Success stories with Blender

Hello,

I would like to know any success stories with Blender. More specifically business success stories. I plan on going freelance soon with arch viz and I am a Cinema 4D user. I use Blender almost as much as I use Cinema 4D but I would like to make the transition to Blender for good. Can anyone relate to this (having a freelance business in the architecture visualization field). Besides the architecture academy are there any other just as good tutorials out there? I have searched but found nothing similar.

Sorry if this is in the wrong section.

Yeah. We need to hear or read more of these success stories.
All we are plagued with are stories from hobbyists, who don’t really make any income from it.

And it’s pretty clear that 95% of Blender users are into still pictures. You would be lucky to see 5% of them using animation features.

Well, I’m a freelance using Blender as my main app (I have Maya, 3dsMax and C4D just to open some client files and convert them) and sometimes I have to do stuff related with Archviz, as well as product shots for advertising and lots of motion graphics.

While there’s not much content related exclusively to archviz, I think the guys from Chocofur.com have a pretty succesful thing going on using blender as their main software (combined with different render engines and Cycles).
Also, there’s some people in this forum with pretty impressive archviz renders, which I believe do that for a living.

What I’ve been doing lately is watching and studying everything I can about archviz for other softwares and try to translate that to Blender and Cycles; the blog of Bertrand Benoit for example is an amazing resource (I’m miles away from getting those impressive results, but I’m certainly learning!)
I think that is actually better to look at resources and tutorials that are not directly aimed at blender users, because the technical aspect of shader creation and lighting is just a part of a good architectural render.

Finally, for a freelance Blender is a pretty solid choice, especially if you’re already familiar with it, and with the money you are saving on a license you could always donate some to the development and of course buy a license of any other render engine for the cases in which Cycles won’t give good results (like difficult interior scenes).

EDIT:
@blendDoodler I’m making a living from this, not at the scale of a VFX or animation studio (obviously hehe), but for anything that needs 3D I use Blender, and that includes animation too.

This commercial was done almost entirely in Blender, in the ad agency I was working for 2 years ago.

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Exactly my thoughts. Would definitely love to hear about animation and vfx ‘success stories’ too.
Everything around here seems to be games, fan films and stills which is fine.
But, we need more stories from users who use Blender exclusively or as a part of their workflow and to be even more specific, those who make some kind of income from working in blender.

I have been successfully maintaining a little art selling business which all started with the idea that there may be a lot more money in selling work made in Blender than games made with GameMaker.

I was right about that of course, I have managed to get revenue up to a few thousand dollars a year and I am now a published author (finally got around to publishing an art book containing some of my work with commentary after a couple of years).

What also helps is that since my father took early retirement from his job, he basically took to helping me manage the more boring stuff (like maintaining the website).

On the opposite of the succeeded stories, what about of some monuments of non succeeded stories?
Do you like to count?
(adopted form my favorite philosopher’s workaround, Diogenes of Sinope)
This is against any major 3d suite around. Please don’t misunderstand me.

We’re a small VFX/software company in the east of the Netherlands (around 30 people) and have been using 3Dsmax + MentalRay for all of our work.
Last year i was able to push Blender into 5 productions because of it’s fluid simulator. Because we were having some issues exporting this to 3Dsmax without a load of of Normal issues (caused by 3dsmax) we rendered the Fluid shots in Cycles.
My team leader was amazed by the realtime feedback of cycles in the viewport, and both we and our Client were very happy with the results!

One problem however… Now the complaining about 3Dsmax and MentalRay (iray in particular) has increased even further.

We’re talking about switching to Blender completely, but seeing as we do allot of after-effects work with out 3D, the discussion is still open about either Blender or Cinema4D.
The latter mainly because not enough people use Blender :frowning: We are however looking for experienced After-effects people with (some) 3D skills.

Nice, good for you Ace. Always good to hear these kinds of things.
I couldn’t imagine trying to work in games independently. I’m sure the market is over saturated with the things.

---------the works down there are all professional team works, not only blender and not only one people work at them--------

this was my first real proyect with blender, using cycles back to the 2.62 i think, it was when cycles was almost unusable ^^, volumetrics using blender internal, compositing was external exr were exported
-Modeling, animation, some materials(witch are really basics), and simulations, renders
<a href=“https://vimeo.com/49303977” target="_blank">
https://vimeo.com/38446061

this one was rendered and modeled using blender and cycles, the animation was external, the models were exported and rigged on a different software then the animations were imported using ps2 meshcache modifier, witch at the time blender hasn,t any, thanks to a guy call Yuu something(i promisse to search for it and edit this post) who send as the patches to use it, two months later a different version of the mod was added ~, ~ blender always gave us the features to months late, always ^o^(just kidding thanks to the devs a bug reported on saturday was fix for monday, thanks guys)
-modeling of some characters, some enviroments, assist with shaders lighting and render

This one was interesting all modelled rig and rendered inside blender using cycles and gpu. . . and that leads to some unpleasend surprises like, the memory its not the only limit under GPU, cuda has a limit amount of textures that can load, small or big doesn´t matter the video cards that we have could only handle 128 textures so was an interesting surprise, also some textures were painted using blender.
-character modeling, some basic rigging, assist on the shading and rendering

after two years of work on that studio due to administrative issues i have to quit, there were lots of things done during that year but i didnt backup everything and some things cant be shown by contract, but i take some time to try other areas, such as games.
this is the first publish game that i have worked for, all environment buildings and ambulance were modeled inside blender and painted using blender and krita, some retouches of color and distortion were done using photoshop, unity as game engine, the animated characters and other screens were done externally
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.NoxvilleStudios.Babyez&hl=es

Lastly im starting slowly on the world of freelancing, by recomedations of other blender user and people i knew on the way, my a month ago more or less i did a work, i was modeling assest and enviroment for a commercial and the guy next to my was using c4d to animate and other was using 3dsmax, using fbx the work was almost seamlessly.

I not sure if i can say that i am a success, but thats not an issue of the tool, it may be because i sucks doing buisness, there are a very few reasons to not success using blender, the main one its the artist behind the tool, now a day blender its a fully professional software if it is use in the right way, by the proper time with the right client, i don`t recommend selling to some one a fx water and fire simulation, that may be a issue ^, ^

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I have used the smokesim in a couple of commercials which were otherwise mainly done with Max. I hope to get some alembic support soon for enhanced compatibility with customers. None of them work with Blender.

Wow, thank you all for the replies! This is great to hear all of these success stories. Looks like Blender is making really big strides in everybody’s workflow. There are only a few things I will miss from C4D…and that is the spline workflow and the outliner. I think that I will seriously consider switching completely over to Blender for business and of course hobby use. By the way…I was thinking about starting in the gaming industry as well (model, texture) props, environments etc.,any good advice on that?

@lich

Good looking work there! Question: When you guys hit your 128 texture limit, why not break the scene up into layers and render it in several passes? Just curious.

we reach that limit if im not wrong on the background and assets group that came linked, actually i cant remember at the time what was the solution, its one of two or just simplify and combine maps or delete stuff, i need to ask to the one who was the supervisor at the time, maybe, he remembers, but it wasn´t a really shows topper was a surprise that suddenly the renders wont come out thats for sure .
in the other hand that scenes has several pases, beauty, three light, highlight, sss, some shots was one bg and the rest, packs, i think there were a few different masks etc etc