Not exactly agree that Ton should contact anyone, but this I will say is a bit related to the idea that you pose:
I think there are more artists, freelancers, small studios and not so small studios collaborating with Blender (donations and code), compared with companies that sell 3D softwares. Or am I wrong?. In my little brain it sounds logical that artists and studios are interested in collaborating to improve the ‘tool’ they use and then share these improvements (after all they make money with art, not selling code). But think about big companies that make money by selling software that competes with Blender/Cycles, sharing their work?. That sounds a little less logical to me. But as I said is my little brain, if developers have taken this decision then I guess it must be because they have studied well the benefits of that possibility.
If I recall correctly both the Poser team and Rhino have contributed back already.
Btw: I did a talk at the Blender conference 2013 about the topic of Cycles becoming permissive and why it probably was a good decision and in no way a bad one:
This is very interesting. I’ve often wondered if Blender is also planning on further developing motion graphics friendly tools (similar to MoGraph) in the future? I’m mainly a motion graphics guy but am learning blender at the moment to fill the 3D gap… it’s awesome but compared to C4D it’s not as friendly for motion tasks. This could be a good opportunity as more artists hear about Blender.
I get what you are saying and agree with you. I can also remember that some companies wont employ blender artist, all because blender is not industry standard yet.
But just look at it on this angle, imagine cycle is available in all 3d softwares, we will be able to share materials across softwares, no need of creating it all over again and also Blender cycle will build and invite more artist to migrate to blender and also this will come with a huge community that might make Blender Cycle an industry standard due to it speed and workflow at the long run.
Am happy i started with blender and i will stick to it, see it grow and become an industry standard.
That’s great for C4D. However, Cycles is by no means going to become “industry standard” in it’s current state. Yes, you can create some very beautiful, photorealistic images and get whatever you want out of it, but there are issues that need to be resolved first. While actual render/computation times are relatively fast, “Artist Overhead” in actually rendering the final image can take MUCH longer than initially expected due to some funky settings here and there, and a lot of “not so intuitive” workflows. After 5 years of fiddling, I still run into this problem on a day to day basis.
Cycles is lightyears away from offering the features an industry standard renderer needs. Actually - at least on one field - VRay is an ‘industry standard’ with reason.
I tend to agree, but I think its slowly getting there!
This said, it produce fine images, and it is more then enough for the average Blender user!
It could deliver fantastic renders, but for being ‘industry standard’ it should offer far more. Let me to be honest; it would be great to have an open source renderer for all the 3d apps with industry standard features to fullfill al the needs.
For the average Blender users it is completely OK, no doubt.
What do you mean “industry standard” anyway?
what industry are you referring to?
CG is split into many categories, and last I checked they use entirely different renderers as “standard”
So which one can’t cycles get into?
Animation?
Automotive?
Gaming?
Arch Viz?
Which one.
There is no singular standard in the cg industry as a whole.
Giant tent-pole movie standard
Industry standard is a terrible term that is misused and abused for a variety of reasons. There is no industry standard. There are widely used renderers, there are commercially successful renderers, there are time-tested renderers, there are high-quality renderers, there are fast renderers, and no renderer is all of those at once.
I meant archviz as the field I talked about, sorry for not being specific enough.
I partially agree; but - as an example - for archviz the studios used to ask for VRay knowledge, so we could say that VRay is a standard.
A thought: I really do not want to turn this post to a VS debate. Not I mentioned Cycles as a potential industry-standard renderer, I just reacted to a comment.
Cycles however is about as good as it gets if you’re looking for a free and opensource rendering solution (alongside Luxrender and Appleseed, but I don’t know if the two also have an ultra-flexible node-based shader building approach).
If you’re not wanting to spend a few hundred bucks on a commercial engine (that may or may not require a custom Blender build to actually use), then Cycles is a pretty good deal at the moment.
Ace, we were talking about something else, featurewise.
Cycles is a good renderer, no doubt. I already spent on a commercial renderer.
can this bring more attention & boost for cycles development
Yes and no, what makes Renderman, Arnold, Mental Ray, V-Ray, Maxwell, Mantra or any other 3D render engines used by medium to large size studios a standard, is the fact that they can take anything that is thrown at them, they do so in a very efficient way, they maybe biased or unbiased, but they all have one thing in common, they are mature, solid render engines you can rely on, and Cycles is not quite there yet, it chokes on large scenes, it has no support for micro displacement, at least not in the official, stable release, and so on, hopefully it will change in the near futur!
At work I used Mental Ray for like 12 years, we sorta hated it, then 3Delight, which we loved, then we were some of the first Arnold beta testers, and we used it for years, and now that AD bought it, We are moving to Houdini and Mantra, which is a revelation to us, each of these can take billions of polygons and render predictably, again, Cycles is not quite there yet!
So, polycount is the deciding factor?
There are multiple “industry standards”… No one is denying this. Cycles doesn’t compare to Redshift in terms of pure speed. Cycles doesn’t compare to Arnold in terms of stability and scalability. All I’m saying is that it’s high time Cycles decides what it’s GOING to be, instead of what it isn’t going to be.
Cycles very well CAN be the open source renderer of the future. We and the developers just need to decide that we want it and start working on things that will make it better for that purpose.
Nope, but the ability not to be restricted to polycount is one of them, imagine if the FX peoples behind Elysium had to render all those polys in Cycles, sheesh, and FX are getting more and more complex, there is also memory management, but Cycles is getting better at that as well, there is also stability, and a few other things, like micro-displacement, decent ptex and alembic support, and such!
Cycles is a great render engine, but its not quite mature enough to be use on a large scale!