Blender 5.2 LTS(blender.org) |
Blender 5.2 LTS(blender.org) |
That said, I can't help but feel something is wrong with 3D asset creation in that becoming an expert at Blender or 3DSMax, Maya or literally any other 3D creation software, it's a multi-month if not multi-year project. There are 1000s upon 1000s of options buried all over in nested upon nested options.
Maybe AI will solve this. You ask for or sketch what you want and it does the 3000 steps to create it for you.
There just has to be a better way than what we have now. It (3d asset creation) practially hasn't changed much since ~1995. If you compare 3DSMax 1995 to Blender, with few execptions, you'll find them very recognizable. Yes, there are amazing features that have been added but still. It's quite a slog to get good at, not just artistic good, that's a whole extra level of training, I just mean good at knowing where and how to use the software.
I wish I had an idea for how to make it easier.
a) Having lots of options
b) Making those options discoverable for beginners
is with some kind of nested categorization scheme. Any UI you create to render that will naturally converge onto a high-fan-out tree-like menu.
I don't think this is strictly true, not only are there new approaches to modeling like mudbox and such, but the nature of the assets people are creating is meaningfully different in 2026 than it was in 1995. The polycounts are orders of magnitude higher, the way you texture and shade the models is different, etc.
And then the actual hardware being used to render the finished assets is very different - it's much faster, it has dedicated acceleration for rasterization and ray/path tracing, etc. Fewer compromises are necessary to deliver your 3D assets to the viewer than back in 1995 and it's cheaper to deliver them.
It's true that a lot of the fundamentals haven't changed though. I'm not sure that's a bad thing.
It did take me ~5 years to get comfortable with the majority of Blender's features, but I made decent contributions to a small project before then. Solo stuff is much harder since you have to play the one-man-band by yourself.
But nothing feels lousier than coming back after a few months and finding out that you've forgotten how the workflow goes.
I was under the impression that Thunderbird is on life support, while Blender is everywhere.
Fore More recent numbers: In 2024[1] (last info I found), Blender had 3.1m € in donations (600k more than the year before) and Thunderbird had around 9m € [2].
I kind of get it, Blender is way more niche than Thunderbird, but imagine what they could do with even more money.
[1] https://download.blender.org/foundation/Blender-Foundation-A... on page 76 [2] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/10/state-of-the-bird-2024-... I did the money conversion based on today's exchange rates
It just goes to show you how badly managed Thunderbird is, since Blender is doing so much more with the money. I'm more and more disappointed with Mozilla all the time.
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/644/why-does-the...
They improved the UI already, but maybe they could improve it a little bit more. And this is not the only frustration, I constantly have to ask around for little things like that.
Also important to know, but late blender versions don't support old GPU, which is a bit sad: I can't use late blender version on my old thinkpad which only has a graphics chipset.
I've been hearing this complaint since Blender 2.48 twenty years ago, where it might've had some merit. But even then you could still pick it up in at most a few weeks with focused study, and the biggest non-intuitive (in terms of adherence to things like OS guidelines etc) and Blender-specific features and workflows remain the same to this day, and the interface overall is remarkably consistent and effective once you get used to it.
The only thing I can see that comes close to doing the same thing in terms of a general/integrative/swiss-army-knife-of 3D content creation suite are to this day Autodesk Maya and 3ds max, and maybe increasingly UE and Unity. I wouldn't exactly say you can just "intuitively" click around in any of those and high-quality results come out by default. Other software may be better at specific things and perhaps offer a more focused UI for some subset of tasks, sure, but at that point you're using the wrong tool sticking with Blender.
But in basically all cases, as soon as you're doing anything moderately complex, you're constantly referring to the manual/LLMs/tutorial videos. This stuff is just difficult, man, and most of the difficulty is even orthogonal to the software itself!
It opens instantly on my computer. It's fast. It's lightweight to the point my fans don't even spin up no matter what I do. It's customizable. It does everything I want to do and it never gets in the way of me trying to do my job. Meanwhile Photoshop these days randomly shows fucking popups about features and begs me to use its cloud scam, it's slower than it was 20 years ago without offering significantly better features, and the UI has somehow gotten worse when it was fine before. Blender does everything right. All I want is someone to take Blender's design philosophy and make a 2D image editor for desktop. Or hell, everything. I'm sick of bloat and BS in every damn app these days.
That and the lack of easy portability (say modeling on my Mac and then handing off to a more powerful (or less utilized) desktop for rendering), made the learning curve steep.
I’m a novice and barely got the things done that I wanted to do, but was happy with the output. Maybe I’ll do more in the future, but finding tutorials for beginners for the latest interface was also challenging.
I just checked Lightwave 3D and Cinema 4D is still getting updated. Just found out Zbush got bought by Cinema 4D. And Foundry decided to wind down development of Modo. A lot of these names were big in late 90s and early 00s. I am wondering if everything is still pretty much the same.
Speaking of 3D Modelling software I am still pissed the whole CGtalk forum got deleted and decades of community knowledge wasn't even backed up or sold.
The big problems are that license cost doesn’t outweigh the pain points. In production I can get support from Autodesk for specific bugs without rediverting my production resources to fixing it.
Blender has no C++ API and even the Python api is not stable version to version. Studios live by maximizing their competitive advantage and that takes the form of extending the DCCs with custom pipelines and high performance plugins. With blender I’d have to maintain a full fork.
Also blender’s ghost UI system is significantly worse than Qt. It also means I can’t share the Qt tools I built for the rest of the apps with blender.
And while Ton was still CEO he heavily told studios he didn’t want their business. He believed blender shouldn’t be part of a pipeline but be the whole pipeline. These were his explicit words in a presentation blender gave at SIGGRAPH.
For background, I was a lead engineer in the film industry and still am quite involved with industry development while also contributing to blenders code base. My partner also works for one of the big animation studios.
I think blender is great and it’s seeing adoption professionally but there’s a lot of fundamental things that need solving before it displaces the current status quo DCCs.
It's a wonderful project. Even small amounts help. Thanks!
The fact that Apple Pay is an option made it take only another 20 seconds for me to throw some money at a great project.
A monthly thing makes no sense; just letting hobbyists dabble until they are in a place to pay used to be a lot more normal. They ought to make the entry for paying a bit less heartburn-inducing, though.
Ah man, been waiting so long for this, finally! The integration with sound to geometry nodes is also great and will be a lot of fun for music videos.
Every day Blender inches closer to Houdini, and I for one am very happy about it :)
Really like the polished changelog notes they've done for quite some time as well, used to be a huge hassle to actually understand what changed and it's a breeze now.
Yeah but the distance is crossing the atlantic. I saw this as a blender user who glimpsed houdini a bit.
Damn that's a cool program.
Indeed, a far way to go. But I also remember discussing the Blender UI/UX with people back in 2.5 days, and we were all like "Yeah, the UI is something else, but it is what it is, maybe some day" and look at it now, it's a night and day difference. I have no doubt in Blender's ability to continue iterating over decades to reach something amazing, they've already proven this clearly :)
In terms of nodes and simulation, Houdini is still lightyears ahead of blender. I say this as someone who loves blender and views the programs as complementary. But still, I was shocked at how deep Houdini is.
With that said, learning Houdini is an unrelenting gauntlet. Blender isn’t exactly easy to learn but it’s a walk in the park compared to Houdini. Even something as simple as creating a material and assigning it to an object is an exercise in frustration.
https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-2/
Hopefully a mod sees this.
>it was a friend's license
>didn't pay for a copy of Blender
just for the record, everyone can download, for free, Blender from https://www.blender.org/download/ for Win, MacOS or Linux
Is that true though? I mean sure, more people use email - but I would guess there are more Blender users than Thunderbird users in the world.
There's plenty of competition for an excellent free email experience. Very little for 3D modeling software.
Update: Looks like I guessed wrong. I found some approximate user numbers:
Thunderbird has analytics that show around 10 million active daily installations: https://stats.thunderbird.net/
Blender stats are harder to find. They reported 23 million total downloads in 2024, which suggests daily actives significantly lower than 10 million: https://download.blender.org/foundation/Blender-Foundation-A...
Quite potentially some really great stuff, but I’m skeptical that this is actually a great way to kill a good thing. Ideally money isn’t an issue and everyone is paid well, and somehow the organization managers know how to feel out and draw a line on scale/ambitions.
Though people are so eager to be locked into Fusion 360 I will never understand. Especially when Freecad is so much better than it used to be.
Those assumptions are only crazy if you're an Apple user or a laptop user who uses a touchpad to 3d model.
As for the numpad you can use the tilde key or alt+drag to switch views. There's also a handy gizmo.
That said, Blender is respected. I think it'll get there but still has to battle through momentum.
I've worked in the animation and currently the VFX realm.
Also some extreme ups and downs along the way, almost succumbing at some point(s) and more along the way. It's a miracle it survived, a miracle performed by Ton Roosendaal most likely.
There are still some areas where commercial competitors got edge, but Blender covers a wider base, is the more complete/universal software already. Lot's of people prefer Blender's UI. It's also rapidly developing, the competition is not. I am pretty sure it will become industry standard at some point. Maybe not for the big studios, who invested millions into custom pipelines, but anything up and coming.
Role model FOSS project for sure.
I remember people saying this in 2004.
Blender is widely used in "the industry" (whatever that industry is). What is has really accomplished in terms of "the industry standard" has, from my POV, been preventing a proprietary system from becoming the standard. That's what happened in the DAW space, where ProTools was the industry standard, and it has taken 20 years to get to the point where that hegemony is no longer as solid as it once was (thanks, Ableton!)
There are several different choices for all the things Blender does, but the existence of a FLOSS tool that does them (and does them well) prevents any of the proprietary ones from being "the one".
Imagine if they made Gimp good, this would be what blender became in 3D.
They've done it right, with a foundation and it appears to run like clockwork. Feature wise it now rivals with some pretty expensive alternatives.
Open source; can win!
It is also free. =3
I have a vague recollection that twenty years ago GIMP paid some designers to come up with a great UI, but once the design was ready, GIMP was like "nah we don't like that" and kept their bad UI.
I do image stuff so rarely that GIMP is fine because it's free. But its UI is so bad. I don't know about now, but I remember a few years ago someone pointed out that GIMP had over a million dollars in a Bitcoin wallet and hadn't touched any of it in like a decade.
Tiny Eye: Free Procedural eyes
Sanctus Library: Procedural Materials
Auto-Rig Pro: UE asset export
Blob Fusion: similar to zbrush
Flip Fluids: Better fluid sim
Scribble Gen: cobwebs, wires, fire, and cables
FaceIt: iPhone Pro Lidar camera used with UE5 face motion capture (works better than most industry products.)
Also, there are many great courses that save the pain of learning the goofy workflows on your own. =3
So for anyone on the fence about picking up blender and reading this comment above, no it doesn’t require hundreds of dollars of plugins to be useful. Not for every use case.
I've tried many times to get to grips with Blender but for whatever reason I've found doing the simplest things very tiring. If there's a big, illustrated PDF manual out there for a recent version, I'd love to know of a link to it...or even better yet a conversion guide from C4D (!)
The official manual is more readable than you'd think. It actually switches back and forth between "tutorial" and "reference" style. The intro sections are often in tutorial style and the detailed sub-sections are more reference style. It worked well for me for intros to specific topics. https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/index.html
My issue was yes, it's always a YouTube video, and also always for shit I didn't want to do. I don't want to make a donut. I don't want to model a coffee cup, I want to make something else.
It was full of little errors here and there (the human crafted ones are too because the Blender UI changes so often), but since it had gotten me started and "in" the UI I could usually figure it out myself or use a search engine to find what I was looking for.
It’s a general beginner tutorial, but blender can be so weird that many skills don’t transfer (like how you move the camera in the viewport).
The tutorial takes you through pretty much everything you need to know to get started with blender. Modeling, texturing, painting, modifiers, compositing, geometry nodes, and rendering. You can skip the parts that seem familiar, since you already know 3DS Max.
By remaining expensive proprietary tools, they lost the new generations of developers who learned 3D with Blender and Houdini Apprentice and who will naturally continue to use them once they become professionals, so the customer base will keep shrinking.
I think people just pirate all this stuff anyway. I'm kind of surprised about the casualness (and often encouragement)of using cracked software in 3d communities.
Basically take whatever you'd do in 3ds Max normally, commit to doing in in Blender and prepare to Google/Ask an LLM "I can do X in 3ds Max 2025, how can I do the same or equivalent in Blender 5.2?" A LOT. Nothing beats practice :)
The issue is Blender has been in perpetual Beta for decades. Every update something breaks, moves, permutes, or goes missing. It is chaos incarnate in some ways. =3
OpenScad and FreeCad also works for 3D cad files. However, many people that own 3D printers will never sculpt, re-mesh, or cad up their own objects. =3
I use blender because I also like to do a lot of 3d printed art, and as you mentioned, that sculpt tooling is one of many fantastic tools for that purpose.
Also LLMs know a lot about Blender, making it very easy to describe what I want to do, and then get a walk through of how to do it with Blender.
https://bartoszstyperek.gumroad.com/
LLM are sometimes good at organizing the awful documentation for Blenders ever permuting API, but will not help you get better creatively. If you are interested in geometry nodes, than this channel offers a lot =3
I had the movie industry in mind, because it demands the largest set of Blender's features. I believe Maya still has/had the edge in animation and particle stuff. Though, AFAIK the main reason is integration and custom tooling built on it, which makes switching to Blender less tempting than sticking up with license fees... which are rather negligible compared to overall operating costs.
I believe, Blender is creeping in with smaller studios, especially anime/cartoon kinda stuff.
I think one of Blender's biggest assets is its wide creative tool set. There is even a useful video editor included. Honestly, it's not far off from being the swiss army knife of digital creative work, a creative operating system. Maybe we get a DAW too at some point :D Anyway, I think that's why Blender will dominate. Anyone starting out got everything they need for "free" (with a consistent UI you only have to learn once), but they still won't outgrow the software professionally either, now. That's totally unique.
We spent around $3k conducting a survey of the Blender ecosystem for a game dev project about 2 years ago, and continue to monitor the situation every update. A rather sobering experience in some ways.
Would recommend Poly Haven as the plugin is not required to access their free assets, but it is usually a good idea to support people that make things easier for everyone. =3
I don't remember the last time I used a software package as smooth and clean and tidy as C4D.
After a video tutorial I always concluded that I had a few really clumsily ways to work around my lack of knowledge. Some workflows really need an expert demonstration, or you won't even know what is possible. (I do pause the videos to look up the docu.)
Since hacking on a 3D DCC in your spare time may be more than three times as enticing to people than doing the same on an email client?
I'd wager Occam's razor favors this explanation.
but still, they were open sourced about 1 year apart. I still think having a bigger user base is a good reason for the difference
It's come an absurdly long way since I first dabbled with it in the early 2000s, and has gone from a niche FOSS tool to something widely used in its field.
Nowadays, Blender is an example of masterful UX for a professional tool. Immediately responsive, information dense UI with keyboard shortcuts for absolutely everything. Actions are composable, like with vim: something like "ex5" will extrude five units on the x axis.
Gimp still has a lot of good features that I find myself crawling back for, on bigger projects. But Pinta has that good ol' fashioned Paint.NET feel to it that a lot of people still strive for.
> Though people are so eager to be locked into Fusion 360 I will never understand. Especially when Freecad is so much better than it used to be.
Because Fusion 360 is that much better than even the latest Freecad? Just because Freecad sucks less nowadays doesn't mean that Fusion 360 isn't simply a better product... Freecad 1.0 was too little too late. The only way it could gain traction in the hobby market is if Fusion 360 pulls the plug on its free version (again). And I say all this as a Freecad user.
And also such a deliberate ploy to try and undercut competition, which sadly has been working unreasonable well. Even after onshape shafted everyone which should have highlighted the obvious risks.
I’m not an animator but I do know that mayas rigging support is second to none; we’re often working on characters with 100+ bones and 200k triangles being driven by said bones. The standards stay standard for a reason when working at that complexity.
Note: Blender might have this too. I haven't tried. But, my impression so far is Blender didn't start this way and trying to add it in after the fact is difficult. Maya stays clean because any UI feature needs to buildable from scripts. By enforcing that rule on themselves, they keep it customizable.
A note on that pointer thing, I don't use it much, instinctively going for the pad and as such sort of dismissed it. Until I was trying to use the laptop in moving vehicle where the pad was useless due to bouncing but the pointer, rock solid. I totally get it now. lesson: Touch screens sort of suck anyway but are really terrible in moving/bouncing vehicles.
Blender’s UI just makes bad assumptions.
Those aren't really bad assumptions.