That’s what I was trying to bring up in the Softimage thread. I was making the point that maybe blender should stop chasing an industry that has no real use for it at this point and instead that Blender should focus on creating the best tools for creating assets for games. Its a tool that is perfect for indie developers and it has most of the tools are there already, they just have to be refined. However that requires focus form the BF away from open movie projects which imo have brought in some great tools but for the most part is a lot of wasted resources for one or two tools that actually stick around at the end.
I think the BF needs to take a step back and re-priotize what Blender should be and it’s focus. That doesn’t mean getting rid of what is there it just means tailoring it more towards a specific market or segment of content creation where it can actually fill an actual need. I still think the indie game creation is the way to go. Blender is the perfect tool to use to work on assets for budget constrained, small team, game development imo.
Now that ADSK can actually focus and have moved all the important players to their most favored application (Maya) I suspect that updates are going to be far more interesting and as of late Maya has been trying to make in-roads into the indie game scene. A scene that Blender should of already had their foot planted solidly on with a freak flag banner waving “We’re already here bitches!”.
Well Maya was and is a very powerful software if you like working with it or not. Without being useful it would not be among 3DMax one of the top two apps.
But do you need Maya? Do you want to pay so much for it?
Not everybody needs Maya that’s why Modo is also so successful.
And so is there a user base also with pro’s who use Blender.
I don’t see the problem… if you could compare a free software like blender with Maya, a proffesional suite with two decades of expensive development and only see a few differences in the base suite (and remember that maya don’t have any composition, video editor, good render engine like cycles,…) I think that it’s not a big difference. Blender only need a few time and users. And Blender foundation need new users to have more invesment.
I don’t think there is a problem with this at all. On the contrary, it would be surprising if expensive industry-standard software like Maya didn’t have have some features that outshine free, open source Blender.
The fact that Maya is an awesome piece of software doesn’t take anything away from Blender!
It’s really only a problem for people who do nothing but hang out on forums and have this kind of “football team” mentality. I really don’t get this inferiority complex, I could afford a couple of seats of Maya easily if I had to but Blender does everything my customers need, so why should I bother? Sure, bifrost and opensubdiv and whatever are nice but most important is core functionality, Blender has a solid workflow, a top notch renderer and with a couple of additional programs (eg AE, Photoshop, ZBrush) it becomes an amazing suite. Shiny new features are impressive but do you really need them?
Well, in big productions all this is necesary or better to have
Blender it’s a perfect suite to make videogames, but for animation and movies need new systems and tools to manage big scenes, for example. We have a hair system but once created the hair you don’t have control about this,… Ton is making a good job but I think that need make more things for the studio piplines… for example, blender is a perfect suite for videogames, but don’t have any way to modified the normals… This little things that for amateurs it’s not a big problem is something that the proffesional needs.
The thing you must understand about Maya (and other Autodesk products) is that nobody really is paying for using it individually.
People download and pirate it so they can learn it or for personal work- to build a better showreel. Education institutions get it for free and even get support from autodesk.
And Autodesk is just fine with that. For people who learn how to use maya or max are maya and max users in the end. And when a studio has to hire artists, those people have primarily a maya or Max background. Therefor the studio buys the license and support from Autodesk.
It’s part of the equation that keeps them in monopoly. Piracy and/or free education licenses help them be the main software people learn. And when it gets to actually making money with the software, Autodesk comes on top and collects their fee from the production budget.
Where it is starting to get more dangerous for Blender is their LT release and especially if they start to bring down the LT license price down.
Maya LT is kicking blender’s butt in almost every aspect. Better performance, better animation tools, superior shader tools, really good modelling tools (although not quite as good), much better compatibility with game engines and other software. This is going to steal a chunk of the indie game devs from Blender. It already probably is doing it.
Meanwhile the Blender foundation is pursuing feature film 3d animation and VFX .
Now the goosberry project however seems to have some tools planned that would be extremely beneficial to game development.
look guys, instead of comparing Maya to Blender, why don’t you use both? There’s nothing beats Blender on the fastest modeling on the two. Blender is gonna be on the industry, slowly. It will. And I was wondering, I hope Blender will get the BGE out and make it’s own stand-alone program. Because it’s easy to develop and BGE will be much powerful in that case, they just need to divide there developer teams in to two, for the 3D main Blender and the BGE. And also, I hope they will increase the power of the sculpting tool…
Apparently, if blender can’t take over Hollywood and kick maya to the curb, then the devs should just give up and not bother, according to some people on this forum…
The software is merely a tool for an artist to express his or her own creativity. Installing a software does not make the artist but a willing artist will find around ways to get the best results even in the most restrictive piece of technology. I have been using Blender for six years now. And I dont really care what Maya provides, not because i have reservations about it, its because Blender does all that I want. And I use have used it just to make an “indie” feature film.
The problem is not with either Blender or Maya. You might hate Autodesk or you might loathe the Blender fanboys who will love anything if its made especially on blender.
An artist takes years to specialise on a specific skill set, be it Modeling, animation or what not. And is usually comfortable on a particular software usually purely out of habit. Theres also usually quite a bit of emotion in it. The software becomes a faithful friend who helps us make art.
Blender came into the scene a lot after Maya/Max had already users working on it for almost a decade. For them and studios to switch to Blender is not as simple as switching from Proprietary to Free and open source.
In such a scenario Blender is not a free alternative as the time taken to adapt workflow around blender and users getting comfortable around it means valuable time which means money. So studios working on live projects would not want to experiment at the cost of expensive projects. So their existing pipeline works better for them. Not usually because “blender is not worthy”
I see blender as a great tool for start-ups and growing studios who do creative stuff rather than just process jobs. It does a lot for a lot less.
The gooseberry project is the ideal step forward for blender where it will be thrown challenges of handling a feature length film. It has already been proven that blender can handle shorts well (BBB, Sintel, ToS) Now a feature length film is due. Handling the data of such a huge project around the world means people can expect some solid project management tools to go with Blender projects and a lot more stuff.
Since you’re here, I don’t know if you’re subscribed to the Bf-committers mailing list, but someone was proposing to continue Nurbana integration as a possible GSoC. Ton seemed a bit iffy about it, for good reasons. One of the options Ton suggested was dropping Nurbs entirely.
Don’t get me wrong here. Great demonstrated potential. But … how does it translate to more common working environments. For example:
What level of GPU cards enable such magic?
Hell, for that matter, what base level of CPU is required?
What is the base RAM requirement for real time functionality?
And given available RAM, how does it match up against polygon load? (Likely, it scales functionality to available memory.)
Does it work with particles? I saw very simplistic short hair on the first demo and in the second demo, the female character had poly sculpted hair? Again, likely it does, but I haven’t seen it.
Does Maya 2015 function well on an AMD systems?
And while I really would appreciate a real time detailed work window, I think Blender’s trajectory of development is pretty good at this point. Particularly for a software program that is free. Compared to 3600 euros. Or 1800 Euros a year.
What I really like about the Maya demo though, is that it’s a good sign post. Showing where things can go. Can Blender get a real time highly detailed work window, rendering in real time? Probably. Some day. It’d be nice. Seeing the work window layout and how things could function is … nice.
Can Blender achieve a Z brush level of polygon load for sculpting? Hopefully.
So it was a great display of eye candy happiness. And if I had some spare scratch, I’d go for a student version of Maya to play with.
Select Viewport 2.0 for a high performance scene view that optimizes large scenes.
It allows you to interact with complex scenes with many objects as well as large objects with heavy geometry.
I only need the same equivalent in Blender.
Any info about development… roadmap… expected for version 2._ ?
Its possible, it is not… ?
It’s slow, but Jwilkens has been continuing his work on overhauling the viewport code and some of his internal changes (not noticed by the user) might hit Master soon (depending on who’s available to review it).
I do agree that Blender’s viewport is slow and outdated, but it’s not like there’s literally nothing happening.
knowing blender devs this would have the opposite effect and make them want to kick it’s butt even harder
From the stand point of game development, and a biased personal opinion:
blender’s biggest hole for animated characters pipeline in games and static meshes is:
bad exporting. When you export fbx meshes, blender adds new values to their transformation channels. This makes it a bit of a pain in the butt when you move stuff to other software. You have to zero out transformations in blender or in the other software. Always. if objects have transformations- they get completely messed up.
Now imagine exporting a scene of furniture you made in blender. You have to parent stuff to an empty? I’m not sure what the best solution would be. Last time I tried it this became a pet peeve for me.
Rigify can not produce an armature that is friendly to other software. There is no quick solution for generating rigs that are exportable. So no out of the box solution for animation baking from script generated complex rigs onto a simple armature.
Viewport performance during animation. Even with one character- kind of slowish if you dont have lots of cpu. Slow generation of playblast files. Maya makes them faster.
Not sure if I should send him an email. If the code is old it might be a problem but to call NURBS out dated is quite problematic.
Blender in contrast to Amapi has no extrude along a path tool for polygons either. To be honest Blender poly lacks many good modeling and surfacing tools. It only has the basic set of tools. Sofar the limited NURBS tools where a nice work around. They are also well animatable.
However the NURBS tools in Blender are odd they feel and work different. Maya has for a long time not really updated the NURBS tools either. But because animators do not use it does not mean object makers will not use it.
Sub-D is great but it also has it’s great downside and limitations. It is too bad that Blender did not morph into a free tool that features a decent poly and surface modeler.
I use the path and pipe (Bevel path with a profile) tools a lot when doing furniture mock ups.
