if I could favorite a post 
Do you actually think that Blender in 2004 was close to be something resembling commercial 3d software used at that time?
There wasn’t even a fully implemented undo function in the program back then.
Being professional is to use the available tool that does the job best. This can be max or maya. Or another tool. This can even be total outdated crap. But it’s in the very most cases not Blender. Not even with its price of zero. Didn’t work in the past ten years, will not work in the next ten years.
I hear this “just wait, now Blender will take off …” cheering since many many years. I heard it already when i first heard about Blender. And exactly nothing happens, because the strategy is still the same. The Blender fans cheers. The Blender developers ignores the needs. The industry ignores Blender. End of story.
Do you actually think that Blender in 2004 was close to be something resembling commercial 3d software used at that time?
There wasn’t even a fully implemented undo function in the program back then.
And what makes you think that the current situation is any different? 
Well, Blender seems to be making gains from since I started using it. It barely even was mentioned outside this place in 2008; not even YouTube had much. Now, Digital Tutors is doing training material, Epic Games discusses it in Livestreams, common to see WIP shots of the Blender viewport on various message boards, Commercials are made using it, it seems popular in the 3D print arena, etc.
That said, I don’t think Autodesk going subscription only is going to cause a major spike in Blender users. Adobe didn’t seem to get damaged at all by going sub-only. Continually improving Blender is the only way to gain more Blender users.
No, being professional means no more and no less than to make a living doing whatever you do. Things like tools can only be professional in that they are marketed to professionals. That usually implies high prices meant to be offset by the money you make with the software. Thank goodness Blender is not “professional” that way.
The reasons Blender hasn’t seen wide adoption in the industry are manifold and have already been discussed to death. The relative merits of the software are only a part of it.
A so called professional who uses the weaker tools all the time is not long a professional …
True, but they are a BIG part of it. Let’s not pretend that adoption of Blender wouldn’t be immensely improved were it able to offer the same functionality to studios (with the same ease/speed of use) as one can get with the commercial alternatives.
On the other hand, let’s not pretend the industry would switch overnight if Blender offered every single feature in Maya. Even if that were the case they would still have little incentive to switch. And even if Blender beat Maya hands down in every category it’d still take a long time to retrain so many artists and rework so many pipelines.
Not debating that. However, there are plenty of small to medium sized studios that would make the move in the short & medium term, you wouldn’t have the same list of functionality shortfalls come up every time Blender is raised in forums outside this one, and Blender would get more attention in the graphics schools/colleges that teach folks their first steps into 3D modelling, animation, rendering, etc.
The issue isn’t as black & white as either side is trying to make it. Yes, Blender will not become the most used 3D graphics application overnight if it were suddenly offered as much functionality (with as much ease of use) as the commercial alternatives. On the other hand, it wouldn’t have just a trivial effect on adoption & use either. Both the pro & anti sides of the issue here are presenting a false extreme and pretending comments about that extreme are a valid rebuttal to serious/realistic comments made about Blender as it stands and where it can/should be moving. They aren’t.
Of course, it’s never black and white only. But it’s not all just grey neither. There is a clear tendency.
And even if Blender beat Maya hands down in every category it’d still take a long time to retrain so many artists and rework so many pipelines.
Modo is a very popular example which showed that breaking into the industry and become a big player can be done easily with the right strategy. Reworking pipelines is already the wrong one. Integration into the current pipelines is the key. And offering what the artists needs is the key.
Blender does obviously something wrong when the goal is breaking into the industry. Question is, is breaking into the industry really the goal of Blender?
What percentage of the market is Modo anyway? How many artists use Blender? Does anyone actually keep track of these things, or is everybody just making things up?
It’s not a percentage thing, Piotr. It is used as part of a pipeline as opposed to trying to replace it. As such, users of Modo are not necessarily taking away from users of Maya, Blender, or other software.
I think the more important element here is that it, like Blender, was a new tool that required additional training above & beyond what most graphics schools & colleges offer when it came out. It is, however, a good enough product that is used by enough people that Modo courses are now available in said schools (far more, I posit, than Blender courses). Probably because it has been used in major motion picture after major motion picture, game after game, and advertisements galore. Like Blender, it gets it’s time in major file/game pre-viz. Unlike Blender, it also gets used in the actual pipeline producing the final CGI shots used.
Loathe as I am to give Tiles more ammunition, he raises a valid point. If the primary issue holding Blender back was the “retraining” required, Modo would not be as popular as it is today. If it makes the job easier and artists more productive, Modo demonstrates that new tools that require training will get used by the big studios. As such, relying on that argument to claim Blender isn’t getting similar traction doesn’t hold much water.
That’s why I use blender, lol!!!
it’s largely subjective but is it so hard to understand that for many of us blender runs rings around other tools? For sure blender isn’t best in market at everything, but then again nothing is.
For modelling texturing and sculpting blender is my tool of choice… often for rendering too… Of course I use after effects, premiere, final cut etc for a lot of stuff because they’re quicker for what I need but arguing over “how proffesional” a tool is is just childish nonsense…
I don’t need people telling me whether they think software is profesional or not, itdoesn’t change anything. I just care whether using it helps ME get the job done or not…
the rest is just dick waving nonsense
Of course it’s a percentage thing. Anything can be a percentage thing. Of all the 3d artists in the world, how many use Maya, Max, Modo, Houdini and/or Blender in their pipeline? I never implied one excludes the other. Everybody keeps touting Modo as a great success story, but I wonder what the adoption really looks like. Courses offer some kind of indication of course, but wouldn’t you say schools have a great incentive to organize them when companies like The Foundry or Autodesk are backing them? These companies have actual education departments that put these things together and form partnerships with schools and companies like Gnomon or Digital Tutors.
Less talk, more rock.
Every time a product becomes subscription based people assume the current rental price is the final price… ha ha. Nothing could be farther from the truth. It starts off cheap but does anyone think it will stay that way?
The question is not if Blender can be used professionally. Never doubted that part.
Blender obviously can be used professionally when there’s a professional artist that uses it. A craftsman can also use a stone* to hammer in a nail. But when he works in an area where everybody else uses a hammer instead of a stone then he might have a problem with competition. So you have most obviously found a niche where the stone is still enough, and time and quality does not play a this significant role. Congratulations.
*Forgive me this radical comparison. It just makes things a bit more obvious. Blender is of course not a stone. More a smaller hammer with a weird handle, and not made for every nail. There is always a industry tool that does the job much faster, easier and/or more accurate. And time and quality is money. And most important, those tools integrates into the pipeline.
The question is why Blender is nearly not used in the industry. Which is simply a fact.
What percentage of the market is Modo anyway? How many artists use Blender?
In the industry? There Blender plays no role. But Modo does. 1:0 for Modo i would say
Don’t ask me for percentages though. I have none. All i can offer is the usual places where you can meet the artists that works in the industry. CGSociety for example. Or Polycount.
That Blender is mainly and nearly exclusively used by hobbyists shows its real target market.
Yes, people do keep track of these things but good luck getting those figures out of them. The Foundry, Autodesk, etc of course have records of current licensees but they aren’t going to let you know how many that is. Blender keeps track only of the number of downloads (and perhaps unique IP addresses amongst them). However, as recently borne out during the Gooseberry campaign, this is nowhere near an accurate reflection of user counts. Also, the issue doesn’t seem to be just “number of users”, but “number of professional &/or productive users” as far as I can tell.
As exact counts are not possible, one needs to go by secondary indicators. In other words, how many awesome works of art are being posted up in DeviantArt, CGSociety, etc (i.e. forums in which there is no “focus” application) mentioning the software? How many jobs are being advertised seeking (& hence later employing) people skilled in the software? What movie/CGI breakdowns reference Blender as part of the pipeline? And so on.
By these indicators Modo’s adoption rate and usage well exceeds Blender’s.
Of course they do and yet, if Blender were the software of choice for studios hiring students out of these schools - it wouldn’t do much more than ensure that Autodesk & Blender were taught side-by-side. This is not the case.
Modo was, like a great many other now defunct & discontinued tools, an entry into the market that required training to be useful. It is now not only taught in schools alongside other industry essentials like Maya & Zbrush, but it has been used in a variety of major motion pictures, AAA games, and a smorgasbord of professionally developed advertisements. I put to you that if artist training was the major issue, as it is being presented in regards to Blender, this would not and could not happen.
I don’t get what you guys would magically gain if Blender were adopted widely by “professionalzzz”.
Meanwhile, the development roadmap is amazing and touches basically every aspect of the software, both in features and performance, demonstrating a really healty and fast growing project overall, while i wouldn’t bet a penny on the rather obscure future of some AD product currently.
Another thing might be the lack of 3rd party plugins (renderers partially excluded), but personally I think this one is gonna improve with the Blender Market, it will take time perhaps but already are appearing very useful tools for specific use cases which you may purchase or not by your needs depending on your job needs, not counting how this could potentially improve the API since advanced commercial scripters could request extensions to the core devs to make their addons better (or even possible).