As mentioned before, the fact that Blender is GPL has definitely hurt Blender’s rate of adoption in larger studios.
The trick though is that it puts the community in a quandary, many here want the GPL to stay so Blender itself doesn’t become a base app. that needs a thousand dollars worth of plugins to really flesh it out, but then people get frustrated at studios not even looking at Blender and technologies that can’t be integrated. The point I’m making here is that we can’t really have it both ways here (a licensing system that ensures a completely free experience and widespread adoption in larger studios).
Regardless of that, we are hearing of small to medium sized studios picking up Blender and helping to achieve what Ton ultimately wanted, that being sponsored development to allow for the creation of functionality and tools that were not possible before. What also might be helping us here is the fact that the small/medium sized studios aren’t as dependent on their own stable of proprietary software to augment the DCC apps.).
That being said, anyone hoping that the current generation of large studios (ILM and Weta) will adopt Blender are delusional, there is no use in the BF trying to target them because they will never use it (not even 15 years from now if Blender can render scenes of billions of polygons almost in realtime). The key is the currently smaller Blender studios becoming big production houses that will ultimately try to place Blender content in the big blockbusters (and I mean in ways that aren’t sneaky and are actually in the meat of the film).
The exponential growth in desktop computing capability has also affected this, I think. A decade ago you wouldn’t dream of doing production for what you could do with a couple of 1080 Ti’s (or online cloud services) today.
It’s worth pointing out that the GPL does actually allow secret in-house plugins.
It merely states that if you give someone the plugin, you have to give them the source etc. But, as long as the plugin never gets published, nobody can force you to do so.
Being open source is Belnder’s biggest problem and its biggest blessing. As a production company, it gives you independence from third parties. Any software bugs or limitations you encounter, you can fix yourself instead of having to wait for someone to do it for you.
The even stronger point is that with opensource someone else might fix it, or add functionality you never thought of before. And if your into coding, you have a finger in the future development (one is free to publish a specific branch on go on from there). (although people usually dont do that, there has been a special fracture version
Not only secret, but linking with GPL incompatible code/libraries. For example an indie studio may create an internal build with the official FBX SDK. Obviously that can never be published.
So blender is used professionally, but mostly it won’t be the primary driver for most studios. One major reason, aside from the GLP issue mentioned above, is how the software works in a multi-software pipeline. As pointed out, the FBX problem is somewhat big.
In Modo I can transfer content, even scenes easily between it and Maya, but toss in Blender and things start to go wrong in between all that.
The good news is that individual artist are picking it up, even some well known ones. With 2.8 that can only increase, especially as they get fed up with autodesk subs or Modo performance hits.
If I were in charge of Blender’s 2.8 direction, and wanted to get Blender into some big name studios… I would target one in particular and understand what they would really want in software (that was geared towards them), then really push it in that direction first. This also means becoming the best at one thing that can introduce it existing pipelines.
This is what 3D Coat did with its retopology tools, as well as its hand painted texturing features. In fact, thats the market I would suggest Blender go for first, extremely good retopology, sculpting and hand painted textures with a substance designer like workflow via nodes. Something that Blizzard would love to have in their pipeline, this would basically make sure it covers a lot of ground while appealing greatly to independent artist who will bring it with them into studios.
Your trolling right ?, there is no GLP issue how many studios write their own software?
Sure some have handy coders but from those few companies…
How many do you think have the source code of Autocad / Maya / solidworks / … etc …
How many of those studios share their code, share their file formats, be open about it (that ends with blender).
Why should Blender be FBX compatible ?, its an addicted market where these days people flee from.
Like your doctor advising you to visit your doctor more, people dont want that.
Instead people realize that there is another world outside and if you like to stay with FBX, oh well i remind those companies who refused to use telephones it was way to modern to them. I have proo they still exist these companies (they never call me). I gues these companies build pipelines now and may eventually learn about something that works without pipes.
Maybe because artists use Blender in conjunction with other programs?
As long as glTF is not included and enabled by default for import export, the current solution is to use FBX.
right now the experimental glTF importer of UE4 4.19 is included but needs activation
and for now only allows the import of Static Meshes, Materials, textures with it.
Unity gets its glTF file format support at the end of the year.
Its save to say that for the next couple months that FBX is needed.
Unfortunately, it’s one of those problems that are very difficult to impossible to fix because of the GPL (the BF can’t use the SDK and has to perform some convoluted reverse-engineering technique, this providing that Autodesk does not make a bunch of changes in the meantime). This is why the BF is really trying to push for support for open formats such as glTF (which I will also note that Alembic and even Collada has gotten a bit of attention as of late according to the commit logs).
Go ahead and click my user name, look at how long I have been around here. Just because you disagree with something or it triggers you (resulting in cognitive dissonance), it does not make it “trolling”, no more than your response in return is “trolling”.
That said:
There is a GPL issue. There has always been one, and there is a reason why Cycles was changed to Apache 2.0 (license). This is not a debatable subject at this point, it really limits the software. It is possible to be both open and not be restricted in what can be used with the said software, only it requires a different license type. Its too late at this point for Blender, as Ton and co have mentioned in the past, because they would have to get permission from every single person who contributed to its development. Thus, the GPL is an issue, its a ball and chain. There are simply better licenses out there for open source software, and its a shame Blender cannot easily adopt them.
Why should Blender be FBX compatible? I get the impression you do not work professionally or at the very least, have worked in a studio, with clients, all who would generally use different software packages. I don’t care what emotional reaction some may get over the idea of FBX or Autodesk (not a fan myself) or whatever, for the artist, the professional, the client… they only care about what works, what gets the job done. FBX is a requirement, if that changes in the future…then great, but until then don’t think that crippling software for ideological reasons is some how smart. Its not.
If you drop the passive aggressive responses, and talk like a normal, mature, working adult. You can, surprisingly, get more constructive responses back, and in turn actually contribute something to a thread. Remember, Blender had a horrible image in the past because of off-putting fanboy behavior, don’t be one of those guys. Blender is finally getting past that stage.
From what I am seeing, it looks like it might. Modo 12 already has it as one of the default material types. Its addition into software seems to be moving long quickly…
Unless you thought BGE is a game engine thats great, i don’t see why GPL would be a problem.
but i can’t imagine serious game developers using BGE, and FBX even within its own branch of application is a poor standard to switch applications and version, compare that to open formats.
I usually talk to my customer if he has something, small talks (avoid fbx) reduce a lot of work in my area.
I’m not into gaming, those who are probably will like Armory to solve the gaming-blender issue.
So why does a Modo user bring up Blender-GPL as a problem?
Except he never mentioned the idea of using the BGE (and the engine itself is gone now so no one will use it in 2.8).
Even Ton has reportedly said that the GPL is not the best option for a game engine (because of how it allows people to get the source of your game if they bought it, which they can legally re-skin and and give away for free).
Your comment “So why does a Modo user bring up Blender-GPL as a problem?” is completely unnecessary and it only undermines any argument you are trying to make. It not only makes assumptions about the user but implies an “us vs them” situation with regards to the software.
Stop it.
It does more harm than good.
This was written for you, its a good read if you want to boost Blender’s image rather than damage it: How to Be a Positive Member of the Blender Community (don't be a fanboy)
BGE? Irrelevant. I didn’t even mention it, nor do I care about it. Lets not make assumptions to fulfill confirmation biases or seek to create a straw man to target. This thread is not even strictly about GPL, or my use of X software for that matter,…please try not to shift it in a completely irrelevant direction.
Since this thread is not about GPL on its own, lets get this out of the way so that it doesn’t have to go on ad infinitum. Going back to my post regarding GPL, I clearly stated this:
Thus, it is not that open source is bad, but that GPL is not a good license type for Blender and the industry/market it is part of…especially as it relates to future growth potential of Blender. As Ton himself stated, “Blender’s GNU GPL license is sometimes considered restrictive, since we can’t link to or include non-GPL-compliant software.”
I ask again why Cycles would move to Apache 2.0 if GPL is the ideal choice? Why would MIT be the most common open source license type (over double that of GPL)? Developers are NOT making these choices for arbitrary reasons.
For the sake of articulation, I’ll post what Lawyer Joseph Morris said regarding the GPL license:
GPL is risky for a lot of companies, many who would also be developing their own closed source tech. Take Allegorithmic and their creation of “Substances” for example. It can safely be integrated into Maya, Modo, Unreal Engine, Unity…ect but then it gets tricky if Blender users want to see a plugin for it in Blender. GPL is then a bigger deterrent rather than an incentive. It makes it more difficult to play nice with everything that exist in our industry, and instead isolates it into a world of its own to varying degrees. Do you want Blender to exist within a bubble?
You can be all for open source software/“open formats”, but it would be simply foolish to think that the world of open source is some how tied to GPL and GPL only. OpenCOLLADA for example is licensed under MIT. Again this is not being done for no reason. If you want more software to adopt “open formats”, do you think they can or will if they were licensed under GPL?
Use your head. Know the difference. Be professional.
I’m professional, may I remind that I never put in that topic in, although i do think GPL was and still is the right choice. Blender is open-source capitalized. Its not that many years back that the .doc standard was commercialized, it took EU government actions to push companies into embarrassing open standards. GPL is what keeps Blender Blender as Joseph Moris explained very well.
Otherwise Modo would become commercial makeover of blender. As for Cycles well it works with Blender, Collada is integrated in Blender too. A GPL umbrella construct is perfectly in place here. “Integration”, is is not a dead road for Blender, the way those companies choose to react to Blender is their choice. I don’t blame people either for making use of it, (though i hate to see people starting GPL as a “pain” topic), just understand where GPL comes from.
Well professionals can make all the difference here, lead your industry.
Thought the cost of an ecosystem informs what third parties make apps / addons / plugins for. If willingly haemorrhaging money was as synonymous with Blender users as say those of Autodesk or Apple poducts devs would risk it / figure it out. It’s a free app… besides, whose got spending data that they’d share with potential competitors?
Couldn’t you create essentially a new source code section as a separate product to blender with a different license better suited to allow commercial apps to plug in, made by blender for blender as a specific plugin system, Even better would be a plugin and post process system.
