Is Blender Looked Down on Because It's Free?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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If by no Plugin API, I assume you mean a native plugin API? As in: no python or python as glue paradigm?

That has been my one major annoyances with Blender over the years. Gotta have many versions of it installed, or built myself, because of no native plugin API. I can tolerate the minor quirks, the right-click select, microscopic icons, no colored wireframes, etc., but no native plugin API is the biggest problem.

What artist with a goal of completing their craft wants to deal with applying patches, coding and building the software just to get the functionality they want? All other major 3D packages have a native plugin API. The ability to extend the software in a performance oriented way without rebuilding the whole thing.

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We talk with developers on other ocasion and they tell that nobody seems to want to implement and maintain an API.

We talked about modifiers, that you can’t implement a new modifier without compile blender and nobody want to make it, except few users.

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For my 2c worth, as a recent new Blender user, how about we forget what it can’t do and just focus on making it better at what it does do. The rest will follow in time.

Places like Disney, Sony, ILM, Weta, Pixar, etc, etc aren’t going to change any time soon, for a whole mass of reasons, so lets no worry about it. Instead, the focus should be more on single artists, new studios and actually creating a system that can compete. If over time, a new VFX house can get the job done and the client happy using Blender, at a cheaper price then the ‘big boys’ (due to partly not having to spend 10k per seat for the software tools), then that’s what will slowly change things and make all take notice.

Lets face it, Agent 327 is very good and holds up extremely well against products from Pixar/Disney and others. As such, if one was going to produce such a film and didn’t have all the ‘legacy baggage’ of Pixar/Disney, etc, what would stop you from using Blender or make you more likely to use Maya as the central software in such a production?

Identifying those issues and working towards addressing them, would have to result in greater use of Blender and just maybe make the ‘big boys’ stand up and take a bit more notice.

65

I gotta ask when you guys post some of these “provocative” threads is it to start a real discussion or to mine views for your YouTube channels. I almost feel like am being played.

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Both things are incompatible. You must talk about blender can’t do to know what stop people from using blender in production.

You cannot address a problem without debate about limitations and things that blender can’t do.

67

From my experience’s. Blender is still looked down on a little bit with some in the industry. As in it’s the free one. But this is changing very fast. And from what I’ve encountered industry wise, recently at least. The people it is most highly respected by tend to be the people who are most clued up on 3D animation and CGI. Those I encountered who are still a bit suspicious of Blender tend to not be hands on content creators and often of the mindset that everything and anything 3D needs to be made in Maya because it’s the best one and what was used for Lord Of The Rings.

But I think it gets forgotten a bit on threads like these that Blender is already, right now … ( … up there … ) and doing really well. It’s currently being used as the core 3D app in several large scale studio animation and VFX productions around the world. Just the other day I heard first hand of an animation Studio in France that had just switched almost their entire 3D animation pipeline over to a Blender centric workflow.
At the last place I was at where we tried to integrate Blender into a pipeline the things holding it back a little were the Python version it was using as well as Alembic integration needing a bit more work. Also a lack of a clear place to go for that sort of tech support. Although the Institute guys did get back to us.

But all of these things are getting worked on now and a lot of attention being given to studio integration issues. It looks as if the Cloud could become a great technical support center. A shared pipeline system is being worked on that can easily be adapted by all. As opposed to to the internal and highly customized one off pipeline solutions used by the open movies in the past. So I can’t see any big problems right now. I feel very optimistic about Blenders future.

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Simple, most mid-size to large studios have spent a great deal of time and money in building their pipelines, everything is coded in house, it works, so they have no intention, or interest, in changing them, and lets be franks, Blender is great, but it cant handle huge scenes like those used in movies special effects these days.

Integration is key, most high end render engine, like RMan, Arnold, and the such, have poorly integrated plugins for Blender, and Cycles is not mature enough yet to handle huge renders.

Houdini is making strives in game development right now, because of its procedural nature and its Houdini Engine, which lets Houdini procedural assets load directly into other 3D software and game engines, Blender just cant compete with that at the moment.

And the list goes on…

Blender is perfect for small studios and small to medium size project, which is fine by me!

69

True the big data thing still seems to a problem.

I think possibly comparisons with other 3D software can be a bit distorting as well. Blender has very much followed it’s own course and is it’s own unique thing in so many ways. I just did a couple of days of pre viz working at a London studio in house. I came in with Blender on a USB and simply set myself up on a spare office PC.

It’s like carrying a little mini production facility around in your pocket. I’ve never known anything else quite like it. Especially for the immense feeling of freedom and flexibility. It’s not simply having a 3D app to carry with you. There is a video editor and a compositor in there as well as main features. And none of it is locked up on to a single machine or a license server. You are free to carry it around and work with it anywhere. Forgotten the USB ? Just download it again. One of the assets for Monday morning has a last min problem but don’t want to stay late on a Friday ? Just chuck it on the stick and check it out later at home.
Which I just did :o

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Neither can max or maya! its why things like Katana exist

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I haven’t read all the replies in this thread so sorry if I am repeating something someone said already, but the video is mostly missing the most important point:

To many people, and especially large and high end studio, quality and efficiency matters.

Picking a software to use is not just a matter of checking off “does have” checkboxes.

1, The money saved by using free software compared to let’s say Max and its plugins is negligible compared to amount of additional money that has to be paid to for the artist’s time if he/she uses inefficient workflows.

2, Movie directors care only about visual quality. So VFX studios and high end freelancers have to choose not the cheapest piece of software, but one capable of outputting the best quality.

Yes, Blender has a lot of features in one, but:

  • It can not do large scale scene assembly nearly as quickly and efficiently as 3ds Max (no proxies, no effective scattering solution like forestpack - don’t even dare to bring up scattering with particle/hair system, lack of proper layer management until 2.8, no proper material manager, etc…)

  • It can not shade as efficiently as 3ds Max

  • It can not sculpt nearly as well as Zbrush

  • It can not simulate fire and smoke nearly as good as PhoenixFD or FumeFX

  • It can not do fluid simulation nearly as well as PhoenixFD or Realflow

  • It can not edit video as well as Premiere or Resolve.

  • It can not comp as well as Nuke or Fusion

  • It can not texture paint as well as Substance Painter or 3Dcoat

  • It can not rig and animate as well as Maya.

  • It does not have a single properly integrated rendering engine that can render interiors in reasonable time (lack of secondary indirect illumination caching)

  • It does not have a single properly integrate rendering engine that has a proper toolset for integrating CG elements into a real world footage.

  • Up until recently, it did not support Alembic necessary for most pipelines

  • The GPL licence does not allow you extend it on C++ level without having to make that proprietary tool opensource. This is unacceptable for many studios, as they don’t want to give their advantage they invested a lot of money in to develop to their competitors for free.

Blender has a lot of tools that fall into a “good enough” category, but if you are high end freelancer or a significant VFX studio, you can not afford to be just good enough, and you can not afford to use just good enough tools, because using the best in class tools will ultimately come cheaper by saving you a lot more time. Once you reach certain skill and/or quality level, you can easily manage to make profit out of the investment into the best in class software, because you can utilize it to its full potential, and land a jobs that are paid by order of magnitude better than the “just good enough” jobs.

People often don’t realize how minuscule are the software cost expenses for the large studios compared to the expenses for employee salaries. Artists time is the most valuable commodity, so by giving them the very best tool to do the job, not the cheapest one, they can achieve a lot more with their time, so you ultimately save the money.

Of course I am not saying Blender is not mediocre at everything. For example, it’s one of the best modelers around, so for modeling specifically, I can easily imagine it paying off in a large VFX and game studios. I myself use it as a modeler these days, but I can not imagine ever using it for a large VFX scene assembly.

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@rawlanche

We can tell that blender is only really perfect for modeling, retopo and paint classic textures. COntent creation. And all this part are the abandoned since a lot of time.

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Hi Rawalanche.

I couldn’t help but comment on some of your points. Please take this in the spirit of good natured debate. But I thought you were being a bit harsh on poor old Blender there.

Anyway all the best.

1 ‘ Can’t sculpt as well as ZBrush : ‘

ZBrush is a specialist sculpting and hi res modeling app. And also it lives away by itself on Planet ZBrush. There is nothing else comparable to it. But it’s most commonly used in conjunction with other 3D hub apps like Blender Max and Maya. Anyway Blender’s sculpting tool set is still pretty great. And is stable and usable. It’s not ZBrush. But then nothing else is.

2 ‘ Can’t texture paint as well as 3D Coat and Substance : ‘

These are both highly evolved boutique and narrowly focused specialist 3D apps designed to work alongside and compliment central hub apps like Blender Max and Maya. Although Barnstorm VFX used Blender as the main 3D modeling animation and rendering app for the VFX work on ’ Man In The High Castle ’ I think they used Substance Painter to texture most of the 3D assets.

3 ‘ It can not do large scale scene assembly nearly as quickly and efficiently as 3ds Max :’

I have years and years of direct experience using Max in production as well as owning a commercial license subscription of it for very many years. I’ve overseen the pipelines of several FMV cut scene and small scale animation productions using Max and also worked on many TV VFX productions with it.
I loved Max in many ways. But as far as I know Max does still not have a reliable referencing system for character rigs and other complex and vital scene hierarchy’s. It’s still not good at talking and assembling across a studio pipeline and this caused many problems and funky workarounds for me in the past. Blender certainly does have a solid scene referencing system. And although there is room for improvement it is very robust and reliable and simple to use. Far ahead of anything I remember in Max. And it’s set to get much better with the new Dependency Graph from most accounts.

4 ‘ It can not rig and animate as well as Maya : ‘

How would you exactly define what is rigging and animating well in this context ? Also software doesn’t animate, people do. From my experience of working with the others Blenders rigging and animation tool set is superb. It is hugely flexible and adaptable and getting better all the time. It is also even developing it’s own unique features and innovation’s in these area’s.
With softimage being taken off the field and no longer developed. Blender actually appears to be the main character animation software out there next to Maya now. Is there any other major 3D hub app apart from Blender and Maya that are investing so much effort into character animation ? Possibly Houdini ? But as far as I can see it’s mainly between Blender and Maya right now.

5 ‘ It can not comp as well as Nuke or Fusion’ :

Again two specialist apps. But it can certainly do the job if needed. There was a talk at one of the Blender conferences a couple of years back from a TV VFX producer who uses Blender to track and composite all the time.

6 I mentioned Alembic integration in my comments. That’s getting a lot of attention now.

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@Toka

Well, you are basically just confirming what I said.

Regarding 1, 2, and 4… That’s exactly what I am saying, the software I am comparing Blender to are highly evolved and specialist packages, and that is exactly the point. My post is a reply to the video in the very first post on this thread, which is asking questions about why isn’t Blender used by high end artists and big VFX studios so much. I am giving an answer as to why. Because high end users and studios prioritize the best efficiency and the best output quality, because they know how to turn it into a profit.

Even if Zbrush would be only 10% better sculpting package than Blender, therefore the artist would sculpt only 10% faster in Zbrush compared to blender, and the output would be only mere 10% better, it still pays off. Let’s say the guy is paid $6000/month (high artist in a high end studio). If the job takes him just 10% more time, then his time already costs $6600/month, and on top of that, the result comes out 10% worse. Given that Zbrush licence costs $795, such an investment will pay off in a just a little over a single month for a high end studio employing a competent artist.

You are arguing a point I have never made. I never said I expect Blender to match up to a specialized pieces of software. I don’t. I find Blender extremely valuable for what it is.

My post was solely a reply to Bugzilla’s video, where he is literally asking “If Blender has all the features required for production, then why don’t all the studios use it, when it’s free?” And he then proceeds to speculate that it’s because of prejudice about free software. To that, I am arguing that the reason is not a prejudice to a free software, but that high end studios and high end artists prioritize quality and efficiency above everything else.

As for your point #3, by complexity, I don’t mean referencing rigs, I mean literal scene complexity. Blender currently simply does not posses a toolset to assemble scene like this https://www.artstation.com/artwork/JVZra , and then render it in a single pass with all elements together in a reasonable time while at the same time retaining fluid and manageable viewport performance:

Regarding point #4, it’s very easy to define what’s rigging and animating well. If Blender was equally good or better at rigging an animation than Maya, every single artist using Maya would be using Blender. It would make absolutely no economical sense to do otherwise, if the quality and efficiency was 1:1. If you were offered two exact same cars, one for free and one for $50k, you’d definitely pick the free one. If on the other hand, your goal was to win a race with $200k first place reward, and you were offered a free car with max speed of 220km/h or $50k car that’s only 10% faster (242km/h), you’d definitely pay those $50k for just 10% faster car :slight_smile:

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Hi Rawalanch.

I think you might be misinterpreting some of my points as well. Blender is a major 3D hub app. Like Max and Maya. Most of these more narrowly focused specialist apps are designed to work alongside and compliment 3D hub apps like Blender. So in a Blender based pipeline they would most likely still be used for some areas. Exactly as they would in a Max and Maya pipeline.

As for quality and efficiency. They all have their own annoyances and quirks. All of the apps.
And jumping between apps can be a bit of a workflow drag as well.
The fact that Blender has so much in one place is a huge advantage and unique feature and should not be underestimated.

’ If Blender was equally good or better at rigging an animation than Maya, every single artist using Maya would be using Blender. ’ Sorry but this is quite an over simplification to put it mildly. But anyway Blender is already good at rigging and character animation.

Improved viewport performance is getting worked on for 2.8.

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@Toka

I never said other apps are perfect either. Sure, they all have annoyances. 3ds Max, which I’ve used a lot has tons of annoyances, some of them very serious. In fact they are reason I use Blender for modeling these days. I also never disagreed that the fact Blender has a very robust feature set is a great thing, it definitely is.

But regardless of that, even if other software has annoyances and quirks, as you have said, that still doesn’t mean its efficiency and output quality in specific areas can not be quantified. It can, easily. Based on the proportions of people choosing it for a given task, and based on the average quality level users output with it for a given task.

Yes, my point about Maya is indeed an oversimplification, you are right about that, but the general idea still stands. If the Blender was as good, or even as close as good, then the proportion of the users would be at the very least significantly shifted to the current state. Blender is very good at animation, I don’t deny that, but now I am making a full circle back to my original statement. For high end studios and high end artists, efficiency and quality is the priority, so even if Blender was just those 10% worse or slower at these tasks, Maya would pay off more.

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Toka no single DCC tool out there can beat that list of apps all in one package! they are several narrow focussed specialist apps.
That blender can do all of these things and even warrant comparison is quite the achievement.

Not everything has to be at “best in field” quality to be useful. WHat are the nearest rival apps to that list? blender actually does pretty well against 2nd place and in some ways can compete and surpass the top apps! Is Max a substandard tool because Maya beats it at animation? Are people using max for animation? etc etc!

For modelling I’d take blender over max and maya anyday. FOr sketch sculpting its as good as or better than dynamesh. Better than mudbox. Obviously Zbrush wins in depth and breadth of feature set for finishing but hey!

It seems churlish to think that blender is only useful if it beats everything out there. It’s already good enough to compete well with all the general purpose apps. Given C4d is better for motion graphics, Max a better for architecture, maya for animation… what does that matter?

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By all means, being 10 percent worse than the best is actually a major achievement for a FOSS project (considering the resources available). That is also a major boon for hobbyists who, until recent years, could not easily create work that resembles what professional artists do in their commercial apps.

Others have pointed out in the past that Blender’s future lies in increased use in small to medium sized studios (as it is absolutely a sure thing that the likes of ILM and Weta will never pick it up for any spot in the pipeline, even if everything gets overhauled during the 2.8x series).

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I don’t deny that either. I agree with it. I think the main confusion, which caused the ongoing discussion is that my first post in this thread was not a reaction to any of the previous discussion, but just to the video in the original post.

The question asked was “Why don’t major film and game studios use Blender?” and Bugzilla then proceeded to present his assumptions. My post was reaction to those assumptions in that video, not to the replies in this thread. I was simply pointing out that all of his 5 points together do not attribute to the fact that Blender is underused in major studios nearly as much as the reason that major studios simply prioritize efficiency and quality over monetary investment in software.

Major studios are major because they produce the best quality work out there on an unprecedented scale. And they produce it, in part, by making sure the tools they utilize are the ones that can deliver the absolutely highest quality and highest efficiency, regardless of if the price/value ratio of the software is good or bad. Blender is incomparably better than any of the Autodesk’s products when it comes to price/value ratio, but that’s just not what major studios care about.

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More or less, I take Bugzilla’s videos with a grain of salt (because they have gotten a reputation for stirring the pot a bit whenever he brings his latest episode to BA). He also posts these on CGsociety as well, and people can get pretty emotional over there if they hear anything trying to sing the praises of Blender without any backup to the points.

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Hey yes. I totally agree on this.

As for modeling. Agree there too. Blender is the best and most efficient poly modeller I personally have used and know of.

Blender has only started to get fully production ready from an animation and VFX studio standpoint in the last few years anyway. And it’s also clearly always been embarked on it’s own very individual and unique course. But it has already become so ideally suited for freelancers and small studio set ups. So that’s why I find a lot of these sorts of discussions a bit confusing. It’s already increasingly being taken up and adopted and used in the industry as we speak. I don’t know what the big issue is. Apart from discussing where it could improve.

I think this … better … word is confusing. What does it mean ? Better how ? From everything I have gathered from reading on forums and also direct experience. Blender’s main stumbling block from a studio pipeline perspective is simply plugging it into an established studio system and getting tech support and guidance for something like that.
Not really anything to do with the interface or the right click select controversy. And certainly nothing to do with the standard of the tools. Which is pretty great in so many areas anyway. That’s why it’s so good to hear that there is a serious effort now to focus on pipeline issues.