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Fluid Designer 2.71 is now available

19

The Microvellum has released Fluid Designer, the amazing parametric furniture modeling fork of Blender.

I know we released this way later then we wanted to, but we had a lot of preparation for a trade show we just attended where we were demonstrating Fluid Designer for the woodworking industry. There was an very positive response, and many cabinetmakers and designers are going to be using Fluid Designer which means Blender is soon going to be used by a whole new industry of users which i am really excited about. The trade show even put us on the front cover of the show magazine because we were able to demonstrate automated kitchen design that can then connect to the Oculus Rift for a virtual walk through of a kitchen. You can see photos from the trade show on Microvellum's Facebook page.

I also just put out a training video on doing a kitchen design using the newest version:

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About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

19 Comments

  1. William Armstrong on

    So, where's the source? The GitHub repository hasn't been updated in months, and refers to changes made to Blender Source code not provided there, and his other repositories are effectively empty.

    They even state that it is GPL on their product page, but neglect to say where to get the source. It being a beta is no excuse, as they are now shipping to customers, they have to release the source at that point, or it is in violation of the GPL.

    • From beginning it is violation. Now registration. They collect information about users? WAT?

      If they used blender as basis, than lets divide and say exact thing - we are close. Other way it seems violating.

      lets get lawyer to bring to justice. That how i see this softly closing source have to answer front of GPL.

    • maybe we have to wait for answers again, as previouse time? hope, developers have strong explanation to avoid that kind of questions. Specially i not need that kind of software, but too many things here annoying.

    • Charles Guillory on

      when I saw "a fork of blender" I had also assumed the license would carry because the code does? or maybe there's some clause I didn't read.... I don't know. I can't read the site thoroughly as it seems to be down ATM

    • Oh please! It is GPL. To my knowledge there is very little that changed in the core code if anything. The functions of FD rest on a set of Python addons. Maybe you know that in Blender addons can be closed source. FD has put them under GPL, even if it did not have to. So they went beyond whatever they had to do.

      • William Armstrong on

        No, they have stated in several places, including on their github which has 6 month old versions of the add ons, that they modified the source, and as of the beta they are distributing it. The GPL requires that they now ship the source for that beta.

        The functions in the add ons rely on the changed source code. They mentioned this in several of their annoucements. I realize the add ons do not need to be open source, but they have explicitly released those as GPL as well, so they are now required to ship the source for the version that they released.

        The GPLv2 Doesn't require them to release all code, only that which they are releasing in any form they must provide a way to get the source by anyone downloading the release.

  2. Brilliant. You Sir, are a legend. I hope you make a billion $ for all your efforts because you have just as you said, introduced a whole new industry to the marvels of CGI

    • It seems so. I haven't find any post to say if and when there will be a Linux (at least ubuntu) version.
      Too bad for me...

      • Since I don't think they released the source code your kind of out of luck with compiling it for Linux yourself. Hmm... have you tried getting it to run using WINE? I know it sounds silly considering we would never think we would have to get a blender based product to run on Linux using WINE but it is worth a shot.

        • I cannot get it to run under WINE, and about compiling... Anyone here wants to help with it? Then we can post the results for everyone else.

  3. I've been playing around with this since around 7 pm yesterday. It's very cool.

    The room design/layout aspect is great for getting a room put together really quickly, assuming you have the parts made already. You could sit down and throw a basic setup together with a high degree of accuracy in half an hour, tops.

    Building parametric models for the task is a tedious endeavor, though, and not terribly intuitive. You'll definitely need to follow through the tutorials to get your head around it. Saves lots of time later on, though.

    The big downside about the parametric modeling stuff is that opening the .blend in stock blender will show most of the parametric pieces gone, and there doesn't seem to be a simple "make duplicates real" type of function just yet.

    There's LOTS of little UI changes. Not sure how I feel about LOTS of little UI changes, other than they're huge UI changes. Some things I used a lot were hard to find.

    The REALLY cool part is in how the library is built. Appending pre-made models to a scene isn't a terribly simple process, but Fluid Designer's approach makes it a terribly simple process. Blender should look at that part of the system as something to integrate. Granted, you have to make a thumbnail image for every object and material, but when you're done it's a great time saver.

  4. marcelomiguelbazan on

    Does Anyone know where I can download Fluid Designer 2014 R4? I've downloaded 2015 R4, but it's different from the one used in the tutorials online. Thanks.

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