A cool new feature by Lukas and Campbell. Thanks guys!
Boris writes:
Most of your readers are likely also reading the Project Mango blog, but they had an interesting piece of news a few days ago: Copy+Pasting in the node editor.
Perhaps others feel different, but to me this is a minor gamechanger. No more having to mess with duplicating materials, storing them in slots etc. Just copypasta!
Link
- Copy and Paste - Tears of Steel Blog
17 Comments
I think the Blender for Android is bigger than this.
I think the Blender for Android is a waste of coding time, at least at the moment while the bug-tracker count won't go down. Blender is a wonderful program, but it's dependent on keyboard shortcuts and eats screen space. I find it almost unusable on my laptop, so I don't understand how it will ever be a serious tool on a low-res touchscreen.
I'm going to have to agree with Reaction. The novelty of being the first 3D animation/editing solution on Android may be great for bragging rights, but what is the usefulness of such an app when efforts should be solidly used in fixing things as they are? Hasn't this been an age old problem with companies such as Adobe?
For now, the Android port is only for the game engine, which is a useful and legitimate target.
Being able to display blend files on your Android device may also be useful for certain use cases.
At the end of this, there *may* be some form of editing capabilities that likely requires a new UI. It's not like there are resources being diverted to the port, it is done by someone outside the core team out of personal interest, so there isn't really anything to complain about.
I have to agree with everyone here. Yes, for now the port is only for the game engine, which is a good thing. On the other hand, Blender game engine was never popular, as in its never as big as its modeler / animation counterpart. Most people model in Blender and uses Unity. So it is good if the time spent on coding Android port is used to fix bugs instead.
Still, being open source, we cannot force people to code things that they didn't like. Although, interestingly, Android port is part of GSOC. So if Android port is not allowed, he probably wont touch Blender anyway. So I guess we just accept code as it is.
I just hope that one day it won't be removed from the main branch because of lack of maintainer. Because once that happens, maybe it is a waste of coding time and better spent on bug fixing...
Keep in mind that Android devices will only get more powerful, with higher res screens and perhaps some sort of mouse device will become available. Every 6 months CPUs get smaller and more powerful, tablets will soon be capable of running Blender properly.
I think that is what we can expect. Actually you can already connect a keyboard - mouse bluetooth combo on some models. You can even conect the phone to a HDMI display so blender on android is a very smart move IMHO
It is only a port of the BGE, not the whole of Blender.
Recent developments show entire blender UI running, for this to be useful it will need to have customized keymaps of course (and probably customized UI). But this can be done fairly easily with python- eg, animation optimized tablet mode, sculpt optimized tablet mode.
The reason the tracker count is high is _not_ because a GSOC student is working on an android port, its because devs who normally work on the tracker have their attention diverted to OpenMovie project - mango in this case.
agree, but you know we can have copy/paste and blender on android, they are not mutually exclusive.
I think it's awesome, the more usability features the better!
Arguably, it would be. I guess it depends on where you are in the chain really. As a blender user, this is big. As head of a team aiming to deploy onto as many platforms as possible...
Anyhow, this is a feature I've wanted since I first laid eyes upon the node editor, I sure hope it makes trunk.
Blender being the awesome sexy beast it is, it is still lacking many of these little things that would make it perfect. So let's be happy one more little irritation is possibly out of the way. :)
And it still lacks things that it once had, like the 'Link Scale' button! So So SO So SOOO many times that I have needed that button.
http://i47.tinypic.com/al4y88.png
Thanks (as usual), Lukas and Campbell. ;)
sweetness!
That's wicked cool...
Getting rid of redundancies like this should be one of the top priorities.