Real life Blender usage

Hi gang,

Just saw this article, http://mashable.com/2014/03/05/seinfeld-oculus-rift/ which is totally unrelated to Blender at first sight (Oculus Rift VR demo) but halfway in it is mentioned that the envronmnet was created using Blender.
I like such mentions of Blender a lot as it indicates that it is being used more and more ouside the Blender hobby sphere and more and more as a standard 3D creation tool. (The Oculus Rift too has me drooling of course…)

I work as an Art Director at an ad agency and I have been working on a project that I need renders for - the work is out of my scope and my current role does not allow me to use a whole lot of Blender… but I sneak it in where I can. Anyhow, for this job I have been working with two production studios who are bidding on the project and when I was visiting the one the other day they realized I knew a little bit too much about 3d for your typical AD on the agency side. I mentioned that I use Blender and he started listing off a few things they have used it for. Oddly they used it for motion capture, but he was unaware of the quality of the renders you could get straight out of cycles and some of the other amazing features.

But yea, I thought it was pretty cool to have a quality studio mention in person that they have used Blender for actual production work.

We do!

We use Blender with Cycles for all our rendering work (including the rendered sequences in the video above). For in-game assets we use Maya, but we are considering moving to Blender when the new FBX exporter is released. This is the only stumbling block for us, but progress on the new exporter is very promising!

Blender covers all our needs, and it does a better job than Maya in several areas, like 3D painting, unwrapping and texture baking. And Cycles is very intuitive compared with Mental Ray. The turnaround is considerably faster.

I’ve done tons of animatics for nationally televised commercials with Blender. Works like a charm.

@Dan, this is very cool game. Awesome artwork as well.

I am a web coder/designer mostly and not a dedicated artist, though I like to play around with Blender and trying stuff. While working in an advertisement company I used Blender to produce 3D logos of companies, animated elements for website graphics such as header logos and mascots. I had no complaints, it totally covered me while needed.

All you have to do is check out the demoreel!

In that video, the sequence that begins at 51 sec and the city destruction that follows is from a short film called “R’ha” and this Tumblr link appears to be saying that it was done in Maya student version and Zbrush, not blender.

I think that I have also caught clips belonging to Arnold and Maxwell reels that didn’t belong either, and were in fact rendered in other engines. I don’t know how or why these clips sneak into such reels, maybe it’s just marketing… but it is a tad misleading.

Btw Rha may be turning into a movie. :cool:

Kaleb writes:
Mainly I worked with Maya, but used Blender and zBrush for the modeling. I sat at the compositing with Nuke and After Effects – supported by Photoshop.

If Blender is used anywhere in the workflow, it can be used in the reel. It’s not a cycles demoreel or a every aspect is made in blender demoreel or a must be rendered in Blender demoreel.

Most people who watch it however will expect that it is a “software” demoreel because of the name that has been put on it. I myself for example, have no idea which part of that reel represents which part of blender. This is not a knock on blender or it’s capabilities. It is a simple statement that when I see the goldfish on the man’s head, I do not know what package it was modeled, rendered, painted or composited in.

With such an extremely vague definition of what makes a “demo-reel”, the videos in question then become more of a “multi-reel” demonstrating a pipeline of softwares. It can be more than a little confusing especially if you are doing research. But I suppose it is commonplace enough, being that Arnold & Maxwell reels (at least) seem to be doing the same thing.

Just something worth taking note of.

This one

is 100% Blender.
Here


the newspaper animation is made in Blender.