Apple Joins Blender's Development Fund To Support 3D Graphics Tool (macrumors.com) 51
Blender today announced that Apple has joined the Blender Development Fund to support continued development of the free open source 3D graphics tool. From a report: Alongside a contribution to the Development Fund, Apple will provide engineering expertise and additional resources to Blender and its broader development community to help support Blender artists and developers, according to the announcement. Blender CEO Ton Roosendaal said the announcement means that "macOS will be back as a complete supported Blender platform."
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I thought Apple was trying to kill OpenGL... where does that leave Blender?
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This is just a bit of virtue signalling for the freelancer crowd, from which Apple has been absent so far.
Other prominent names on the list, that can be associated with some questionable morals, are: Amazon, Facebook, Epic, Nvidia, Microsoft, Adobe, Intel, google, Activision, and others. Blender is still independent.
Re:Embrace... (Score:4, Interesting)
Blender is licensed under the GPL, so Apple couldn't make it macOS only. Just ask Oracle about their purchase of MySQL and the resulting MariaDB fork the community produced. The best Apple could do is fork it themselves and providing the source to the community (as required by the GPL), though they'd be better served contributing to the main project.
Probably the big thing hurting Apple right now is Apple's decision to deprecate OpenGL on their platform and essentially hold it in a zombie state. This means if Apple wants a first class version of Blender for macOS they have to options, being to provide a version of OpenGL matching the latest spec or provide Metal support to Blender. I suspect Apple would likely choose the latter route. Additionally if they can show that Blender on ARM is superior to Blender on x86, then they can sell more ARM based Macs to the people who care.
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Additionally if they can show that Blender on ARM is superior to Blender on x86, then they can sell more ARM based Macs to the people who care.
CPU performance in Blender is almost irrelevant at this point when compared to what Nvidia's OptiX raytracer delivers in terms of performance.
But don't take my word for it, check out Blender's benchmark database yourself: https://opendata.blender.org/ [blender.org]
If Apple wants to make their platform attractive for artists using Blender, they'll have to support one of those high end Nvidia GPUs as external GPUs.
Re:Embrace... (Score:4, Interesting)
Additionally if they can show that Blender on ARM is superior to Blender on x86, then they can sell more ARM based Macs to the people who care.
CPU performance in Blender is almost irrelevant at this point when compared to what Nvidia's OptiX raytracer delivers in terms of performance.
But don't take my word for it, check out Blender's benchmark database yourself: https://opendata.blender.org/ [blender.org]
If Apple wants to make their platform attractive for artists using Blender, they'll have to support one of those high end Nvidia GPUs as external GPUs.
Certainly, but if they can break into either of those charts, without needing a supplementary graphics card, especially in laptop form, then people will take notice. I am not saying they will, but if they do. The likelihood of outshining AMD or Nvidia are low, but any dent from a non-GPU specialist would be enough be news, especially if the price point is that of you regular Apple MacBook Pro.
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While the RTX 3090 isn't very useful for many other things, for Blender artists it can be considered one of the best possible investment you can make at the time. It's only one of the best and not the best, because Blender doesn't need as much VRAM a
Re: Embrace... (Score:2)
Using the search function of the database the M1 is currently listed with a median render time of 938.369s and with a sample size of 255. Not great when compared to a Ryzen 7 5700U has a median render time of 733.909s but at a low sample size of 71.
Math is admittedly not my strong suit; but isn't that just around a 28% speed difference?
So, the question really comes down to how much does Apple have to beef up the Mx series to start making that Ryzen speed advantage be in their favor?
To me, a 28% speed gain seems very attainable for Apple in one SoC generation. And it is important to note that Apple is in full control of their SoC design, and can easily whip up a hardware subsystem to place in the Mx to potentially dramatically speed up whatever the Ren
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And after AMD kicked Intel's ass rather good with Zen, making them come up with some rather different approaches to x86, none of the competitors seem to be sleeping either.
And again, CPUs are pretty much irrelevant for Blender. So I strongly doubt that they'll come up wi
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Hence if Apple tried to blow some socks off, they'd have to come up with some contrivance that'd boost the apparent performance by a factor of about 20, which is not likely to happen without causing some severe backlash over insincere marketing.
Why is it that, when it comes to Apple, everything has to be a "contrivance", or "Marketing", or "Reality Distortion"? Why can't it be just plain old Innovation?
The M1 came out of the gate a year ago with a CPU that was already comparable to high-end i9 CPUs, and was also doing quite respectably in the GPU department as well, and at a fraction of the power budget of either Intel or AMD. Why is it so unbelievable that their next generation SoC would not be significantly better.
Remember, we're likely a year o
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The CPU part of the M1 is an ARM based design whose parts have been refined by ARM itself for a long time. Apple didn't do it from scratch. And it's also not only a year old. Claiming that it is is the "Reality Distortion" right there.
Don't get me wro
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While we are measuring body parts, I too am an Embedded Systems Designer (both hardware and software), with nearly 40 years of paid experience.
Apple has an Architecture-Class license with ARM; one of only about a dozen worldwide. That means they can (and do!) design entire ARM-based CPUs from scratch. This is in stark contrast to the sturm and drang of ARM microcontroller/SoC “OEMs”, who in fact do go shopping in the ARM "catalog" of pieces-parts (CPUs and "Peripherals"), licensing the IP for ea
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Apple's been using ARM designs in their products for a long time, plenty of time to gather real world experience with their devices, which is why statements like "only one year" which suggest that Apple managed to accomplish this out of the blue with no one expecting it, sound rather "reality distorting" to me. I mean it was obvious that they were up to something that's pretty good
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Perhaps I wasn't clear.
I am not amazed by this. In fact, that's why I originally opined that a 28% performance gain should be quite do-able between the M1 (which obviously builds upon several generations of their modern Ax series SoCs) and the upcoming M1x (or whatever it will be designated). Especially if the rumors regarding numbers of high-performance CPU cores (12-16, IIRC, up from 8) and their apparently quite performant GPU cores (16-32, up from 7/8) pan out. And that doesn't even consider the possibi
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Apparently Apple has recently submitted Metal related changes to Blender.
https://twitter.com/i/web/stat... [twitter.com]
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Apparently Apple has recently submitted Metal related changes to Blender.
https://twitter.com/i/web/stat... [twitter.com]
Exactly.
I had already posted that a couple of times to this thread.
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Blender is licensed under the GPL, so Apple couldn't make it macOS only. Just ask Oracle about their purchase of MySQL and the resulting MariaDB fork the community produced. The best Apple could do is fork it themselves and providing the source to the community (as required by the GPL), though they'd be better served contributing to the main project.
Probably the big thing hurting Apple right now is Apple's decision to deprecate OpenGL on their platform and essentially hold it in a zombie state. This means if Apple wants a first class version of Blender for macOS they have to options, being to provide a version of OpenGL matching the latest spec or provide Metal support to Blender. I suspect Apple would likely choose the latter route. Additionally if they can show that Blender on ARM is superior to Blender on x86, then they can sell more ARM based Macs to the people who care.
I think you just stated Apple's goal.
Mx-based Macs are already so fast at graphics-heavy tasks, and this coming Monday, they are about to blow away the competition in that regard with their new MacBook Pros, 27" or larger iMac, and updated Mac mini.
Having an Mx-native, Metal2-supporting Blender would make for a quite a useful machine for certain Applications.
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Now that you mention what a perfect demo in a keynote. Instead off the old Photoshop tests (that promote a competitor), show off how great your Apple hardware by building your own metal support into Blender. Benchmarks will seem like honest comparisons, and the 3D aspect makes for great visuals in a keynote. On top of it all Apple is supporting my favorite open source project. So yay and wow.
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Now that you mention what a perfect demo in a keynote. Instead off the old Photoshop tests (that promote a competitor), show off how great your Apple hardware by building your own metal support into Blender. Benchmarks will seem like honest comparisons, and the 3D aspect makes for great visuals in a keynote. On top of it all Apple is supporting my favorite open source project. So yay and wow.
I just checked over at MacRumors, who’s Forums are often nearly as Mac-Hostile as Slashdot, and there was uncharacteristically nearly universal excitement over this news about Blender.
Also, Apple reportedly just contributed a Metal Backend for the Cycles GPU Renderer:
https://www.macrumors.com/2021... [macrumors.com]
So, I suspect there will be a jaw-dropping Blender Demo at next Monday's Apple Keynote!
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> then they can sell more ARM based Macs to the people who care.
People who care use 3DS Max or Maya.
Blender is excellent for free, but if you care about this sort of thing you'll drop money for the above, because they're just flat out better products.
Perhaps; but Apple can't easily (and completely in secret) modify (Optimize) those Products' Source Code like they can with Blender. That is obviously started with that particular popular and well-respected Open Source graphics workflow tool.
And if Apple is able to demonstrate the performance gains in Blender that I predict they will, how long before the Publishers of Maya, 3DS, et al, start wanting to "Partner" with Apple to bring those Mx optimizations to their own products?
These companies are smart enoug
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Yep. This will be a way to coerce Blender into supporting their Metal API. It'll be in the contract for sure.
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Yep. This will be a way to coerce Blender into supporting their Metal API. It'll be in the contract for sure.
This would be Apple doing the development to make it happen. In fact they did that with the latest patches they submitted.
Apple Joins Blender's Development (Score:5, Funny)
We'll finally get to drink some iSmoothies.
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Microsoft joins the open source movement, people bitch and say Microsoft is trying to take over...
Apple does this, people are cheering..
Well Microsoft users would be cheering in the former and Apple users cheering in the latter. Linux users distrusting either of the two corporations, unless they are secretly users of the other platforms too.
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Apple can play nicely with FOSS software, when they choose to. It's not like they broke CUPS on Linux after they bought it.
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I'd rather queue the question, how many proprietary companies does it take to make open-source a success?
Interesting... (Score:2)
I want to see if they will adopt Metal only or what, since Blender seems to be deep into CUDA only.
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I want to see if they will adopt Metal only or what, since Blender seems to be deep into CUDA only.
Apple just made a Metal contribution to Blender.
Will be back? (Score:2)
Embrace, extend, extinguish... (Score:2)
It seems Apple has learned a lot from Microsoft. The question is, will there be a feasible fork of Blender, or will take another project its place?
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There is absolutely no possibility of anything like you are suggesting happening. Blender is open source and GPL so in no danger of being taken over. No, this is a way for Apple to make sure their hardware is supported by a graphics app that makes for great demos.
Now if they can just perfect (Score:2)
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Making it 100% seamless to use the massive library from Daz3D inside of Blender and I'll be all set.
All in good time, my friend.
This is just the beginning.
Hopefully this is to fund Metal support (Score:2)
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Most of Blender works just great on Mac OS, what doesn't work well is rendering. It will do it, but not efficiently. Hopefully this is a move to fund development for Metal rendering support.
You mean like they just did?
https://www.blendernation.com/... [blendernation.com]
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You act like I didn't RTFA before posting!! Well I had not!!
But seriously, this is great news.
Sorry! Didn't mean to be snarky!
I just get like that after battling with Haterz all morning, LOL!
And yes, it IS great news!
Maybe they'll make it useable (Score:2)
Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of Blender.
It's just that despite having used most of the other 3D big-names out there, I still find Blender incomprehensible. The keyboard shortcuts, the weird way everything works (yes, they cleaned up a lot of, but still) and lots of things are just different for no good reason. I feels so much like it's made for a "make a copy of a common tool, except mix up all the controls" challenge.
I use Blender from time to time, and the main reason I don't use it more often is t
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Having used blender from time to time since the early days just after it went open source, I have seen the interface change from being extraordinarily ugly and janky to being quite usable and definitely more capable than those early days, though it has sometimes required re-learning how to do some things when there have been big changes like when node based rendering was brought in.
The interface is very configurable to whatever shortcuts you want to use, but to expect it to work just like some other program
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The interface is very configurable to whatever shortcuts you want to use, but to expect it to work just like some other program's interface is unreasonable, given the vast number of operations and actions available.
I'm not expecting it to work like a text editor.
I'm expecting it to work at least somewhat similar to other 3D software so that those of us familiar with the basic concepts of 3D editing can find their way around without having to re-learn EVERYTHING.
Sometimes being different is good - when the old way of doing things was crap. From time to time you pick up a new software and it's different and strange, but then you "get it" and it's so intuitive and obvious that you wonder why the other software you've use
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AFAICT so far the interface from Lightwave 3D back in the Amiga days (!) was better than what Blender has today. At least I was able to get a whole lot more modeling done in it. I'm trying just to simplify a model in Blender right now and it's not going well.
I'm not a pro, but like I said, I could do the same stuff in LW3D that I'm having trouble with in Blender.
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Exactly. Same here. I work all the time in Unity 3D (including some simple modelling with ProBuilder), I've used Cinema 4D, 3DS, a bit of Maya and one or two old ones I can't remember. None were nearly as obscure as Blender.
Blender has reached critical mass. Awesome. (Score:3)
I've been with the Blender camp for 20 years now, met Ton and the small blender community back in the early zeroes, when 1.8 was a thing and fitted on a single 3.5" Floppydisk. I even have a commercial blender license from the brief period at which it was held by NaN, including the professional license for the texture and model CD. I always knew that Blender hat the potential to rock the 3D world, with it's innovative UI concepts and fully open-gl accelerated UI. That Ton Roosendahl and his mates have held on and seen it through to this day and that they are now reaping the benefits of industry giants almost tripping over themselves in joining the foundation left, right and center is soooo satisfying to observe. Apple forking resources to integrate it into their metal hardware thing is another instance of this. Feature films [youtube.com] are being produced on studios running nothing other than pure blender pipelines, it's the de-facto tool to support for 3D libs, it's being used more and more in hollywood and the classic vendors such as sidefx, pixologic, newtek, maxon, foundry and autodesk are shifting their focus, because the underdog is now slowly rolling up the market and reaping the lions mindshare.
Blender has become a household name in professional production and that is well deserved. The current version is an all-out industry-grade 3D/Compositing/NLE production suite with advanced features to boot in one neat program that's one download or "apt install blender" away, no strings attached.
Plain and simply effing awesome is what that is. I love it.
FOSS rulez! Raaaargh!