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@xeash: Love how the thread went from discussing drop of VFXPlatform support in the blender to writing your own DCC 
@instinct-vfx: We tend to escalate quickly 
@passerby: so who wants to start the repo for it. Can just toss in a C++ QtWidgets project to start
@xeash: we already started one, with the caveat that it’s not open-sourced yet
not so grand and awesome like Blender though
@il_berna: All this Blender VS VFX stuff bugs me a lot. The nice addon I wrote using QT is not working anymore since 2.93… :face_with_symbols_on_mouth:
I’m not the most qualified person to say that but, I think this (plus the license stuff) is a very stupid decision… It seems to me like that meme with the man putting a branch in his bicycle wheel
Do you want to see your sw adopted on a large scale? Better start playing with other people rules then
this “we do everything we want” a-la Venom… meh
@Edward_Whetstone: Is that a goal of the Blender project or the Foundation? The last bullet point on the Foundation’s “Goals” section is:
• Provide individual artists and small teams with a complete, free and open source 3D creation pipeline
Everyone’s definition of “small” is different, but if you’re primarily concerned with freelancers and ad-hoc production teams… But then, of course on the other hand those kinds of teams probably don’t really care what build software you’re using or version of Python
@Shea: sure - but that is contradicted by their past actions and other things they have stated they want to do, ie make it easier to integrate into studio pipes, which is at least the same, if not a bigger issue for small studios surely?
@Edward_Whetstone: It depends on the studio – and “small”. I’ve worked on commercial teams where the idea of building a pipeline was considered crazy. Why would you tie yourself down to one way of working, when you have thirty different kinds of production in a year? (I tend to disagree, but I didn’t have much voice at the time)
@bob.w: I would honestly say, their definitions of “pipeline”, “integration” etc… are going to be vastly different than “tech artists aren’t annoyed by things”
@il_berna: Definition of small is of course vague, but we’re “small”…less than 20 people, and had issues with libraries conflicts and breaking of compatibility
We could be the only example, but I doubt about that. Knowing that the foundation of your work won’t change tomorrow is good
even if you’re not a 200 people store
And I also think that many small studios would like to grow in time. For this reason too we started thinking about our pipeline and wrote some small addons. I was also confident about LTS versions, and I was betrayed, 'cause LTS 2.93 is not 100% compatible with LTS 2.83
To me they care more about individual artists, and that’s it
@bob.w: I feel like the expectation that moving from one LTS to another would be a compatible easy transition was a vast misunderstanding of the term.
@il_berna: but even individual artists rely on other people addons a lot: they’re basically forcing addon devs to run after them, trying to stay always updated
@bob.w: 2.83 LTS meant that 2.83 would be supported for X-time that was longer than say what 2.84 would receive.
That same promise was provided for 2.93.
At no point was it promised that LTS to LTS would be 100% compatible
@il_berna: You’re probably right @bob.w, but if I remember correctly, before 2.93 expected python version was still 3.7
And instead…surprise!
@bob.w: Oh yeah, that was when they actually stopped caring about the reference platform
They’ve just made it official this week
@il_berna: It was probably my fault, but I didn’t expected so much issues in the transition
@bob.w: But that was completely separate from the LTS promises
@passerby: not sure how they defined their lts
but used to it just meaning this version gets patches for x amount of time
@il_berna: yes. In fact I asked artist to stop upgrading. But at the same time, since Python version was apparently “decided”, I also thought that 2.93 would fine from that point of view
@bob.w: I think the problem was that they announced the LTS version, at the same time they announced the VFX platform experiment. And a lot of people conflated the two things
Meaning that for most people LTS==Platform support
@il_berna: as bob said, they’re two separated issues, but to me they seems symptomatic of the same bigger problem
REDACTED The part that’s interesting to me is that they’ve gotten millions(?) at this point, from the “industry” which I’m assuming was to make sure they would allocate resources to supporting said industry, but are actively moving away from doing that
https://www.blender.org/press/epic-games-supports-blender-foundation-with-1-2-million-epic-megagrant/
blender.org: Epic Games supports Blender Foundation with $1.2 million Epic MegaGrant — blender.org
"Having Epic Games on board is a major milestone for Blender," said Blender Foundation founder and chairman Ton Roosendaal. "Thanks to the grant we will make a significant investment in our project organization to improve on-boarding, coordination and best practices for code quality. As a result, we expect more contributors from the industry to join our projects."
@bob.w: Yeah, that is the part that I feel will be interesting.
@il_berna: Yep
@il_berna: And I’m one of the people who think that 2 years is just a short time. Even here we have some inertia in changing things… what did they expect from a whole industry?
@Shea: not sure - but the uptake of blender in the past 2 - 3 years has been bonkers 
@bob.w: Yeah, I’d think the important question for us would be “was that because of LTS/VFXRP announcements?” or “coincidence?”
Like does anyone imagine a downtick in blender usage, and a retreat towards more “known stability?”
Or is the cost offset of “Free Beer Software” costs higher than “Licenses that make some of this another teams problem”.
@bob.w: But is there any proof that happening? or are the bean counters just happy to kill a cost center and saying “fuck it?”
@passerby: > I guess my dream would be that we could use some of the license cost towards internal resources to stabilize and push fixes back out
that costs more then just paying for things though
@bob.w: Almost always, otherwise things like AWS wouldn’t exist
@Shea: my work is going to be discussing options moving forwards - as supporting blender was enough of a burden before this
@bob.w: That’s where I’m at.
I mean hell, technically right now I don’t even have enough of a team to support Max, much less blender
@Shea: having it may not have been the main reason to get on board - but dropping it is not going to make it any better
@bob.w: Oh I agree
@bob.w: > Realistically though, I’ve never got a bugfix from Autodesk, but they kept it from self imploding and we could trust it would almost work
I can say I did get one bugfix from them, but I included the working code in the bug report, so it was pretty low hanging fruit
@instinct-vfx: Did also get bugfixes. Not as quickly as elsewhere possibly, but they have gotten better recently