i´m getting back into Blender and i´m really impressed how far it´s developed since 2.4 – that´s when i had to switch to other 3D-Packages (Softimage & 3dsMax) to make my living from 3D.
Softimage was killed a few years ago and now Autodesk is switching to a rental-only, overpriced licensing system. The problem with such a system is, that when you stop paying, you´re not able to edit or even view your own work anymore. A lot of people are really pissed of and are looking for alternatives to esp. Autodesks products.
I think this the point where Blender could jump in and get a whole new role in the 3D-world.
BUT (!) when i start investigating wich software could do my daily tasks in time (or less), i often reach the capabilitys of Blender (and other commercial products).
But in contrast to those commercial packages, blender lacks, due to it´s strict and viral gpl license, the support of common third party software (Renderers, Particles/Fluids/Dynamics, Converters & File Formats,etc…).
For example: i´m sure there would already be a perfect integrated and full featured Corona-Render, if there wasn´t the viral gpl license (https://corona-renderer.com/forum/index.php?topic=792.0.)
I think Blender is agreat piece of Software, with a lot of cool features and one of the best UIs on the market and i love the spirit of freedom around it, but the freedom could be bigger – in support of commercial plugins/addons.
I think there must be possibillitys to keep Blender free and open, but also benefit from commercial develepors and users.
The GPL means that Blender can only have tight integration with other free and open source applications and libraries (though the guys doing the Vray and Octane plugins work around that by having special builds only for licensed users).
On top of that, this is something that can’t really be tackled by the BF either, because the GPL can only be removed if every developer who has ever contributed approves of it (which is impossible). That means it’s something that can’t even be fixed with a fork and the only real solution is to pretty much create a new FOSS 3D solution from scratch (there are other methods that can be done such as a sort of API with a non-GPL license, but they are unlikely to be approved by the BF).
So in short on whether Blender can be made more commercial friendly, the very fact that the GPL was chosen means they don’t have a lot of options here (not like the BF will want to do anything since there’s a few key developers who made the choice to not work on permissive software).
here in argentina blender its not a huge thing, the majority of the companies and studios uses pírate software(not every one but most of them), its almost that if you want to be a pro here you need to know how to crack a software or get pirate resources, such culture its a problem, im trying to do my living trough blender and legal stuff but its really difficult to do because most of the time the use of maya or max its a requirement.
i dont want to go into that circle again(yes i started same as most here at home with a cd copied)but if i cant get a job at something i may have to ~, ~ the only thing that makes me keep trying is that i know people here that lives using open source so it is possible to do but its extremely difficult to get the right contacs at the right time.
this is exactly what I think. But as Ace Dragon pointed out, it is not that easy. I remember I red something about the fact that something COULD change in a major blender version change (3.0?). I don’t know how it works, but yes, I consider the problems in integrating 3rd party software into blender one of the “showstopper” to its diffusion. I really hope this can change.
The license is there to guarantee so Blender will always be opensource, (this can never be reverted) and by that protects the rights of all people who in this spirit contributed to Blender, ea their code might not be included by some commercial product nor may someone sell Blender or parts of blender under a different name or so.
However people are free to work on closed software that works with Blender but who’s code base will not be part of blender.
They are allowed to ask money for their product, but are not allowed to ask software for an altered version of Blender.
As long as they sell only their part its OK. The Blender part (if it where bundled) should stay free.
The responsibility to keep such software workable with Blender is then also up to such closed parties themselves.
Since their code doesnt fall under the blender code base.
In regards to that, people who create an opensource import/export of some comercial 3d package are free to backwards engineer such things. But if a comercial vendor then changes the format (cat mouse game), then dont think “why cannt this work why is blender so…”, think of it that mouses have outrun the cat again. In the end however opensource is much liked by a lot of groups.
And large groups might someday become large enough to make a voice and to call out for industry standards.
(we’ve seen that for example with open .doc format in office packages).
So till that day the mouse are on the run for the cat.
A mouse needs to stay inside a commercial base, while a cat is free from that.
There are usually more mouses then cats… and cats develop a bit slower, funding for cats is more difficult.
But there are people who use cats to keep the mouses away :eyebrowlift:
This is a bit silly though. The guy who made Corona basically said that he doesn’t want to make an exporter+standalone version for blender because it’s “clumsy”. He’s basically blaming blender (as are you) when that workflow is viable. I mean, how many commercial renderers are there for blender? Octane, VRay, Thea, Indigo etcetc… To me it just seems like laziness.
I´m not an expert, but that´s not how the license works as far as I know. The owner of the code can always change to another license for later versions. Older code will remain GPL, altered code does not have to. The problem with Blender is that there are so many contributors it´s just not feasible to get the approval from everyone to do that. Also, there is nothing in the GPL license stating you can´t sell the application (provided you include the source code) under a different name, afaik.
Or a matter of investment vs return. As capable as Blender may or may not be, the plain fact is that it’s not a heavy hitter in the ‘pro’ field and most of it’s users are hobbyists and not likely to fork out money for a commercial rendering engine. So why take the time to develop a plugin?
And as far as being ‘clumsy’ the Luxrender guys often talk of how difficult it is for them to actually integrate their 3rd party renderer into Blender (as opposed to just exporting files like Renderman does) so maybe the Corona coder guy isn’t just being lazy.
Sure, but since there already are a ton of commercial options there seems to be at least some reasons to invest in developing a blender plugin, at least for those renderers I mentioned. Even if the Corona developer isn’t lazy, in that post he’s talking like it’s impossible to make a blender-corona workflow when it clearly isn’t (you’ve got at least five implementations to reverse engineer at your leisure :p)
Anyway, in my opinion why blender has gotten this good this fast is just because it is open with lots of people contributing code from all over the world. Because of the license you can’t have full commercial render integrations directly in blender, but this is more of a convenience issue, you usually need to use other software anyway, like external software for texturing, exporting your models to a game engine or working in a (better) video editor.
As long as the exporter file formats are working fine I don’t see a problem, and blender will continue changing the market.
I am no licence expert, what I say is just based on stamements I red here and there about blender licence. But from what I understood even blender developers says that nowadays there are open source licences which would allow blender to be less restrictive in terms of 3rd party software integration, without losing the insurance of remaining a free and open source software forever. But as BrilliantApe pointed out, changing the licence is not easy at all, as EVERY SINGLE DEVELOPER that gave even a single line of code to blender has to give an explicit authorization in order for such licence to be changed. Which is I think, impossible.
As for the work about doing plugins, vray and renderman proves that is not impossible. But many other examples proves that is also not so easy with the actual licence. There are several examples of failed or too clumsy too be used plugins for blender, such as Corona, octane render, allegorithmic substance system and others.
In general I see a growing interest in developing plugins for blender. Interest that often gets “ruined” when the problems concerning the GPL licence come in.
And as a professional who really likes to use blender as my 3d software to work, I also have to say that the lack of some of the 3rd party solution sometimes is a pity.
I didn’t know that 4 equal a “ton” of options.
Lets not forget that we only have a Vray exporter because an independent developer decided to make a Blender plugin for the already existing Vray standalone software and the Octane team complained about the tedious process of having to work around the GPL license and their users are also left with a less-than-perfect workflow because of it.
Essentially the renderer plugins are just exporters. They are not integrated with Blender in any way and because of it the performance is suffering. Even so, render-integration is possible if you want to deal with the workarounds.
Also you are completely ignoring that there are other sorts of plugins that are literally impossible to integrate to Blender because of the GPL (such as FumeFX for example) because they require the use of Blender’s API.
Formats like Alembic enabling multisoftware interoperability
“Nodal-everything”. Once you can create “fragment modifier”, build cityblocks, musclesystems with nodes (like Houdini, ICE, MCG*) there is little need for external plugins.
No of course, it’s just a few… How many commercial renderers do you know of? Octane, Vray, Thea, Indigo, Maxwell and Corona (haha), that’s 6, and that’s just the commercial ones that I know of.
Lets not forget that we only have a Vray exporter because an independent developer decided to make a Blender plugin for the already existing Vray standalone software and the Octane team complained about the tedious process of having to work around the GPL license and their users are also left with a less-than-perfect workflow because of it.
Even if it was tedious it’s here now. Even if it’s not perfect it works.
Essentially the renderer plugins are just exporters. They are not integrated with Blender in any way and because of it the performance is suffering. Even so, render-integration is possible if you want to deal with the workarounds.
I don’t see how performance can suffer, sure, you might not get a realtime preview as good as cycles, but the rendering itself shouldn’t be slower.
Also you are completely ignoring that there are other sorts of plugins that are literally impossible to integrate to Blender because of the GPL (such as FumeFX for example) because they require the use of Blender’s API.
If you really need that in your pipeline you can just use max/maya with that plugin. There’s no rule that says you can only use blender. In my opinion it can be a good thing that there aren’t commercial plugins for blender (well now there’s the blender market) so there’s an incentive to make addons/patches for new features that then everyone can use. I mean, if you think about it blender is pretty crazy right now, and that’s before development for 2.8 has even begun.
You do realize that you can’t just copy models (with all of their shading options, weight values, and geometry flags) to a clipboard and magically have it appear in other apps. with a paste command as with text, right?
The way that applications deal with text is pretty universal, not so with geometry (besides that, it would cause most machines to run as slow as molasses because of all the RAM needed to hold a large scene).
Parts of Blender are already out of the GPL, like Cycles. You would think that as development continues there will be other opportunities for putting more of Blender into less restrictive licensing?
The reason why Cycles is out of the GPL is because they were able to keep in contact with all of the developers who contributed to the project (which is far easier than for Blender itself due to the contributors being far lower in number and the project itself being far newer).
For other areas though, Cycles tended to be something of a special case because was something that could actually be separated from Blender and integrated into another app. Besides that, the license change to something more permissive was something planned from the start when Cycles was still in a branch (Ton’s idea then was for it to spend its infancy under the GPL so as to protect the code).
OP, please read the forums! Topic you mention had been chewed and spit out so many times before.
Corona SA 1.4 was released few days ago. Joel is working on new exporter. A whole lot of changes, so sit tight and wait.
Other engines have no problem with licensing they just had to fetch and make a Blender version for thwir engine (Vray & Octane). Other exporters work just fine for: Thea, Indigo, Maxwell, Lux, PRMan RIS, Mitsuba…
Many other engines don’t even care for Lightwave, Modo, Maya, Cinema… except Max, which enjoys fine support of almost all & some extra rendering engines (-Arnold / soon?). Not to forget SA engines such as: Arion, Clarisse, Guerilla, Maxwell Studio…
The only true set back is lack of alembic for now… oh, and newbies (1st posters) knowledge.
Anyway… nobody prohibits you from learning any tool to work in studio. Nobody prohibits you from buying any commercial software or using FLOSS, GPL… and creating a studio. But when you are solo on the market you have to play by the rules and small fish get eaten first. That’s the reality - it’s not for a light headed, easy going person. The biggest and baddest of the Houses make their own solutions.
If you can’t make a profit from things you like doing, get a simple job and stick with your hobby or just plow the dirt and take care of farm & land.
Octane, Vray, Thea, Indigo, Maxwell and Corona (haha), that’s 6, and that’s just the commercial ones that I know of.