Why PROs in the 3D industry are usually using 3DS Max or Maya?

Hey guys recently I was curious about jobs in 3D, so I searched on artstation about it and mostly they want artists to know 3Ds Max or Maya, I was wondering why, because from my experience Blender seems to be really good I tried 3Ds max and I was disgusted, Maya is better from what I’ve heard, but still why there are no Top studios using Blender?

tradition, synergy, tools, market base,…

in modelling speed blender is probably the fastest out there but it lacks of some tools which maya and max has, also big studios want maintenance and tailored tools for their needs which blender foundation can’t deliver if I’m right?

They have been using those programs for years. They have many in house add-ons that they have created over the years, all their people are trained on those programs, they have someone to call and complain if there is a bug in the program. Those programs handled larger scenes a lot more efficient. However times are changing, and I suspect in the next decade you will see some major changes. After movies like Agent 327 and shows like Man in the High Castle, industry people are really going to give Blender serious thought, especially indie studios.

I think that the only problema that I see is that Blender is the perfect tool for videogames and BF don’t finish 3 tools that will make a big difference with all the rest of tools

There is still a lot of functionality missing for professional VFX work as well as feature film production.
Without the core rewrite it won’t happen.
There is the issue with simulations. While vanilla Blender has Fluid and Smoke/fire simulation tools (and others like C4d & Modo have not) they simply are not sufficient for film production because of lacking quality.
Since there is no real 100% working OpenVDB pipeline available so you can import simulations from Houdini, there is no way to do complex VFX in Blender.
Without Alembic and OpenVDB Blender can’t fully integrate into a VFX pipeline if you want to stay inside Blender. (Idk about the current state of Alembic)
Particle effects are bad in Blender, needs a more complex node based system.
More control via nodes is needed in lots of areas.

Then there is the issue with rendering. Renderman is on Blender (slightly unstable), Vray is cumbersome to work with, Arnold and Redshift are missing (these are the current favourite renderers of the movie industry).

A pipeline which may be possible today is working with Blender for modelling/animation, simulation and VFX in Houdini and then render in Clarisse or Katana.
Depends on Alembic export. If you can get an animation out of Blender via Pointcache then it should work.

So yeah, i expect some serious moving and shifting in the 3d world when Blender hits 2.9, but not really earlier.
Game industry is a different animal, Blenders adoption rate here might get up faster and earlier.

What those 3 tools are?

Shortly: development of Blender is resource-oriented, not feature-oriented. In practice it means that features are developed by the resources (coders) available, not the production needs. I really respect the efforts of everyone who makes Blender better and better,
but as someone who came for big scale projects in Max I run to serious issues again and again with no fast fixes.

As an example making Cycles to be able to handle more than 95 textures on GPU took like 1 year from the first time I reported it; OpenCL rendering issues are still unsolved and I had to made the case ‘Reopen’ like 3 times as typical Blender users do not face problems with big scale projects ever (and as an example it makes AMD cards unusable for big projects). Working with external libraries is still a pain (which is needed for team work), viewport is still ridiculously slow over 10K objects. Using GLSL materials is incredible slow in viewport; also file operations (a simple duplicating or deleting many objects) could take minutes in a big scene.

Import/export tools must be improved; editing multiple objects at the same time should be a basic feature (there is no sense today in separate Edit mode this way it works now); lack of parametric editing (like Max Modifier system), UV unwrap is above expectations; 3rd party module integration is painful and/or slow (remember to the Corona story); I just checked the new denoiser beta, it vanishes all the details (it is better to use external noise editor if you wanna save the details what makes no reason to use it at all).

The list goes on.

While I would be one who would argue that Blender’s development practices have improved over the last several years, there’s still two notable issues that remain to be addressed.

1). Blender’s development is known throughout the industry to oftentimes drop the ball when it has a chance of implementing something really powerful that could bring it on par or ahead of the commercial apps. Current examples include PTex integration, OpenVDB integration, and good quality normal editing tools to go with the base functionality (though the third one is being worked on).

2). Remember the forum game known as “corrupt a wish”? Unfortunately, the implementation of some new tools in Blender seem to use that game as a model to follow (you’re excited to see it then find it has some major issues). Some people might argue that this is the way the new shadow catcher was done for instance, it was the same way for various modeling tools for a long time too (though some were fortunately refined and now work the way they are expected to).

Though with the comment above, both issues tend to be exacerbated a bit by one common issue, and that is the BF just not having enough money to keep key developers on staff indefinitely (in part because of the complete inability to pay them at the rates that billion-dollar companies can). The way around that is to encourage an increasing number of active volunteers, and fortunately at least there seems to be some improvement in the department of reviewing and committing patches.

Still, Blender’s getting better at an incredibly impressive rate as far as FOSS goes (where other projects for various market segments have largely slowed to a crawl or even die).

If you’re looking for a studio job where you get to use Blender, Tangent Animation is hiring: http://www.tangent-animation.ca/careers/

And for those that think Blender can’t do feature films - these positions are for our second feature film created in Blender, currently in production and due to release next summer. :yes:

Ace, I completely agree on the funding. Some years ago (when I became active Blender user) I suggested to make a fund to finance dedicated developers for requested features/fixes by pro users what could be used only for this purpose (inside BF): making the necessary moves.

This is one reason why the growing trend of studios hiring devs. to work on Blender is so important, the BF can only hire so many people for the core team and the core team can only work on so many tasks at once (in fact, the studio involvement is one of the primary reasons why the big 2.8 push is currently ongoing).

A combination of that and the Blender Cloud service is also critical if we want to see high-caliber developers stick around and we don’t just see Blender as the home of people who are only developing as a learning experience (noting Lukas Tonne’s departure to a job that can actually pay the price his skill is worth). As already suggested, we see firsthand how this is making Blender 2.8 possible (because some of the projects really do require experienced programmers).

As far as I know, the Blender Foundation is legally not allowed to do that. The Blender Animation Studio is investing money into actual production relevant areas and maintaining it.
Giving the possibility to invest into specific features has quite a few risks. Estimating features in general is somewhere between very complicated to impossible. It can not be ensured that the actual feature is delivered. And if the feature is finished, who decides whether it meets the requirements? Who defines the requirements in the first place and adjusts them during the development?
Another risk is that the development fund looses money, because most people prefer to decide where their money is going to be invested. And the new feature is certainly going to produce additional costs in the long run to ensure maintenance. That’s why it would be naive to invest all the money into the actual feature itself. It would require a huge time investment for a person to coordinate all that, which would certainly cost money as well.
The Blender Foundation and Blender Animation Studio would risk to undermine their current business model with this kind of change. In my opinion, that risk is far too high.

The great thing about open source software is, that another company could fill that gap.

  • A boolean “bevel” or inset to replicate mesh fusion. A guy the other day made a addon in the free time with this and work “well” to be a alpha. I don’t think that BF can not make this in few time when all people ask for this since years ago

  • A bevel node for cycles, to bake normals also. This little thing that somebody with experience in Cycles could make in few time will change drastically all the workflow for game modelers. Some users make a try with OSL in a few days but is complex to use, can BF not to make this? please…

Maybe I could tell some tools more, but really few. And blender will be the BEST tool to work actually for a modelling. But BF preffer ignore this tools that they can to add in weeks, and try to fight for the “movies” industry.

All the things for Blender 2.8 are cool, but not are so important to workflow like this things. But please, it’s something hard to think that the developers ignore this few things years and all the problems of blender are solved by users of blenderartist making paid addons and people paid thousand of dollars to see this tools meanwhile BF don’t make this.

I’m the only guy that don’t understand why nobody in BF could make a custom normals toolset and that three different users make in a few days three differents addons that made the work perfectly?

I have told a lot of times… BF needs target funds to make tools, that users needs, not that developers wants. Need to ask to the users whats we need, not make the half of a tool,… And the problem is that they ask for money but you see that the money go only to “make movies” when you want to model, uvs, sculpt,… and then you don’t put money because you preffer use the money to pay addons

In defense of Blender and the BF the same critic points Ace Dragon just mentioned some post earlier apply to billion dollar companies too.
C4d and Maya for example. Maxon has a tendency to integrate a tool and then NEVER touch it again even if its a decade old (see pyrocluster, thinking particles, Bodypaint…)
The OpenSubd implementation was late, is shoddy, buggy, i cant find ways to crease edges and is in general much slower than Blenders.
1 Million polys + rig = 60frames per second, no problem in Blender, same Rig in C4d = 30 frames.
If you think they fix this soon you don’t know how Maxon ticks.

Autodesks recent trackrecord regarding Maya has been the worst ever. Forget a new version, its unusable, stuff breaks and simply doesn’t work as expected. Looks good in an PR video with a sphere, put it in a production environment and Maya shits the bed.
If it doesn’t already when you accidentally right-click somewhere (where you shouldn’t).
That and the usual 15 crashes per day.

The grass is always greener…
Still this Frankenstein Monster of Dead Plugins gets shit done even if it has to suck the life-force of its operators out to get there.

All the studios have an investment in the tools, and more importantly, the pipeline, which often contains custom scripts and actions that do things that they consider vital to getting stuff done. Nobody is going to suddenly decide to ditch that for what is seen as some free software that nobody owns and doesn’t have any support. Also, situations like the ‘No more FBX support’ scare is going to give anyone considering adopting Blender the jitters. Nobody at the moment is going to be the one to suggest that all the ‘working’ software be gotten rid of. That is just job security rather than any kind of ability.

Also, don’t forget that it’s only in the last few years that Blender has acquired modern tools and a decent renderer. Blender has come a long way in a short time. Word and examples of Blender’s capabilities has to spread through a few of the more established studios before anyone in a position of power is going to take any notice. Wait for some of the up-and-coming Blender artists to ‘make it big’ and you’ll find more studios using Blender, especially when they realise that for what they are paying in licences, they could hire an army of coders to make a new toolset and tweak any problems that arise.

The grass is always greener indeed. Lightwave users complaining, Max users complaining, Cinema4D users complaining, Maya users complaining, Modo users complaining, ad infinitum.

“Giving the possibility to invest into specific features has quite a few risks. Estimating features in general is somewhere between very complicated to impossible.”

A skilled Blender developer could tell if it is possible or not.

"It can not be ensured that the actual feature is delivered. "

Why not? That is what development is about. No magic needed.

"And if the feature is finished, who decides whether it meets the requirements? "
As an example: for the features I need I could easily decide if it meets it or not.

“Who defines the requirements in the first place and adjusts them during the development?”
The ones who pay for it; priorities could be set by the pros with voting.

"Another risk is that the development fund looses money, because most people prefer to decide where their money is going to be invested. "

I cannot see any problem in that. Even for BF it is better if goals are marked by professional users.

“And the new feature is certainly going to produce additional costs in the long run to ensure maintenance.”
That is true fir everything, not a problem at all.

“That’s why it would be naive to invest all the money into the actual feature itself. It would require a huge time investment for a person to coordinate all that, which would certainly cost money as well.”

Naive? Probably. But I cannot see any other way as cost-effective way. Development should aim professionals. If pros are happy, beginners will be happy, too.

“The Blender Foundation and Blender Animation Studio would risk to undermine their current business model with this kind of change. In my opinion, that risk is far too high.”

Business model? That has to be adjusted continuously to stay on the ‘market’.

“I have told a lot of times… BF needs target funds to make tools, that users needs, not that developers wants. Need to ask to the users whats we need, not make the half of a tool,… And the problem is that they ask for money but you see that the money go only to “make movies” when you want to model, uvs, sculpt,… and then you don’t put money because you preffer use the money to pay addons”

Exactly. But users have to be filtered.
On the other hand, investing into “making movies” is worthless, I personally never would pay a cent for it.
You know what made Blender interesting for my friends in the industry? Real life production usage, like the man in the high castle.
Also excellent renders made by pro users.