there is a reason why the indutry and pros use maya or photoshop or freehand.
there are so many features apps like gimp or blender just dont have and i think never will have.
as martin also mentioned this companys have an army of devellopers.
all this calculation how good blender is in terms of investment and etc are leading to no point.
blender is free and has many tools you need. for high end tools blender cannot compete. and even when there will be dynamics or different things still they will not be as impressive and powerfull than mayas dynamics for example or their new particle system.
this doesnt mean blender sucks. i use it manly for my free time since its free and for my tasks it fits 80 percent into it.
for special renderings i use 3delight since blender shaders arent offering what i need for my work.
i guess i will not stop using blender even when i switched to maya after finishing my study.
I, for one, hope that in the future this can be changed to:
the number of people developing blender cannot be counted on one hand. [/quote]
Please note that I said “Full time” coderes. The number of part time coders for Blender is already too much for both hands (not a reason to stop there, mind you ;))
You code a little project, just something you would like, like the new zoom function, weighted meshes, some new rendering algorithm you saw, and submit it. If the people in charge like it they can add it. If you get good they can give you permission to be one of the people in charge and submit things freely. Also try submitting things to Tuhopuu, or adding on and compiling your own version of Blender. Someone else can probably explain better.
i looked once for the personal learning edition of maya and for that you need a powerfull computer with windows 2000 or windows xp. also its a 180 mb download. (if i remember it well).
blender is 4 mb and it can run on a pentium 75mhz laptop with windows 95. ok rendering will be very slow but it is just enough to make low poly models with it.
the stratego piece in the finished projects is made with that laptop. not the rendering of course but i think the rendertime of that picture would be half an hour on my very old laptop.
I switched from max to blender mainly because I had an illegal copy of max and didnt want to use this illegal stuff anymore… It’s true max had a lot more to offer, has a more intuitive menu system. But that all come with a price, and what a price! I can buy a new car from it… All these new features are allmost purely designed to speedup or ease the developing stage in a 3d production. If you have the potentials you could make something that looks like something thats made with Maya, Max or XSI… Look for excample at rustboy, aproject made with oldfashioned 3d app. But it looks stunning and receive lots off good critics.
At the end it comes down to the artist and not to the app. Sure you can’t make a good human simulation without muscle and skin simulation. But Square had all these and still their movie was a flop. But I liked toystory even without all these fancy features. And I think blender is able to create toystory quality. And that all for free. Just stick your heads together and get this thing moving.
full time PAID coders can be counted with one finger if i´m not mistaken?!
it,s cool to be legal!!!
so you did actually a good job, getting rid of your PIRATE copy.
DONT PIRATE !
BE LEGAL !
if you don´t have the money, use blender
even so it will cost you a bit to get the same results, but we´re getting closer to the same qualityevery day!!!
just look at the new textures…wow…without any knowledge of writing shaders, you actually could not get the same stuff done with other tools
jesus when blender would be so powerfull over maya everybody would use blender instead maya.
rusty boy is cool but in the special fx part it lacks. sure maya runs slow on an old PC but maya is NOT made for an old PC. people who use maya just dont have old PCs. even on our systems here mayas interface is slow but in terms of special FX there is hardly any other good thing to do.
and when you watch the making of movies you will notice that a lot of the interview is just about special fx.
there are things that looks the same when you do it in maya or blender.
i would say it is easy for maya to do something like in blender but it isnt possible to do things in blender like in maya.
for that blenders material system is by far to limited. a non nested shading appraoch cannot compete with a shading network system.
plz just dont compare blender vs maya and than also with old films like toy story or so. this just doesnt work. also toy story doesnt realy have any special fx.
SamAdam:
i second you. i think there cannot be enough coders. when there are good coding guidelines it is possible to sync the work, to dev compaticle code elements which the code lords check test and implement into blender.
Is that true that you can’t nest materials in Blender? That is a fair limitation. But, from using Maya, I’ve discovered that I don’t use the functionality that offers very much and Blender has a scene graph that I use to overview connections, which is the main use I had in Maya’s hypergraph. One thing I kind of miss is Maya’s undo function but it makes you lazy anyway. And as you can do animated textures and use bitmap textures & movies, there is usually more than one way to get an effect done in Blender that would match Maya.
A lot of the Maya users at the big companies hack it to bits anyway with custom scripts and use fancy flim compositing etc. for effects. If they used Blender, they would hack it too to get the effect they wanted in fact even more that it’s open-source. It’s just that for some reason the big-boys have more consistently opted for Maya as its popularity has grown. In a way, Maya is like Windows and Blender like Unix. But, the more that people get frustrated with closed source systems that have bugs they can’t fix, the more people switch to open source systems that the finest minds can perfect for the sake of perfection, not money (not everyone’s greedy y’know).
Blender has a way to go but it has started out on the right path. Maya currently has over 15million lines of code (like Windows) in it and to fix problems takes a long time - notice the new virus that destroys the hard drive by writing over sector 0 and no cure yet. But Blender is being tweaked (like Unix) as it develops and so when it matures, if all goes well it will have few bugs (like Unix - e.g there are I believe at present no known viruses for Mac OS X, a Unix based system, which has overtaken Windows by far in terms of power, security and stability in just a few years and Windows will never catch up unless it goes open-source).
ps: to the people who keep saying not to use Maya if you don’t own it and not to steal software yadda, yadda, yadda - don’t you think that if these people could afford it they would? The statement that using a product solely because of money issues directly contradicts the philosophy of the Free Software Foundation and open-source users. Do you think it’s right that talented artists should suffer because they can’t afford to use the tools that help them? Ok, I agree people in that situation should look for free alternatives first but occasionally they’re not enough and it’s not like the greedy folks at Alias are losing a sale because if you can’t afford to buy Maya, you’re not going to buy it anyway. Here’s one thing I’ve learned from being part of the Alias community - Alias don’t care about people and art, they ignore their customers’ problems and only reply to licensing issues not usability ones. They just want money and people like that don’t deserve to be where they are in the industry today. That’s why I’m so happy to be using Blender now and be a part of this community and I strongly hope Blender will one day earn the crown of industry standard.
i did not say that i love alias. hell the hole printing industry hates quark but still it works a touch better than indesign.
thats true maya users hack it into bits. still i think from using maya and shadermaker blender has a nice set of tools but does not provide the tools for high demands. it just starts with limitations like no metal shader or the particle system or the hole uv support. you cannot animate each parameter of a texture or material…
blender has the tast of supporting many features but most of em are incomplet or optimized for speed. well i think thats related to its history and is fine.
i think until you are not a big fil studio alias will treat you as a number and you are right here all works different. another reason why we are here and so happy about blender and the users.
i share your hopes as well. i dont expect that blender ever will became a industry standart or competitor to maya. but as all goes right now blender become more and more powerfull.
I remember reading somewhere that some big animation studios (Pixar, ILM, DigitalDomain, among others) have special agreements with Alias that give them access to the source code of the software so they can modify it as they need to, to get the job done. i can only imagine having access to the source is a very exspensive way to do things and further illustrates the advantages of an open-source architecture. when the thought of making a profit fades from the minds of Alias’ execs, we will see a program that can compete with Blender in the long run.
If we could somehow find a way to convince the programmers of Maya to come work for Blender we would have a kick ass FREE 3d package on our hands, but alas, that probably wont happen anytime soon, but a guy can dream cant he?
Having used both Maya, and now Blender, i can say with all honesty that i find Blender to be a supremely powerful package capable of doing just about anything you can throw at it. aside from the limitations that have already been discussed, i fully intend to use Blender as my 3d modeling, animation and rendering application of choice!
I find this topic very very interesting, and a lot of great opinions and views have already been discussed, so I’ll be brief.
First off I’ll say Blender is one of the best damn programs that I’ve had the pleasure of using, and I’ve used just about every 3d animation package out there from maya to max, animation:master to Carrara.
One thing I would like to say is that blender, since it obviously lacks features that some of the “commercial” packages have (I won’t say “higher end” and insult our blender programmers) IS a great starting point. Atmosphere, it’s funny that you mention studios and proprietary software and source for other software.
We have at our fingertips the source for a great place to start. Just think. Average beginning 3D newbie, picks up blender as a hobby. A few years down the road, after banging around as a freelance, starts his own studio, and with some of his start up capitol, decides to take the source of his beloved blender, and create a monster of a program that is acutally able to compete with some of the commercial software. Obviously there’s a lot more to it than that, but you get the idea.
Last, I’ll say that after using nearly all of the highend packages for animation in three dimensions, blender has a bit of everything in it. It’s got a nice unique interface similar to Carrara or Amapi. It’s got some of the best modeling tools out there, rivaling the Lightwave Modeler. It’s got the handy dandy toolbox via the spacebar, a simple yet versital appliance also found in Maya via the “hotbox.”
So, if I had some money, you could betya…blender would become one MONSTER of a program, if it isn’t one now.
hopefully not as massive though, I hate waiting for those apps to load
in the past year blender has added a bunch of things [raytracing, all the edit tools, new interface options, return of game engine, …] I have no more reason to thing other applications have anything else I need.
even the less expensive ones, like animation master. [I was never much of an animator anyway]
the thing I see blender lacking right now is a good community. I am not helping much either. (could make so many more current tutorials)
however, the documentation on blender.org is pretty good, mostly current, and getting even better.
I haven’t used any big commercial app though enough to know what I am missing. It doesn’t seem like much. Buttons instead of keys to do mesh editing functions. Difficultity modifying the interface for particular needs [each project of mine that I get reasonably into seems to benefit much from it’s own unique window layouts]. Peculiar 3d view navigation [why must I hold two buttons in maya? why must I use keys all over the keyboard in xsi? I guess cinema 4d does pretty well using the number 1, 2, and 3 keys [but without being showed that I would have never guessed]. zooming with the mouse wheel is real nice, and I will probably be doing it more often if the odd zoom towards center thing [in cvs] isn’t changed to be up is in, down is out or something else I don’t have to look at the screen and the location of my cursor to understand]
If there is one thing that i have learned is to nerver say never. Anything is possible and all things are possible. People write programs and in any endervour that the human is involed you nerver put a limitation or a cap on it. Blender can become far more powerful than anything that anyone can imagine right now.
I believe we have all said in the past “surely that is not possible” only to be blown away by the next acheivement. ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE ! lets just keep working at it.
sure all is possible but pretty unlikely to happen.
even when apps catch up the comercial will have other features.
just to have a color management doesnt mean it also works good.
ghost print is a free PS RIP and is it good? cannot it compete with best or so? i dont think so. sure i hope blender will get better! and for me i dont need all the high end features. a simple cloth simulation and a better particle system are fine for me.
chad
let me put it this way:
character modeling:
blender cannot create professional hair and hair movements.
blender has no powerfull cloth simulation
few of my friends model in wings3d and give life to their characters in maya. there they have access to create realistic looking and moving hair.
next to realistic moving cloth.
atmosphere
you know what open-source also means? no pay checks. alias and other have quite strong R&D teams and they are the diamonds in their companies since they invent all the features. for me it sounds pretty unlikely that a guy from alias will put the similar code in blender. copyright and money. it would be nice but i just dont belive in it.
Atmosphere: If we could confince some people from alias to contribute to blender it wouldnt make a big difference. All these inovations Alias did are patented. So if one of these coders would implement a feature that maja supports it is very likely that alias would sue blender and the blender foundation will have to pay a huge fine and remove that feature from the code. In short>: that would be the end of blender.
And OSXRULES: Is it ok to steel some chissels and a hammer, rip a peace of extremely pricey marmer and start creating your statue??? Just because it s good for your creative progression?? I bet you say no in this case. Then just think again about your opinion and keep in mind that the once that suffer the most are the people who allready receive the less, not the rich guys!! Think again, you like to get paid for your work so does others…
Anyway, no hard feelings. Once I had excactly the same thoughts…
I don’t necessarily think that Blender has to “compete with” Maya. Or 3DS or any of the others. Each of the products are different. All of them face an insatiable demand for improvement. All of them compete in their own turf… So does Blender.
Never mind the fact that patents expire, quickly. Ideas expire even more quickly, and are improved upon all the time. No one needs to stomp on someone else’s toes. No one needs to give a lawyer one dollar more than lawyers already steal. Ideas are aplenty.
What we need to do is to improve the product we use, and that is Blender. This product has a very versatile plug-in system and a very versatile script system that leaves other, older products in the dust. It can be expanded to serve our needs better and better.
But… you’re just not going to get a major movie studio to “switch from” the devil they know. It does not make economic sense for them to do that and it probably never will, when viewed from their perspective. Labor, not hardware and not software, is the largest expense they face. Switching software base to save a dubious-few millions in license fees is absolutely no bargain if it puts the studio at risk for its bread-and-butter product; which, I think, it definitely would. (Even if the effort is technically successful, which we may indeed presume it would eventually be.) These films and shows are built over many years, with incredibly tight deadlines, using millions of dollars of borrowed cash. There’s just no return on a software-conversion effort.
So… let’s let Maya be what it becomes, and 3DS Max be what it becomes, and Renderman be what it becomes… and focus on making Blender what it may become.
