Popular 3D application Blender will get a tablet version
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I totally get the reasoning of going with iPad Pro first, but does Apple's App Store submission criteria allow developers to make the distinction? As far as I can tell it's not an option. It's either iPhone or iPad or both.
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I think is is great news for a variety of reasons, but one of the bigger ones is I think being forced to really think about the UI and UX for a tablet will benefit desktop users too.
I'm pretty shit at Blender, I can do some basic sculpting, and I recognize the power users are basically keeping one hand on their keyboard at all times. Which is fine, power using is power using.
But that first layer of interface could I think be improved still.
Especially since to really sculpt you need a pressure sensitive device, and my attempts to use my iPad tethered to the desktop app definitely revealed some of the weaknesses of the "hand on the keyboard" approach when you're also trying to juggle a tablet.
I'm pretty shit at Blender, I can do some basic sculpting, and I recognize the power users are basically keeping one hand on their keyboard at all times. Which is fine, power using is power using.
But that first layer of interface could I think be improved still.
Especially since to really sculpt you need a pressure sensitive device, and my attempts to use my iPad tethered to the desktop app definitely revealed some of the weaknesses of the "hand on the keyboard" approach when you're also trying to juggle a tablet.
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So nearly a decade ago now found a lot of applications for OnShape on mobile devices. Not sure Blender fits as neatly into those kinds of use cases, but at the time there were loads of critics of a CAD app on a mobile device because they couldn't imagine using it without their workflow, and also couldn't imagine the utility of it in the field. All the same I remember watching TV with my son a few years later back when he was still in high school and he's noodling around on his phone and then I can hear the whirring of his 3D printer upstairs. He'd been designing something on his phone and sent it up to print - so clearly the mobile workflow wasn't all that bad.
Around the same time I had architects sliding me an iPad with architectural drawing I could interact with in on-site visits, which was pretty helpful.
Around the same time I had architects sliding me an iPad with architectural drawing I could interact with in on-site visits, which was pretty helpful.
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It'll likely let you download the app and then it shrieks on launch that your device isn't supported. There are already some apps that will do that (final cut comes to mind… though I don't even think it'll let you download maybe?)
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Yes. Not sure about iPad/iPad Pro as such, but you can make a distinction between A series and M series. There are M series only iPad apps.
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There are certain technical specifications which can be marked as required. I have an experience which that not install on certain iPads but would on others.
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I don't think there's anything fundamental that would prevent Blender-tablet from running on an iPad Air rather than a Pro. The latter has a better screen, and is usually a generation ahead in SOC. I think that's it. Pencil support is the same, right? So, unless the system requirements end up being "needs the very latest Mx SOC", it should work.
The baseline iPads might have trouble though, since they've been getting Ax rather than Mx SOCs, and have significantly less RAM than either the Airs or the Pros.
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Blender and 3D printing are an okay mix, depending on your use cases. Some people do use it in CAD-like ways, but it's not ideal for that. You can make it work though! And for some needs the tool you know beats the better tool you don't. But of course lots of 3D printing is also sculptural or organic.
I think maybe the space Blender would really 'compete' against things on the iPad would be Nomad Sculpt?
I dunno, it feels like there's all these overlapping circles in these spaces but so many different use cases.
I'm tempted to try OnShape, I just use Fusion for CAD these days.
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This sounds good, but like anything f this nature I worry about how "full" it will be. Blender is really complex and I'm not sure how you can cram that ona smaller screen like an ipad and still be able to have all the same functions
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Based on the wording I would strongly suspect they're thinking about what types of input widgets work on touch- and pressure-sensitive devices, and mapping those to existing concepts that are mostly keyboard-driven.
It's very easy to nudge, connect vertices, subdivide, etc. when you have those as muscle memory, but I can definitely imagine -- for instance -- pressing a little harder than normal for a moment on a specific edge to subdivide it, or a firm line drawn between two vertices creating an edge. Those are not only intuitive feelings, but they take less time.
If this is the case, and they do it well, I would be excited enough to get a pressure-sensitive tablet just to try this.
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Yeah, exactly. This is my hope, that the work they do to support the iPad trickles back to regular ol' desktop users with pressure sensitive input devices, be they iPads or otherwise.
As I mentioned I'm very baby at Blender, nobody should listen to me when it comes to it for more than the most basic thoughts. But if you do any sculpting in it I think a pressure sensitive input device is such a huge leap up.
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From devtalk.blender.org/... it's apparent that they have no wish to restrict how anyone uses their device but they are building and testing with iPad Pro.
From the FAQ:
So at the moment they aren't at the stage of app store distribution.
Also, the blog post author answered the following question:
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As someone in the job that I do with the background that I have, I implore you to reconsider that viewpoint. The experiences of people new to a software package or technology are every bit as important as the established pros.
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There's a number of architectural differences between A & M. Historically A series had better NPUs because they were used for photography, but M series has better GPU, matrix math, etc. support including some dedicated silicon that A series lacks that I could see Blender relying on, depending on what feature set they feel is critical. Sure, you can strip Blender back to where it was 10 years ago and it'll run on modern A series no problem, but if you want it to be mostly feature complete it has things like thermal simulation and ray tracing and a bunch of other stuff that A series really isn't designed for. And yeah, basic things like RAM is a factor in that as well.
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I didn't mean it in that sense, just that at the time people thought CAD on a phone was stupid, and it wasn't - there were real use cases for it in the field. We were using it in education, where anchoring that task to a limited number of university owned workstations was a real problem. Give every student the ability to do it on their phone/laptop/etc. including when they're trying to sort out why their quadcopter isn't working out in a field somewhere or at a competition was extremely valuable.
I'm not sure Blender has the same argument. I didn't mean to suggest these competed (though I suspect Blender is a little better suited to the kinds of things people use resin printers for, printing miniatures, etc.) rather 'what are the use cases for Blender where mobility is needed/desired'. I'm sure they exist, but do they exist on a large enough scale to form a market to justify the effort? I think that's the important question here, and I'm not in that space to offer an informed opinion. But OnShape captured almost all of that mobile market in the beginning and it's what got them in the game - it turned out to be really important to the company.
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In a lot of cases more important because an awful lot of products cater to the installed base, struggle to grow because they are increasingly impenetrable, and then they get innovated on and become irrelevant. Looking at you WordPerfect.
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I have to admit my use of Blender is pretty limited mostly because the tools aren't exactly intuitive and you really do need a new vocabulary unique to CAD to understand what to do, let alone how to do it. So if this simplifies any of the tool use aspect, it'll be very welcome.
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Fair! I was really more thinking "don't let me tell you how to use this software like I'm some kind of expert" lol.
I've done some sculpting, some rendering, even some client work in it. Watched a bunch of tutorials, consumed content, I'm like ... versed in Blender.
But very conscious of my limits.
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Ah, yeah I gotcha now. I think the answer to your question is really "iPads aren't really mobile devices in how we tend to use the word".
They're becoming more and more 'actual computers', especially for creative functions. A lot of artists are working full time on iPads, at home, not even on the go. Procreate etc.
OnShape is cool because it's just portable af in general. It's also part of what makes me slightly nervous, I hate using Yet Another Cloud Thing. But it's not like Fusion is really truly offline.
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alterSchwede
Ars Scholae Palatinae
It is pretty much a power user software, isn't it?
This isn't just for you but you often hear complaints about blender's interface complexity and, well, it's a complex software. It is, as Sam said in the article, a 3D modelling software. But it's also a 3D sculpting software (not the same), a 3D animation software with bones and forward kinematics and inverse kinematics and stuff, a video editing software, a node based compositing software (with a camera tracker in there somewhere). With the new-ish grease pencil you even have the capability of 2d animation. And near anything can be scripted in python too. And I bet I still forgot one thing or another.
As for "hands on the keyboard", as a professional do you honestly use Photoshop without one hand resting near the most used hot keys at all times?
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Animation friends of mine give high regards to this if you want to do some 3d sculpting on the iPad
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nomad-sculpt/id1519508653
Edit: of course only after I posted this, did I realise you mentioned Nomad in another of your posts
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There are several possible responses to that concern.
If anyone has ever been able to be productive with Blender on a 13" laptop, they will in theory be able to be productive on a 13" iPad Pro which has a 2752 x 2064 px HiDPI display, so it's sharper and more readable than a cheap 1080p tablet or laptop. It will certainly be less comfortable on the smaller iPads, and depending on what they do with the UI it might be unbearable on the iPad mini, if they even decide to support that size.
An iPad user is not constrained to the built-in screen. They could make Blender use easier by using the iPad like a laptop: Plug in a big external monitor so you can make room for more palettes and readouts. Stage Manager in iPad OS already enables both mirrored and extended display on an external monitor, apparently iOS 26 this fall is going to make this even easier/more powerful.
Blender is far from the first 3D app on the iPad. The preceding 3D apps have used an array of designs and techniques to make 3D doable on a tablet, or even in some cases, fun. We shall see how Blender solves this (providing touch alternatives to desktop modifiers, for instance) while still keeping it Blender-like. But serious users will probably connect a keyboard and mouse to the iPad.
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I agree there. I'd really like to have meaningful touch gestures to sculpt with.
Only thing is I wonder just how many more people they could reach compared to the effort needed to not only meet the App Store rules (and risk arbitrary rejections), but completely revamp the existing heavily KB/mouse dependent Blender UX (and I mean very dependent). iPad Pros are more expensive than the equivalent Mac Mini or iMac once you add in pencil, requisite keyboard, etc. Don't really need a drawing tablet for Blender itself.
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I have "try Nomad Sculpt" on my list of things, I'm really just waiting for a project that will help incentivize me to put in the effort. From what I hear it's pretty easy to jump into though.Animation friends of mine give high regards to this if you want to do some 3d sculpting on the iPad
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nomad-sculpt/id1519508653
Edit: of course only after I posted this, did I realise you mentioned Nomad in another of your posts
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Trying to sculpt in blender without pressure sensitivity feels pretty painful. I dunno that you "need" it I guess, but it sure feels like a significant handicap to not have it.
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I'd argue iPads are mobile in their ability to be useful in the field in a way that laptops aren't. I mean, as simple as stand in the middle of your yard with a laptop and see how useful it is, relative to a tablet - which is kind of the use case for a lot of convertibles. And because the tablet isn't guaranteed to have a keyboard, unlike a laptop, tablet apps are forced to have an interface that can be worked without a keyboard, and therefore while standing, etc. One of my concerns about the current iPad trajectory is the degree to which that will remain true. Apple did something similar by refusing so ship 2 button mice so developers couldn't lazily hide all of their interface under contextual menus that lacked discoverability as was common on Windows. Eventually they conceded that fight. But in this context I think Apple forcing developers to make the app usable without keyboard/mouse/trackpad is what's critical. So even if you have an iPad that is outwardly identical to the Mac, Apple has through the way they sell the product and control the App Store forced developers to make the iPad software usable in a way that is fundamentally different than the Mac. And, I think it's fair to argue that has probably limited the ability of the iPad to fully replace the Mac because the iPad developer does have to solve the problem of 'how do I make a spreadsheet productive without a keyboard', which may be an impossible task. So that's the trade, and it's very conscious on Apple's part.
The other big selling point for OnShape was the cloud feature. It basically has git for CAD built in as a core feature, so it ended the days of 'Steve never sent me the Solidworks file' because each team had a workspace they could check designs in and out of and those were always up to date. For design teams it was like the invention of, well, git. Not as key of a feature for individuals, but given that half the point of the design project was about learning to work as part of a team, that solved SO many headaches. It was one of the only times I went to an instructor and demanded they change how a course was taught (the intro ME CAD course) because it solved so many goddamn problems. And it was right at the time 3D printing was showing up as a tool for all kinds of different students in different majors so it became a really broad solution.
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How about they work on finishing important features that have been in limbo for the better part of an entire decade first like nondestructive sculpt layers and user-sorting of the outliner and select-through without using x-ray mode? I could think of a few dozen longstanding pain points that should be addressed before redirecting their very limited developer resources into burdensome scope creep like porting it to an entirely different operating system and designing an entirely new UI and UX paradigm.
The irony here is that in many ways it is less complicated than its industry peers like Maya, Max, Houdini, zbrush, etc. (because a bunch of features are keyboard only with no UI discoverability). Can't have a complicated UI if there's no UI for a given feature!
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I actually commented on your post because I think you hit on the core concept in a way that the article didn't. Note it mentions the word "keyboard" once, and in a three-way long-winded comparison that makes the point a bit too subtly:
Which is soft-pedaling the point a bit, I thought: the keyboard should be optional for [some] Blender users.
No one, no one, can tell you that Blender is usable without a keyboard nowadays. Not efficiently, anyway, at least without a lot of work and practice. But there it is, that's the goal! Eventually, they'll try to actually get rid of it. The
gx-0.25<enter> I use to adjust something a quarter-unit negative on the X axis may be replaced by something else. That's what you could imagine as the end goal here: a new input method, a user-base expansion, and an accessibility win in one.It's a big task. I am glad it's being approached by the Blender community seriously. I think it's a very smart strategic move.
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Blender is the most used open source 3D modeling tool in the world. 20+ million users?
Been around for 30 years. Hardly obscure.
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Yeah. I literally have two conflicting feelings about this.
One, Blender needs to be easier for casual users to pick up. Flatten the learning curve.
Two, Blender must not cater to causual users at the expense of utility. Don't reduce the application's power and flow.
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It’s been quite niche for many years but since blender 2.8 (2019) you can see its adoption curve growing exponentially every year.
In the last few years, in addition to pro I’ve seen many design & architecture students going into it and now I see schools dropping older (polygon) 3d package like 3ds max and Cinema 4d in favor of blender lessons.
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Now they have AI for coding. The development will be faster, right? Just saying
Edit:
What about a lighter edition? Something to create the barebones of a project for later complex editing? It could be divided into different apps for lighting, texturizing, and video editing. Not the whole pack, but enough to make some fun things with the possibility of further editing in the full version. This would open the door to new, casual users and would be useful for sketching new projects outside of your home or workplace.
Edit:
What about a lighter edition? Something to create the barebones of a project for later complex editing? It could be divided into different apps for lighting, texturizing, and video editing. Not the whole pack, but enough to make some fun things with the possibility of further editing in the full version. This would open the door to new, casual users and would be useful for sketching new projects outside of your home or workplace.
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B
Blender is already divided in different tab for modelling/texturing/sculpting/etc… Dividing it in different apps will add another layer of complexity, especially in project workflow
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