Blender 4.3

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Blender’s Funding, History, and Open‑Source Success

  • Major inflection point: the Blender Development Fund, growing from roughly $5k/month to over $200k/month, enabling many more paid developers.
  • Earlier “kickstart”: initial VC-funded commercial development (~€4.5M, large team) created a strong base before open‑sourcing. Later, the community collectively raised ~€100k to buy back and open the code.
  • Thread emphasizes that simply “starting a development fund” doesn’t replicate Blender’s early mindshare, momentum, and evangelism.
  • Corporate users now depend on Blender and contribute financially, which helps distinguish it from other open‑source projects.

Adoption, Industry Context, and Comparisons

  • Some see Blender as having “eaten the world” in games and as the obvious choice for new studios avoiding Autodesk’s high‑priced subscriptions.
  • Others argue it hasn’t had a full “Linux moment” in film/VFX due to entrenched pipelines and risk‑averse businesses.
  • Comparisons made to GIMP and FreeCAD: they lack Blender’s polish, funding, and early commercial boost, but FreeCAD’s 1.0 release is seen as a major step.
  • Mechanical/parametric CAD: consensus that Blender (a mesh modeler) is unsuitable for precision engineering compared with parametric CAD (FreeCAD, others).

Learning Blender and Use Cases

  • Popular beginner paths: the “donut” tutorial, beginner courses, CG Boost, Grant Abbitt, and various Udemy/Skillshare offerings.
  • For 3D printing: Blender is great for artistic/organic models; functional parts usually benefit from parametric CAD, though simple one‑offs can be faster in Blender.
  • Architectural/BIM workflows: Bonsai (formerly BlenderBIM) praised for home renovation and IFC-based collaboration; alternatives mentioned include Revit, SketchUp, and Sweet Home 3D.

UI, Performance, and Desktop vs Web

  • Blender’s UI is now widely praised (viewports, keybinding, command palette), despite an older reputation for poor UX.
  • Its responsive, GPU‑driven native UI and modest binary size are cited as arguments for native apps over Electron.
  • Others defend Electron/web tech, noting class of product, missing cross‑platform native frameworks, and evolving WebGL/WebGPU limitations and latency. Opinions are polarized.

Hardware, Community, and Outlook

  • Strong emphasis on good input devices: multi‑button gaming mice, vertical mice, trackballs, and especially pen tablets for sculpting and precision.
  • Several comments highlight a welcoming contributor culture and hands‑on mentoring in earlier days.
  • Some criticize shallow industry takes; others argue Blender is still young but uniquely extensible and poised to become first choice for many CG tasks as it integrates into more pipelines.
  • Question about using LLM-generated code to drive Blender animation appears but is not substantively answered (unclear in thread).