So you can cite me all the bylaws they abide by? Because if they actually are a legitimate non-profit and not simply an organization, then you’re suggesting Blender Foundation is incompetently managed.
A professional can choose to use blender as they see fit, I don’t see that they are mutually exclusive. But if you somehow manage to earn a living with blender, then you either have a low cost of living or you are the best in the world because you have proven you can literally do anything.
No, novice vendors “slap” professional on something and then never amount to anything. Professional vendors are the ones who define the industry and directly support the majority of work done by studios and freelancers. Blender does not define the industry, it attempts to play catch-up.
Then what makes developers decide they should maintain an addon or not?
Now there is more money = more man power at will.
Maybe there was a golden age of users interacting with devs but that’s not the point.
I am saying that there should be at all time an updated document representing the users priorities and that every time it is possible, that document would be the deciding factor of what is being worked on next.
BF should constantly work on finding an maintaining ways to accumulate and organize user’s feedback (sorry for saying “feedback” every 2 words…).
Currently, there are less addons officially maintained by developers. Most of them are importers/exporters or related to export/import jobs ( Import Images as Planes, 3D Print Toolbox, Freestyle SVG exporter) , the rest are fundamental extensions (Cycles, Blender ID authentication, Manage UI translations, Math Vis, demo mode, VR Scene Inspections) or basic demos ( Scatter Objects).
Addons from community, bundled with an officially release, have been managed by @Meta-Androcto .
Most of popular addons during last decade were added to this collection unless their author were opposed to that or they were requesting an unusual installation.
Some were invented by official developers during movie productions like Rigify, Cell Fracture or Amaranth Toolset.
Some are perpetuation of very old scripts like Discombobulator.
Some are relatively recent like Tissue.
And in Testing category, you will find stuff that may cause problems because they are a little bit deprecated, needs an update or simply not tested enough.
But most of addons bundled are pre-2.8 stuff because hindsight on mass of new stuff that have been developed with 2.8 hype is not there, yet.
More man power : yes.
At will : no.
2.8 targets were too much work for team at beginning of adventure.
New manpower was directly affected to 2.8 new core stuff (Workbench, EEVEE, Grease Pencil, new physics, VR… )
Manpower expanded but core of Blender expanded, too.
My point is that I doubt that is possible.
User priorities are not the same for all types of users (architects, 3D animators, 2D animators, illustrators, VFX artists, game assets creators, 3D printers, …).
If a percentage of a certain type of user is more important than the others; that may create an important bias in order of priority obtained by a simple voting system.
Some papercuts that are blocking for some users, may be completely ignored by others.
Collecting thousands of opinions and trying to be fair while prioritizing them takes several weeks of work and requires busy skilled people involved in the process.
Brilliant new additions to software may require to modify that order of priorities very frequently. At a faster speed than the public discovers new features.
They are a non-profit according to the laws they have in the Netherlands (which I think have at least some differences compared to what defines such in the United States and other countries).
If you believe Blender is still that dinky little FOSS program for low-income people who don’t know any better, then you obviously haven’t given the app. a shot since years. It has been a long time since it had the strange horizontal UI with the quirky workflow and the truckload of missing features, and the last year brought it a lot closer to the standard industry workflow in many areas (left-click select, active tools, industry-standard keymap option ect…).
The European Union is not known to keep corporate records a secret, so, where are they? Where are the specific bylaws BF has to legally uphold? By what metric do they prove they benefit the public more than hinder it in order to keep their status?
That’s a quite shameless shawman, I literally said the same people who use blender go on to build professional skills. If you’re going to act childish like that, it’s not worth talking with you.
The way I read it, it sounded like the statement proclaimed that Blender users have shown they can do anything only because they can make something beautiful with a horrifically low-quality application (because it came after the statement implying that Blender does not have the ability to make content a client would pay good money for).
There are still some people out there who view Blender as that failed commercial app. that has made zero progress of any kind since 2002. I know that statement is far from truth when looking at the data, but you’ll be amazed at the myths that are still around.
Blender can make plenty of photorealistic images, but that doesn’t mean it’s efficient and versatile enough to expect to make a living off of.
You obviously come from a sheltered background so you don’t understand the dilemma here. If you go around telling people “hey, invest your time and resources blender and you’ll make a living,” you will be ruining people’s lives, people should not be gambling their livelihood on something unproven, unregulated and underdeveloped and that’s why Blender remains for the vast majority of users, simply a hobby.
The reason the professional software is professional is because if you can do everything you’ve been trained to do, you can literally jump right from the learning into a salaried position or as a freelancer.
You sound like someone who has never used blender before. I don’t think you even know what you mean when you say “versatile”. A lot of studios currently use blender as the core of their pipelines:
From what I hear, when it comes to maya or max being dominant in the industry, it’s mainly an issue where older studios built their pipelines around those tools and are too invested in them to really want to switch. They aren’t actively changing the software they currently use because it’s seen as an extra cost for no clear benefit (“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”).
The people who work in the industry say that they will look at your portfolio before anything else and teach you the tools in their pipeline if necessary. Apparently, in some cases the in-house plugins change the UI/UX of maya to the point where it doesn’t resemble stock maya at all, so knowing how the vanilla version works ahead of time is just a bonus.
There is even a guy who applied for a job at a blender studio along with his friend, and even though he was the only one between them with blender experience they picked his friend instead. They felt the style that friend used in his work was a better fit for what they were doing:
Please just kindly remember that everyone who uses Blender “professionally” … or, who doesn’t use it … “has abusiness to run.” And, that business actually has fairly little to do with the technical capabilities of the product(s) they’ve chosen to construct their world around. They “have promises to keep, and miles to go before they sleep.”
So in other words, people who already have so much experience that it almost doesn’t even matter to them what software they use, or people who have the luxury of making that gamble in the first place.
That’s the same with most industries. When you have the luxury to continuously invest in your own capital and fool around with new features in your free time and then attain 20 or more years of experience in for instance coding, you can see the similarities between platforms and make a switch to a new language often very easily. If you already know how to program everything you want in python or C++ and you have the experience to know how to do it well, it’s not an issue.
The issue is when you’re living an average life and you’re in the process of building or starting a career. Are you honestly going to bet your family’s food security on Blender? If you have basic common sense, then no, not unless for some reason you absolutely have to.
Blender can’t even legally protect its own assets which is a major disincentive. Not only that, but it doesn’t even have real customer support. It has a few okay Q&A sites that sometimes get the job done, but that’s not reliability when you’re working for a client, that’s a hobby. If blender could offer actual customer-related Q&A, comparable to what large companies offer which all large successful companies have, then there is a very realistic chance it could take off because then the information that would allow modelers and animators to do what they want for clients would be a lot more easily attainable.
In any industry there are outlier success stories. Even for myself I’ve had a lot of success selling stock assets simply because I have an unusual aptitude for a variety of multi-media design, but the first advice I would ever tell anyone is “don’t quit your day job,” because even for me, it’s a very slow build and 99% of the follow asset producers I know have the same problem. Similar with blender, “don’t quit your professional software,” stick to what you know, and in your free time if you can manage it, maybe you can eventually make the switch to using blender in a professional capacity if you really want to.
In that same situation, you’ll be getting a degree from a college in 3d animation, and since most colleges have licenses with autodesk, you’ll be forced to learn their software whether you like it or not. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t use other software like modo or blender to produce your work. Also, you shouldn’t treat what you are saying as a public service announcement. If anyone wants to spend what little free time they have learning something, it doesn’t matter what it is, it’s their prerogative to learn it.
I have no idea what you mean by that. The GPL license doesn’t apply to any of the content blender can produce. It only applies to executables with that license, so the only portion of blender where that might have been an issue is the old game engine that was removed in 2.8 (gpl licensed rendering code would be part of the game when published).
I never disputed that. You “can” use other software like Blender all you like, just don’t expect it to solve everything and consequently, don’t expect to start support yourself and/or your family with it. In most instances, a studio or group will have licenses so that same software that you’re trained to use, but it’s their license, so you can’t necessarily use their resources for your personal work and your free time and if you want to, you’d probably need to pay thousands of dollars. That’s mainly what blender is for, doing stuff in your free-time, aka, a hobby.
If you somehow manage to navigate Blender’s setup well enough, and, as I said, build enough professional experience, you can eventually switch to Blender if you so choose.
Not individual assets you make personally, blender itself. Suppose some specific organization like Blender Foundation announces they’ve raised enough money to support a lot of new and much needed development. Well, now they’ve attracted the attention of every code-troll on the planet, any will be able to copy and paste anything BF does which means BF can’t expect to hold steady revenue streams.
Blender is as capable as other programs. The reason large studios often use those “industry standard” programs, are not because of the programs themselves, but because the programs fit better with the pipeline.
Because large studios often use a whole bunch of different programs, autodesk, sidefx, adobe, pixologic, all these companies cooperate to create synergy with each other. Synergy that blender has for a long time lacked, which is why its been left in the dark for so many years.
Blender is FAR more common in indie, and smaller studios, where synergy between lots of suits is not required. Blender has also gained a lot of respect in the industry as of lately, you’ll see both pixologic, sidefx, and unreal engine are working on building bridges that will help developers with implementing blender into their pipeline.
I’d appreciate if you stop downplaying blender as much as you do. Just because its free, does not mean its not suited for professional use.
To some extent it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, but not entirely and that fact is also part of the problem that Blender needs to navigate. If you want people to take Blender seriously, show that risking your livelihood pays off, show that there is accountability, show that when people encounter a problem that they will get the support they need to pay their bills.
I didn’t say you can’t choose to use it in a professional capacity provided the necessary skillset, in fact if you read what I said, I said it can produce plenty of photorealistic images. You obviously have a much more personal tie to Blender’s success being a moderator, so no offense but I kind of doubt debating with you will lead to good results.
You personally own everything you make in blender, the same as if it was created in any other programs. And blender has the largest support related library by a mile, direct connection to developers is not nessicary. If you’re working on a project that is so significant as to requiring direct dialog with developers, then chances are you have a dedicated person writing costum code for blender, great, given its all open source.
Here you have quotes from one of your recent replies, you’re drastically downplaying blender. You are actively seeking fights on the site.
I think the heart of the idea comes from you being frustrated over things you feel are critical for the animation workflow being missing in blender. Like “maybe blender doesn’t have this or that in its animation pipeline because they were fixing random bugs that weren’t important to the users”.
Please don’t assume that these things aren’t there because the devs don’t know what to work on first. From the user’s perspective something might seem easy to implement, but the supporting framework might take a lot of time. For example, animators wanted fancy widgets where you could just drag parts of the model’s face and the bones would animate. This seems simple, but the dependency graph needs to support a concept called “copy on write” in order to make that happen. The ground work for this started well before 2.8 was released, and represented a massive change that affected how everything in blender manages data.
The users who asked for this didn’t know how much work would be involved to accomplish this. I don’t think the community should have the power to make the devs focus on building specific features for reasons like this. That doesn’t mean they don’t listen to what the users want, or take their proposals into consideration. They are simply the only ones who understand how much work it would take to implement these things, so they should chose what order things get resolved in.
They planned for a major animation design discussion this year. The foundation is in contact with animation studios other than the institute, so they probably won’t miss any big pain-points animators have.
There is lots of low hanging fruit that is not picked because the developers do not know about the community’s desire for that small life improving feature.
A few years ago at Mozilla the developers of their “Dev Tool” features had a system where people could upvote and downvote proposed small features.
Each user had a limited number of votes they could spend. I think you had 10 votes in total and could only spend a maximum of 5 on a single feature. So i’d spend 5 of my votes on 1 thing I really wanted and spread the other 5 out on things that weren’t already popular but were good sounding proposals.
As features requests were completed (or disqualified and deleted) my votes were returned to me so I could spend them on other proposals.
I remember this system working very well for them. They did not build it themselves. There was some other website that was built specifically for this feature that they used.
There is a similar tool for blender, all though i dont know if the devs use it actively. If im not mistaking i think its community driven
edit: actually, on a second look, there seems to be a fair number of posts labled “Done”, so it might actually be a site used by the devs to look for feedback from users
