement that the vertices and edges be sub-elements of a polygon, its the reason you can't have polygons share vertices with the same UV coordinates..

Is this actually so?

No, that is BS.

Martin

Has it changed?

[bfvietnam]

well this is an annoyingly pointless thread.

we all know that in the end if we want more features we just wait. I have been with blender for about a year now and the feature list has skyrocketed. just look at the f1 competition for an idea of the improvement in user skill and program power.

if you want a huge update in features and power I have an easy solution. Stop using or upgrading blender for six months and then come back. I am sure you will find some changes for the better, and it will still be F. R. E. E. free.

Yeah, but blender will not be where softimage is now.. For more than 6 months, probably not for a half decade.. I'm sure this fact is just intimidating the others, for fear that users will lose interest..

I'm saying relax, its not going to die.. But you can't develop in a vacuum,
else you bring users future resentment on yourself, for keeping quiet on
the subjects that are obviously taboo..

Softimage will never be open source.. Its creditors won't let it, lest it becomes bankrupt.. And what do you imagine will happen to the sources? I foresee blender's GUI atop Softimage's brawn..

The access to data, directly, is a result of the database style of access that blender gives users.. The data is not structured and hiearchical, like an object oriented system would be.. But that has problems too, in that you can't structure complex relationships without the use of python, and special parenting relationships.. Eventually blender will become less accessible as features creep in.. The focus is to allow users to access the data directly, without construction history and other stuff in the way.. But that makes blender, what people say, its essentially the VI editor of 3D packages.. VI is modeless, it has three states actually, edit mode, command mode, and an expression mode.. Blender is similar in that any edit mode you are in, you can get out of with a hit to "escape". However blender even has commands in edit mode, which VI doesn't.. The expression mode of VI is what I call it when you use regular expressions and calls to external packages.. Blender uses python to give extended use and automation.. Blender has multiple undo and redo.. VIM has multiple undo and redo.. The similarities are uncanny.. Evne the choice for deleting and object is the same as deleting a character in VI, "x". So obviously Ton must use VI or must have been somewhat inspired by VI when he devised the design for blender..

Its amazing to me, that they didn't push to use VI as an editor for the text files in blender..

But to say Ton designed this in a vacuum with sheer programming genius is a made up.. I know facts about blender and what TOn has told me in the past, that would certainly kill blender's development if I said anything.. And I don't want to reveal what I know.. For fear that it would.. But blender borrowed a lot from other softwares.. But its not competing, because its free.. And its not a major competitor, its just a small little niche of the 3D world, not competition (* evil grin *).

[bfvietnam]

I have been with blender for about a year now and the feature list has skyrocketed.

? I think about 7% has been added the last 5 years.
In my perception development is getting slower and slower.
Sure we get a new interface (again) and some people think rad is better than deg, but from scratch till now the mayor development has not been in the last (opensource) years. My POV.

And that's quite logical, when a program is smaller you think it develops faster because for an equal amount of features added you increase much more the currrent feature set. As the times goes on the growth rate slows, but the quantity of features added each year grows.

Yeah.. But how many object oriented designs are developed by a few users and gain in feature sets greater than the previous year.. And how much has blender grown in the last four years? I can name a few major features.. The rest are bug fixes: Subdivision surfaces and Winged Edges, Multiple Undo/Redo, and maybe the Pose IK/FK system.. Relative keys are too easy to implement, its just vector addition over time. Many of these are just organizations of existing code in creative ways.. Its not anything major like construction history, or surface painting, hair, etc. Some of the features that go into blender are like simplifications of features in other packages. Its like being in a garrage band and looking at Eddie VanHalen and saying "Hey I can do that, and maybe perfecting one song and playing a it a lot".. Now blender is way more significant than how I painted that analogy, but over time how far has blender come.. There were packages in 1995 that were just as capable as blender is now, minus the subdivision surfaces. . The difference is how blender is developed, and to what means that blender is developed.. Its not for money, its for use.. Simplest most direct way to getting the features people want without the complex structures that would take too much time to do accurately.. The complexity and efficiency is not in the code, but in the use of blender.. It isn' t developed with "primitive wizards" that make beautiful objects the first time, its designed to give users the essential tools. But this is a blessing as the result of a curse of the design.. Its like designing applications on a Palm Pilot, you have clever and efficient designs because your system resources and options are limited. Blender has no shortage of system resources, but it does have limited options, as the design of the code does not resmble a distribution of functionality without the distribution of code (therefore little if no code reuse). You can recognize a lack of object oriented design by the replication of code across a design and the replication of functions with incremental naming, like having a magnet tool for lattices, vertices on meshes, vertices on NURBS, cruves, etc.. Rather than having one magnet tool that works on vertices, and having the magnet tool as a method of a vertex object, and having all other primtives aggregate the vertex primitive, or overload the vertex to support weighted vertices, UV texture vertices, tagged vertices, attributed fragment shaders that determine the color, texture, and displacement of vertices.. These are all methods of a vertex object, but if you find ten primitives, each with its own kind of vertex, and each primitive having its own implementation of a magnet tool.. Then you don't have an object oriented design..

Blender has come to a point where it is usable, and you can see it by the incredible growth of number of users.

A friend is a student in the Video Games industry, as such he had studied maya and 3Dmax. I showed him blender, he was interested, but didn't think it was useful for his job. Then he had to do a stage in a company, they were all using blender and wings... They told him that more and more small company are using blender. They aren't advertising it but blender is being more and more widely used. When i go at the library in my university I often see people using blender on their laptop. I find it quite amazing

Well it will be more widespread.. I haven't seen the acceptance.. I guess it would be taboo to reveal peoples preferences.. I personally would much better prefer blender in a shared environment to Softimage.. I still have yet to get oriented with Softimage.. I'm not at the level I can really go and do things with Softimage.. But I've seen stuff done with Softimage that just amazed me.. And when I know what blender can do, its like it really can't compare.. Its like with blender I can say "well if it has any soft bodies with IK, forget about it." But if its level design for a video game, blender is on par.. I could design entire levels for Battlefield Vietnam so quickly in blender I would be popping out mods like hotcakes.. But the lack of a game design interface to blender, just makes me more frustrated at the idiots who prefer 3DsMax for such exercises.. However, Softimage when I see someone doing IK work with Softimage, I just have to laugh because I blender can't even bat in the same ballpark.. You really have to know where blender stands to have an opinion.. But Softimage's interface does pretty much suck.. I can't navigate in it like I would like.. And there is no way to make it work like blender.. Blender is one of those packages I wish I had never learned how to use, because it just makes me more frustrated using the old turntable navigation systems an the rigid viewing panels.. I mean in blender, to add a new view on your data you can judt middle-mouse click on a bar and dial an interface.. These are the kinds of things I think packages like SOftimage will gradually have when the popular use of blender gets to be too competitive..

[Desoto]

You're talking about so much that you're talking about nothing. Your posts just take on this monotone "inner-monologue-on-the-web" form and are nearly impossible to follow. If you have a coherent and important thing to say you should be able to do it in less than 30 paragraphs. One short comment like, "Blender's design is such that it cannot expand in the ways that object oriented code would allow." Or something of that nature. This enormous rant about a hundred random topics about Blender is absolutely useless to the dialectic.

[bfvietnam]

You're talking about so much that you're talking about nothing. Your posts just take on this monotone "inner-monologue-on-the-web" form and are nearly impossible to follow. If you have a coherent and important thing to say you should be able to do it in less than 30 paragraphs. One short comment like, "Blender's design is such that it cannot expand in the ways that object oriented code would allow." Or something of that nature. This enormous rant about a hundred random topics about Blender is absolutely useless to the dialectic.

I did it in less than 30 paragraphs.. Did you re-read over your message to
realize just what you said.. I read over my messages several times to make sure that I didn't emphasize the wrong message..

"Blender's design is such that it cannot expand in the ways that object oriented code would allow." Is concise.. But the issue is the language not the code.. the language does not enforce object oriented design, so it allows the existence of global variables and distributed/copied code across the codebase. It doesn't give the developers the tools to reuse existing code, easily. This also effects the kind of developers that are attracted to developing blender, and the speed of the development that blender can take..

The only way blender can be developed quickly and in a way that users would expect, is to have blender completely recoded from the ground up in an object oriented language.. That will get you the larger development team, that will attract the developers blender needs, and that will bring the tools to blender that users need.

But its either that or continue at a snails pace trying to make the current codebase work.. If you spend more time reogranizing code than adding features, the development is slowing down..

[joeri]

Let's not discuss bfvietnam writting style.
He's been told before that long posts with many (personal) opinions are hard to follow (even by native english speakers). Or not interesting to follow 'cause the reader does not gain enough by reading them.

[bfvietnam]

Let's not discuss bfvietnam writting style.
He's been told before that long posts with many (personal) opinions are hard to follow (even by native english speakers). Or not interesting to follow 'cause the reader does not gain enough by reading them.

Most people who don't get anything from reading my messages are living in flatland.. I'm just stepping out of the dimension.. Its tough to condense things for you squares..

[joeri]

Happy easter to you to kiernan.

[soriyath]

bfvietnam, you're too long to read. but you might want to apply to softimage. they may hire you for advertising their products.

nothing else to say.

edit: yep, i remember something else. amazing that blender only has 10 developers... I would have thought it had at least a hundred... I guess knowing that it is an open source software made me think a lot of people were working on it.

I didn't want to be harsh here (related to bfvietnam's posts). It's just that overall, all this construction history stuff seems a good thing, but it has not been presented in a constructive way. Until now, it's basically only "Softimage XSI is much better than anything blender might get someday"... If you have ideas, bfvietnam, why don't you join the developers? They'd be eleven, then... 39 to go and they match XSI!!!

[joeri]

bfvietnam, you're too long to read. but you might want to apply to softimage. they may hire you for advertising their products.

Old news.
I haven't seen bfvietnam for a while now so you are talking to empty space.