fan-boys should not hinder a studios productivity.
They don’t. However, for the longest time there wasn’t a real good way to get information on using Blender other than asking questions in BA.org or IRC. One bad incident is all it takes for someone to back away, and it’s not because we are weak rather that our time is very limited and if it is wasted on some troll fanboy then that is something that does not sit well with us and a bad taste is left which can take some time to go away.
Communication is really important in this industry. I have known of several applications and plugins that colleagues pass on simply out of bad experiences with the developers. Since Blender is community maintained this means the developers/contributors are either fanboys themselves or mingling a little too close for comfort with those that are. Granted Ton and the BF is taking steps (Blender Network) to improve on that but prior to this you had to wade through a lot condescending and nasty remarks just to get a simple answer and that is if you ever got the answer in the first place.
The reason studios do not use blender is most likely compatibility
Meh, not really. That doesn’t seem to stop people trying to mix up applications in a pipeline, this is why we started the Alembic project.
stability
Not by a mile, commercial applications might seem stable to some but wait until you get into a large shop where it has been noodled with to no end and there is a constant danger of crashes from either scripts or compiled plugins that may get developed under horrific deadlines who have to rush everything out without always being allowed to test first. Blender is no more or less stable than what I have to fight with on a daily basis. Sometimes the stability issues are not necessarily the fault of the 3D platform.
and pipe-line integration.
Some truth to this, jumping into Python 3.2 is a little too bleeding edge and that alone will be a hard one for many to catch up with. Each year there is actually a large meeting with commercial developers (which is now mostly Autodesk, SideFX, TheFoundry) and the technology heads of major studios. This is where lots of discussion occurs over topics like Python versions. With many of our pipelines based heavily on Python it is critical that we keep the versions of our pipelines and 3D platforms as close as possible. Not saying that there is anything wrong with 3.2, large shops just don’t move forward as fast as some might thing.
Yes the Maya/3dsMax communities have their own turds. But to be honest, very very few of them are actually working in a studio. You rarely find fanboy attitudes in a studio. Something about long hours and stress seems to beat that out of people. All they care about is getting their jobs done. With that said, not all of us are fans of commercial applications. In fact we aren’t all fans of any 3d application. They have all managed to piss us off and let us down at some point in our careers. We do what we do because of a greater love than just a particular application or brand name.
There are many of us who do use Blender, however I am one of only a few that will come close to this forum or the IRC channels. And it isn’t because of “Blender fanboys”, it’s just fanboys in general who have never walked in our shoes that we have no time for. In fact we really do avoid many CG communities in general, big part of that is we can stay up on commercial products without being close to a community. For a long time getting involved with Blender met interacting with the community. Better documentation and sites like Blender Cookie are allowing people to get hands on with Blender with minimal or any interaction with the community.
Be the community others fail to be. Just because someone is new to IRC or doesn’t have a certain amount of posts on BA.org is no reason to speak down to them or attack them. You truly have no idea who you are talking to. I think that is one point of failure in this community. If you’re name isn’t known or you’re not a mod then you couldn’t possibly know anything and are treated as such. Tho in some contexts I have seen similar behavior #cgchat but this goes back to being the community others fail to be.
There is a growing interest in open source in this industry, as some of you have noticed studios have started open sourcing some of their technologies over the past few years. Open source does need a community to thrive and you can’t thrive without good communication. There is a chance for this community to set an example that an entire industry would potentially notice, the question is are any of you up for it?