You already stated a lot. Yes, any 3D program could be used and being used. But, not as much as broadly like max in all the area you mentioned.
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I’d still like to see some examples. I watched a presentation by a lead character modeler at Blizzard from a few years ago and her emphasis and joy about her team FINALLY finding a programmer who could make custom things they wanted in Max after years of looking, and then the struggle to not let other teams steal him. It sounds to me like there’s a new world of opportunities for Blender addon developers if more big organizations let more of their employees use Blender if they want to.
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You can go to this website, which I found by just googling ( I have no idea how trustworthy this site is)
https://discovery.hgdata.com/product/autodesk-3ds-max
Their data shows that they track ~42 000 companies using 3DsMax (in the United States I guess, not worldwide)
Interestingly the majority of these companies is doing construction.
The other key areas are Business Services (whatever that means), Technical, Manufacturing and Retail.
And this is where the hammer drops:
There is no way in hell that Blender can take away customer from Max in these markets en masse.
Autodesk is way too entrenched in “the Industry” as a whole that you can’t compete with them because they produce all the other tools and of course they depend on interoperability.
Media and Entertainment comes at place 7 and 8 and does not even make up 25%.
This is what many people don’t understand. Autodesk is HUGE in the producing industry; cars, architecture, machines, you name it, whatever it is at one time it was probably touched by an Autodesk tool.
They will, undoubtedly, but they will not exchange Max for Blender, they’ll use it addition and they might even start developing their own stuff for Blender that they keep behind closed doors.
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If we assume that a good percentage of the non-media-and-entertainment activity falls into the category of “making software do something it wasn’t designed to do and struggling to keep our customizations working in updated versions or struggling to keep it working on older operating systems”… I feel like Blender has a really good shot at getting into a position where 10% of the workstations at such a business still have Max installed for the final steps but the other 90% could easily become Blender.
I don’t think it’s prohibited (in VFX at least), especially for people working in assets. As long as everything finds it’s way back into the pipeline it shouldn’t make a difference.
No, i don’t think so because your assumption is flawed.
That would be Blender in this case.
Like I said, take a look at how other Autodesk industry tools tie into 3DsMax and you’ll see that it is a problem that the BF can hardly crack.
The non-media and entertainment companies that use 3DsMax have even less incentive to switch to Blender because it doesn’t cater to their needs and it probably never will.
The main focus of Autodesk as a company (by order of importance and revenue) is:
- Architecture, Engineering and Construction
- CAD
- Manufacturing
- Media and Entertainment
- Other
The Media and Entertainment sector is only representing 6% of the total net revenue.
I won’t be adding any sources this time (is not blender related) but for whoever want the details, you can google “Autodesk fiscal 2021”
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I work for a software company in the construction industry and we purchased Maya for years because it was the only thing that would reliably read VRML and let us make nice marketing renders from it. VRML was the only 3D output our software had for a long time. We finally got off Maya last year and moved to Blender after I wrote an importer for U3D. Because of the file format change(VRML is basically raw polygons where U3D has instancing and construction data has a lot of repetitive 3D), huge imports went from 8+ hours and an extremely laggy interface to a relatively quick 45 minutes to an hour import and a usable interface in Blender.
Blender is getting things like IFC and STEP addons which are big formats in the construction world. These could contribute to some companies moving away from expensive packages to something free like Blender because construction companies are really frugal and always looking to save money. Blender isn’t going to replace AutoCAD or Revit but there are probably smaller companies(and maybe architects adding/renovating existing buildings with IFC files) using things like Maya and 3DSMax for marketing or other visualization purposes that could move like we did.
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Max is included in every single Autodesk collection. The price is not concern for many big companies. The point is that the diverse user base is one of the unique strength of Max. No other program has that. Even Maya, it is only #1 in very small portion of CG industry.
I see this statement again and again and my experience is different. Part of my income comes from working for automobile giants and price is a concern for them. The individual departements do not have endlessly deep pockets and some are happy that they can save the software costs. In my experience Max and Maya are used a lot in the visualiation departements of automobil coroporations but I have seen Blender popping up there since at least 2016. I have used Blender there myself and never had pipeline issues.
I personally agree with you, blender can do most of the things you want. I think people sometimes want to always go for the most famous one. If you work for a big company you sort of need to know maya. But I think that one day blender will be the standard program for all things cg.
Then, how could a small vfx company afford Houdini floating lic? it is 10k to buy. 5k/year to have maintenance. 800/year for a network sim.
If a big company can not afford 150/month. They have different issue. Also having collection means you already have it.
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They need more than one license, they need additional plugins, and they need render nodes. All this stuff adds up and saving on some of these - Blender is free, Blender render nodes are free, blender Addons are dirt cheap - is welcome.
But you’d have to ask somebody who is actually responsible for this kind of stuff. Personally I just freelance and get to see how stuff works inside of companies. I noticed that Blender was ganing traction in big companies and I have often heard employees complaining about not having enough licenses/render nodes and the managers not wanting to buy more because of budget issues.
150/month is less than 3hr of their artist cost. Again if a “big” company have issue with that. They better outsource the entire team to a cheap country.
BTW, Max doesn’t charge render node either. Renderer charges per render node. Yes, you can use Cycle. Then, there are tons of free renderer, too.
I have been in small to big company. I have not seen any single one that has issue with sw cost. But, I do here explicitly “SW cost don’t matter” from IT.
Outsourcing is not possible because of secrecy issues.
You probably need to think of it less as “can’t afford” and more as a “why pay more if there are cheaper alternatives”. These companies are not veteran 3D animation studios with deep integrated pipelines. Their main business is not making high end animations for hollywood films. Their main business is producing stuff and their viz departements only need a DCC app for rendering stills and an animation here and there and Game Engine like Unreal or Unity for the their realtime stuff. The cost of converting their pipeline is not nearly as high as that of high end animation studio.
Also, some of the departements, like the realtime stuff is still in the process of being built up or has been created in recent years, when Blender was allready a viable solution.
So why go with something that costs money, even though the free solution is just as good?
You missed my point. Many of them already have collection which means they are not “pay more”. Also Blender is not “as good” certainly for viz. Considering most CAD model has hundreds thousands parts and many millions poly. Blender has long way to go. It is not about just “having a feature”. The feature need to be production proven and solid. You don’t risk your project and spend money to learn a new tools when there is no proof that something would work “a lot better” than what you have. “It is good enough considering it is free” doesn’t work for companies.
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There is probably no way for either of us to convince the other. You have your experiences I have mine. Since there is no way to prove either way it does not make sense to argue any further.
As even small companies become bigger they jump on better tools like Endnight Games Ltd (with their game, The Forest) for their next game they just jumped ship to Houdini as most assets would benefit more from it and saved a lot of time.
as far as making money goes better tool always wins in the end.
Yet it be Blender or anything else.
But as good as - does. And Blender nails this in many ways. And for a mid to small sized company cost is a big issue. So you use the expensive tools only in the parts of the pipeline that it is necessary to save time. The rest is done with Blender. This is how it works at my company.
That said, I also freelance for a large company. Cost is always an issue. Having enough seats of commercial software is not a given. But training people on something new, or perhaps disrupting a pipeline to implement a new tool is not always the viable option. A lot of thought and planning as well as bureaucratic steps are involved there. So it is not just as simple as “cost is not an issue”. It may or many not be. Or software cost is only a small part of the larger resource picture.
“expensive tools only in the parts of the pipeline that it is necessary to save time” doesn’t save money. It makes pipeline more error prone and fragile. If your pipeline is really departmentalized, it might work. But, then it is not small company anymore.
There are still softwares that cost 10k per seat or even a year. We can talk about cost issue for that kinds of software. But, 150/month? If a company can’t even afford 150/month for their primary tool, I’ll think twice before working for the company.