Blender wireframes and white-boarding with Penpot

[dfelinto]

Hi,

Blender is an open-source DCC (digital content creation) tool that is used for modeling, animation, …

Each team (module/project) is free to pick different tools for their development process. But there is a natural inclination to use open source tools, and many of us have been given Penpot a shot. The use is usually as a
wireframe and a white-board tool.

I would like to share the projects I personally used Penpot for. Other developers are welcome to add to this list

Library Overrides

I used Penpot for the final mockups of the new Library Overrides outliner modes. You can see some Penpot mockups used here: Overrides Workshop — Blender Developers Blog

This is how it looks inside Penpot (which if we had the “see but don’t touch!” option, I wouldn’t mind having everyone looking at it, as is the case for most of the Blender files):

And this is how it looks in Blender 3.2:

This will still be polished a bit more, so the name of the property is its UI name (e.g., Display Type, Hide), not its internal RNA path (e.g., display_type, bones[“Bone”].hide).

Hair Curves

I have recently written about the new hair system in Blender. This project is built on top of the Geometry Nodes project, with a similar team. For Geometry Nodes we used a lot of white-board to explore use-cases and to make wireframes mockups.

For the hair curves project we tried to quickly use the same process but now with Penpot. A few examples of trying to find a replacement for the modifier stack:

UV Nodes

As part of the hair discussions we needed a solution to handle UVs inside the node tree. After some debate we came up with those results:

Which was used in our issue tracker:

Those are not implemented yet.

Resources

Blender uses SVG for a lot of its internal resources, from its icons to Blender logo itself. And the more people started to use Penpot, the more we started to port those over to Penpot.

For icons we are still bringing them one-by-one on a per-need basis. We keep them white so we can color them afterwards (similar to how we do in Blender).

Bug report

I also want to take the opportunity to thank the Penpot team for squashing those bugs left and right

Internal Error when selecting vertices with shift pressed in a rounded rectangle

[juan.delacruz]

Thank you very much for sharing your design processes with the community!!!

It’s very interesting to see how other professional teams organize and solve their product design challenges. As a designer and Blender user, I’m quite interested to know how you get feedback from your teamates about these work you did in Penpot and how the process continue from that point.

Thank you so much again @dfelinto

Fun fact

At the beginning, when Penpot very first Alpha version was released we used Blender to create few creativities to support the project in its early stages. Here are some of those designs…

[myfunnyandy]

This is is beyond awesome @dfelinto! Love the wireframes style and would be very very interesting to see more of these to better understand your use case at Blender.

BTW, the “see but don’t touch!” option is something that we are already defining, it will happen eventually.