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BlenderNation Peach Interviews: The Future of Blender
Duration:
15 minutes and 42 seconds
Country:
Netherlands
Language:
English
License:
CC Attribution Share Alike
Genre:
Documentary
Producer:
BlenderNation
Director:
Bart Veldhuizen
Views:
18,755
(14,920
embedded)
Posted by:
bmud on Feb 14, 2008
Ton Roosendaal explains features that will come to Blender in the near and distant future.
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Video Transcription
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- Subtitles by Bmud. Interviews by Bart. Translations are welcome!
- I'm here again with Ton Roosendaal at the Blender Institute
- and the question on everyone's minds in the Blender community is: "What is Blender 2.5 going to be?"
- and "WHEN is it going to be?" -- Yeah. -- That's even a bigger question... hehe
- At the moment, as you know, we are in a deadline crunch time for Peach.
- But last year I went two weeks on holiday, and usually I take my laptop an do some more complicated work
- because you have to do that without getting disturbed or distracted.
- I made a basic design for a new internal core for Blender's events system, windowing system,
- event handling, and the way tools in Blender are being handled and talked to.
- It's very technical; it's all on API level... a programming level... but the benefit should be that
- everything inside of Blender should have a uniform way of handling and being handled.
- So if you develop a tool like "extruding a face," then that tool can be accessed by Python, or by a hotkey, or by a button,
- or by a gesture, or by a history, or by undo/redo... Whatever thing you can think of should be possible to use the extrude tool
- or use the duplicate tool, or use warping, or use grabbing. All those tools in Blender have to become uniform.
- It has a lot of benefits. For example, programmable keymaps, macros. So you can do five actions and turn it into a new hotkey.
- And you can only do that if you redo actions in a way. [It's] Very interesting. That way, you can also make Blender's
- interface better, and more modal because Blender has a couple of unique interface concepts which is more
- modal and totally parallel non-blocking interface. So if you do, for example, an extrude,
- you should not get a menu with lots of options asking you "Do you want to extrude: This, That, 5x, Multi-extrude"...
- or all the options, because every time when you extrude, you think "Shit! uh...that!" "Extrude. uh...that!"
- It goes slowly. So instead you should be able to extrude, and if you decide you want to do it different,
- you can go to a specific panel in Blender with buttons with all the settings. You change the settings,
- and whatever you change, it will apply the difference. For a simple example, if you rotate something 90 degrees,
- you get a little button that says "Rotate 90°" and you can type in "45" and it will become "Rotate 45°". -- Okay.
- So whatever tool you use, there will always be some kind of redo and mechanism that remembers what you did.
- So the last thing was: I wrote it to rotate 45 degrees, and then there will be a new hotkey in Blender that says "Rotate 45° again".
- You can drag the button? -- but on another selection. So you can click on the camera, click redo, rotate the camera 45 degrees.
- Whatever complicated actions you can think of, you can combine that into a macro and apply it on something else.
- Does it also mean that you can start using Blender with a programming language such as Maya's MEL?
- Yeah. That is an example. And lots of that kind of... I mean it's pretty much standard.
- Most of the modern 3D tools are based on that kind of event system. It's "modeling". It's what people do now-a-days.
- Blender still had [the old] core based on what Silicon Graphics (SGI) did in 1992, '93, '94...
- When Blender was designed, I was using their event system, and their way to think of how events work.
- Blender had a lot of options in 1995, but not that many that you couldn't find a hotkey for it!
- We had plenty of hotkeys left. But right now it's the opposite!
- Blender can do SO much, that it's impossible to map it to any hotkey layout. So we have to make that more flexible.
- So that's one thing, the interface will be much more powerful then?
- It's a good way... a different way of working with the interface in a sense that you can approach tools in more uniform ways.
- What do you think that will mean for Blender users? Will we have to relearn how to work with a tool?
- Nah. I think you can configure Blender 99% identical to what you are used to. -- Okay.
- So if we finish the coding work, you can configure Blender to be as usual
- and probably redo most [of the] keys [yourself], because most people have to migrate slowly.
- But what you can do quickly is completely make it different.
- Like the Python department in the Blender community would like to configure the interface using Python.
- So you can have different button fields, or maybe even a whole editor.
- Like the IPO editor; maybe you want to have a little bar on the left side of the window with presets
- for specific animations, that we can add with one button press.
- That kind of configuration should be possible.
- We also will try to integrate this work in the game project. So in Apricot, the open game,
- what we are going to do here requires a configurable interface to make a game level editor
- and we have to able to make custom properties and objects, edit that, and preview it. So we have to build some custom editing.
- And I hope that's what we can test 2.5 work for. -- Apricot's already... -- Yeah. Apricot has a deadline of July.
- and I hope 2.5 can have same deadline. (pops) -- Nice...
- ...if we make that. I can only do that if I don't get bothered by people. So no interviews; that kind of thing!
- No blog postings... and that's not possible. -- Yeah. -- I'll probably have to withdraw myself again for a couple of weeks.
- Do you also think you will be able to reskin Blender to make it look exactly like what you want it to be?
- and it make it just as flexible and ... -- Up to some level, yeah. -- Okay.
- It will be difficult to make it worse. I mean, if we want to have it really like a completely modal interface
- that wont pop up windows where you have to type in things and close it before it continues.
- We want one thing, that's going to be possible for example, to split Blender into two windows.
- People already saw crazy videos for that, and some people were screaming
- "Oh no! That's horrible! Now Blender is going to be like The GIMP or like Photoshop"
- or like any other program that has lots of windows where you always get lost where you are because the many windows.
- But that's not true. I mean, in some situations, having two or three windows is not that bad,
- especially not if you have multiple screens for yourself for example. Having one window per screen is interesting.
- but also, Blender can then present to you that you have multiple projects open.
- So at the moment, you can not have multiple scenes, or work on multiple scenes in one screen in one window.
- That would be far too confusing, but it can be very useful. For example, I got an e-mail from a film-maker who said
- "Argh. I would love to have two windows because we are working on a project where we are making a film..."
- "...and I want to have one monitor that has a blue screen background, the monster in preview animation running around,..."
- "...and then we can match the view to a camera with real footage. And in the meantime, on another screen,..."
- "...we can use the novel interface to tweak the animation, tweak the camera, whatever."
- That kind of separation we thought was innately useful for him. For that kind of reason, it is important to have that.
- Of course it will be optional if you want to have a split window.. You can but you don't have to -- No, you don't have to.
- Sometimes it's fun. Why not? I'm not against those kinds of things, and it will make the code more clean.
- And the other thing that was a factor... Of course I'll keep having the interface totally parallel,
- but at the moment if you have an editor open in Blender like the 3D window, the IPO window, or the Action editor,
- those are separate nodes in blender, and the separate windows are totally rigid. You can not configure them.
- [except for] "Is the header at the bottom or is the header at the top or is there no header?" That's old. That's not good.
- You should be able to configure that and a "new subdivision". So that's already working.
- So there's a "second subdivision level" inside of an editor.
- For example, you can have a 3D window and have it draw four 3D views using one header.
- It can also have a vertical header next to it, for example a toolbar or a presets option.
- That's what you can configure; however you want it. That's totally fitting the Blender philosophy of
- having a parallel working subdivision interface. You could do both, You can split, and you can fully subdivide.
- And it looks good. It's going to be really good to have that.
- Alright. How many people are working on that now? Just you, or...
- No. There's five people already testing the API and giving feedback on it.
- The last few weeks it stalled a little bit because I had my personal assignments to work on the movie.
- but we are going to pick it up again next week to freeze the API for it, make a couple of good documents...
- Next up is to confer to one editor in Blender with the new API, to test it,
- and once that's working fine we can give it to the whole development community to help in converting Blender.
- 'Cause there's about four hundred lines of code to be tested and reviewed and converted. -- Four hundred?
- Thousand. -- Four hundred thousand? -- Yeah. -- Wow. -- Almost half a million lines of code to redo.
- We don't have to recode every line, but it has to... -- You have redo it... -- All that code has to be removed from Blender over here
- That's all the tools, the whole interface has to be removed and has to be brought back feature by feature.
- That's not easy. -- No, it's not easy. -- But it's also typical of something you can do in open source.
- What do I say? It's not... It's relatively simple to do; it's also a lot of work.
- It's typical of the bizarre of having 50 people doing; we might finish it in months.
- And the interesting thing is you can also not do it and wait for somebody who gets the itch, and codes it.
- Because Blender has a lot of tools, we don't have to put all the tools back at once. We can do it when we need it.
- After a while, we'll get back to the old functionality. It's also good to review a little bit too, and improve them.
- What does it mean for the future of Blender; the new architecture will make it easier to write new functions?
- Yeah. -- It's going to be easier for new developers to get into Blender as well?
- Yeah. This part of Blender is totally not documented, and very difficult to understand and to extend.
- For example, in the new structure now, if you add a new tool, like a smart way of subdividing a window in the interface,
- because it's uniform, we can automate it, and automatically it gets a history, it's part of the macro system, it gets a python script access
- We don't have to code that anymore. Once it's a uniform standard, the way how it works, and how you treat it is built in.
- So are you hoping this will speed up Blender development even more in the next years?
- Well.. speed up?
- Do we need more speed? I think we need more quality especially.
- The speed has never been a problem, but the quality was a problem.
- It was getting more complicated to do good stuff. (doorbell)
- The easy things were done, and now we get complicated things. In this system, I hope we can do easier quality.
- More complicated tools, more custom tools, more tools that fit a specific task well... That kind of thing.
- Yeah -- But there's no end in tools. You can make tools for every person in the world.
- So that's not our job; we should not do that. But you could make a platform that allows people to do it.
- So new Blender, 2.5, hopefully somewhere in July this year?
- If you're looking at the long term, what do you expect will happen with Blender in 2010... 2012?
- It's awfully difficult to predict that, but one of the ideas we have is that Blender can become a...
- well a tool for artists of course, but it can become a development platform for artists
- to configure for their workflow, whether it's a movie or a game or an architecture project,
- Blender offers you the tools to create a tool for you for a specific job. That tool has to do what you want it to do,
- and after that you can throw it away, and you make a new tool for the next big job you have.
- So you're going to open it up so artists are empowered to develop a new tool as well. -- Yeah.
- It could be working. Not now, but it's going to be there. It's a big change. -- Sounds like an excellent plan. -- Yeah!
- I wish you all the luck. Thankyou, Ton. -- Okay. -- Okay, bye.
- Ah, I didn't hear the door.
- Was that making sense? -- Yeah.
- I was distracted. Now I forgot what I was talking about.
- I think we're done now... -- Heyyyy.
- We have to give people keys.
- We were almost finished.
- Let's wrap this up?
- Yeah.. What was the last question again?
- Well, I wanted to ask you about the future of Blender, but you already mentioned that yourself.
- Yeah yeah yeah... the development platform...
- Yeah, an open platform, I like that image
- Did I say enough about that? Because I was in the middle of a sentence when they came in.
- If you're not sure we can do it again
- Okay... Can I tell it again? Just ask me!


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