Introduction (and some rant time)

General Forums Off-topic Chat
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Hi there people! i’m 3D-Fer, i come from Spain and i studied 3D Animation, videogame design and virtual environments.

So, i’ve learned blender, i’ve been using blender since then (3 years) and i just love what cycles can do. I noticed that in the school i was, they used to teach 3ds Max and zBrush, which they are a lot common in 3D industries…But somewhere, someone decided to quit that and start with Blender.

Now i can’t explain exactly what i want to say (you know, english is not my mother language, i’m angry and tired, it’s 03:00hs) but i’ll try.

It’s been 3 years since i started using blender, all this time i was searching for jobs, places, opportunities to work and improve my skills and i wasn’t able to find a single job. Everyone ask to me for 3dsMax, maya, zbrush…but not blender…when they knew i was a blender user they insta-kicked me, i felt marginated… (“sorry but we don’t use blender”)

Ok i know, i get that these programms are a lot common, used by people by decades, but nowdays i think that blender is 100% capable to do what other programs can do, at least in basics, hell, Cycles is a goddam good render engine. It’s like that poeple percieves blender as a cheap and ugly version of 3D software for being free.

And this makes me to ask a question: Why not blender? I mean, it’s like as if Blender users where pariahs, it doesn’t matter if you have a good PortFolio, it doesn’t matter if blender is capable to do whatever they want to do with 3Ds or maya. You are a blender user? Fine, you don’t get the job, no matters how good at 3D you are.

And now i’m wondering, do we have a future? Do we have a chance to work in a medium-big companies when i’m not even able to work for a small one? As far as i seen, any companies are using blender. Should i stick to Blender or should i start learning to use another software? I mean, i love Blender, i’m not gonna quit from blender, but i have to eat.

So guys, what do you think about blender and his future as a 3D software? Are we doomed or maybe we have a bright future in 3D industry?

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There’s a number of small to medium sized studios that now use Blender as either their primary 3D app. or as part of their pipeline, it may be just a matter of none of them being in your area (as it’s still a small minority compared to the numbers that use Maya).

As for Blender’s future, it’s looking pretty bright when you look at the number of paid developers working on the next big leap that is Blender 2.8 (either being paid by the BF itself or sponsored by sizable companies such as AMD).

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I think eventually blender will become more popular in the professional world. But in the mean time, if I was in your situation, I would learn 3dsmax.

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Blender pbvhtree based painter is in review now I think,

Multichannel texture painting is in the gsoc project list emails, I don’t know of it will be included.

Pbr is on the way,

I would knuckle down and start learning a full game animation pipeline,
With realtime PBR one could kick out movies or games in blender without touching ANY other software.

If you can act, and render in realtime using mocap in a small studio,
Without touching maya or substance or zbrush, and do this repeatedly,
Autodesk will die.

Maya crashes like crazy and is super frustrating.
(I hope you like icons)

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This thread might be better categorized in the “Blender and CG Discussions” subforum, but let’s experiment and leave it here in Off-topic Chat, as it could be grounds for a nice, friendly chat.

My recommendation: think outside the entertainment industry(-ies). 3D gets applied all over the place for all kinds of interesting purposes… in industries that don’t tend to take artists for granted. They also don’t always have an entrenched pipeline married to a specific set of tools that they’ve gotten used to over multiple decades (at least, not in the 3D side), so Blender adoption tends to be better there, too.

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I have been using blender since the early days, and at the time there was some discussion over whether blender would ever become a mainstream solution. People like myself who believed blender would rise in popularity to it’s current level were labelled fanatics and fan-boys and considered delusional. As it turns out, we had it right. And there is nothing to suggest that it won’t continue to do so, imo.
(edit) just to give you an idea, my first copy of blender was " game blender " which required a key to activate and was produced by NAN ( Not a Number ).

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In terms of saying that Blender would start being used by studios, yes, you did have it right.

But there was also the camp that made the bold prediction of Blender toppling Maya, which even now is not even close to happening (as it still remains the go-to app. for all of the larger studios). Blender still hasn’t made much, if any headway among the major VFX houses such as ILM and Weta (all of the progress mainly has been among small to medium sized studios).

Blender is capable of professional-grade work now, but some of the bolder statements of the past have not come to pass (though never say never as Blender 2.8 is shaping up to become a much larger leap than 2.5 was).

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autodesk has just called an emergency meeting to discuss adding a monkey to mayas default set of primitives, but they can’t agree on whether to call it suzette or susan. har har.

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Well, i was just only frustrated, i still i am but i refuse nowdays to learn another 3D software, i mean, i love blender but learning blender was tedious and i still learn new stuff about blender, i have no time or the patience required right now to learn maya or even zBrush, i find it so easy to sculpt in blender…

let’s hope blender gains more popularity over these years…is too much to think that one day big companies will use it eventually? Or just only medium-small companies?

Because as far as i can see medium-small companies take as a reference big companies, and maybe if big companies used blender nowdays, things would be different (in my opinion)

Can’t wait for 2.8, by the way.

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I don’t speak specifically about the 3d industry, but within a lot of fields open source software is starting to take over. Where teams of people have an established program that they are using for something they keep using it, and so do their successors, because “that’s the program the project was started in and changing format is too much bother”. Where this program they started in is a proprietary one they keep paying for it. But new teams/companies/research groups/… with no established precedent generally pick an open source product*, so while we might never see a time when all the existing big players in field … have switched to an open source product, we can expect most of the new groups in that field to pick open source options. And if the old established groups wither away and the newer ones take the lead in a certain field then the open source option for that field will become the industry standard. I see this going on with people who I know and work with, many of their projects use closed source software because the project has been going on since before the open source option existed, but new things they start on use open source options. Yes, often it’s the same people using one program when in an old established project they work on and another program in a new project they’re involved with.

*Why: A) free is popular, B) being able to edit a product to your needs (especially in really technical fields) is popular, C) not being trapped when a manufacturers changing vision of what a product should be leads to it becoming irrelevant to your needs is popular

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D) No crashie crashie.

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Or rather, D)" when it crashes (everything crashes from time to time) you (if you’ve the skill) or someone else will fix it quickly"

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The situation is far better than it used to be, it used to be that it was almost unheard of for a production house to use Blender (other than the BF itself for its open movie projects).

The first several years saw Blender as more or less just a tool for hobbyists who couldn’t afford better software, that has changed and at least one animation studio dumped their Maya licenses in favor of using that money to help fund Blender’s development.