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(10/18 October 18th at 10 a.m. PDTPacific Daylight Time.)
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Apple Pledges Support for 3D Graphics Tool Blender
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Looking forward to monday? : )
(10/18 October 18th at 10 a.m. PDTPacific Daylight Time.)
Not sure if you guys have seen some of the threads about the Mac Pro and W6800X Duo cards; but we are posting very competitive Octane numbers vs. RTX cards.
With this announcement about Apple and Blender; my guess is the Mac Pro and the high-end AMD Workstation GPUs are going to be very competitive against Windows/RTX cards.
One thing tons of reviewers always seem to miss is that having multiple GPUs in a 3D rendering environment does not double or triple your VRAM (for rendering.) Octane for instance has to load the scene assets into each GPU. So trying to render with a lower spec and higher spec card actually limits performance.
I wish I had time to download Blender and throw some benchmarks; but right now I do not. All I can say is the W6800X duo is a beast for 3D GPU rendering platforms.
With this announcement about Apple and Blender; my guess is the Mac Pro and the high-end AMD Workstation GPUs are going to be very competitive against Windows/RTX cards.
One thing tons of reviewers always seem to miss is that having multiple GPUs in a 3D rendering environment does not double or triple your VRAM (for rendering.) Octane for instance has to load the scene assets into each GPU. So trying to render with a lower spec and higher spec card actually limits performance.
I wish I had time to download Blender and throw some benchmarks; but right now I do not. All I can say is the W6800X duo is a beast for 3D GPU rendering platforms.
Agreed. I only have one in the MP and it's a monster when running Octane – like you say, combination of powerful GPUs plus shedloads of VRAM. Anyone who says you can't do 3D on Mac, or you can't do realtime fully raytraced previews with denoising genuinely doesn't know what they're on about.
Why should they do it? What would they get out of it, even IF it would be possible to buy an open source project?
Supporting its development will sell much more machines and strengthen the Mac as a platform, without the added complexities of distributing a product.
Now let's do the same for Lightroom…
I voted you up, but wanted to mention: Lightwave has always been more flaky on Mac OS (first-hand crashing & bugs experience), and NewTek seems to have abandoned the product entirely.
They’ve had customization for ages. Part of their earlier effort at modernizing the GUI was customization that went into the realm of utterly mindless stupidity. The open source world does not generally do a good job of guiding users with judicious UI options. They seem to go all or nothing, and neither approach is acceptable.
Here’s an image of Blender’s UI I captured ten years ago:
This mess was way too easy to cause because the customization was mindless. Much of this functionality is still there, but doing this crap accidentally seems less likely.
To be fair, that isn't blender's default UI layout. You'd have to purposefully make it that cluttered. Yes, it ALLOWS you to do it, but it isn't forced on you. The non-blocking window layout of blender is actually quite useful, and I find myself missing it in other apps at times. Often, people make more windows than they need because they don't understand the workspace tabs, and try to put all the functions on one screen. Also, the ctrl-space method of making any window jump to occupy the full space means you CAN have a layout with lots of window panels (if you want) and immediately toggle it to a large workable canvas.
Fair enough, we've got a ways to go! The point I was trying to make was that rendering local tests is very different than batching rendering a bunch of animation.
It was too easy, to the point of having this happen accidentally, repeatedly, and finding it very hard to undo. That made it a problem just learning the software. UI should GUIDE users by implementation of reasonable limits; making things very easily undone, and protecting new users with “guardrails”.
As I’ve said, it seems to have improved since then, so I’m not picking on the CURRENT Blender. I wanted to make a point about customization having been present for some time, not solving the UI problem, and actually making things worse by going too far (or not being designed with guardrails).
Yeah, I presume this is laying groundwork for a future Apple Silicon Mac Pro announcement, which we can expect to NOT be this year.
I had the same issues. Current UI is much improved.
Supporting blender helps with (artistic) 3D content creation on the Mac, but I'd like to see some effort in the functional CAD space as well, especially with the proliferation of 3D printing and affordable CAM machines. There's really a lack of options on the Mac for this, the "heavy hitters" are all Windows only: Catia, NX, Creo, Solid Edge. Solidworks dumped their Mac version a couple years ago. None of the Autodesk stuff other than Fusion360 runs on Mac. OnShape works, but only because it's web based, not a native app that can be run offline.
On the open source side, you have SolveSpace and FreeCAD. SolveSpace is feature constrained, and FreeCAD is where blender was 10-15 years ago ... powerful, but still behind the commercial offerings and with a UI that is not very "forgiving" or "discoverable." For both of those projects, it feels like the Mac port is sort of a 2nd class citizen, in that the main devs don't use Mac, so it's up to talented members of the community to make sure builds are up to date. Apple making sure those projects have access to Mac resources would ensure we don't lose what little bit of support exists there too.
(Edit: yes, there's Rhino - which is more a freeform NURBS tool, and less a parametric CAD app, and some fringe CAD apps like Cobalt or Corel, but the mainstream apps are missing.)
On the open source side, you have SolveSpace and FreeCAD. SolveSpace is feature constrained, and FreeCAD is where blender was 10-15 years ago ... powerful, but still behind the commercial offerings and with a UI that is not very "forgiving" or "discoverable." For both of those projects, it feels like the Mac port is sort of a 2nd class citizen, in that the main devs don't use Mac, so it's up to talented members of the community to make sure builds are up to date. Apple making sure those projects have access to Mac resources would ensure we don't lose what little bit of support exists there too.
(Edit: yes, there's Rhino - which is more a freeform NURBS tool, and less a parametric CAD app, and some fringe CAD apps like Cobalt or Corel, but the mainstream apps are missing.)
My main 3D platform are Cinema 4D, but these are great news! Seems that Apple are keep focus on 3D acceleration for 3D graphic designers. Can't wait what they show on Monday event... 👏
It works fine on my Mac, if Foundry isn’t going to support it anymore I haven’t heard the news yet
Super happy about that. I have an iMac and MBP, using them for all kind of creative tasks
- Art/Design (Photoshop, Illustrator, Procreate)
- DJ/Music (Serato, Ableton, Audacity, Logic)
- Video (iMovie, FCPX, maybe Resolve)
- 3D (Blender, Sculptris, DAZ)
While the first three branches work great, 3D has always felt limited due to that awful OpenGL/CL, CUDA and Vulcan situation. I had seriously considered getting an extra PC with a Nvidia 1660/2060 but couldn't justify it for my hobby projects. Now, hope is back that I can keep MacOS solely, and the upcoming M1X devices are the icing on the cake. Great news!
- Art/Design (Photoshop, Illustrator, Procreate)
- DJ/Music (Serato, Ableton, Audacity, Logic)
- Video (iMovie, FCPX, maybe Resolve)
- 3D (Blender, Sculptris, DAZ)
While the first three branches work great, 3D has always felt limited due to that awful OpenGL/CL, CUDA and Vulcan situation. I had seriously considered getting an extra PC with a Nvidia 1660/2060 but couldn't justify it for my hobby projects. Now, hope is back that I can keep MacOS solely, and the upcoming M1X devices are the icing on the cake. Great news!
Official support ends in a few months...
An update for Mari OS Support | Foundry
Mari 4.7 will be the last version compatible with macOS
Exactly. It was too easy to do in two seconds what took half an hour of googling learn how to undo. And that made "try it and see what happens, undo it if you don't like it" -- sort of the fundamental principle of learnability in an interface -- a bit like "strap on this belt of explosives and press that red button, and see what happens, although undoing it may not be simple."
Exactly what kept driving me away. But it turned around starting with 2.8.
Best they could do with Open Source software would be to "branch it off", if they wanted to roll it into a paid software suite (like, with FCP/Logic/Motion/etc.)...
But...! Including it as pre-loaded software with every ASi Mac sold couldn't hurt to make folks getting into 3D take a look at the Mac platform...?
Mac mini (Pro) with a M1X SoC, 64GB RAM, & 32-core GPU running Blender would seem like a pretty potent little personal 3D workstation...
And every time you get a new Mac mini, the old one gets plugged into the 10 Gigabit Ethernet renderfarm...! ;^p
They could only do that if they wanted to make those suites Open Source as well. Blender is GPL (not LGPL) so there isn't a clause in the license allowing linking from non-open code. The only way they could potentially do it without opening their own code is to have separate binaries that "talk" over a communication socket so that there isn't any direct linking of the binaries. That would mean having to serialize and de-serialize all the data you wanted to communicate and would introduce a lot of overhead.
(Edit: this is if they were trying to introduce blender functionality IN those apps. If they just wanted to distribute it WITH those apps, they could. But, they could do that now anyway.)