Amen. 
I do think we could create some jawdropping work if we would stick together as artists⌠The coders came together and developed something incredible⌠Maybe it would be nice if we, as users, would stick together and create something that would show the world what capabillties this program has⌠Like bingo the clown was for mayaâŚ
Any folunteers who want to make a showreal for Ton and his fellow programmers???
Ok joostbouwer, you have some good points and we could discuss the morals in using technically âillegalâ software forever as we could about getting free mp3s from filesharing networks. Analogies like the hammer etc. donât match because with software you donât take someone elseâs copy of the software, hence depriving someone of its use. You make a duplicate which, if you werenât going to buy the software anyway, hurts no-one.
My opinion is that if people can afford to pay for stuff they need then they should. Thereâs nothing I would hate more than seeing some spoiled rich-kid downloading warez. But I see so many talented artists who are going unnoticed who may need commercial software to either get a good job (as some jobs say you must have used Maya or Max or whatever and the PLE Maya doesnât have the devkit) or to produce their art better. If that were a talented sculptor and I owned a toolset, I would give it to him. In the same way I wouldnât grudge a man who âstealsâ a loaf of bread to feed his starving family. But again these analogies donât match very well because thereâs no duplication involved.
You said that once you thought the same way. What changed your mind? Was it perhaps when you started earning money and would hate if someone ripped you off? I could understand that but as Iâm unemployed and donât yet get payed for my work I guess Iâm still in student mode (against the oppressive, greedy capitalist attitudes of the major industry players). Maybe if they employ me someday, my opinions will change, lol.
Anyway, many thanks for your opinion, I always like to hear other peopleâs views on matters like this. And many thanks too to everyone who has taken part so far - it has been quite interesting.
Ok, back to the Maya vs Blender debate. Well, to sundialsvc4, I kind of agree with the statement that Blender doesnât have to compete against the big software giants but I certainly think that they compete amongst themselves. Their competition is based on price vs performance/functionality. In this respect as someone else pointed out before, Blender should win because itâs free. But I hope that because Blender doesnât have to compete that it makes the developers lazy. The price vs functionality issue is what spurns many developers to make their product the best.
Also, sundial is right in the sense that the competition is lessened by the fact that artists tend to choose the tools that let them do the work they want in the easiest way possible. I, for example, wouldnât touch Lightwave with a bargepole because I am personally not productive with it despite Maya and Lightwave having similar features. Iâm even finding myself more productive with Blender than with Maya, which is why Iâm using it for now.
As for cekuhnen and the cloth simulation, itâs only Maya Unlimited that has the cloth sim and thatâs $7000 or so unless you count the syflex plugin but thatâs not free - Maya Complete + syflex = $3000 + $2200 = $5200. I donât think itâs the case that Blender cannot do stuff like hair and cloth but its power hasnât yet been harnessed to make it do it. In fact, I bet it was probably the artists at a big company who needed cloth etc. like we do and just made a hack of their own and then Alias built it into their system. Alias have been taken over by Accell-KKR now - I wonder if thatâll change prices etc.
Anyway, I think weâre all agreed, we need some top brains to get Blender up there with the best. I do a bit of development myself so Iâll see if I can help out. I wrote a basic 3d software app at uni that allowed some real-time surgical facial manipulation but I dunno about cloth and hair - the maths is probably pretty difficult.
Hereâs a link for a hair model that someone might want to look at:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=545273&dl=ACM&coll=ACM
Hereâs a list of stuff Maya has been used on. Most recently is the superb Shrek 2. Have you seen the hair sim in that? The bit where Prince Charming shakes out his hair is mind-blowing:
http://www.mayaassociation.fsbusiness.co.uk/
i did not say that maya is as cheap as an apple!
and blenders current hair generation cannot in any way compete.
just accept it. i do not mean that there are no good work possible but
just with mayas tools the results are much more realistic in stills and special in animation.
silence
UhâŚhrmâŚ
Ok, you got me there. 
BUT, with Blendermania fast sweeping the world, and Blenderâs plugin system, hopefully this wonât be the case for long. I would surely like to see some improvements in those areas, really cloth. I mostly use cartoony hair for my shorts and characters, but cloth on the other hand is a little more tricky to fake.
I really donât like the word âprofessionalâ tagged on to a tool, such as Maya. I think that itâs the professional (animator, artist, etc) that makes the tools do what they need to do within the context of the project.
I think THAT is what defines âprofessional.â If you put a monkey infront of a computer with Maya loaded up and let it bang around, Iâd hardly call what gets rendered out âprofessionalâ; if the monkey threw poop at a canvas on the wall, I wouldnât call it âartâ after it dried. MmmâŚyummy analogies. Thatâs just my humble opinion. And it is humble, trust me. Itâs modest, too.
Oh wellâŚI guess we know the âproblemâ if you wanna call it thatâŚIâm not sure of the word to use in this situation. Maybe we could do something about it? Any ideas
So what about the commercial apps wich are less expensive than maya and 3ds⌠how about cinema 4D for instance, or lightwaveâŚor rhino ? These are all used in commercially and by professionals tooâŚand they cost far less than maya⌠how does blender compare with those ?
md01
Blender looks like it has most of the same features as the bigger apps but the size is much smaller:
Maya 5 is 600MB on disk
other apps like carrara, lightwave are in here
Pixels 3D is 23MB
Blender is 7MB
However, most of the Maya bulk and the other big apps is made up of brushes for paint effects, plugins and documentation - that alone comes to about 500MB. Maya itself is only about 70MB. Most of that size is due to using bulky libraries. This is also why it takes so long to start up. With 15 million lines of code or so, I guess thatâs justified. How many lines of code is Blender?
I know thatâs probably not the best way to judge software as itâs to do with the quality of the code but I just wanted a rough comparison of the scale. Also, I donât know how Maya draws the UI but itâs a shoddy interface and one of its UI libraries alone takes up 3MB, poly & NURBs & subd engines are 15MB combined. Most of the bulky libraries seem to be there to hold the others together like shared UI libs, geometry engine, render model, data model, extension layer.
Another thing is that Alias implemented their own scripting language called MEL. Thatâs bound to take up a lot of resources and itâs not as extensible as Python. Iâm not sure about performance though. Python can rival Java in terms of performance:
http://twistedmatrix.com/users/glyph/rant/python-vs-java.html
MEL is, by the admission of Alias, at least 10 times slower than their C++ plugin architecture. But, you say it can use C++ so thatâs surely better. Well, I donât think so because C++ is difficult to use to build & debug and anyway, you can build libraries for Blender in C++ too. To write 1 measly plugin, like a file exporter could take hours-days in C++ but in Python just minutes-hours. I think such things are probably possible in MEL but I rarely come across MEL scripts used for anything except animation. The syntax is soooo much nicer in Python too:
http://www.flat222.org/mac/bench/
I donât know if the benchmarks are accurate but it looks like Perl is faster. Still, I like the Python syntax better:
http://vsbabu.org/webdev/pydev/python10.html
So, I mean if you consider that Python is used too in Blender and take out the MEL and UI bulk from Maya, I bet that Blender is maybe just 5 times smaller, maybe less. The fact is that Maya may have more features but they might be implemented quite badly. If you take a look at the new release of Maya, they say the have increased subd performance by a factor of 8 and something else by a factor of 10 so either it was rubbish before or itâs pretty darn good now. But it shows that even the big apps have to constantly improve to stay in front - they havenât reached a plateau of perfection as some people may believe.
:o ⌠
So if you owned a $5,000 toolset that you saved six months to buy and a sculptor came along and asked you to give it to him to advance his art, youâd give it away. Uh huhâŚ
And if that starving man stole the loaf of bread you were going to feed your starving family, itâd be okay. Uh huhâŚ
(flame on!)
Hmm. :< My company makes software for a living, among other things. I co-founded it. Invented our main product. Slogged away for two years on it before it ever saw the light of day. Hired people, and we work on it to this day. The money that pays our rent, mortgage checks, car payments and all boring-stuff like that comes from, ummm⌠selling it. 
We donât have millions of dollars of some VC sugar-daddyâs money. Never have; never will. Every dollar, we earn.
So donât say that stealing software is a âvictimless crimeâ because it isnât. When you steal our product you steal directly from me. :x You declare that the eight-so-far years worth of work that people did on it ⌠mean nothing to you. You ask for support and all the other benefits (theyâre costs, btw) of a legitimate purchaser but you want to walk out of the store without paying. Thatâs wrong, thatâs wrong, and it cannot be rationalized. The true cost of any product is labor, not the product itself.
At this point in time you may not have had to earn your own bread, but one day you might be a baker. Then you will know that the flour-man doesnât unload those sacks at your loading dock without picking up a check (to pay the farmer); the man who fixes the ovens expects a check; the man who delivers the bags; and even the man who delivers your bread to the stores to be sold. All of those people are paid in the price that you charge for the bread! Youâre in college now, and that room youâre sitting in and the teachers in your classroom is paid for⌠and the scholarship and/or family money that goes to your tuition comes from the price that someone puts on something somewhere. And on and on. Not to proselytize too much here, âstealing is stealingâ and no matter where or when itâs done it deprives someone (maybe many someones!) of their livelihood. There is a very solid reason why it is wrong, and one day you too will see it.
How can a massive effort like Shrek 2 be paid-for by a $4 ticket, and how can it be so harmed by the person who sneaks in with a videocam and downloads a bootleg copy to the Internet? Believe it or not, a few thousandths of a cent of that ticket ⌠and millions of tickets just like it ⌠go to every one of the people who are on that long list of credits. It is not âvictimless.â
(flame offâŚ)
About teh illegal software thing: It s not good thatâs why itâs a crime. Just like murder and rape you will be prosecutedâŚ
That said, I do think we could help programmers âsellâ their blender product if we could create a showreal or something for them in which we unite our strong points to show off the capabilities of blender.
If we could create something stunning more programmers will be attracted, more users will too and maybe even some sponsors. So these special features which arenât in the package yet, may come soonerâŚ
Or am I the only one who think this will work out???
Agreed. But what we need to try to do is make blender a product that new studios will pick up. That new studios will choose to make the âdevil they knowâ. When the labour costs will be there regardless of the application chosen, and the âfew millions in license feesâ is important.
But to do this we need more high-end features like hair and cloth, a more intuitive UI without restricting workflow (blenderâs UI is great once you know it, but the people I think we should target, at least in this sense donât know it), and of course more beginner-level tutorials, placed in more places around the internet where people are going to look.
The tutorials link on blender3d.org is a bit inconspicuous, and Iâd be surprised if the tutorials list on elYsiun has changed since the open-sourcingâŚ
Without these (UI and tutes) the labour costs sundial mentions for learning blender from scratch will easily outweigh the costs of learning Maya and of buying it.
Despite what the zealots say, blender does have a learning curve, and it is hard to get over. Sure once over it is a great program, but thatâs less important than the time it takes to get there.
Particularly since by the time the new studio gets to the point of choosing an application, they may very well already have a client, and thus be on a schedule - and time wasted learning an app is time that could have been spent earning money, money that could have been spent on Maya and friends.
Ok, ok, I guess Iâm getting some people a bit angry and irrational with my comments (joostbouwerâs comparison of software piracy to rape and murder proves that). But I think that itâs being taken the wrong way. I think too that the analogies about material possessions as I said before are just not applicable to software because itâs just different copying stuff. Like if I could copy the $5000 toolkit and give it to this sculptor. The company making the tools isnât losing out because the sculptor couldnât afford it in the first place and Iâm not losing out because I still have my copy. But now he has the tools he needs, he can make and sell the art to then buy a toolset for himself. So, in fact, this actually makes an extra sale for the company.
Iâm not saying software theft is ok in the sense that the developers shouldnât be rewarded for their hard work - they most certainly should. Iâm just saying that not everyone can afford to buy the software when they need it - Iâm not saying they should never pay. You might then say they should try and earn money and save up to get a copy first. How long do you think that a guy earning about $200 a week, paying rent and living expenses can build up the $3000 it costs for basic Maya + $1000-2000 for the computer needed to run it, not to mention the $2000 for decent compositing software?
By the time heâd saved up, the software will have moved on and he still wonât have learned how to use it properly or if the software heâs getting is going to be of any use to him. Demos are all very well but they donât always let you see the full capabilities of the software and they often run out after 30 days. Maya PLE also has that ugly watermark in the modelling window and in renders.
But, if you donât see where Iâm coming from, then I wonât discuss it any more. I didnât mean to make an argument out of it. BTW, sundial, what software does your company make? Donât worry, Iâm not going to âstealâ it or anything - Iâm just interested. How did you earn money in the 2 years you were developing your product? Iâve actually been out of college for a year now and no job and I need loadsa cash quick to pay off the scholarship that I had to take out a $15000 loan to pay for (no family money). I need ideas.
Back to this Blender Maya thing again. I think the comment about the learning curve is right. Blender is hard to pick up but I think that you just have to go through the curve with any 3d software app and Blender is easier. Iâm not sure if new users could pick it up all that quickly but people who switch from Maya will have very little problem. Some tools are missing but thereâs more than one way to âskinâ a cat, lol.
I see where youâre coming from, but consider this:
If you had someone âcopyâ their $5k toolkit for you to use, and as you say noone has lost out anything yetâŚ
Then you earn your lots-of-moneyâŚ
Would you then go out and buy another toolkit, given you already have a copy of one sitting there handy?
Okay, maybe you would, but would the Average Joe do it? Hell no!
And this is where the software company looses their cash - they donât get their rightful cut of the money you made using their tools.
Yeah, youâre probably right. The Average Joe isnât likely to do it. I guess thatâs where big companies find it hard to draw the line between honest people who pay their dues and those who just want a free ride. And everyone suffers as a result. I wish there were more companies like NaN, though.
I have a novel idea - do you think that Alias or whoever would earn the same money or more if they gave out their product free like NaN online just from advertising alone?
Iâll bet they could easily increase their profit. Isnât it through advertising that google and bananalotto makes their money?
This is an interesting thread.
I like Maya but I think that the time and effort that it takes to learn and effectively apply Maya in a basic pro 3d workflow compared to Blender is a factor for me.
This is my take on this subject.
Sure Blender doesnât have all of the node based procedural tools that Maya has. It doesnât have the advanced dynamics, animation, etc. like Maya. I just spent a few weeks knocking out a remake of some of my old characters with Blenders new modeling features. A mesh loop structure was applied for better deformation based on reviewing old and new methods for edge looping techniques. I gathered new ideas on modeling in Blender here on this forum. I could have spent the same amount of time in Maya, etc. and got the same topographical results. I always model one character and form all of my other characters out of that one base mesh. I mainly work with human characters so all I have to do is add the proper parts as needed.
The rest of the applications to these characters I consider as layering on levels features for project usage. I will uv map them with Blenders new LSCM tools. I will rig them with Blenders Skinning tools. Then I will setup facial morph targets with RVKâs. I have never done this before in Blender, but I have good resources. I have never used Ripstings hair tools but I will used them in this project.
In Maya I could setup a better rig setup, cloth dynamics for the clothing and hair dynamics or choose not to. Oh and later on I could splash some water on my characters in some cool animation sequence and let Mayaâs dynamic system control the drops running down the characters bodies and clothing. But I really donât need this. But it would be cool but extremely difficult to set up anyway.
I have most of my character props but I may need some more scene props. Now I just have to add them too their environment and pose and setup cameras and lights. I just choose a lighting setup to add and anything else that I need. Finally I select a rendering solution, Scanline, Raytracing or Yafray. It looks like I my adding a standard Renderman rendering solution soon.
The best thing about this whole process is that it is all done with opensource 3d tools. Iâm happy that I didnât need some beast of a 3d app to set my stuff up. Blender is like a cargo plane that only needs half a tank of gas to fly around the world.
When I set up my 3d stuff I am creating âmyâ 3d worlds. If dynamic clouds are too much trouble to create, my world will have stationary clouds. If photon lighting takes to long to render radiosity effects I will only use scanline rendering and Blenders baked radiosity and fake the rest. Hey, I can do whatever I want, itâs my 3d world. Hehehe. Once I have my graphic âlookâ locked down itâs on. And Blender has proved to be very efficient in helping me to get my graphic looks locked down.
I still mess around with Maya and XSI at my leisure as one day I may need to use features like these. Even Ton mentioned in an article that most Pro 3d artist donât really need feature film FX for most every day 3d work.
Erm, do you realise where NaN is now? 
Some companies have tried âdemoâ versions with moderate success, but the first thing that any vendor must do is to clearly establish âwho is my customer, and why does he buy?â Maya, 3DS and the like have clearly decided that their best customer is âa studioâ and that he buys âto produce a very high-end work product, e.g. to be projected on a movie screen.â The relationship between vendor and customer in that case is more than just âa sale;â it is âa relationship.â Part of the fees paid by the customer are understood to help pay for support, for improvements, and so-on. It takes a massive amount of money to do that at all, let alone profitably (oh yeah, âprofitsâŚâ), but then again studios have a massive amount of money on-the-line. If Dreamworks didnât get what they needed, who knows? The whole Kingdom of Make-Believe might show up at their door and start trouncing the place. 8)
A consumer, or a student, on the other hand, is an entirely different picture. Not a lot of cash, no motivation beyond fun or small-bit projects (under $1 million each). Not too likely to be profitable for a product like these. And not a good fit. Even the video-work that Blender does admirably would be a fairly difficult target for these companies to serve, and of course, Blenderâs already there and they know it. It does not stand to reason that these vendors should go out of their way to sell to that [non-]market, particularly not by the avenue of âgiving copies of their product away.â
I doubt that Blender has escaped anyoneâs attention.
i must admit that i dont use maya (because i dont have the money to buy a new computer) but mayaâs goal is to make nice pictures with nice effects. rendering times are long but the customer doesnt mind because the picture is great.
people who hire a blender artist want a quick result and dont want to pay a lot of money because the artist happens to have maya. also the quality of the work doesnt have to be perfect.
and then you have the hobby artist. they dont want to pay a lot of money to buy a program that costs a thousand dollars. first they search on the internet and then they find blender. and they are happy with the results.
(untill they want to make something complicated)
the goal of the program makers are a bit different and so are the demands of customers.
In reply to Broken, I didnât know what happened to NaN but I assume that from the way you put it they went under. But isnât the reason that Blender is free because of the fact NaN was failing against the bigger players in the industry? This isnât the case for Alias as they are well established in the market. I mean when NaN or whoever announced that Blender was going open source and would therefore be free, I doubt there was much hype going around.
Kind of the same way if Bobâs burger bar down the street starting giving away free burgers. Itâs hardly going to get McDonalds fans queueing up. But if McDonalds started doing it then there would be a much bigger hype. Ok, it wouldnât work for McDonalds as they have looooads of staff to pay but how many employs do Alias have? Probably under 1000. They only took on 145 staff over the past year. So if Tiger Woods can earn billions of dollars from advertising, how much can Alias get. I would think into the 100s of millions per year - more than enough to pay each member of staff $100000 each.
BTW, hereâs a link that shows the industry giants are allowed to hack away at the source of Maya:
http://www.pluginz.com/news/1401
Do you think Blender will ever catch up to the likes of Maya? Because if the software source code is being constantly tweaked to perfection by the likes of Acclaim Entertainment, Inc., CNN, Core Design Limited, Digital Domain, Disney, Electronic Arts, Industrial Light & Magic, Factor 5 LLC, Midway Games, Nintendo, Pacific Data Images (PDI), Pixar, Sega, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Square Co., Ltd., Warner Feature Animation, Weta Ltd and more and Blender just has lowly programmers (I think. Am I wrong?) then I canât see how it will reach the same quality.
Whatâs worse is that the people who could make it great will probably look for employment at Alias or similar rather than work for free. As some have already pointed out, we all sadly have bills to pay.[/quote]
osxrules, I suggest you read this: http://www.blender3d.org/cms/History.53.0.html
Iâd also suggest you take some time to familiarise yourself with Blender, itâs history and itâs community before proposing business ideas or directions about what Blender should be.
Anyway, this whole discussion is a bit strange, really. Unlike many open source applications, Blender was never made to be a cheap/free clone of something else. It has had constant professional use since the day it was first compiled, and serves many people in their day to day work and hobbies, around the world. Blender has itâs own reason for existence, itâs own unique style and philosophy, and itâs own community. Comparing it to other applications like Maya in this way can be self-defeating, and is dangerously close to boring old open source knockoff-ware - saying âBlender will never be anything unless if has Feature X like Maya doesâ is not only silly and plain wrong, but it leads to a mentality of always having to play catch-up, rather than innovate new and potentially better ways of doing things. Thatâs not to say that all features of other programs are useless, far from it, but if you want Maya, then use Maya. If you canât afford it, then get a job and buy it. If you want Blender, then come and join the fun, get involved and be productive with it, or help others to be productive with it, in whatever way.
With this also goes the sayings of âBlender will never be anything unless itâs used by Hollywood Studio Xâ. What other people do with software is interesting, but what matters most is what you do with software. If Blender is useful for you, then great. Blender has been useful for me and plenty of others in professional and hobbyist work, and whether Pixar uses Blender doesnât make an iota of difference to that. Although software companies like Alias like to promote it when their apps are used in big famous movies etc, the feature film industry is only one small segment of the industry. Thereâs so much else out there like broadcast graphics (including TV station IDs, promos), corporate video and presentations, TV commercials, previs for movies/TV series, information graphics for documentaries, product and scientific visualisation, education and training, and so on that doesnât get nearly the same amount of publicity, and thatâs only in the video field. On top of that there are things like print illustration, game graphics and design, and all sorts of things that are the bread-and-butter work of so many designers/artists out there, and for which Blender is perfectly suited for, even if it doesnât yet have some of the super high-end features in the other apps.
I hate to keep harping on, but your last few sentences are quite insulting to everyone whoâs worked so hard to come this far. Why donât you actually try using Blender for a while before saying things like itâs made by âlowly programmersâ and that nobody that has or is working on it âcould make it greatâ.
Otherwise, welcome and I hope your further contributions to the community are constructive ones.
I wonder if Maya should ever go out of business like NaN, (Hopefully it will not. It is one of the best 3d software apps out there.) if these same companies will continue to tweak the Maya sources.
The Blender community kept working on improvements for Blender even after NAN went out of business.
What are you talking about? I wasnât insulting anyone - there have been a lot of people who have posted saying far worse things about Blender. Ok, the remark about lowly programmers - sorry, I didnât mean that Blender developers werenât good, that statement was a bit off. I was just saying they might not be getting rewarded for what they do (i.e. poor) and so might not try to make it the best. Earning money for hard work is more encouraging than earning nothing. I mean, do the developers of Blender get any financial reward?
Look, all Iâm doing is to try and establish how this community can make Blender the best. You might be happy to keep Blender as a hobby tool or whatever but I (and Iâm sure Iâm not alone) want to see Blender recognised as the best and it currently isnât.
Comparing it to the likes of Maya is not self-defeating unless you think Blender does not have the potential to be compared to it, which I think it does. If you think it doesnât then you are insulting Blender developers. And in this respect, itâs no more dangerously close to saying Blender is a knock-off than saying 3ds Max is a knock-off.
I certainly didnât say anything like Blender would be useless if it didnât have X feature like Maya. But the mentality of always playing catch-up is a good thing, I think. Because it gives the developers goals and targets. And this mentality leads to innovation. âNecessity is the mother of inventionâ. If Blender doesnât need to get better then why not just stop development right here and now?
You appear to be the only person in this post who thinks this discussion is a waste of time and if so then you shouldnât post here.