Has Blender really made zero progress to attract professionals since 2.4x?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

I know this might be some strong wording, but this is somewhat based on what I read on Andrew Price’s CGTalk thread on why people don’t use Blender.

Now one might think that all of the overhauls and new tools Blender has had since 2.49 would have professionals warm up to the Blender application, but reading that thread, I can’t help but think that the reaction to why Blender isn’t used is more or less exactly the same as it was five years ago (as in, the number of uses for the word no, never, and it does not or can not is more or less the same). This leads me to ponder this question, if it is indeed true that we can never seem to develop Blender into a preferred application by professionals, should we just abandon the idea of attracting them and just make a constantly improved Blender for Blender users, I mean why not just abandon the open movie marketing attempt and just hum along making a tool that has rapid development that professionals can use if they want, rather than trying to promote Blender to them (as in the community just pretending that we were all just quixotic in that idea for all these years and move on)?

This also means keeping the game engine indefinitely as well, I mean it seems like Blender might always be a permanent underdog in all areas of the market so why divest the app. of the game engine if Blender will always be just like it in the context of the professional industry in general (considering hot it might seem like at times even Cycles and Bmesh has not been able to bring a lot of professional interest)?

So what to do then, do you think there is an achievable plan for Blender to cement a place alongside the professional apps. or do you think Blender should return to something similar to it’s original intention, that is a rapidly developed app. for existing users and giving everyone a chance to access and work with modern 3D technology with little to no barriers?

2

blender game engine has been killed even before it has started, after decision that it will not run on playstation.

The new interface and modeling tools, make blender very comon software in game developing creating models etc. Cycles rendering engine give the possibility for interior renderings

3

But it did run on playstation :slight_smile:

4

after all the project was killed ;/

5

There are a few reasons Blender will never be used as widely as 3ds or maya. One it’s free. In today’s society things value is set in ppl’s minds by how expensive they are. I’ve seen more than one person’s eyes roll when they ask how much blender costs and I tell them its free. Free to most ppl will mean worthless; that if it were really a good program ppl would be willing to buy it.

Another reason Blender will never be widely used is for the simple fact that autodesk owns the education system as far as 3d is concerned. No 3d artist or video editing person is going to learn anything but adobe or autodesk. So after they spend a fortune to go to school and here you come telling them you learned 3d art on youtube with a free program… Well you can imagine that doesn’t sit well. Like Matt Daemon telling that guy in the bar that his $100k education could have been gotten for the price of a library card.

The thing holding blender back the most is perception. In order for blender to ever be widely used it would have to be 100x better than anything else on the market and that’s just never going to happen. All software is free as far as I’m concerned but I still chose blender over 3ds or maya or cin4d. I like what blender is about. I like the community. I like being a part of something that isn’t all about money, but puts the emphasis on the importance of giving everyone the ability to express themselves.

6

Consoles are like macs imo. They cater to a lazy less intelligent group which sadly greatly outnumber the rest of us.

7

Careful, Brent. Don’t look now, but a lot of those lazy, less intelligent mac users are on this forum.

8

Whether it has or has not, I’ve got no idea and personally don’t really give a damn.
It seems to me that those constantly banging on about getting ‘professionals’ using blender only seem to so they don’t have to feel inferior and can believe they’re using ‘professional’ software. It’s getting extremely tedious.

The vast majority of blender users are hobbyist and with the increase in forum numbers meaning more and more new hobbyist users. If those people wittering on about changing ‘translate’ to ‘move’ spend a little time helping those new users at least they are benefitting someone.

9

I can say that since 2.5 the perception of it has improved a lot, and Blender’s been picked up by a few previously Autodesk-using indie gamedevs including me.
The reality of it is that I would switch to something else if I went back to freelancing (mostly AAA) though, as Blender just isn’t there in terms of modeling tools and highend realtime support (yet).

One main component of that is the performance. When I bring in Zbrush sculpts I decimate them a bit, but ultimately you want to keep quality as high as possible, in which case you’re still talking about some pretty hefty polycounts.
You might say ‘get a better pc’, but the point is that competing software can display much higher polycounts on the same machine, and that’s an advantage when it comes to high-end development.

Another component is third-party plugin and engine integration, but those are ofcourse outside of the developers’ influence, and are a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. The more people use Blender, the more support of that type will come.

10

Ace, professionals are n’t really gonna talk about it here. Unless you are aiming to get attention, then you brag about it and then show something to back it up - but seriously, there are professionals that have used Blender in the previs or mockup area of their work before diving in to the rest of their pipeline - and they can’t tell you that. Just like they can’t disclose the rest of their internal tools that are custom made, that is just not going to happen.

If those people wittering on about changing ‘translate’ to ‘move’ spend a little time helping those new users at least they are benefiting someone.

This, exactly.

11

I think you are over reacting to the thread. Blender is used professionally, just not on high end studios. Cgsociety doesn’t represent the whole community. And let’s be honest, blender still cannot tackle every vfx or cg problem, is far from that. Altough for animated shorts or even feature films it may do pretty much ok for everything. I belive, however, that we are close. Cycles is maturing a lot… The new depsgraph, faster viewport, truly linked modifiers, multiple editing of modifiers or objects, and lastly, an easier interface for firstcomers (or an easier welcome, i like the interface), will surely gain more and more blender users. There is no need for so much marketing right now, blender is not good enough for high end studios (at least for complete pipeline, for modeling is great), but for now small studios can live with blender quite well. As soon as blender corrects these things missing maybe then it will be good to market it for high end studios.

12

What kind of topic is this? The pursuit of the “professional” market is precisely why blender is so damn good! The goal is to create a tool that allows artists to create anything they want, at the highest quality possible, which is precisely what professionals want. I never understood all of this negativity towards professionals. Don’t people understand that using tools that help you achieve your vision and achieve it FAST is good for everyone? Blender’s current path is the correct one. Every new feature that has come out throughout the life of blender has been to enable artists. Professionals will notice or they won’t. Making blender’s interface more “noob” friendly will not change that. If you love right click, it will still be there for you. It just may not be default. What I don’t understand is how users are so damn in love with right click that they would rather see the blender foundation stop making open movies before they find themselves having to set “right click” in the preferences.

/rant.

Seriously. For the record, I’m a professional artist who has been slowly moving away from maya towards blender for years. Each year I find myself spending less time in maya and more in blender. These things take time. Probably many years, but it IS happening.

13

That’s the thing when I say that perhaps we should end all of the effort to show professionals what Blender can do (diverting those resources to development in the case some want to start using it) because this thing saying ‘it isn’t there yet’ has been occurring for many years, it didn’t matter how many new tools came in, how many overhauls were done, or how many features were added. At the end of the day the answer is ‘it isn’t there yet’. This is also something that might lead some to think that the best that FOSS will ever be able to do is attract the users of independent or small studios because the big budget apps. have already gained control of the professional circuit and that the perception that free = low-grade may take a sweeping societal shift to change. I can also see why the big studios will also want to go to development houses that retain various paid developers for years, something that’s never a guarantee in FOSS without a means to get the majority of the community doing monthly or annual donations to help put said developers on paid contracts.

So after factoring that in, the old memes proclaiming “Blender is for Blender users” and “I would rather want 1 happy Blender user than ten happy Maya users” may end up having more relevance to today than we would’ve thought.

Finally, if there is indeed evidence that a lot of professionals are starting to use Blender more, than I guess there’s no need for a major reassessment of what exactly Blender is being developed for and what it’s trying to do, but there does still seem to be places where professionals gather where it seems like there hasn’t been an appreciable acceleration in the positive perception of Blender or its use in the professional community there.

14

I suspect what you are seeing, Ace, is an artifact of the English language. Sure, if you talk to professionals who speak English, you wind up talking to people whose original training was in Maya or 3DSMax or Photoshop, and they have a long expensive investment of time in those products. So of course they will not be eager to throw all that away to embrace Blender, and will justify that decision, in part, by pointing out perceived ‘flaws’ and ‘faults’ with our favorite software.

But I am seeing a lot of really professional work being done lately in Brazil, in Russia, in Bulgaria and Poland, in Central and South America, in Asia, in Europe… stuff which looks like it is appearing in advertising, on television and in theaters. A lot more than I saw five years ago. So while we may not be making headway with native English speakers, looking at the Blender world through that lens may be givng us a distorted picture of what is really going on in the larger, and increasingly open source world.

15

Enough with the omphaloskepsis already. Go make some awesome art.

16

Sure, if you talk to professionals who speak English, you wind up talking to people whose original training was in Maya or 3DSMax or Photoshop, and they have a long expensive investment of time in those products. So of course they will not be eager to throw all that away to embrace Blender, and will justify that decision, in part, by pointing out perceived ‘flaws’ and ‘faults’ with our favorite software.

I think that this is only partially true. I can speak from experience here as i’ve been watching Blender for a long time and have started investing time to learn it…in recent versions. This is partially the problem though…Blender…like ZBrush takes an investment of time to not only learn but become proficient. Is that to say that Blender can’t make great art…not at all. But the fact is that if i can’t jump into Blender and do what i can in MAX as easily then I’m ultimately cheating myself out of money and/or time.
Now to be honest, i think that “professionals” that don’t at least have Blender installed, as another tool in the belt, are just plain crazy! Dynamic Paint alone is worth installing Blender! As i see it, there are two main issues: the ability to learn Blender easily (UI and workflow), and how easily Blender can integrate into existing pipelines and tools.

17

You mean this redicule ? >>> http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=2&t=1127034

First of all I would like to point out that I do not believe Andrew’s attitude nor approach towards problems blender might have.

Most of the time he seems like he doesn’t know what he is talking about. This also happens in his tutorials, without fully
understanding 3d concepts or 3d terminology he jumps in and makes a tutorial, and fails to explain a 3d concept / term /usage “why
its like that”. I am not saying this to undermine him or make fun of him. He can do whatever he feels like, but from my point of
view Andrew sounds more like a hobbyist rather than a professional 3d artist… and i personally think he is not helping blender
when he makes threads like that or makes videos like “why is blender broken?”

Going to a well known old CG site like CGSociety and asking a question such as “why won’t you use blender ?” won’t help him find
answers , it will only make blender look bad. How do i know this ? Let me explain…

Until last month I was working for “Taleworlds”. I have been using blender everyday for making game assets for our studio for the
last 4 years. The studio had 42+ people working which 17 of them were artists. I was the lead concept / senior generalist. 8 of
these artists were Max users, 2 were XSI, 3 were Maya, 1 was Blender (me) , the remaining 3 were concept artists but started to
learn Max as progression towards 3d.

The studio was founded in 2005 and its primary 3d package was actually blender until the 1st artist was hired (The game art was
made by the programmers).At that time there were only 3 people working so they swapped their pipeline from blender to max because
their only 3d artist was a max user. Now i would like to point this out again their “1st artist was a max user”.

From that day forward the graphical decisions were based on the personal preference of the lead artist. Since his comfort zone is
Max every new comer HAD TO use max.I joined the team in August 2009, and I also had to learn max because of this.

Over the years I have proved abilities of blender not only to my colleagues but to my boss and other programmers as well. Every new
artist that had a different 3d background would at some point start to complain about some AD product that went wrong. But never
did they try blender.Why… because the marketing make it so, people look at what others do and how they do it and they automatically presume what they did and how they did is right.

“How did you do it ?” “well I used Maya for modelling and rendered in Vray” “Wow maya is the best!”

I may sound silly but this is what happens.When what Andrew is currently doing sounds more silly to me…

Now I know this because I lived through it. The executive staff depend on their leads, seniors. They depend on them to get the job
done. The leads and seniors are people who invested their time on the best 3d product of their time, they learned it, got
experienced in it and mastered it. When they do something, their way is the right way, you can compete with that proving otherwise but you cannot argue with this. You can’t expect that to change all of a sudden. But it can happen…

Let me ask a question ? Why do so many people use Vray ? All AD packages have Mental Ray built in… but you see majority of them
use Vray. It is because ease of use.It is because Mental Ray is a bitch to setup…

Why do people use Zbrush even though it has completely awkward usability and odd way of doing things… because it was the first.

Blender is a capable program. It does have its shortcomings, but in time it will become better.

Even though Blender is open source and the Blender Foundation is a non profit organization, what it is lacking is marketing and proper funding.Thats why open source short movies is so important, thats why a 5 euro donation each month is important. Theres only one problem here and it is a psychological one.

18

It might be early days but at least GameDev.net and Valve seem to have some respect for the package. Give it a few more years and Blender ought to do well in games development at least.

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The number one reason I can see is professional support, at least at the high-end professional level. No studio is going to use a piece of software with no professional support team to talk them through usage and API issues when they crop up. I personally think BF should start a professional subscription-based support system and hire a small team using that income. It would definitely ease the pain for more studios to start using Blender in a production environment.

20

You might need to grow up a little before you should be allowed to participate here again. I would be happy if Mac Desktops would outgrow Windows because Win just sucks at networking and media file handling on a desktop level.

I know many professionals that use Blender - I also do. I dont see a need for VRay or Modo.

However what for studios and larger companies is important is also support security. Blender cannot offer it.

At work we purchased Alias and with that the service plan incase something goes wrong. The same with our 3D printing equipment.

Blender also is a patch work of good and half finished tools - keep that in mind. And apps like Maya outperform Blender on a professional level.

So if a studio needs so features Blender will not cut it. But if somebody does not need them Blender will be great.
From CG Cookie to Endie and others I think it shows how powerful Blender can be if it fits in!