Looks like they picked a bad day to do a major release.

But after that, all the other things on the page are AWESOME! I’m super stoked about the proper HDR support and all the new node improvements.

That's the whole internet now. That or Anubis.

"AI will make this pointless" is so exhausting.

If you don’t work in the industry, you have zero chance of accurately evaluating whether or not, or how, it will be impacted by any new technology.

The fact that it “seems easy” is a great flag that it probably isn’t.

Can there please be one post on this godforsaken website where there is no attempt to shoehorn it into the AI craze?

What will AI train on?

You build apps for Shopify.

You are asking for industry predictions from industry professionals in an industry you know nothing about while assuming a lot about that industry.

Why do you think they should do all the heavy lifting for you?

You might as well ask ChatGPT what it thinks because it seems you already have an idea of what you want the answer to be.

As someone who's actually used Blender for small video projects, I'm fairly confident you'll still need this type of tool even with AI assistance doing some of the work in it, especially for at least the next 10 years.

AI coding agents didn't make IDEs obsolete. They just added plugins to some existing IDEs and spawned a few new ones.

If AI is at the point where it is exactly as capable of your average junior 3D professional in 10 years, it will probably have automated a ton (double digit percentage?) of current jobs such that nothing is safe. There's a lot of complexity, it's fairly long time horizon, it's very visually detailed, it's creative and subjective, and there's not a lot of easily accessible high quality training data.

It's like 2D art with more complexity and less training data. Non-AI 2D art and animation tools haven't been made irrelevant yet, and don't look like they will be soon.

Directors spend a LOT of effort trying to keep continuity and that's the weakest part of AI.

What blender and other CGI software gets for free is continuity. The 3D model does not change without explicitly making it change.

Until we get AI which can regenerate the same model from one scene to the next, the use of AI in CGI will be severely limited.

I design projections for independent theatre in Baltimore. I use AI in my workflows where it can help me and won’t compromise on the quality of what I’m making. I frequently use AI to upscale crappy footage, to interpolate frames in existing video (for artistic purposes, never with documentary archival stuff) and very occasionally to create wholesale clips in situations where video models can do what I need.

I recently used WAN to generate a looping clip of clouds moving quickly, something that’s difficult to do in CGI and impossible to capture live action. It worked out because I didn’t have specific demands other than what I just said, and I wasn’t asking for anything too obscure.

At this point, I expect the quality of local video models (the only kind I’m willing to work with professionally) to go up, but prompt adherence seems like a tough nut to crack, which makes me think it may be a while before we have prosumer models that can replace what I do in Blender.

I've used blender since 1999. It's my favorite open source software. Simply amazing

It might be possible to reproduce the same effect in EEVEE using geometry nodes. I know people have done that for automatic level of detail work. That being said, IDK if subsurf as a geometry node will take a non-constant number of iterations.

IDK how they compare to professional CAD tools, but I've heard good things about FreeCAD and OpenSCAD. I know that some people use Blender for CAD work, and there are even some extensions to make it easier, but I'm dubious that the representation of meshes that Blender uses are well-suited for CAD applications.

Blender is a decent option for low effort 3d modeling for 3d printing in my experience

FreeCAD is the front-runner for me.

KiCAD was also a meh ECAD FOSS alternative 7-8 years ago, now it is by far the tool of choice for regular ECAD designs. I can see FreeCad getting there by 2030.

Plasticity is the closest thing to this, I think. It uses Parasolid, which Blender does not, and supports xNURBS, which Blender does not.

Same, but I don't think it's possible without a large and sustained investment into a free geometric modelling kernel, which can probably be only done by a government.

Parasolid is powering practically every major CAD system. Its development started in 1986 and it's still actively developed. The amount of effort that goes into those things is immense (39 years of commercial development!) and I don't believe it can be done pro-bono in someone's spare time. What's worse, with this kind of software there is no "graceful degradation": while something like a MIP solver can be useful even if it's quite a bit slower than Gurobi, a kernel that can't model complex lofts and fillets is not particularly useful.

3D CAD is much harder than Blender and less amenable to open source development.

Onshape has blown me away with its browser interface and how quick it all loads. And as long as your projects are public, it's free.

You may be interested in CAD Sketcher: https://www.cadsketcher.com/

You're on point that there's a tremendous amount of money captures by Autodesk for CAD software that could be better directed at the open source community instead.

Software like OpenSCAD and FreeCAD are obviously not suitable for much commercial work, and have very irritating limitations for hobbyist work, in my mind a big part of that is the UI and Blender has a good and established UI at this point so I'd love to see the open source CAD that provides an alternative to vendor lock in come from a Blender add-on instead of a separate program.

I am no expert but as I understand it the primary difficulty with developing good alternatives to commercial CAD software lie in the development of an effective geometric kernel.

It seems to me that if a developer of an opensource CAD program develops it as a Blender add-on they can effectively outsource the remainder of the development efforts to the Blender community while focus can be made on the CAD kernel itself.

Probably requires something that is almost there then a sponsor(s) to throw in developers or funding to get the rest of the way. On the EDA side CERN did a lot to lift Kicad to the point of being a credible alternative that could breakthrough like Blender. Both those projects are over 30 years old and for a lot of that time were dismissed as too difficult to use or lacking in features. FreeCAD is only 23 years old. I don't know what the code base is like but if a large org put a couple of good devs into it for a few years who knows.

It must be difficult when so much management is short sighted and focused on delivering short term profits for shareholders. Even academia is run like a business now.

Unless a privately held rogue company like Valve got interested its probably going to have to wait for a government/ngo/scientific. Industry, particularly the tech industry, is notorious for leaching of free and open source software and in some cases building entire businesses on it and not giving back.