Is Blender Looked Down on Because It's Free?

Something I have wondered for a long time. Why isn’t Blender used by AAA game and film studios?

Nice video.

The truth is, a lot of people associate how good a program is with how much it costs.

There is a good reason for that though, and that is how in the past (say 15 years ago), the quality of a program oftentimes really did go up the higher you got in the price range. You had your high-end for serious production work, you had your mid-range with less features, you had your low-end with basic functionality for hobbyists, then you had your freeware (including FOSS) which sat at the bottom and was unable to really produce much more than simpler stuff.

However, massive progress in FOSS in various markets (same with low-cost commercial apps.) and stumbles by industry-leading companies has led to a squeezing or even a breaking of the value gap (Blender can compete with 1000 dollar apps. despite its non-standard design, Photoshop is seeing stiff competition from apps. less than 100 bucks, ect…).

Do people actually go to formal schooling for 3d art? I am sure some do, but I always figured that most people learned on their own. That might be the core of the problem, where people have invested lots of money in a formal education, and they are stuck in the system.

It’s nothing to do with cost.

The pipeline at most, if not all high-end vfx houses is based on python 2.7 whereas Blender is python 3.X.
This makes Blender troublesome to integrate into these pipelines.

Another reason is the GPL license Blender uses. In the real world the GPL license shouldn’t be an issue but the lawyer-class of humanity are so paranoid and fearful of litigation and signing off on due diligence, that they avoid the unknown and ‘different’. They would rather accept the assurances of Autodesk, Maxon, Foundry & SideFX, that the code in their software is their own.

The lack of Blender in high-end vfx is dam annoying though. I’m with you there.

I’ve just had a discussion with another potential freelance client who get’s their assets from their client in maya format.

I started looking for freelance work in London, in January, I 've had the above conversation multiple times since then.

I love Blender and truly know it’s one of the most capable 3d suites out there (I’ve used Max, Maya and LW professionally) but I’m running out of savings so today I am going to have to park my Blender portfolio projects and dust off my maya skills just so I can get some work. I’m not happy about it but for the immediate future I have to go with the software that’s going to give me cashflow.

I don’t think it has to do with price. Not anymore at least.
Do note, that blender only recently catched up to max’es and mayas in power. Maxes and mayas were used in big studios for years and they are the industry standard.
A tool being the standard, fuels itself to remain a standard.

Most developed film studios and such use Maxes and mayas, therefore you can only get a job there if you use max or maya. They simply can’t hire blender users, as they will not integrate to their workflow. For a whole company to instantly switch from max to blender is an extreme task.

And since there are no big studios using blender, pretty much all movies are made with max and mayas.
So, the impression is - Why would I learn blender if Max and maya is what used in all movies?

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No, imo it’s mostly ignorance, arrogance, hype, strong ego trips & weak minds, fear in industry… oh & lots of those delusional to be superior just because of the brand (“beauty lies in blonde hair and blue eyes”). Big ones move slower, basically.

BTW
Have you checked how much Houdini costs?!?

Blender is slowly gaining traction. I remember being excited when I learned it was used for animatics on Rami’s Spider-Man movies. Now it’s being used for end titles on Wonder Woman and extensively on Amazon’s “The Man In The High Castle”. These may not seem like much, but it definitely helps.

Free blender is a problem, because basically blender doesn’t have a stable development. If it had a steady income, people would trust the program more. But it’s not a problem in a "well, if it’s free it’s because it’s bad"way.

Use the GPL license if it’s a big problem, because it prevents anyone from using it without accepting the GPL license and releasing your code. In the end it’s a headache, as some programmer has admitted to me, the GPL license is the least free of all licenses, it only really bothers you. It is better any other open source license than the GPL license which is in short, a cancer. Some people call it a viral license because it spreads like one, I call it cancer because it kills the host.

The fact that it’s open source and they don’t charge for using blender also creates another problem. Nobody gives a shit about users, and it’s a typical problem of open source projects that never work for the general population. A company wants to make money, and it makes you a product that gives them money, that is, that users like it. An open source program doesn’t work like that, unless there are companies behind it and that’s not the case. A FOSS program is developed not where its users need it, but where developers have the most fun. And this is where all the current blender problems arise. Don’t we have an API for other developers? Why is that? because nobody is interested in developing or maintaining it, even if it benefits the user. Why do we have strange things like selecting with the right click? Because there isn’t a boss who scares the crap out of you when he sees that he has the whole community saying it’s a decision bullshit and that he’s scaring off new users. Why can’t we implement blender on other pipelines? Because instead of seeking the well-being of the user we think of philosophical decisions…

That’s the real problem of blender, licensing and philosophy. But not for being open source, but because it is GPL, because you have dozens of other open source licenses that are not so restrictive.

I agree that blender is gaining traction slowly. Companies don´t like risk (some Head-Stuff will now disagree) and to have your set of tools is state of the art.

Change the tools and you take a risk, because maybe your workflow can break. Let´s take a look for example to the
new export format giTF 2.0. I post a link that will pass you to the Khronos Group.

Wikipedia-Quote:The Khronos Group, Inc. is an American non-profit member-funded industry consortium based in Beaverton, Oregon, focused on the creation of open standard, royalty-free application programming interfaces (APIs) for authoring and accelerated playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. Khronos members may contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, vote at various stages before public deployment, and accelerate delivery of their platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.

On July 31, 2006, it was announced at SIGGRAPH that control of the OpenGL specification would be passed to the group.

Here is the link: https://www.khronos.org/news/permalink/exporting-gltf-2.0-from-maya-lt

If you had read the Article on their website you can say Blender is pretty good involved in the workflow of the Industry-
Standards. There is a way to go and that is good. I hope the headquarters of the studios will take more risk in the future.

But what ever you goal is, i can say: Happy Blending :o

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  • note that the comments here are my own and not reflective of my employer or studios having worked for *

This thread comes up once a month here basically. “Why isn’t Blender used in AAA movie/game production”, and I feel the point gets missed 99.9% of the time.

It has nothing at all to do with being free. Almost every large film studio uses Redhat or Centos. They are free as well. What is the difference? Support (at least on the redhat side). The studios know if there’s a problem they can call someone and get it fixed.

The blender “model” is that well, anyone can contribute. So hey there large studio you want to use Blender and find a bug? Well you should just hire an engineer instead of paying for support, use that towards the engineer’s salary. And maybe we’ll accept his patches or you can keep a forked version of Blender on your side. Same thing with feature requests. It’s an interesting idea, but all due respect to the leaders at BF, I don’t think most commercial enterprises are interested in that model. (Assuming that they could even find the people to work with Blender’s code).

There is also the GPL issue that many studios want to stay away from legally, and I would argue some big picture design philosiphies of having Blender be it’s own ecosystem rather than fitting into a bigger pipeline. (I’m looking at you OpenVDB for example). But honestly, the biggest issue is support. A larger studio like a Pixar or Sony or ILM has an engineer on site when they contract to use Maya or Katana. There’s nothing like that in place in the Blender world.

I would argue the same is true for the general users. If BF wants to raise capital for coding drives why not offer paid support priority tickets? Or Kickstarters for features that the public actually wants rather than ones that some hobbyist coder comes up with? An example of this would be raising coder funds for a UI redesign which everyone wants. I feel like there is a missed opportunity here both on the commercial and personal user side for users getting something back for their donations. And I know the argument will be that Blender is supposed to be a community open source effort rather than a commercial one, but then why are we selling non-biodegradable plastic toys to bring a bunch of coders to amsterdam to work on features we don’t have a ton of say in?

/rant

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I don’t really understand your point. The tool is free and open, not the stuff you make with it.

Okay, to explain it, I’d better give you the example that a programmer told me a few days ago. When programming, he always needs open source libraries, and also makes open source programs, but he never uses GPL, he runs away from it. The problem is that when the GPL letters touch your code all you do must be GPL, everyone who wants to use your code must do it GPL, all libraries you use must be GPL,… EVERYTHING MUST BE GPL or compatible. And many times it is impossible to do this because you already use a library that is not GPL, and maybe it is open source code but not compatible with the GPL, or simply that you want to use a proprietary API. That’s freedom, being able to do with the code what you want, not whoever wrote the GPL.

So my friend’s solution is simply to ignore everything that contains the acronym GPL and prefers to use any other license.

This is an anonymous developer, without many problems,… Now look at it from the point of view of a developer of plugins, third-party software,… and simply when they see the acronym GPL in the license they go from doing nothing. First, because many times a plugin doesn’t rent them the development cost, and most of the time because even if you simply can’t make your software compatible with the GPL.

With this you get a few plugins to go out for blender, and the plugins are the ones that give you the real ecosystem of the program. 3DsMAX is basically a nexus between plugins.

-LOL- Too soon! Or is it? This is fascinating.

-LP

@DcVertice,
If someone told me there is this great free tool called Blender I can use, but everything I make with it I must allow anyone to have access to the original Blender files to do whatever they wanted with, then I wouldn’t use Blender.

That makes total sense to me. I don’t really think that is what’s going on here.

I think the bigger question is ‘Why isn’t Maya and 3dmax light years ahead of Blender?’

It is because they have some monopolistic tendencies?

Not quite.

For starters they’ve been around for a while and the big studios have a long history with those programs - assets, customizations, work procedures. As a developer you have to move carefully lest you break something important. And as a business they can’t simply drop one program and drop in, say, Blender.

Second they have a more structured development process. You don’t have people just “dropping by” with something interesting. Things to be worked on can be set months if not years in advance. It’s closed development, partially to keep out crud, partially to keep out those looking to sneak in a back-door, and partially because it’s a public company and there’s rules they need to follow about public information releases.

Third, they usually have licensing agreements with NVidia or others for things like Mental Ray or Arnold. There’s costs to that which have to be recouped. There’s also potential legal issues with various GPL licensing as noted - you don’t want to get into that tangle if you can help it.

Finally, there’s the age of the program. As they get older, there’s a drop-off in things which can be added or changed. A lot of the budget gets put towards keeping pace with technology e.g. 4k/UHD support, new GPU hardware, and so on.

Not for the user, but for developers.

Maya is not light years ahead of blender? if you pick all the tools, plugins and third-parties software maya is light years ahead of blender. Because they have a ecosystem of software made by thir partie developers, in blender you only have blender and a few python addons.

Sure, you only double, triple, or even quadruple the total price you pay as the average Maya plugin can cost way more than what is found in the Blender Market. Then you have to maintain a ton of installations and make sure they work whenever the base app. is upgraded (prepare to say some painful goodbyes to useful tools).

Even without plugins, you can probably credit Autodesk’s monopolistic and highly corporate tendencies for Blender’s ability to not be lightyears behind and become competitive in spots. If Discreet and Alias were still developing Max and Maya, and Softimage was still the company behind XSI, Blender would still be that FOSS app. that can’t seem to make any headway into any sphere outside of the hobbyist market (simply because the development rate of the commercial solutions would be faster and Blender can only look forward to being even further behind).

Maya plugin can cost thousand of euros… blender plugins no, because we don’t have other thing that opensource addons. so instead of being able to have this plugin, paying or not, we get screwed and we can’t have hair in blender.

A really better way to have an ecosystem, of course.

It seems the industry is bloated and trapped into a way of doing things.