while you do have a point, current market says no. in a matter of fact, it should be easier, kind of.
in a matter of fact, what a simple app developer currently need to do:
support fbx (via autodesk library)
support other format (via library)
support allegromithic tools (no licensing issues)
support AMD free renderer and/or NVidia Iray
support popular motion capture file format
everything else can grow organically.
the thing is that market is now broken into smaller pieces because not everyone need everything. game modeller. texture artist. product renderer. film animator. etc. i think app developer have followed pipeline model. anyone who wanted all-in-one might have to buy multiple products.
scupting via zbrush
texturing via mari/allegromithic.
animating via kaydara/autodesk app/motion capture clean up tool
modelling via modo/lw/blender
renderer via renderman/gpu render/whatnot
1* I run a company, we are 7 people atm, most of us are Blender users (like heavy blender user, you can find info about me)
I’m literally forced to pay a rent to AD because all the other companys I work with uses it.
I have no choice here.
2* A standalone model you pay a software, you can use it as long as you want. Let’s say that one year I get 4 jobs on MODO, the company wants MODO data, so I buy a single license to convert files to work with this company, even I don’t get MODO job for 3 years I can still open a MODO file.
Also with a standalone model you can force your self to try other softwares.
For example I have Maya 2015, I don’t like it anymore, so for 2 years I don’t upgrade it, I save money I train my team to the new stuff, but STILL if I have trouble I can use Maya 2015 because my license works, it doesn’t expire.
This new business model forces small company like mine to pay a LOT of money in subscription just to stay in the business with the other big companies.
If you look at court room issues in regards to forensics, or at the drama in the scientific accidemia community, it has been a case where you can have 2 different people with radically different views on the evidence both of whom have more than ample credentials to their name, so this is more of a sign of breakdown in communications and each spokesperson having a vested interest in being biased.
But that aside, I see what ground autodesk is trying to take when it comes to the CG industry and as much as it looks like a bad move it is actually quite in step with their game plan and most likely the best move they can make in the long game.
They want to remain name that people think of when they have high dollar and high profile CG needs. That is what they are selling, the software package is just that, it is a product it is a thing, but the name and reputation behind it is where their market power comes from. What major studio would use blender for a major project? I mean yeah there are some good reasons to do so but if the project flops it would be career suicide to stake your reputation on a software package that has not been tested and proven under a decade or more under fire.
Yes they will take a short term loss on the indie and independent devs. That is not where their money is, their money comes from their reputation and major studios being willing to fork out the big $$ to have autodesk in their list of credits.
Now what I think I will see quite a few hopefuls who will kick up a fee to autodesk to remain proficient with their software in the hopes of hitting it big time, but I also think that in the next few years blender will find quite a bit of acceptance as a freelance option for small projects, after all an fbx is just an fbx if it loads into what you need with minimal adjustments and a lack of drama and surprises.
The bottom line for any software in any situation is what it offers in the way of tools. And decisions to use one oer the other are dependent on facts which can be known and tested.
And it is a matter of demostable fact that while some tools between software overlap and have redundancy, there are some wide divisions. By and large arists choose tools that get the job done from their best judgement based on thier specific needs… This extrapolated out tor small groups of artists to the largest production house is how software is used. And this alone determins a market.
I think you are confusing “opinion” with “belief” and/or “prejudice”. We aren’t living in a post-factual world at all - religion has always been as “non-factual” as it can get. If anything, in the past 100 years it has improved a tad here and there. Stop thinking so short-term.
When I point my finger at the moon, you would not confuse the finger with the moon, would you?
Reference An opinion is a judgment based on facts, an honest attempt to draw a reasonable conclusion from factual evidence.
Unlike an opinion, a belief is a conviction based on cultural or personal faith, morality, or values.
Another kind of assertion that has no place in serious argumentation is prejudice, a half-baked opinion based on insufficient or unexamined evidence.
Just got an Email advert from Autodesk saying 3DSMax for $125 per month (Translates to £99 UK Pounds) as long as you get it for a year. When I went to check the link it redirected me to the UK store which has the deal for £151 a month. I fail to see the logic.
It occurs to me that many of the views expressed here smack of being the viewpoints of technicians, not studios.
A studio, doing a multi-million dollar project that is paid-for by impatient investors, is going to demand a business relationship with every software supplier, such that if the studio says “Jump!,” the vendor will reply, “How high?” The studios want support, and they to a certain extent also demand leverage.
Although Blender is an exemplary product today, it’s not going to compete with – say, Autodesk – products, because there is no Autodesk Corporation. There’s no one to write a contract with.
So, one is never going to replace the other. They will continue to co-exist, and to grow, each in their respective mostly-parallel streams. They will both be what they are – highly-respected products in the CG world – but one will never replace the other. Nor should we ever expect them to.
Blender has a reputation, and it has earned that reputation. It has nothing to apologize-for to anyone, anywhere. But, like every other CG product out there, it is going to co-exist. Forever.
For large studios, the price increases are just a drop in the bucket in terms of just how much income they earn each year.
However, for individual artists and small studios, the price increases are a big deal (and if that’s not enough, they will have to pay for an Arnold or an iRay/MR license if they want to have features like distributed rendering and batch rendering, either that or they have to go backwards to whatever is built in to Maya and Max).
Though yes, it’s not going to cause large studios to jump ship (even if Autodesk raised the subscription fee to 1K a month they can afford it), it may even appear that the individual type of artist is something that they can afford to lose (if you can keep the really big customers it may be all that matters).
Nonsense. The word “opinion” is not commonly understood to have this particular meaning, therefore it doesn’t, unless you define it so for the sake of argument - which we didn’t.
If instead you just google the word “opinion”, you will find the following contradictory definitions (or shall we say, alternative facts):
As for the source of your statement, H. Ramsey Fowler, he has neither a Wikipedia entry nor a Twitter account, which makes him culturally irrelevant by all modern standards.
With this example I hope I have proven to you my original thesis: It is a waste of time to differentiate - especially when it comes to the meaning of words.
For the discussions suggesting that Blender has made it harder for 3D startups, I think that is wrong.
Blender has a huge wealth of algorithms that any startup will likely glance at, and save tens of thousands of man hours in engineering those algorithms from scratch.
Also with Ogre3D available there isn’t a need to write a 3D rendering environment from scratch, and there are a large number of libraries (3d format reading and writing; image reading and writing, brush libraries, etc.), that make it cheaper and faster to create a new 3D app than ever before.
@ambi: I didn’t say ‘copy’ I said look at. You can read source code to your hearts content, and as long as you don’t copy the code you aren’t violating copyright law. Algorithms aren’t subject to copyright protection, only the creative aspects are protected (variable and function names - and even then not necessarily since the names can be purely functional).
If the variable and function names were the only thing protected it would be trivial to abuse any GPL code by writing a simple obfuscator, making the entire license meaningless.
copyright protects only creative expression, not functional.
Under the Useful Article doctrine in US copyright law, if an object has a practical or useful function, copyright protection applies only to the original, creative elements “that can be identified separately from the utilitarian aspects of an object”, but does not extend to the underlying design of the functional object.
Blender has a huge wealth of algorithms that any startup will likely glance at, and save tens of thousands of man hours in engineering those algorithms from scratch.
It’s of course useful to have some sort of reference implementation of an algorithm, but about 95-99.9% of the work in a software project is not about implementing some fancy algorithm, it’s about integration. Porting an implementation in itself is a big amount of work. Blender doesn’t have that many original implementations anyway, it relies on libraries for a lot of stuff. Here, too, the work is integration.
It also doesn’t matter if the cost of creating the application goes down by 95%, you’re still at a heavy disadvantage when you need to compete with a fully-featured application offered at zero cost.
I think you misunderstand the 3D market. New entrants attract users by either greater efficiency for specific narrow use cases (Mudbox, Mari, Headus UV, Topogun, Modo, Substance Designer, Substance Painter, Sketchup) or entirely new workflows (3D Coat, Zbrush). Then they can expand their use cases to compete with existing DCCs (ZBrush, 3DCoat, Modo).
Right now, there is nothing at which Blender is the best at a for any narrow use case - we generally have gotten to the point of ‘good enough’ but we never end up with an extremely polished high efficiency work flow for any particular area and often have a huge pain point for any particular workflow (for instance we had leading edge UV unwrapping, but awful packing and difficult import and export, and lacked support for many needed workflow issues for UV editing.)
For hobbyists Blender being 10% slower workflow at most everything and having awkward workflows doesn’t matter since the users goal is to have all the tools they need that do most things reasonably well and there are benefits from being able to stay in a single application. Professional workflows though the efficiency and handling all needed use cases is extremely important - and the value of a license for something that does the job fast and perfect is work far more than the license cost of the specialty software.
There is an advantage to having everything you need to do in a single pipeline, since the user only needs to train on one tool and the knowledge is portable throughout the pipeline - so Blender can make sense for smaller shops where everyone is a generalist. It also makes sense for pipelines where the cost of labor is cheap, and thus software licensing could be a major percentage of overhead if using the major DCCs and dedicated software.
Maybe that’s somehow not clear, but I’m not talking about specialized applications. Obviously, there’s been development there. I’m talking about a “host application” (for lack of a better word) that serves as the backbone of a production. None of the applications you mentioned are even on track of becoming that, with the exception of Modo. At over 1000$, I wouldn’t consider Modo “entry-level” anymore.
Arguably, even if Blender wasn’t there, as sub-1000$ host application might not be sustainable. Now that it is there though, I don’t see sense in even trying.
If you mean DCCs, it hasn’t really ever been viable to start out as a full fledged DCC. They mostly have started small and expanded - Maya started as 3 separate dedicated products; 3DS Max started out as Autoshade - a renderer for Autocad. Lightwave was originally 3 separate products that merged. XSI was perhaps the closest to your view.
Also Modo, ZBrush, and 3D Coat are all three moving towards full fledged DCCs.
