Fork Blender

[Kayleigh Telega]

Iget it, there are differences in the software that you want to have in Blender. So why not incrementally program them in yourself, as others have suggested? If the tools you desire are not in Blender, then research how to do it and give it a try. That is what I did with the Renderman shader tools many years ago, I wanted a feature so I looked at the code and made some changes. I even placed them on GitHub. Got some likes for it and a couple of forks but eventually the tool just ended up being obsolete. Am I discouraged? Not really. It served a purpose at the time.

Am I a programmer? Not really, I have dabbled in C,C++ and have some experience in Python. A technical director of sorts, but not a real programmer. I just know that software development is not easy especially for something as big as Blender. The shader tools I worked on modifying were simple in comparison.

Back in 2015 I posted a super simple banana oatmeal protein pancake recipe on, what was then, a very quiet blog. Amazingly, that post became a huge hit, perhaps due to its incredibly short ingredient list (3 to be precise). One of the greatest things to come from that post is the interaction I get to have with readers on a daily basis. People from all over the world get in touch to tell me about their version of the recipe. They send photos, comments, and suggestions. One reader, David, came up with some excellent modifications. He graciously agreed to let me post the recipe for his banana walnut blender pancakes inspired by my original post.

I was searching for an easy to use alternative for blender after using tinkercad for a while. I loved tinkercad but the functionality is just to basic. Most of the alternatives are really expensive and at one point i was thinking why did nobody ever fork blender? I found the bforartists fork and i have to say i liked it alot.

Digital (English) Paperback (English) Digital (French) Paperback (French) Digital (Spanish) Paperback (Spanish) Do you know that Blender has lots of forks with derivate projects? Since Blender is open source, anyone with the will and knowledge...

Bforartists is a complete, free and opensource 3D suite to create CG content. It offers you the full 3D art pipeline to create game graphics, pre-rendered movies and stills. From modeling, sculpting, texturing, rigging, animation, rendering, up to post processing.

The primary goal of the Bforartists fork is to deliver a refined graphical UI and a better usability to Blender. This means a complete switch in the usage philosophy away from the hotkey centered UX towards a user friendly, discoverable and intuitive graphical UI.

Bforartists is fully compatible with the Blender files and addons. Every feature that works in Blender should also work in Bforartists. Also, every release is always up to date with the newest Blender version. The toolset is the same. Where we differ the most is the GUI and the handling of UX.

Basically it would be a UI overhaul to blender with added features. It would start with a grid and you could manipulate objects just like with TinkerCAD, but could also draw/create by exact points/vertices, where it would generate lines(or 2D shapes/planes I guess?) between them, and then polygons(with your set limit between points/solid objects when finished, or whenever you wanted.

3 of us built 3D Orchard to distribute free access to CAD, to enable people around the world to collaboratively build products together. So it has full browser-based CAD built into the platform. The CAD UI is slightly different than typical CAD, because the tools pop-up based on what you click. Would love to hear your feedback! You can use the button in the bottom-right corner to give us feedback.

To make a fork from Blender, you have to follow some rules dictated by GPL, which says that you have to share the source code. That will ensure anyone can access the source code the same way as you did.

Having all those parallel projects is great, but you need to consider something before jump into one of them. Most likely you will need to learn a few concepts again to use one of them. Since most of them alter Blender ranging from the user interface or functionality, you must go through a learning process all over to use any of them.

One of the last big projects in Bforartists is fulfilled. All text and properties are now left aligned in the modifiers too. The experimental keymap with F to center at the view and X C V to adjust the brushes is now the main keymap. As a reminder, here you can find a pdf file with the vital changes in the new keymap: _changes.pdf

The rest is the usual work to keep Bforartists updated with the Blender changes. Align all the new middle alignend things left in the UI, create new icons, fix oddities. All in all we have around 110 changes in this release.

This release ends the current development cycle. Our design goals for Bforartists are largely met. And we fade slowly into a maintaining development status to keep our changes stable, consistent and up to date with Blender. But we won't stop to make Bforartists better and better.

Bforartists 3 Version 3.1.0 is a maintenance release. It comes with all the changes from Blender 3.1.0, and with the usual changes to keep Bforartists consistent and compatible with Blender. The last release 3.0.1 was just a month ago. So the number of changes in this version is expectable low.

Bforartists 3 Version 3.1.2 is a bug fix and maintenance release. It comes with the bugfixes from Blender 3.1.2, the further development from Blender 3.2.0 Alpha. And with the usual changes to keep Bforartists consistent and compatible with Blender. The list of changes at the Bforartists end is expectable low. There is currently little development at our end. So it is just about merging in the new Blender features.

I think this is a rather interesting project, but as mentionned earlier (I think ?) one crucial piece of information is missing : how does BFA deal with the blender preferences folder ? Meaning, would a version of BFA based on 3.1 conflct/override the preferences folder in AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\3.1 ? And if it doesn't cause any conflicts, well, how are things stored then ?

This topic is probably considered too advanced for the target audience of BFA but ironically this is the single reason I personally never tried these builds. Because the fact that it is not clearly stated makes me fear that it might indeed wipe out my preferences and that's not a risk I am willing to take. Having to setup a test machine or having to prepare backups just to find out sounds like a drag (and a litteral waste of time).

Also (and that's a bit of a tangent ...) I feel like there is a market out there for less heavy modifications to the software than the full-on BFA reskin. For instance Blender would hugely benefit from better support for floating windows (mainly for the UV editor and the shader and texture editors), as well as having the ability to resize the 4-quadrant viewport. These are things that I think many would be more than happy to pay for.

This means at the contrary that you need to migrate your addons. The in Blender installed addons will not work out of the box in Bforartists. And Blender settings, namely the startup.blend and the userpref.blend, should not be migrated. This can lead to conflicts up to the situation that Bforartists does not start anymore. We have quite a few settings different under the hood. Blender misses for example the toolbar editor. So please just migrate the addons folder. Not the whole content

For the less heavy modified version, well, where to draw the line here? Which modification should be included, which not? All we can do is to make Bforartists as good as possible. So we improve what we can and what makes sense. Every change has a good reason.

Things like resizable quad view is not part of it though, unfortunately. That's already a core feature, and is best asked the Blender developers. I don't even have an idea how this could be achieved. Our dilemma here is, every change at the core code makes updating and maintaining the fork harder. We have to care that the project remains manageable. So we usually just concentrate at the UI.

Ha, that way of popping out a window is pretty cool, didn't know about it and only knew about Window>New Window. But still, having little buttons in the UI to create the main important ones (UVs, shader editor, texture paining editor) would be great, for instance.

If anything I feel like the knowledge accumulated by developping this fork could be directed at creating some handy standalone tools. Like a barebones sculpting program, perhaps a painting app, and so on ...

Well, i know what you mean. It just makes not much sense. The average user doesn't work with floating windows permanently. And for the masses these buttons would crowd the UI. Well, maybe this could be done by an addon. But it is too special. Just used by a few people then. And the functionality is already there. It is even pretty comfortable with shift dragging it out.

Blender and Bforartists is a general CG tool. And i promised to deliver the same functionality than Blender. To turn Blender or Bforartists into a standalone one trick tool is the job of somebody else. I am happy enough that we managed to improve Blender :)

Bforartists 3 Version 3.2.1 is a maintenance release. It comes with the changes from Blender 3.2.1 . And with the usual changes to keep Bforartists consistent and compatible with Blender. This release also includes two new painting modes for the Bforartists Brush Panels addon for the toolshelf - select your paint brushes with one point and click. Now in Vertex, Texture Paint and Weight Paint modes (activate the addon in the Preferences).

Creamy, fluffy, and loaded with garlic - toum is the flavor bomb missing in your kitchen. Pair this Lebanese garlic dip with grilled chicken, roasted veggies, and one of my favorites: french fries. This recipe comes together in just a few minutes and you don't even need a food processor! What's not to love?!?

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