Rebrand Blender
Hopefully just bad choice of words, because that sounds moronic (no offence). It’s getting a bit much this obsession with wanting to push Blender into the “professional market”, as if Blender isn’t anything worth (yea, well…) if it isn’t used by ILM or Naughty Dog, or that Blender would suddenly gain tons of “professional” developers and features “if only it works like Maya per default”…
Look at how awesome Blender has developed since it was liberated, and how many users started using it, especially after 2.5x. The target audience already know about Blender by now, whether they want to use it or not. A pretty webpage won’t change their mind. Nobody’s validation of it matters really, except your own. And if you still want “Hollywood’s” answer, haven’t you read Ton’s Siggraph report? It takes time, always, no reason to feel entitled to a specific preference now! Bmesh took forever, but we have it now, YAY! Am I a fanboy? lol whatever. Relatively soon (1+ years) we’ll have Open{Subdiv,VDB} and maybe Alembic, PartIO, etc. But booo, it doesn’t support proprietary formats and plugins and the license sucks, so everything else is irrelevant, right?
It would be fun to see, just if primary studios switched to Blender today and had a guarantied seat to anyone who mastered it, how fast many who now thinks it isn’t “industry standard” would learn to love RMB select and the 3D cursor Totally unrealistic yes, but we would learn to use their inhouse software no doubt, or follow if they pick up Houdini. Maya keybindings won’t make learning/understanding Houdini any faster… Who knows if/when Blender will play a larger part of a summer blockbuster, and if that will change “new pro users” perception of something that doesn’t mimic their current workflow. Does it really matter? If it takes 4 years for mainstream adoption, would you wait learning Blender until then? Does it matter if it takes 4 years? 8?
I don’t understand why somehow people expect the BF to do the heavy marketing push. I would rather all income to the BF is used on development, and not on campaigns trying to “sell” Blender like some consumer device. This is a community, it is up to us to spread the word, like BlenderGuru, CG-Cookie, BlenderNation and many more are already doing. Maybe someday we’ll get corporate sponsors that are willing to pay for “professional” marketing, like with the members of Linux Foundation, but until then if you think Blender needs “Rebranding” you are free to become a more active member and participate in the process (and risk becoming a fanboy!)
/Rant