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The release notes and features highlight reel page is now live!
https://www.blender.org/download/releases/3-0/
The first three parts of the Donut tutorial, updated for Blender 3, are here, as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIoXOplUvAw
I've only done a little bit with Blender as a hobbyist, but Andrew's tutorials are what really made it fun for me and helped things start to "click". If you've never used Blender but wanted to check it out, these are the tutorials you should use.
They never clicked for me, unfortunately, although I should give them another try.
I highly recommend
https://academy.cgboost.com/p/resources
Also free of charge, and a very good presenter (if you can excuse the German accent).
But most people like the Donut tutorial, that's true.
A friend of mine just finished his Introduction to Blender series on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjcpPOioHUk
Have you tried it after 2.8? The interface is a lot more intuitive now.
Wow this guy is FUNNY. Thanks for sharing!
Blender Guru was my inspiration into Blender as well, but since I've seen the at-worst homophobic and at-best tone deaf comments he's made in tutorials and on Twitter, I can no longer recommend him. Go watch his rant about how he misses using the word "fag" like he used to in highschool.
I'm not saying cancel the guy, but I am saying consider seeking out an alternative source of tutorials.
https://twunroll.com/article/1347630835235573761
I was expecting much worse but he repeatedly mentions in that clip that “of course you should never say it because its demeaning”, and that its stupid how he has nostalgia for it.
There _was_ a time when that word was used like that by kids, I think we can allow people to have nostalgia for their childhood as long as they acknowledge how bad it is according to 2021 sensibilities.
Sorry, but no, "nostalgia for your childhood bad behaviour" is just dumb.
People can’t exactly control what they have nostalgia for.
And what about how he wishes there was a day where white kids could say the "n word" just to get it out of their system?
And no, I'm not going to respect some sense of nostalgia for the word "fag", because when people were calling me that in middle and highschool, it sure wasn't a fun experience, and I don't look back on any of that fondly.
It was pretty clear that was a joke tweet, and also he was referring to using the word among his friends, not bullying.
The thread you linked to is definitely _problematic_. And I'm not referring to Andrew's tweets but to the person who decided to launch a passive aggressive smear campaign.
Apart from the question whether he still acts this way; those homophobic comments were not in the public view anymore.
Now with your comment and the link they are again.
Congratulations, _you_ have just reproduced homophobia. Sometimes it's better to let the past rest.
These videos were always in the public view. After all, (as of this comment) are still publicly available for anyone to view.
Anyone doing a deep dive into this channel would have come across these videos on their own.
Of course they were public to view. He says it in a video on his YouTube page, in a tutorial.
You realize it's absurd to say I'm the homophobe for pointing out Andrew's homophobic views, which he never walked back.
You misunderstand "in the view of the public".
How many people saw that today? How many saw your comment today and digged into the Twitter thread?
And nobody called you a homophobe.
Oh, I hope more people see it, so people can have a more wholistic idea of who they're supporting when they view Andrew's videos.
Andrew has never walked back these comments, and he's never said "Actually I was wrong in saying these things". Ball's in his court.
Mel Gibson has said and done some unsavory things yet I still enjoy and recommend Braveheart. Calling for boycotts in order to force a behavior change of someone whose speech you disagree with is lose/lose in my opinion - you usually don't get the desired outcome and everyone is worse off. I say: recommend Blender Guru but don't recommend following the guy on Twitter. Why is that such a bad option?
Blender is the best open source project around. Major kudos to everyone who works on it for making such an excellent tool
Yeah, it's been amazing to watch. I was one of the original funders back in 2002 to open source it. My career took another path and I never did more than mess around with Blender. But that, I think $100 (not small amount for me at the time), is the best, most proud/happy donation I've ever made.
This is the release that rolls out their new rendering engine that they've been working on for a while:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Blender-...
Yep, specifically the offline rendering engine (they have a real time one too)
For anyone not familiar, "Cycles X" is the new offline (not realtime) renderer, replacing Cycles:
https://code.blender.org/2021/04/cycles-x/
The realtime renderer is EEVEE, slated for big upgrades in 3.x:
https://code.blender.org/2021/06/eevees-future/
Thank you Blender!
I'd like them to bring back some more of the game engine components.
I use Unity, but seeing what Blender can do, via their demo movies, I'd love to see a Blender Game Engine!
There is a project called UPBGE, it is a fork of the old game engine and being actively maintained.
Thank you, however as far as I know it's only one dev. Blender would probably need to pull this back into the core product for it to be useful.
A powerful mature engine with Python, one can dream.
There is a lot of effort to get Godot in that spot. 4.0 is going to be really good, especially for 3d.
How does Godot handle terrain ?
Unity is mainly useful since if you're willing to drop a few thousand dollars on assets, plus about 200 hours of your own personal time, you can have a shipable game in a month or so.
Godot looks really neat, but at least with my skill level I need a starter kit to get going on most projects. Then again, I know Godot's gotten a ton of funding lately so we'll see what happens.
Eeeeh, maybe if you're extremely experienced in Unity you can have a shippable game in a month. There's a lot of jank in Unity that is non-obvious to inexperienced Unity users. I don't even mean inexperienced programmers. Between un-/under-documented features, surfing the wave of continuing to use "deprecated" features versus their incomplete replacements, and the general architectural problems baked deep into the core of Unity, it takes a lot of Unity-specific expertise to get a good game together.
It took longer than a month but I have shipped games for Unity before. Nothing groundbreaking, but if you want to make something simple, Unity is pretty easy. Now if you're pushing for a AAA title, are doing something really innovative, it might be a bit harder
I too would love to have a Blender game engine. But removing it was the right (though painful) decision. It caused a code maintenance nightmare by duplicating and reimplementing a lot of other code, and removing it makes adding new things to Blender much easier (like Interactive Mode).
Back when I was using 3D Studio Max, I wished it had a fast sleek efficient minimal game engine runtime called "3D Studio Min", but that never panned out either.
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/106972/what-will...
>As for the reasons for removal we can conclude it was an old and aging component, it was largely unmaintained, suffered from several bugs and limitations, and the Blender Foundation probably lacked the energy, motivation and manpower to maintain it properly.
>"Adding new things to Blender gets much easier that way. The Blender Internal code started in early 90s. Over 25 years old! Functionally, EEVEE can (and will) completely replace it." -Ton Roosendaal
>It was also very architecturally outdated, lagged severely behind the current industry standards and modern technologies in many ways, it would be very hard to bring it up to date. Modernizing it or introducing new features would end up being more work than a full rewrite from scratch. [...]
>What About Forking It?
>UPBGE is a third party fork, whose objective is updating and modernizing the BGE with better technologies and features, with the end goal of eventually merging it back with main Blender development branch.
>I fear its future is uncertain at this point unfortunately. While I believe Blender developers won't actively do anything to purposefully break Blender trunk codebase compatibility, I speculate it will naturally become increasingly hard for UPBGE developers to maintain their code working, as features are removed and main Blender development deviates further from the current design. [...]
>There have been talks about replacing the old game engine with a newer better integrated "Interactive Mode". It would be a more integral part of Blender, as opposed to a separate component with a lot of duplicated code that re-implemented a very limited subset of supported features we currently have.
>This is not meant to be a direct replacement of the old BGE, nor a discrete game engine in the traditional sense with wide publishing capabilities, rather more of an integrated real-time "presentation tool" or interaction mode with a physics simulation sandbox environment, that runs directly inside Blender's viewport on currently supported platforms.
>On 28 May 2018 Ton Roosendaal announced in the Developers Mailing list that a portion of the 2.8 Code Quest funds were reserved for the development of a new and improved real time rendering system or "Interactive Mode" and Benoit Bolsee, a developer historically known for his involvement in real time side of Blender, accepted a grant to work part time on this for one year.
https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2018-May/0...
https://www.blender.org/2-8/quest/
https://code.blender.org/2013/06/blender-roadmap-2-7-2-8-and...
>I speculate this will probably feature a new node based workflow and logic system, real time physics, and integrate well with other upcoming features like "Object Nodes" also known as "Everything Nodes" in one way or another.
I'm a big confused, why can't interactive mode become a game engine?
Unfortunately blender is GPL, but otherwise I would wonder if the Godot team could just use blender's rendering engine instead of implementing their own.
I will say blender is exceptionally polished, probably the best open source content creation tool ever made. We'll see what Godot comes up with next year
Definitely, I’m very interested in blender as a better Unity
There’s armory3d which is impressive but it’s still early days
Why are there no torrents offered? The server is clearly under load.
If anyone already has the files and cares to share the magnet, I'll gladly help with seeding.
Steam is another way to get it if you have it installed.
Thank you, I completely forgot it was on Steam.
I'm noticing a lot of interesting extensions coming out for Blender, especially in the Retogo and skinning area which was always a headache. I guess being able to code in Python instead of MaxScript or MEL (althought it looks like Maya does support python now?) gives you a healthier ecosystem.
Maya has been supporting Python for a long long time, it even supports Python 3 now. There is no more need to use MELscript to develop tools for it anymore, even though some commands are run using the MELscript wrapper in Python, but even then it's very rare.
Pretty much all the tools I've developed in the past couple of years for AAA games have been almost exclusively made with Python.
One of them we even developed tools to be DCC agnostic, which means that they could run both in Maya and 3ds Max flawlessly.
What is wrong with Blender lately? Everyone in a workaholic phase?
Much appreciated of course!
They are now funded by all major tech companies. So much for not being "industry standard" (by so many Maya or 3ds Max artists I talked to).
Receiving a lot of funding from tech companies is not synonymous with being widely used within the M&E industry (can't speak for other industry verticals). That's on the studios and artists, not funders. Being an industry standard requires a certain level of entrenchment/integration/mindshare that Blender does not have yet.
> Being an industry standard requires a certain level of entrenchment/integration/mindshare that Blender does not have yet.
In concrete terms, it means convincing universities to train students on your tools. Autodesk has the dollars to spend on efforts like that.
Being funded by tech companies doesn't make it industry standard. For one...the tech companies aren't the industry to begin with.
It definitely is a strong show of support for Blender, but there aren't a lot of studios in the industry using Blender, so it's quite far from being anything like a standard yet.
What are your sources? From what I hear, few friends in CG, Blender is gaining ground. Don’t know if there is an official statistic anywhere.
My sources are that I am very involved in the 3D industry groups.
Blender is gaining ground, yes, but most studios are very much Maya based still with Blender used sparingly.
The one major Blender studio (Tangent) has also shuttered and were mid moving away from Blender at the time. I think the next biggest users of Blender are a division within Ubisoft, but it's not the primary DCC for Ubisoft in it's entirety either.
Where Blender is gaining most traction is freelance artists and people who don't need to work with a pipeline. Blender is slowly getting better for Pipeline integration, but it really doesn't like to play well yet within a studio where you're dealing with many different artists working on a shot, in possibly multiple DCCs.
I still would rather us 3DS max over blender, it still feels like using GIMP after using Photoshop productively for years.
Then use that software if you prefer the UX.
As an anecdote, I installed GIMP for my son 6 years ago, who is now going to college to be a graphics designer. He did all of his digital artwork in GIMP and Krita, now Blender as well, for the whole length of that time.
He now has to use Photoshop for his classes. There are some tools in it he is impressed with but overall doesn’t care for Photoshop at all.
I want to use blender and I'm sure they would get a lot more acceptance if they fix the one thing people have been complaining about for YEARS! That's great for your son but no credible agency will use GIMP. Krita is awesome and I love it and comes the closest to an open source alternative to PS, it is much better than GIMP in everyway and is actually usable.
Unfortunately the industry doesn't care if he doesn't care about photoshop, it cares about it and if he wants to be a part of it he should start learning to care unless his work is beyond amazing and he will only be freelancing then ignore everything I said.
Photoshop is not impressive but it gets the job done quickly and smoothly with minimal friction and that's why it is number one.
Would you mind elaborating on what complaints you mean? Blender has had multiple major UI overhauls in the past few years, and changed a lot of basic command assignments in the process. They even moved selection from the right mouse button to the left button. That was the #1 complaint I used to hear all the time from everyone, and it was resolved a couple years ago. So I’m very curious what you’re referring to, and whether you’ve used it recently.
I agree with GIMP vs Photoshop ui-wise, but in the case of Blender IMHO it is the total opposite. Even if it were free I find 3DS ui unsufferable.
This release adds import of USD files which should make Blender fit in more nicely in pipelines.
The new asset browser is also another great addition for plugging into pipelines.
I guess that’s what happens when personal interest is aligned with organisational objectives. Rare.
I haven't had much time for Blender lately and need to correct that. I also need to look more closely at the changes. I know something about an asset manager and a bunch of new nodes in the procedural geometry work, but beyond that I'm behind. And sadly Steam hasn't gotten the new binaries yet and I am lazy so like letting steam manage this one for me.
AMD HIP/ROCm support is there but AMD still hasn't released drivers supporting it.
Funny -- going on a decade ago, Blender had OpenCL support, but the AMD drivers were so bad that OpenCL support was only usable on NVidia cards. Still not as good as CUDA, though. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Are there release notes? Blender usually does a really nice release notes page showing off the new features.
This is what happens with long-awaited Linux distribution or web browser releases, as well: final binaries are uploaded, so they can propagate to the mirrors, and someone posts it “prematurely”.
(I don't mind, I like this kind of heads-up.)
Release notes will be there when the release is officially announced and linked from Blender's home page.
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/3.0
Cheers, thanks. Really looking forward to using the Asset Browser and Geometry Nodes.
I always post this link when Blender is discussed because it's so impressive. It shows what a single person can achieve in Blender. The visual effects and compositing have been created by Blender expert Ian Hubert. The video shows a (grimy) futuristic city scene. Green screen footage and the final shots created are shown side-by-side:
_VFX Breakdown - Dynamo Dream Teaser_:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFJ_THGj72U
The full short _Dynamo Dream_ was posted a few months ago by Hubert on his YouTube channel:
_Episode 1 : Salad Mug - DYNAMO DREAM_:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsGZ_2RuJ2A
His series of one-minute "Lazy" tutorials are fantastic!
Make Nightmare Men in Blender - Lazy Tutorials
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgfJIZEDY44
Edit: Yes, I subscribe to his Paetron series to -- such awesome stuff!
He has a great Patreon series too
https://www.patreon.com/IanHubert
I just dabble with blender but really enjoy his videos showing how he goes about various vfx with blender
Blender is an inspiring open source project. Absolutely killing it.
Is it just me or they added antialising/Lanczos resampling to the render window?
Oh shit oh shit, so I don't have to use prerelease versions to use my new nodes setups anymore soon.
Yay, this is gonna be sweeeet. I have a render going now on 2.9 and it's so cool. I've been using blender for years and years now, just for fun and in the winters I use it to keep my room warm and my renders 4k baby.
Show me what you got
How different is Blender to 3DS Max and Maya? Anyone have experience with both?
I didn't use 3DS MAX for 15 years so I can't tell you how it is now.
Maya is the videogame industry standard for modeling, just like ZBrush is the industry standard for sculpting. It is almost 100% non destructive-editing and integrate with studios asset pipelines perfectly in various ways. It's paid and closed source.
Blender is a jack of all trades, master of none. Aside from a game engine (removed since 2.8) it has basically all that you need to do modelling, sculpting, physics,3D painting, 2D and 3D animation, compositing and even some quirky video editor with audio. And it's free and open source and it has the largest community, by far, since version 2.8.
awesome, thank you
Honestly I'm a bit disappointed with their geometry nodes project. I went into it expecting a generic visual scripting language aimed at generate geometry. That IS what it is to an extent, but the design decisions are strange and limiting to say the least.
The main issue is that data is only stored in the geometry itself, per-vertex. So if you just want a single variable you're out of luck. Math operations operate on vertices so you can't just multiply two numbers, you have to store a number in each vertex, then multiply all vertices by the same value. It's like every node is for-loop that loops over vertices.
This limited design is useful for certain things like scattering rocks over terrain but not much else.
I think what you wrote here is just straightforwardly not correct, eg. you can absolutely set a variable and multiply arbitrary numbers in addition to working with vertex data. There are also a lot of other ways to store and interact with data, eg. textures (either procedural or painted). Maybe you should have another look.
Check out the Nodevember geometry nodes entries this year. You can accomplish quite a lot with it as it is. Also, the implementation in 3.0 is very different from the one in 2.93.
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23nodevember2021%23geometrynod...
sweet sweet 3d modeling!
Have they improved the UI/UX since 2.8x? They said it would be much better and it was still driving me up a wall compared to 3DS Max. It still felt like going from Photoshop to GIMP. That's the only thing holding me back from really adopting blender.
Not an user, but judging from comments, you're part of a small set that still repeats comments like this after 2.8.
What has changed since 2.8 in the UI? When I used 2.8 there were still a lot of pain points with the interface that kept me doing the heavy lifting in 3DS max. It was a cloth sim project and I was using blender to export the files into GLTF and even that was a bit frustrating.
It sounds like you need to spend some more time reading the manuals and less time complaining online.
I disagree. The 2.8+ UI is well designed and way snappier than 3DS Max.
It is subjective but 3D max interface is much more intuitive. Like when navigating the 3D view ports. UE4 also has a nice interface that is similar to blender but feels better.
What does intuitive in the context of a complex app like blender or 3d max even mean? You need to seriously learn the interface for either one before you can do anything. To me this is sort of like saying the interface of a boeing is more intuitive than the interface of an airbus, really quite meaningless for anyone.
I think it's a wasteful debate nowadays. Blender used to be too peculiar if not crippled but they reduced the gap a lot. It's bearable now.. and, they could probably get close to most 3D apps UX (i'm speculating but i'd bet a few dollars).
> _It is subjective but 3D max interface is much more intuitive._
The most intuitive interface is the one you're used to.
I've used many many different 3D programs from 3DS max, milkshape, XSI, Maya, Unreal 2, Unreal 3/UDK, Unreal 4, Hammer, Source, Three.js web editor, Zbrush, Houdini, etc and none of them have made me as frustrated as using blender. So I don't know?
It depends what you're using it for. I like Sketchup and Hammer; Blender doesn't remotely resemble those. But then, Blender can do things that those most certainly can't; they're for different jobs.
Well has 3D Studio Max improved its UI/UX interface since 1998, when I asked Kinetix if they would support pie menus, and they replied that while their users had demanded pie menus (aka marking menus), they wouldn't implement them because of Alias's patent?
I even offered to help Kinetix implement pie menus for Max, since I was already writing Max and MaxScript plugins, and wanted their help integrating my open source ActiveX/OLE pie menus with Max. But Kinetix wasn't interested then, and Autodesk still isn't interested in listening to their users or improving Max's user interface decades later, apparently.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/automating-the-sims-character-...
After 25 years since it was created, 3D Studio Max STILL doesn't have pie menus (while Blender has really great built-in pie menus).
Kinetix's 3D Studio Max and Alias's Maya used to be competitive and innovative when they were owned by different companies.
But now they are both owned by Autodesk, so they have both stagnated and failed to innovate, listen to the demands of their users, and improve their user interfaces, the way Blender rapidly and continuously does today, and always has.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26917124
Alias used to spread FUD about pie menus, and now Autodesk and their minions spread FUD about Blender, like falsely claiming Blender's GPL license means that you can't use it to make copyrighted artwork.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26918150
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26923816
https://www.blender.org/about/license/
As if stagnating and ignoring the demands of your users while spreading FUD and innuendo about Blender wasn't bad enough, it's rumored that Autodesk even went as far as to mercilessly attack Ton Roosendaal with a ceiling tile ;) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-sgk
Pie Menu FUD and Misconceptions:
Dispelling the fear, uncertainty, doubt and misconceptions about pie menus.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menu-fud-and-misconception...
>Huge Problem: Software Patents and FUD
>There is a sad history of people using software patents to make misleading claims about obvious techniques that they didn’t originate, and constructing flawed straw man definitions of ersatz pie menus to contrast with their own inventions, to mislead the patent examiners into granting patents.
>There is a financial and institutional incentive to be lazy about researching and less than honest in reporting and describing prior art, in the hopes that it will slip by the patent examiners, which it very often does.
>Patent Abuse Example: US Patent US5689667A: Methods and system of controlling menus with radial and linear portions
>Unfortunately a bad patent that covered an obvious technique, and also made some incorrect misleading claims, was abused by Alias marketing in Bill Buxton’s name to baselessly threaten and discouraged others from using pie or marking menus, by exaggerating its scope and obfuscating its specificity. It’s my strong opinion that the particular technique that it covered (overflow items) was quit obvious.
>Gordon Kurtenbach and I discussed pie and marking menus in 1990 before he wrote his paper and filed the patent, and at that time he made it clear that he understood pie menus supported mouse ahead display suppression, and that pie menus enjoyed the same benefits as marking menus have in easing the transition from novice to expert user:
>“The the cool thing is that expert can mouse ahead like you’ve talked about but they get an ink trail so they have a better idea what they’ve selected without even bothering to wait for the menu to come up.”
>However that contradicts what the paper and the patent implies, and it’s misled other people into incorrectly believing that pie menus don’t support what I call “mouse ahead display preemption” (or “suppression”, a harsher word), and that the patent covers much more than it actually does.
>When Gordon applied for the patent on in 1995, which his employment contract with SGI required him to do, the patent had at least two misleading statements, and the “overflow” technique claim was obvious, which should have prevented it from being granted or invalidated it.
>Another piece of mistaken but published misinformation about the differences of “typical pie menus” and marking menus is that “typical pie menus” pop up submenus after the cursor has moved a certain distance from the menu center, without clicking the mouse button. However, I have never seen nor implemented such badly designed pie menus in the real world.
>“Typical pie menus” (such as those in The Sims, played by hundreds of millions of people) have always selected leaf and submenu items by triggering on a button press or release (or pen or finger tap or release). They also typically support mouse-ahead. Pie menus can seamlessly support both quick press-drag-release gestures, as well as the more leisurely click-move-click gestures.
>The patent US5689667A “Methods and system of controlling menus with radial and linear portions” also makes the mistake of claiming that that pie menu selection is based on pointing at the items like linear menus (or PIXIE), instead of the direction of cursor motion, which Kurtenbach and Buxton know very well is simply not the case with “typical pie menus”.
Flight of the PIXIE: This video is derived from a film that demonstrates an early graphical user interface in use. The film was made in 1969 to accompany a paper entitled “PIXIE: a new approach to graphical man-machine communication” presented at the 1969 CAD Conference held in Southampton:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI
>“Radial menus include two types: pie menus and marking menus. Pie menus are typically used in item selection using the location principles of linear menus as discussed above. Marking menus operate on the principle of the direction of cursor or pointer motion as being the basis for item selection.” -US Patent US5689667A
>Unfortunately they were able to successfully deceive the patent reviewers, even though the patent references the Dr. Dobb’s Journal article which clearly describes how pie menu selection and mouse ahead work, contradicting the incorrect claims in the patent. It’s sad that this kind of deception and patent trolling is all too common in the industry, and it causes so many problems.
>Even today, long after the patent has expired, Autodesk marketing brochures continue to spread FUD to scare other people away from using marking menus, by bragging that “Patented marking menus let you use context-sensitive gestures to select commands.”
>The Long Tail Consequences of Bad Patents and FUD
>I attended the computer game developer’s conference in the late 90’s, while I was working at Maxis on The Sims. Since we were using 3D Studio Max, I stopped by the Kinetix booth on the trade show floor, and asked them for some advice integrating my existing ActiveX pie menus into their 3D editing tool.
ActiveX Pie Menus: Demo of the free ActiveX Pie Menu Control, developed and demonstrated by Don Hopkins:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnC8x9x3Xag
>They told me that Alias had “marking menus” which were like pie menus, and that Kinetix’s customers had been requesting that feature, but since Alias had patented marking menus, they were afraid to use pie menus or anything resembling them for fear of being sued for patent infringement.
>I told them that sounded like bullshit since there was plenty of prior art, so Alias couldn’t get a legitimate patent on “marking menus”.
>The guy from Kinetix told me that if I didn’t believe him, I should walk across the aisle and ask the people at the Alias booth. So I did.
>When I asked one of the Alias sales people if their “marking menus” were patented, he immediately blurted out “of course they are!” So I showed him the ActiveX pie menus on my laptop, and told him that I needed to get in touch with their legal department because they had patented something that I had been working on for many years, and had used in several published products, including The Sims, and I didn’t want them to sue me or EA for patent infringement.
The Sims, Pie Menus, Edith Editing, and SimAntics Visual Programming Demo. This is a demonstration of the pie menus, architectural editing tools, and Edith visual programming tools that I developed for The Sims with Will Wright at Maxis and Electronic Arts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs
>When I tried to pin down the Alias marketing representative about what exactly it was that Alias had patented, he started weaseling and changing his story several times. He finally told me that Bill Buxton was the one who invented marking menus, that he was the one behind the patent, that he was the senior user interface researcher at SGI/Alias, and that I should talk to him. He never mentioned Gordon Kurtenbach, only Bill Buxton.
>So I called Bill Buxton at Alias, who stonewalled and claimed that there was no patent on marking menus (which turned out to be false, because he was just being coy for legal reasons). He said he felt insulted that I would think he would patent something that we both knew very well was covered by prior art.
>I told him that companies try to get bad patents all the time, and that I did not mean to insult him by simply repeating to him the misinformation that his marketing people were spreading around the computer industry, in his name. I told him that should not shoot the messenger, and he should reel in his marketing department and tell them to stop spreading FUD in his name, which he refused.
>I tried to explain how Alias’s FUD had adversely affected the user interface design of 3D Studio Max, who refused to implement pie menus in spite of user requests for them. But he did not care about 3D Studio Max, since Kinetix was his competition. I asked him whose side he was on, the user’s or the patent lawyer’s?
>He claimed to be on the side of the users, since he is such a well known user interface researcher, but I believe he has sold out to big corporations like Alias, SGI, Microsoft and Autodesk by abusing the patent system for profit, and is in the thrall of corporate lawyers, so he wasn’t being honest. Users beware!