I am curious to hear from a Houdini user if they fully maintain their design tree.
With the work I do often design trees are great but can slow things down / bloat up
so sometimes I save revisions or modeling stages instead. And I never had the issue
that this was a problem.
I work in a studio doing commercials (Max and Maya) and I have close friends who work in movies and TV and I can tell you, this has absolutely nothing to do with why studios do or do not use Blender. To be honest it sounds more like you are trying to make a case for blender adding a history feature than anything else. Which I’m not opposed to but I don’t think this is the place for it.
As it’s already been mentioned here, It has more to do with the CG community’s perception of Blender than any actual or practical reason. I wouldn’t doubt that most CG professionals have absolutely no idea what Blender can or cannot do. They view it as a toy that 13 year olds use to learn how to make goofy/wanky looking CG images. I’m sure that if a CG professional did see a really nice image and learned that it was done in Blender, they would just assume that it was because the artist was exceptionally talented. In the history or CG it’s very common that artists can do just about anything with just about any tool. In other words, it doesn’t always reflect positively on the software used but rather the artist using it.
But lets be honest here. When studios evaluate what software to use it’s almost always based on how many people they think they can find to use that software. Think of it this way: If I decided to start a studio that did animation for TV or movies I would need to hire a lot of artists. Modelers, Riggers, Animators and Lighting TD’s. It wound be stupid of me to choose a software with such a tiny base of good artists. We’re having this issue right now in Portland with 3DSMax. They stopped teaching it at the schools here so suddenly we can’t find good local artists to work for us. It’s a serious problem. Sure there are great Max users from out of state but then we would have to fly them here and put them up while they’re working and what do we do when the next job comes along? This is why I’ve been pushing for more and more jobs to be done in Maya instead. There’s just more people out there who use it. well… that and I also happen to like using it more than Max. 
Here’s anther example: Someone recently asked them to help them putting together a pitch for a CG animated TV series. They asked if I thought it could be done in Modo (it’s cheep). Now, I’m a huge Modo fanboy and I would love to use it on a TV show but… Seriously, how are we going to find enough people to work on the show? I mean, maybe some Maya guys could be cross trained in Modo since it’s most like Maya than any other program but… It just doesn’t make sense. Now think if we had chosen Blender? It’s not imposable to do a TV series in Blender. But it’d be very, very difficult just finding the talent.
And yeah, maybe it’d be a different story if I was in Brazil or Argentina where Blender might be more common. But in the US, this is the way it is.
P.S. My apologies to the OP but I just had to get that off my chest.
Yeah, we always have to collapse the history on our characters in Maya. It’s just standard procedure. When I was using XSI many years ago, we had to work in a mode that didn’t save history we worked because it slowed down the scene to much. Every time you extruded or beveled, it had to re-calculate all the stuff that was done before it. I’m sure it’s the same in Houdini.
It was just an example man, I also work in a studio (see sig). There’s no need to be hostile.
I do agree with some of your points. When moving to Blender it really is just a practicality thing, especially with larger projects. Yeah theres the open movie projects, but we dont have developers sitting next to us taking notes while you’re pulling your hair out. It all comes down to standardization in my opinion. Blender simply just needs more time to develop, and its getting there in my opinion, its just not there YET.
Blender simply just needs more time to develop, and its getting there in my opinion, its just not there YET.
2002 - Just wait, Blender will be a professional software soon …
2003 - Just wait, Blender will be a professional software soon …
2004 - Just wait, Blender will be a professional software soon …
…
2013 - Just wait, Blender will be a professional software soon …
2014 - Just wait, Blender will be a professional software soon …
2015 - Just wait, Blender will be a professional software soon …
To be continued … 
I was formally trained in maya, and we also always had to delete history and reset the pivot point(maya allows you to move around the object center, to do the things Blender uses the 3d cursor for).
The given reason was the object histories can cause unpredictability in animation and export.
I mean, I don’t deny the uses of history on a pure working file. The fact that you can make a ‘make t-rex’ button in maya as long as you know how to model a t-rex is pretty cool, but it’s not going to affect what comes rolling out too much. That would be the export and import filters
Instead of asking if it’s in the studios, there’s another question that will in turn lead to the reasonable answer for this one.
Are there schools teaching courses that only use Blender?
It’s a proven strategy for Microsoft and Apple through the 1980s and 1990s. Microsoft certainly got their Office suite out there, and Apple heavily pushed their IIes and Macs. And it’s still practiced by them and most of the bigger commercial software giants today. Schools or school districts would either get grants or sweetheart deals with some rather nice price cuts.
Blender starts out being free, so why get involved in working that angle? If we can get some educators onboard with using Blender as a mainstay of their curriculum, along with developing some solid courses and certifications, then that should eventually lead to more adoption in the commercial sector.
Likely has to do with exposure, familiarity, and people having some piece of paper that claims they’d know what to do with the software rather than sit there and stare blankly at the default cube.
Of course in the current U.S. job market, if any companies in a major city out there do use Blender and advertize for open positions which specifically mention it, you could bet there would be a line at their door and I’d guess about 1/4 of applicants would be able to use the software at an intermediate level or above. (Given other aspects of the job aren’t too questionable and pay would reasonably support the local cost of living. So many unemployed or underemployed out there.) I’d suspect there are a lot of CG artists not too different than most of us here discussing this that are itching for such opportunities. (And for every active person on a forum, how many lurkers that never post?)
Ton wants to push Blender more into education via the Blender 101 project. Not a lot of info about it, but it’s mentioned on this page.
Okay, that’s not a bad idea. However, let me ask you this: If you wanted to go to school and study CG so you could get a job in the industry, What software would you choose? Whatever software that the places you wanted to work at used. Right?
And the same question could be posed to educators too. In my opinion, the reason Autodesk is used in studios is not because it was taught in schools but rather the other way around: Schools teach Autodesk because that’s what studios use.
This whole issue of getting Blender into studios is actually quite huge and daunting when you really sit down and give it an honest and unbiased look. Think about it: If the goal is to get Blender widely accepted so that you could go out and get a job working with it… How is that even possible? I mean, even if Bender was feature complete, Right? Like all the bells and whistles and all that stuff. How would you be able to make learning Blender a smart career move when all the studios use Autodesk products?
In my opinion, (granted this is just my opinion. Others will and have disagreed with me before) these are the steps needed to make this work:
1.) Blender’s user interaction should be more standardized and less alien to users of other software. This means that if students learn Blender they’re not going to feel out of place if they need to switch software. and Vice versa. The skills they learn in Blender need to be transferable to other software. Like with Max and Maya. They do things differently but at the core, they are similar enough.
2.) Blender should work and play well with others. If you can at least integrate it into some part of a studio’s pipeline, like simulation or sculpting or something, you can began to seep into the cracks of larger studios. Blender needs to seamlessly take files from Maya, do something to them, and spit them back out again. Alembic is a good move in this direction but it needs to be more seamless. Like the GoZ experience. Hit a button, your in Blender, hit a button, you back in Maya.
3.) Find something that Blender does better that other 3D software and exploit that. Everyone knows Houdini is really good at doing hardcore simulation work and that’s what keeps studios using it. Just throwing this out there but, the current state of liquid simulation is terrible. Realflow is awful to work with. It’s incredibly expensive, really slow, generates millions of particles on every frame and crashes all the time. If Blender’s domain based fluids could become superior (it’s already really good) and offer an easy way to transfer data back and fourth, Blender could own that market.
4.) Convince the developers to get on board with this. Ahhh, yeah there you go. You knew there had to be a catch didn’t you.
Now of course, the MAIN issue becomes this: None of this is the goal or intent of the Blender foundation. Ton has stated many times that Blender is made for Blender artists and no one else. So therefore, that last step actually should be the main goal for anyone who wants to use Bender at a big studio: You’ll have to convince Ton that this is the right road to take.
So, I wish you good luck folks!
Good points.
Schools generally want to teach what is used in the industry, which makes sense. Depending on your POV, what is used in the industry (Indy_Logic’s POV), is based on the supply of professionals using said software.
Blender is free so there is no cost to the user other than time to download and learn the software. This means there are probably lots of hobbyists to say the least, but I think the number of professional users is growing faster than ever before. I think as Blender becomes more capable, there is an increasing amount of users likely to remain using the software and thus become more experienced. This is all anecdotal (and possibly biased), but it seems like Blender’s development and publicity are growing.
The official Blender Foundation goal is worded like this:
Provide individual artists and small teams with a complete, free and open source 3D creation pipeline.
In this simple sentence a couple of crucial focus points come together.
- Artists and teams:
We work for people who consider themselves artist – and who work on creating 3D individually or in small teams together. The definition for “artist” can be taken quite wide – to include engineers, product designers, architects or scientists. But each of them can be considered to have a serious interest in working with 3D software to create something related to that interest.
“Blender is for artists” also means that’s it not a programming API or scripting environment, these are secondary to this goal.- Complete 3D creation:
Blender should work for making finished products, without requirement to purchase or run other programs. Its output should satisfy the users sufficiently to share their work in public or market it as part of a living.- Pipeline:
We are aware of how CG production works (for animation, film, vfx, games) and we want Blender to work sufficiently in each and every aspect of such creation pipelines. This to to make complex creations possible and to enable people working together.- Free and open source:
And not only should Blender be a complete production system, we even want this to be free and open source!
You can interpret his words to be describing a professional? :eyebrowlift2: Personally as a programmer, I primarily interpret his statement “Blender is for artists”, meaning Blender is not meant to be a library to be linked to or an API (I still wish for a C API…).
Blender does try to support interacting with other programs, which usually means supporting file formats. However, one possible major issue here is file formats of proprietary programs tend to be proprietary also (or difficult to work with); FBX support comes to mind. So generally, it’s easier to build a blend file importer/exporter for a proprietary program, than for Blender to support importing/exporting to a proprietary format, which places the heavier burden on Blender development. The companies of proprietary programs could contribute to Blender by developing an importer/exporter, but why would a proprietary company want to support a possible competitor?
It has been brought up before that Blender should become really good at one thing to get a foothold in the industry (rather than having the worst UI :p), and it’s always worth mentioning.
I would also add that more commercialization around Blender would also assist in giving it a boost in the industry. The Blender Market is a good start but not a reliable (trusted?) model. Services is really the only viable model.
Good points.
And points that are known since years too. And exactly nothing happens to fix this points. That’s why the situation will remain as it is.
being open source or free does not matter. that’s not what is keeping blender out of schools. python is taught in may schools. what keeps blender out is its lack of documentation. free is no good if you have to write your own text book before you can teach it. python does not release without the documentation being finished first. blender should be packaged with complete documentation and tutorials like python. no school is going to use cgi software you have to data mine the source code to get the instructions for. why does blender use python? why do schools teach python but not blender? python has great documentation. you can bet the autodesk software they teach comes with manuals, textbooks, etc…it comes with documentation. the bf could even start writing, publishing, and selling the text books. if you’ve ever bought text books you know how expensive they are, there has to be some money to be made there.
I really feel like good documentation is only a part of the solution. I would concede to add that as one of the steps though.
You point to python’s adoption as being due to good documentation. I’m not disagreeing that it’s important to adoption but I think it’s only an aspect of it. When I learned Python all I did was read this 20 or so page doc that was like a more like a quick overview. If you already know the basics of programing, it doesn’t take much to figure out what does what.
From my POV, Python became popular because it was so simple and easy to learn, is very clean and easy to read, and yes, well documented. People who create programing languages really underestimate the importance of clean, readable code. But I think more than anything else was the fact that you can write some really complex programs with so little code. I once wrote a video frame grabber using Python and PyGame. All it did was pull frames from the FireWire port, stored them in a list, and played them back at 24 frames per second. It was less than a 100 lines of code. And I’m not even a serious programer! With those kinds of results, it’s easy to see why it became so popular.
That’s interesting. I guess you could say that the Blender Foundations goals need to be more specific. Someone could easily interpret that either way. The goals don’t specifically state professional use but don’t really preclude it either. I would say though that the use of the “Small teams” wording seems to indicate that they are not interested in large studios. Which I actually think is probably a more tangible and reasonable goal. So say small “teams” or studios start using Blender. Then one day, they finally realize their dreams and get a deal for a movie or TV series. How do they find enough people to work on it? See, to me this is a little small minded because yes, you might be able to convince small studios to use Blender but what happens when they grow?
Chicken came first.
Blender WILL prove its Superiority to those other packages, eventually. When it is used to produce a full length feature that is better than anything PIXAR, or DreamWorx have done. Those skinny Tim Burton and LAIKA characters suck.
The question being posed is daft on the simple basis that it’s asking do companies use just ‘any’ other software, free and commercial alike. Do companies realistically only use Photoshop? What about Vegas, Final Cut Pro, Cubase, or any other professionally built packages? The simple answer is if they do, they’re seriously restricting their options depending on the size of the organisation and what their business model is. If a startup company simply sells 3D models, then just using Blender is probably adequate. Generally though people use a mixture of Blender with Gimp or Photoshop and just using Blender on its own is restricting your capability.
Even companies that make trailers for example, you could just use Sony Vegas or Final Cut Pro as the video editor of choice, but as the company grows into something more elaborate and customers start wanting more from you, then realistically the organisation will be looking into adding tools such as After Effects into the pipeline.
It’s often forgotten that Blender, for all intents and purposes, is nothing more than an elaborate tool for an end. You shouldn’t be asking ‘do any workmen only use a hammer?’
It seems that things are changing fast, many good artists start using Blender, and someone uses it in Disney, so I can say that Blender is used in Disney, check this e-mail sent to Ton. that’s cool
Blender development in general however has been seeing more positive and smart choices in recent years (the latest one being the increased effort to really get a patch review system going).
The paradigm that defines Blender has been (slowly) changing for the better based on information from the developers themselves, so the rate at which Blender becomes more (if not yet completely) professional will inch a bit higher.
Yeah, I totally agree with you. The development of Blender has been really great lately. It’s really cresting the hill now.
But my point is that is doesn’t matter how professional we all agree Blender is. Like I said before, it’s already capable of doing the work. The issue is that there are not enough people in the industry who perceive it as professional as opposed to some crackpot crazy town app. As long as that’s the case, Professionals will not bother with it = no well paid jobs in CG for Blender users = no higher education schools teaching blender as a profession = pro’s not viewing it as professional = no well paid…
It’s a huge conundrum and not easily fixed by adding more features. There are many different aspects of it.