Making Blender More Accessible to 3d Pros

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
21

Some nice ideas in the last few posts.

Let me see if I got the main ideas. To make Blender more accessible to 3D pros we need to:

  1. Identify specific areas that Blender’s functionality needs to be extended to make it a more appealing solution to a commercial graphics studio. Perhaps as a community making an effort to find out what perceived “shortcomings” the software has.

  2. Submit the refinements identified in point 1 to the coders, if possible describing how the feature would work, how it would be used, screen mock-ups, any details possible…

  3. Have a “crossover” section of the website & further documentation to help “pro’s” coming from another software background to get up to speed and producing with Blender relatively quick & easy. This would require some assistance from individuals familiar with both Blender and these other 3D apps - and specifically their real-world professional use.

In addition to the above that you all stated, how about this:

It is highly unlikely that any commercial studio that has invested it’s time and money in another software package and related training, is going to switch over completely to Blender at it’s current state. I don’t think any of us could give them a reason to do so that would make immediate financial sense.

What we can do is identify Blender’s strong point(s), which I am not familiar enough with the software or the industry to do. Once we identify it’s strong point(s) we need to introduce the software to those professionals from the angle “We know you already use some other software, but next time you are doing X - give Blender a try - it will help you complete the project (faster | better | cheaper | whatever ), in fact we have even put together this helpful information to show you how. What is more, we have a community of experts (perhaps a pre-chosen team of Blender know-it-alls) that are going to help make sure your questions are answered if you run into a road block.”

That I think is what it is going to take to win over professionals. You get business people’s attention by showing them how something will either save them significant money or make them significant money. Their has to be potential return, while at the same time we need to reduce the apparent risk (not being able to deliver their project on time, etc).

If we could use that angle to “get Blender’s foot in the door” - perhaps such relationships could then grow to getting additional feedback, such as:

“Hey, I would like to use Blender for this project we have coming up - but I would need it to do this…”

I don’t know. Just thinking out loud. Sorry about the length.

22

Firstly, I’d like to point out my opinion, that these days distinctions of commercial/amateur/etc. in the CG industry are becoming more and more meaningless. One only needs to look at the quality of work in cgtalk, or in these forums here to see that in a lot of cases, the only difference between ‘professional’ and ‘non-professional’ work is that in one case, the artists get paid. There’s a lot of great, and crap professional work out there, and there’s a lot of great, and crap non-professional work out there. So I believe terms like ‘commercial success’ aren’t really that relevant. What’s important is the overall quality, workflow, abilities of the software, since people doing both commercial and non-commercial work will tend to encounter similar problems and have similar goals.

Anyway, Blender has never not been aimed at professionals. It was designed and created in-house at the award-winning NeoGeo animation studio in the Netherlands, by the very people who used it in their work (mainly corporate video, broadcast stuff, visualisation, afaik). It has continued to be used professionally by plenty of people in many aspects of graphics creation, though typically not the big glitzy stuff like feature films.

As for where it’s heading, what it’s goals are, well that’s a tricky one. Although ton and the bf-committers admins have final say over what patches get included in the Blender source, there’s not really a guiding force which is pointing Blender in any certain directions (you can’t force volunteers to work on coding stuff they’re not interested in). The improvements so far after the open-sourcing have come from people who have seen something they’d like to work on, and gotten stuck into it. One of the good things about the Blender dev community is that the vast majority of developers are Blender users themselves. Blender has been around since '98, and was only open-sourced last year so all the really experienced Blender users have been using it since it was a commercial product from NaN. This generally means that the sort of features we’re seeing added are practical, ‘scratch-an-itch’ stuff. And these sorts of things don’t really matter whether you want to call it commercially aimed or whatever. It’s making Blender a better product, so what difference does it make?

Regarding goals, what exactly is the ‘goal’ of making something ‘commercially oriented’? A great thing about the current situation with Blender is that there are a lot less restrictions, and great possibilities for innovation. The devs don’t have marketing departments breathing down their necks, getting them to copy other apps feature-for-feature so they look better on the tick/cross comparison charts. There is the possibility for all sorts of new ideas to happen, because taking risks isn’t as dangerous as it is in the commercial software world. While of course it is nice see Blender’s name up in lights in magazine articles, and to get more users (and by extension, more developers too), what does aiming for ‘commercial’ actually mean for Blender and how is it different to just ‘making Blender better’?

EDIT: I’d also like to point out something very appealing that’s starting to happen now - that is studios paying devs to implement features they ask for (check some of ideasman’s topics on blender.org). I doubt I’d be able toget that kind of service with Discreet or Alias.

23

I’ve received a reply from Ton about this topic. I’m sure you’ll all be interested to read it as he makes some very good points. I’ve requested permission to post his response here at Elysiun out of respect and politeness, so hopefully he’ll oblige and you’ll all get to see what he said without me butchering it with paraphrases. All I’ll say for now is that Ton is cool. But then again…we already knew that.

24

Second, it seems that CinePaint is making it very clear that they WANT the studios to use CinePaint. And they are willing to work with studios to make CinePaint into the program that “the industry” WANTS and NEEDS.

That’s something I’ve often ruminated over, but never brought it up.

25

I rather post things myself, than having people quoting from mails I send around! :slight_smile:

It’s the ‘product versus marketing’ dilemma here. We have to organize still a LOT of development in Blender; it goes pretty well, but we will need much more talented developers to be involved. If we can’t prove Blender works as an open source project, its plans for commercial marketing will fail completely. For me the question “where’s Blender heading to” is less relevant now.

Reading this thread I think that’s a bit the major criticism people have. For as long it’s free (and open source) we get the benefits of the doubt. But compared to many commercial packages we’re behind in development. Which makes it hard to convince the ‘commercial professionals’ to adopt Blender as a productivity tool.

That’s one side of the story… the other side is that Blender isn’t really that bad. We could communicate that a lot better to the outside world. But try to convince people who paid 1000s of dollars for a 3d package… they’ll never admit they spoilt their bucks. So you have to do that really smart.
Since we (Blender Foundation) don’t have money to spend for advertisement, we won’t get easily attention from commercial channels like magazines or sites. We also suffer from having only 1 person (me!) working full time on general operations.

Check the roadmap at blender.org, we definitely want to make blender attractive for more artists, including people who work commercially. This is still the main focus for me to work at. Apart from that, I try to get financing for establishing a small office with a couple of people who can work full-time on Blender operations (like marketing and PR).
I have contacts with companies like Apple who are ready to support us with a co-marketing campaign. When 2.3 is out, I definitly will put time in that.

And if others like to volunteer on this marketing & PR stuff, I’ll look forward to hear from them what they like to do… but please bear in mind that I demand high standards for official Blender communications.

26

why not sell a $1000 version cause then people might think its good cause of the price tag :smiley:

27

Thanks for responding to this thread Ton. You have really cleared up any misconceptions that we may have had as far as the Blender “roadmap” to reaching professional artists. Maybe as the marketing plan gets more organized the Blender.org could post a page that would outline the protocols that volunteer promoters need to maintain. This would help keep the many voices of the Blender volunteer promoters unified. It would also work to aid in stating the type of standards that a Blender volunteer promoter should uphold and dictate the goals that we are trying to reach.

28

I am perfect for this job. I have exceptional diplomacy skills,…I will say, “You learn it, or I will sock you in the eye, sucker!” :<

29

Ton -

Thanks for the reply, and I think you cleared up a lot of things. It helps us who are eager to see Blender succeed to hear it straight from “the man” every once in a while.

30

Ton, glad to see your reply in here on its own accord! We all really appreciate you participating in the discussion because its good to get info “straight from the horses mouth” if you know what I mean.

We’re all lucky to have someone holding the reins and making sure that the standards for all things blender are very high. I think some of you would agree that a lot of open source projects aren’t so lucky, and are marketed or promoted far less professionally.

All butt kissing aside, I think we should keep this thread afloat and keep dropping marketing ideas into it for future reference. That way when the point comes that there’s someone working full time on that aspect of the project, we’ll already have a lot to contribute in terms of ideas and resources that will make their job easier in one respect. So despite the fact that we won’t be marketing directly anytime in the near future, that doesn’t mean, as Ton so kindly pointed out for us, that we can’t do some work on our own to get the word out about Blender.

Thanks again Ton! And thanks to everyone who is participating in the discussions.

31

Tried that. well not $1000 but still a pay version. %| Then NaN went out of business.

32

I have contacts with companies like Apple who are ready to support us with a co-marketing campaign. When 2.3 is out, I definitly will put time in that.

I like your plan overall, but we can’t have an advertisement campaign backed by only Apple, that alienates a tone of hardcore PC users, as well as quite a few linux users.

Of course if steve jobs gets wind of it, pixar may be headed our way 8)

33

Often the biggest aspect to draw a user of one app to another is a certain form of software functionality. I would say that Blenders speedy workflow on almost “any” standard 3d enabled PC would fit that bill.

We could show a Blender production example in its various stages graphically on the Blender.org website. We could present a project from start to finish describing how Blender is used in an everyday 3d media production. Also we could show how to link Blender usage to other apps like Wings3d, etc.

I did some render test on various PCs. I was able to load the 3d software, Blender, the scenefiles, the Yafray render engine and more onto a 700MB cdrom. I then could take my entire 3d suite on the road and render on Laptops to desktops.