I think Blender has a different business model. It is not really free software - to make. Since it costs money to produce it, Blender is more on a par with something like LightWave or how Modo was originally back at its inception.
So its development is moving along, but still rather slow to address certain long standing issues.
I can not speak about larger studios because I have never worked at one. But I can speak from my own experience running a small studio.
And as much as I’d like to run an all Blender studio, that would be awesome, I can’t. I need certain tools I get from Autodesk. Tools I can not find anywhere else. Until Blender gets those tools it will not likely ever replace the other software in my studio. But I do use Blender along side other software. And I think you will see more and more small studios doing this and also using Blender only.
It is a slow process because Blender development is still relatively slow when you consider the things that need addressing and improvements.
But Blender use is growing.
And I think that makes larger companies like AD nervous.
In the meantime Blender is used in actual production for popular shows such as “the Good Wife”, “Silicon Valley”, “Outlander”, “The Blacklist”, and so on.
Once I asked my tech director (AAA game studio) why we wouldn’t use Blender, and his answer was: GPL license.
They need the tech they develop to stay copyrighted. An employee who worked on the code has the right to request the company to sell him the tech he (and other colleagues, IIRC) made, for a “reasonable” price.
And then my answer is: because we need to hire experienced artists, and none of them use Blender. It’s a chicken / egg situation, but that’s how it is in the industry.
I personally got interested by Blender when Cycles arrived. Rendering workflows are great in Blender (viewport preview, tonemap curves, pre-compositing…)
Newbies don’t change shortcuts, experimented users do. I don’t see why people don’t understand that newbies need familiar/intuitive defaults because newbies don’t have enough experience with the software to know what shortcuts will be more efficient for them. Expecting a newbie to customize the software before even knowing it doesn’t make any sense.
coming from max (10+ years) and using blender for about 3 weeks now, i have to say it is was not hard to learn - quite the opposite. But i have to admit, i also was one of those who pick it up every 2 years and drop it as soon as i cant select anything and this strange cursor thing is following me around…
I still don’t use it in production, and for that i have to say - what ‘saved’ 3ds max was simply the good VRay integration. If cycles gets better i am happy to switch.
And regarding big projects / studios: Max is as far as i can tell used by medium sized studios, and i worked briefly on 15+ people teams, and one thing is for sure: with max you are at the mercy of Autodesk, and no one is going to fix your bugs, simply because the codebase is 15 years old and nobody knows how to fix things anymore. (I wonder it still compiles)
Maya may be different in this regard…
This. Even when you are doing tutorials, you have to be aware of what impact your use of shortcuts has on people trying to learn, never mind using custom shortcuts.
When I was learning Blender initially, I stuck with “stock” settings apart from left-select as I came from a Lightwave background. Now, I use pie menus and tweaked shortcuts which work really well for me and speed things up no end. However, it just would of made thea learning process all the more daunting to see all these little menus popping up at first, like “how in Hades am I going to learn all that?”.
If we ever see Blender in large scale productions it’s done everything right. But it’s a big mystery if it will happen since open source development is not driven by real world requirements.
I think this is true too after seeing people talk about Blender in other places. This could be improved though, for example it would be nice if you could right click things in the spacebar search menu and have a add shortcut/change shortcut option for example.
When they have used a few different shortcuts they can probably tell if they want to change the shortcuts. I don’t agree that newbies don’t change shortcuts, that is the first thing I do when learning new software. Customizing should be a process instead of just something you do one time and forget about it. It makes things easier for yourself. Even if the newbies don’t maybe know everything and don’t get everything right from the start they can incorporate the new things they learn in new shortcuts instead of just learning the Blender shortcuts which may or may not make sense.
It could be easier though, there are a few awkward things like the fact that you can’t change the keys application wide so you have to change them for every mode (if you want them to be the same) and the fact that Blender doesn’t tell you when you have conflicting key maps. Still, making sure people know you can customize stuff in Blender will probably help with the “Blender’s ui sucks!” thing.
I’m not any absolute expert on GPL, but there is nothing about selling “for a “reasonable” price.”. Situations vary, but if studio makes changes to Blender and does NOT distribute it, then everything about the changes can be kept in the house. But, if the studio needs to eg. sell the product (binaries), then it must deliver the changes.
I think some clarification is necessary. “fdfxd” has not intentionally opened a new thread to say this. This thread has been split from a discussion in another thread. I think when this happens, the moderator should write a clarifying note in the first message of the thread.
Ok, here is a little true story from me to bring some facts into the discussion - some weeks ago, at a studio here in Berlin, I had to create a realistic tree for a specific VFX shot in Maya. I used particle instancing to scatter shape animated leaf instances on the tree geometry and then rendered this with Vray. Because of the very fine details in the leaves and branches I had to increase the quality in Vray to very high settings which resulted in rendertimes of nearly 20 minutes per frame on a Dual Xeon MacPro. Unfortunately I couldn’t render this on the farm, because of some bugs/incompatiblities the render clients couldn’t load the particle caches. Therefore I had to render about 600 frames locally on one machine which took several days… and in the resulting animation there was still noticable flickering of some details.
Then the VFX supervisor wanted me to add motion not only to the leaves but also to the branches and the deadline was coming closer and closer…
I decided to re-create the whole setup in Blender, using the Sapling addon which allows to simply create a rig and wind motion with only 2 mouse clicks. For the leaves I used hair instancing, which is much easier and quicker to do in Blender than in Maya, so the complete setup was done within one day. The rendertime for one frame was 3.5 minutes on a GTX 970. I could render the whole animation over night on 2 computers and the result looked much better in every aspect… the lighting looked better, no flickering, no noise.
The result can be seen in the very last shot of the German TV movie “Kudamm’ 56”, it’s the tree in the foreground on the right side.
As a remark I want to add, that I have experience with Maya for about 10 years now, while I just started learning Blender some months ago. But in my opinion, Blender is much easier and quicker to understand than Maya and for many (but not every) tasks it can be much more effcicient than Maya.
I cannot believe how a guy “who’s been 20 years in 3d business” can’t find its way around the rightclickselect-issue. I’d say he/she hasn’t a real interest in learning a new app.
Btw, a quick preference intro might be taken in consideration for 2.8 series? I mean a first-launch splash screen (in place of current copy-previous-settings) where to set left/right click, other keymaps, and other basic setting such as metrics, CPU/GPU rendering, autorun scripts, etc…
