Blender releases their Oscar winning version tool

Posted by appleaday1 3/27/2025

Blender releases their Oscar winning version tool(www.blender.org)

811 points | 283 commentspage 2

wilg 3/27/2025|

The phrasing of the submission title ("Blender releases their Oscar winning version tool") here is baffling, unless I'm misunderstanding something. A typical boring HN title would be "Blender 4.4"

eichin 3/27/2025||

Ah, that makes more sense than anything I could find on the page (version only appeared as a substring of conversion.) Having only used blender for "minor tweaks to a collision model of a robot workspace" which got managed in git, model-aware version control sounded interesting.

hackernudes 3/27/2025|||

I was also confused. The HN title is weird. As I hovered over the description deciding whether to waste my precious seconds RTFA I had dreams of some sort of version control for 3d assets, but no.

appleaday1 3/27/2025|||

I could do better tbh, more used to Reddit also fasting so its been interesting how it detracts my concentration when it comes to time to break the fast and afterwards.

singularity2001 3/27/2025|||

usually dang enforces the no editorialization rule, either he is benevolent towards this fantastic release or just not online;)

lgas 3/27/2025||

Seems like you understood it perfectly to me.

wilg 3/27/2025||

After some effort!

contingencies 3/27/2025||

For feature length pieces, independent animation is an existential threat to the established film studios that will only grow. Meanwhile, a friend of mine works (very) high up in studio land CGI and recently estimated five years outlook before a total industry implosion due to AI tooling. Leaving the whole Youtube killed TV thing aside (small point!), there has never been a better time to be an aspiring video story teller.

TimByte 3/27/2025|

The gatekeepers are still around, but they don't hold the same power anymore

hermitcrab 3/27/2025||

In the v4.4 showreel video there is a cool rendering of an O'Neal cyclinder (or similar space habitat) at 1:30. Anyone know where that is from?

countrymile 3/27/2025||

And it is also the goto tool for winners of the UK young animator of the year:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42113898

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38282166

pcl 3/27/2025||

I've been using Blender recently to build 3D models for my new 3D printing obsession. The learning curve is significant, but the product seems great. I've gotten decent help from the chatbots, but does anyone here have any suggestions for good non-animation-focused tutorials?

cshimmin 3/27/2025||

If you're making technical parts, I highly recommend just biting the bullet and learning parametric cad with fusion 360. There's a ton of learning resources on youtube etc. OnShape seems like a quite promising alternative but I assume there's less material since it's newer.

pcl 3/30/2025||

I've used OnShape a fair bit, and it's pretty solid for technical parts. But recently, I've been doing prints of 3D scans (which work surprisingly well these days!!), and OnShape is sorta the wrong tool for the job for that.

I'm using a crazy combination of pre-processing in Blender and then post-processing in OnShape today, and feel like I should be able to just use Blender for the whole job.

IshKebab 3/27/2025|||

Yeah parametric CAD is better for most 3D printing (non-artistic). FreeCAD 1.0 is actually good now!

rongrobert 3/30/2025||

I am learning Blender too after failing to learn Maya 20 years ago.

To me, it is like learning to play guitar or piano. You just have to do 1-2 hours a day of practice and do it everyday.

There are so many good youtube videos that it just will depend what you want to do and how you like the person doing the tutorial. Then at some point just start trying to model random objects that interest you.

cloudking 3/27/2025||

Cursor + blender-mcp are starting to make the UX easier https://github.com/ahujasid/blender-mcp

Still has a ways to go, but shows promise.

lionkor 3/27/2025|

It does say a lot about a person's attention span and intelligence when they cannot figure out one of the cleanest UIs in software, with such a buttload of tutorials and guides.

jampekka 3/27/2025|||

Blender's UI has improved tremendously over the years, but I wouldn't call it one of the cleanest UI in software. It still has, for better or worse, quite idiosyncratic UI patterns (e.g. the panel juggling) and the underlying logic of e.g. objects, meshes, textures, materials, world, camera and renderer lining up is not very discoverable.

I'm highly sceptical anyone could learn the Blender UI just by opening it and clicking around.

lionkor 3/27/2025||

No, you do tutorials, and plenty of them. Takes a few days, and then you're pretty familiar. I don't think AI is needed here at all.

jampekka 3/27/2025||

Specific features are hard to find from tutorials. LLMs don't replace tutorials, they augment documentation and stack exchange and such.

IshKebab 3/27/2025|||

Visually clean, sure. Intuitive? Hmm Blender was notorious for having a difficult to follow UI for years. They've improved it a lot over the last 10 years but I still wouldn't say it's easy to use. Way more stuff requires a tutorial than one would hope.

Honestly the fact that you're doubting the usefulness of AI for this makes me suspect you haven't really used Blender in anger.

lionkor 3/27/2025||

I have used blender plenty, I don't think it's mega intuitive, but it's not "I need something else to do the thinking for me" level hard.

IshKebab 3/27/2025||

Nobody said "need". Obviously you can look up all the tutorials if you want to do it slowly.

Think about it like fancy search. You can manually look through a document ("I don't need something else to do the searching for me"), or you can just use Ctrl+F.

lionkor 3/27/2025||

Yeah, or you can spin up a few GPU clusters, upload your entire document, and ask it.

Blender has built-in search. That's not what this is.

jrickert 3/27/2025||

I’ve been using Blender for 20 years and it’s been amazing to see how far it’s come.

Sadly, the writing is on the wall for my trusty Hackintosh since they recently decided to drop support for AMD GPU acceleration on macOS.

methuselah_in 3/27/2025||

Blender has come a long way since 2013 when i had passed out my collage. Kudos to developer standing against few like Autodesk giving designers to try something for free.

gnarbarian 3/27/2025||

there is billions to be made bringing git to other industries.

senordevnyc 3/27/2025|

How hard is it to learn Blender? I did a bunch of 3dsMax when I was in high school, but I haven’t touched any of this stuff in 25 years at this point.

raxxorraxor 3/27/2025|

There are very good free and open tutorials for Blender. Just make sure you use a current one since the development speed was extremely high in the last years and controls changed here and there.

One of the most famous is probably the donut one and I would wholeheartedly recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4haAdmHqGOw

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