My brain on reading this:
You open movie people shouldn’t feel like you need to be soft towards Ton in terms of development needs and instead put him to task on these kind of basic features if he wants to see his movie making dreams realized.
Don’t see it as bashing Ton’s dream, but being a softie on feature demands by working around everything is not going to give Ton the right information on what he needs to do to ‘Bring Hollywood to Blender’. The artists will benefit, the devs. will benefit, and he himself will benefit.
I don’t think they’re being soft on him, they’re just being pragmatic. When you only have one tool to use for a job you will always find ways to work around deficiencies in that tool in order to finish the job. Which is why it is so important that:
I don’t think this just applies to Blender either. Anytime you can draw on people with a wider range of experiences the more likely you are to come up with good solutions to a given problem.
Ive used animation master in the past, and the workflow for that in character animation is brilliant. I just feel a bit of python scripting or add ons would significatly improve blender. Such as the ability to swap groups of hi res with a proxy group by pressing a short cut. Having a list that comes up on screen that shows all groups would be easy to find stuff on complex scenes. Or a script that automates driver creation, so one can add a bone to control anything quickly such a colour, for linked objects. I dont see why these things seem so difficult?
That’s exactly what we had in Tears of Steel, it’s a simple script which can be found in the production files of the DVD.
The title is wrong. The correct title:
“Blender from the perspective of a studio”
While you are correct, the post from this studio poor about asset linking etc - improvement on this area would benefit everyone, I don’t think anyone could deny that this area is lacking. Of course however there are many areas in Blender which are similarly lacking (viewport performance?).
IMO this feature does not get much discussion because to pressed hard up against Blender’s limitations in this area requires a moderately sized project with a number of scenes and shots, most users don’t do level but mostly stills (not many people have computer power to render an animation anyway so not even attempt).
Of course even with still images with it would be great to be able to adjust a linked asset, for example just simply change some properties in a material, change a level in a subD modifier, change a shape key etc without bloating the file by appending everything.
And for the “pros” I imagine many consider it just need not be said that this areas need improvement. Just there is only so much man-power, last few years have been largely about building a modern render engine, hopefully if Gooseberry proceeds there could be work on these project/library/scene management type issues.
If you’re happy with what you have and use and don’t mind spending money on software, why change it? I don’t get the point.
Hi!
I was just thinking…if Blender becomes more production friendly many studios would start to use it to some extent. I’am totally ignorant in all open source rules…but I would subscribe for the payed tech support. It is like RedHat, they don’t sell their OS, but anyone can subscribe for tech support.
Moreover I’am sure that any animation and VFX studio that would start to build their pipeline around Blender would extend their RnD team to customize and improve Blender (open source). This way Blender will get additional contribution. That what Arnold and Renderman developers do. SPI has the source of Arnold and some features they develop are shared with SA, the same thing happens in ILM. ILM has the renderman source and features they invent for their huge productions goes implemented in the next version of the PRman. OpenEXR, Alembic, OSL and Cortex are all open source things that are widely adopted by productions and software companies. These frameworks are production proven and workflow friendly because they are developed with help of studios.
I’am new to Blender and I don’t know who Blender is targeting and I don’t know if there any marketing strategy behind. But if we take a look at Autodesk, we’ll see that their entertainment brunch software is sold just because of their marketing…Maya development stoped many many years ago, AD just fills Maya with external semi-useful plugins of companies they acquire as it is cheaper than updating the core. AD stoped XSI development and their 3ds max is just good modeling and visualization tool…I believe if Blender developers will play their cards right, Blender may become next industry standard.
There’s a solution right there - help build Blender to be the ideal tool to fulfill your production needs.
Gather some developers to build, or sponsor the development of, a production friendly file/asset linking system that perfectly fits your workflow.
Then gift it back to the Blender community - if it’s useful to you, it’ll be useful to others who will give great feedback, much appreciation and endless praise. And others can build upon it further to include their required features.
Blender isn’t really free - unsung-hero developers have bleed years into it.
There’s the solution, which is exactly what I was getting at in my previous post. You can’t just whine and whine whine without doing anything and depend your life on the main developers. Learn how to code, if you can’t, then raise money and hire people to do it for you. Do something.
Then gift it back to the Blender community - if it’s useful to you, it’ll be useful to others who will give great feedback, much appreciation and endless praise. And others can build upon it further to include their required features.
Blender isn’t really free - unsung-hero developers have bleed years into it.
Blender is pretty good for production so long as you only use Blender. It is when you try to get it to play with other software it gets more problematic, thus can be difficult to integrate into traditional production pipelines. Most funding in the past was via Open Movie projects and those only use Blender, so it never really gets developed with a traditional production pipeline in mind. Its goal is essentially to be its own Open Source pipeline, for individuals and small studios.
These days Steam Workshop is generating quite a bit of funding, and Polycount even just became a Gold Sponsor for Gooseberry. Maybe with the game industry funding Blender more, its focus will broaden a bit. We’ll see I guess.
You can check Blender Network, but I’m not aware of anyone that does support like Red Hat offers.
That’s a pretty extreme view, this implies that all that hobbyists do is dink around with simple scenes and never make anything worth showing in terms of art or animation.
The hobbyist sector is actually what most of Blender’s userbase was historically and I don’t see why professionals would see a need to engage in a sort of class warfare to ‘take’ Blender from them and completely shut them out.
If anything, you would need to wrest the Blender software out of Ton’s hands, shut him out, and take over the foundation, because like a lot of hobbyist fans, he also has historically been in full support in keeping Blender from using some industry standards out of the box like left-click select.
BlenderArtists can be tricky that way. What you really have to be careful of is in group verses out group psychology. People will react very differently if they perceive criticism coming from an internal rather than external source. As a general rule if you want a rational response - don’t criticise blender more than necessary to make the point you need to and don’t compare Blender with other software. Preferably don’t mention other software. If you can explain concisely what you are trying to do that blender can’t do well and what a proposed solution would look like and what advantages that would bring.
Not that ignoring this advice would make you wrong at all, It’s just that you will be swimming against the tide so to speak in terms of getting results.
Blender’s limitations are not because of “Blender is for Blender users” but because of limited manpower.
You can’t blame manpower for everything bad in Blender. There’s enough manpower left to maintain a complete video cutting solution and even a complete game engine under the hood of a 3d software. Lots of issues are simply a thing of priority.
And in open source software usability is traditionally at a very low priority, while featuritis is all. Gives more positive feelings to hammer in the next cool feature instead of battling with the community to place a button at another location.
There was talk again of forking Blender
I’m all in. We have more than enough unhappy users. But do we have enough unhappy developers too? Because users don’t write Blender code. I’m for sure no C programmer.
“blender is for blender users”
Wasn’t the statement that Blender is for “artists”? Whoever this guy called “artists” is …
Gentlemen, thank you very much for your insights! What you can’t take from Blender is its cool community, you guys are great! Now the situation is much more clear for me. I will try to contact devs and try to talk to them. If any dev is reading this thread please leave your valuable comment.
Ha! One of the things that bugs me with blender. I had to write an addon to handle mass editing of objects
EDIT:
Hobbyists vs “pros”
and what will you be left with once all of us hobbyists (artists and devs) jump ship? remember, no one was born a “pro”
No one is saying that hobbyists should stop using Blender, but you don’t ask an amateur to design a product. The Simpsons covered the idea pretty well in “A Car for Homer”.
That’s how Blender looks already, so yeah, please, let a DESIGNER do the UI design job, not a programmer …
The users doesn’t have to design the software. But they are very good at giving feedback. And feedback is essential. The users are the ones who uses the software then.
In my experience professional artists aren’t necessarily great software designers either. They’re often the most resistant to changing anything.
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