This put a smile on my face.
Many people say that Blender is not industry-standard, but job postings in the industry are starting to class it as such.
Fingers crossed there will soon be more jobs which take advantage of all the time we’ve all spent learning Blender.
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I always wondered about when people claim that blender is not industry standard.
There is no standarization organisation like ISO for this… it’s just “the most used ones”… for some people “the only known ones”… and still sometimes there is some mass exodus from some industry standard apps when they raise the price or change to subscription or are paid to another company… 
There are also differences in “industry”: modelling (even for Games, TV, Movie ) , simulation ( as “effect”, or documentation), animation (again G, T, M), text and logo animation, still images, art and more…
It’s just a tool.
And for example any luxus car would be more comfortable to bring me to my destination. If i could afford it… And sometimes using any other “tool” (vehicle) might bring me faster there… 
Also funny when people send me an Email (and it is in fact just simple text) and do it in the newest MS-Word format and wonder why i can’t read it.
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Well Industry Standard is a buzzword and far too often used to just bash a certain software or functionality or its read as that even if the author didnt use it like that. Its a bit sad as its by itself rather just describing what the current widespread tools in a specific industry are ( so it exists in a context), or when used for specific features what kind of functionality is implemented comparably in a wide range of tools, what can really ease things for people who need to use such a range of tools for their work. I think its good not to put any emotion into it. Generally it can be really helpful and benefitial if a software tries to align to existing standards if possible.
Your usecase there is a positive example though and hey if it makes you happy that blender is amongst them, its even better. 
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Definition of industry-standard is quite simple really.
- When there are changes in Blender I get scared and I claim Blender will never be industry-standard with those changes and that amount of changes.
- When there are no changes in Blender I claim Blender will never be industry-standard unless they change whole lot of things in a second.
BlenderArtists definition for you.
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I dont think thats the industry standard definition of industry standard.
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I have been getting the impression that BlenderArtists forum threads are harder on the Blender’s progress (or lack thereof) than the actual industries that use Blender at this point. Kind of goes to show how much we tend to nitpick something we know more deeply than most–or, how fanbases are generally harder on the stuff they otherwise like compared to casual fans, in this case people who merely enjoy that Blender is a low-cost alternative to Maya or 3DS Max and don’t go much deeper than that.
There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, at least someone is pushing the Blender Foundation to not get complacent and continue developing crucial updates in an attempt to be at least somewhat on par with Maya, 3DS Max, and maybe ZBrush.
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Additionally i always wonder about the level of comparison between blender and “other” 3D software…
- blender: open source and free
- everything else: paid; maybe even subscription based
Conclusion: the free one has to get better…
Sometimes also this: “has to better to win a better share in the market”. 
– It is not competing on any market… because it’s free… 
This is like: my neigbour is taking me in his car to the next town for free… but he has to make his car a bit more comfortable and maybe serve also some drinking on the tour… so he can compare better on the market.
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Talk to anyone actually in the industry and they’ll tell you hiw they use years old version of paid software because of certain reasons, but Blender community is under the impression that industry standard means THE BEST and LATEST, rather than something industry uses.
Most people in the industry like Blender and tell you how software doesnt matter that much,how they like to play with it. But Blender community thinks they hate us and look down.
Its an insecurity. People require approval from upstairs to feel better about their choice
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I can’t remember where I heard/read this, but my understanding is that “the industry” prefer Maya, 3DS etc because those are big companies which can provide technical assistance. They have staff ready to answer phones to help Disney or whoever solve a problem. Says a lot about the quality of these expensive “industry-standard” applications, doesn’t it!
@nickberckley I have to disagree with you about the “best and latest” statement. But just from my personal experience. I regularly check the job market, but seldom see Blender mentioned as one of the recognised skills. It’s always 3DS or Maya. That’s what creates my perception of “industry-standard”. The things that the industry is asking for most often.
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Based on all of the complaints lately and the existence of people who are only here now to talk about how Blender does everything wrong and to bash its development, you would think there will soon be a fork that will take much of the community with it and send the BF on a path to where it closes its doors for good.
Bashing the BF is not going to light a fire under their feet and change their priorities, but rather reinforce the idea that BA is just useless noise that can be ignored.
There’s certainly such a thing as “industry standard” when it comes to software, and it’s nothing to do with ISO or other comprehensive grading methods.
It simply means that it regularly used in industry by a wide range and number of professionals, who have agreed (whether they use it or not) that the software performs to a level that is expected, and has a large enough professional userbase that it’s not considered a niche product.
An easy example is the Blender VSE. It lacks common tools and work methods that professional editors consider to be key features for production. Due to this and other factors, it isn’t usually the first choice they’d want to use, and thus is not standardly used in the industry for video editing compared to Avid, Premiere, Davinci or (perhaps) Final Cut (not sure what the current state of FC is, since apple blew up their own software years ago.)
Another: right click select is not, and never was industry standard. Doesn’t matter how much blender users loved it, or whatever advantage it gave… in the rest of the world of computing, the left button is the standard.
Is Blender overall an industry standard? It’s certainly closer today than it was 20 years ago. And depending on your own situation, it might not even matter…as the label doesn’t indicate whether or not it can nicely accomplish a task for a particular user.
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Yeah “industry standard” is quite a confusing term. Sometimes it’s about a feature, like UDIM is the industry standard for UV meaning it’s widely used among professional artists.
Sometime it’s about the various software that can be used for 3D, sometime it’s about the most used software like Nuke is the industry standard for compositing, even if probably fusion and flame also got the same main industry standard features…
And of course, this asks what industry we’re talking about, since video game is pretty different from arch-viz…
Anyway, like @PMDesigns I’m quite pleased to see blender more and more adopted as a “standard” software… Since for some time it’s like there where the industry standard tools,and blender… That makes me thinking about what isn’t considered standard nowadays 
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I should probably divulge that I actually use a fork called B4Artists partly because its interface plays nicer with the “industry-standard” keymaps I learned back in college (basically, the Maya hotkeys for navigating 3D space, i.e. pressing E to rotate a mesh, pressing Alt-left click to rotate around the entire 3D space). I still donate to the Blender Foundation, since the creators of B4Artists seemed to have gotten rid of their own “Donate” button. That may complicate this discussion a bit, sorry…
I use a fork myself 
Not due to hotkey familiarity, but for shading options. I tried BFA the first week I tried blender, and I like what they’re doing over there. There’s something to be said for making software more approachable to people who are already familiar with other applications, and BFA does nice things in that area.
Ive definitely changed the blender nav key/mouse assignment though. I can’t undo years of Max hand memory.
Blender is a huge deal in the indie space, because is literally what everybody uses.
Usually is from indie game developers and then indie artists who sell assets or do commision-based work.
In this case you can assume that there is a soft blending of hobbyist-indie-pro type of use that goes into this, that is very natural and organic.
On the other hand is definitely truth, that perhaps Blender could possibly find some limited usage for specific tasks at high-end studios. But not exactly that it would become a core and crucial tool for the entire pipeline stack. (There were quite a few high-end studios who used Blender exclusively, it was all in the news some years back ago, but lately not so much is mentioned. I haven’t learnt anything new recently…)
As for example one very important milestone that Blender achieved, was that it had a very groundbreaking 3D sketch mode (GreasePencil) and that feature alone Blender could enter all highend productions all over the place.
Truth is that Autodesk probably didn’t like this outcome and just a few months ago they ripped grease pencil from Blender and inserted into Maya, probably this was a strategic move to exclude any alternative 3D software existing. All software in the pipeline would be Autodesk based from end-to-end.
All of these I am talking about are good stuff and such, but reality is that Blender still needs a new vision and a new strategy in order to catch up. This perhaps could be based on the new upcoming era of Web3.0 economy and GIG-economy, rather than high-end AAA productions (20 years ago this was the dream of Blender – but now we are in an entirely different era).
Blender’s new direction could just as well simply be starting work on the development projects and promises they made on devtalk and on the code blog. They talked a good game but then let old-school FOSS decision making take over and follow it up with no intention to actually keep their word.
The BF overall has done well with the progress Blender has made (Everything Nodes has been a gamechanger among other big enhancements), but there has been a lot of unforced errors on the way that all but crippled their ability to attract larger studios. Who could forget for instance how during the development of 2.8, the Blender dev. team was the only team in the industry that managed to make subdivision surfaces slower and more prone to crashing after integrating the OpenSubDiv library (to the point where in hindsight it was probably a mistake on the part of Dreamworks to change the license to something compatible with the GPL). A commercial company who thought such a regression was okay to ship would likely go through a round of firings and perhaps even a CEO change.
Don’t get me wrong, Blender by now is seeing a lot of things related to development go right, but let us not pretend that Autodesk, Maxon, and others conspiring against Blender is the reason why it is not being used in most larger studios.
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Well it seems more aimed at annotation than anything, I don’t think you can use that to mix 2D and 3D animation and render that. Not sure you can convert that to actual geometry like it’s going to be the case with GP3 and geometry nodes.
Well, IMO they first need to finish what they just started. Once projects like GP3, Eevee-next, animation 2025 , and all the physics / particles systems turned into nodes , we’ll have a pretty powerful and modern software in many areas.
In the meantime blender never reached it’s peak yet, as it still tends to be used more and more on bigger projects, this is a natural evolution that takes time.
It’s obvious that 2.5 is pretty much less usable in bigger projects than 2.8 and I’m sure in 5/10 years the range of projects than can be done with blender is very likely to spread even more… it’s just that this natural evolution takes time…
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Blender is quietly becoming the go-to software across various industries, primarily for modeling, and sometimes for lighting and rendering. It’s amusing when individuals who aren’t closely following top artists or the making of leading movies and games make dismissive claims about Blender. In many of these videos, you’ll notice Blender’s interface partially obscured by the design plan or the entire 3D scene recorded in one of the corners. Occasionally, only Blender and Photoshop are listed in the software used section on Artstation. Even the recently released movies like ‘The Creator’ and ‘Honor of Kings’ animated series have most of their models created with Blender. There’s much more to discover about Blender, which can change your perception and usage of it. The reason why some parts of the UI interface are covered while other software remains clearly visible in full screen is puzzling. I no longer worry about whether Blender is an industry standard because I know it is. Many of these individuals don’t even engage with the Blender community by sharing their production works. Consider this: Blender developers themselves are aware that most industry professionals use Blender in their projects.
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This sort of thing is not limited to Blender, Linux itself is an experimental development platform, many things that are developed in open source find their way to commercial software.
There are Linux distributions that have their own paid versions, I use Open Suse, Open Suse could be considered the “alpha” version of Suse commercial.
I for one hope that Blender stays as it is in terms of not being “industry Standard”, Blenders development is prepared to take risks and go in directions that are not standard. I find it fascinating that such a small group of developers is able to nudge itself into the world of big business competitors the way it is doing.
There is a lot of talk about Blender in the “industry”, not all good but not all bad either. Blender has gone from the “no go- don’t touch” to “hmm, that is interesting”.
“Getting there”, I do not know but it certainly is somewhere, and for the moment is not going to disappear, Blender evolves and has done at a fast rate since I started using it.
There is only one way to go and that is forwards.
I’m assuming the relevant “Industry” are VFX/Game studios where projects require collaborative teams, ie a pipeline. The lone wolf jobs with a video or image deliverable are largely tool agnostic and nobody cares how we got there.
Anyways, if there’s a pipeline, the cogwheels need to mesh (pun intended).
(IMHO) Blender as a central cog isn’t “quite there yet”, if ever, because:
- Studios with inhouse add-ons for Maya/3DS aren’t going to rebuild them for Blender - you can call this generational advantage, but it is what it is.
- (You’ve mentioned this) SLAs for someone to point the finger at when there’s a show-stopping bug/limitation - “it’ll be in the next version” doesn’t quite cut it.
- Arguable, but the performance required for large scale projects - anyone who has tried using a 4D noise texture with random W will relate.
The flip side of the coin is, if all these big names were (legally) $0 software fees, would Blender have a niche to appeal to?
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