Blender 2022 Strategic Goals
TheMysteryIsThePoint
Posts: 2,948
The Blender Institute once again showing how "Community" is done.
For me personally, physics overshadows everything else. The idea of not having to bake simulations, and hair as a first class object is like a dream come true. The idea that by this time next year I could conceivably have hair sim on my GPU and that GPU is a 4090 or two, is extremely exciting.
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Emphasis is mine but T68981 had been languishing for some time and it is great to hear that the reason why is that a complete overhaul had been planned for it anyway.
This is going to be awesome.
Wow. Very nice.
I would not be disappointed at all if I could run a simulation without everything exploding all over my screen or falling to infinity! Seriously though, Blender simulations may finally get the attention they need. Very good news. Now we just need to learn the 3 gazilliion new geometry nodes..
Also, DAZ is reworking their bridge so not all hope is lost there.
Unity bought Zeva Dynamics. I don't know much about either but the articles I've read look like there could be a lot of cool stuff coming from them.
That would be funny if it were not true :) And by the end of the year there will be 6 gazillion, and fields will be swapped out for yet something else.
I'm blown away even more by this than I was over Weta. The thing I hate most about exporting Genesis characters is what @wolf359 always says: "When you leave DAZ Studio, you leave Genesis". Particularly the JCMs and MCMs. Well, with Zeva's skeleton, muscle, fascia, fat, skin, and hair sims, we don't need JCMs. With Zeva's facial mocap, we won't need MCMs, at least for the all-important face. Once and for all we could stop worrying about preserving the character's original rig in anything we do because it is what powers all the DS goodness but also confounds other apps, like Cascadeur. I cannot wait for the day when all I need from DS is a static mesh.
I think the result will be that, Daz Studio's value will every day reside more in the awesome abilities of certain of its PAs, and not in Daz Studio itself. Because of that, I wish Daz would stop wasting time adding features to Daz Studio that are done infinitely better elsewhere, and concentrate on implementing anything the PAs ask for in order to be able to export their inventions to other software.
But it also means that DS cannot serve two masters; the users who want to do everything in DS, and those who don't want to ignore the head spinning advancements of the rest of the 3D world.
The wildcard in all this is Blender's Asset Library. Still in its infancy but still unlike anything Blender has ever had, I think eventually it will have to enable the marketplace by having something akin to Daz Studio's autofit. But unlike it in that it will be open source and better documented. I think this will be extremely attractive to Daz Studio PAs. I won't speculate about what happens then.
I never had a go at unity or game engines in general but the ziva demo is impressive. I mean a lot.
@TheMysteryIsThePoint I have to admit I haven't worked much with Unity lately, but as far as I know, Unity does not work like Epic does. When Epic buys some new tech that usually means that it's eventually free for use in Unreal like Quixel or MetaHuman stuff, but when Unity buys something that is not the case. Their goal seems to be to build a better integration between Unity and the new asset, but you still have to pay for the assets. For example with SpeedTree they just said: "For now, nothing will change for SpeedTree or Unity customers. Long-term benefits will include deeper integration into the Unity ecosystem and better workflows between products.". So no matter how nice those techs look like, there's still a high chance that those will still be out of normal indie devs price range, or at least for me Ziva's $8800 human rig or $10000 horse rig and $50 monthly fee to be able to use those are way out of my price range. That being said, I do hope I'm wrong, but I'm not really holding my breath.
I was hoping they'd make it free like Epic's Metahumans. Free characters of that sophistication are a big draw for new and existing developers, it's not like Epic is going to sit on Metahumans at their current state of development.
As someone who has not dealt with Unity at all, those are important insights. Hopefully there will at least be indie pricing.