Professional Blender Use

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
#1

Over the past few years, I find every excuse to use Blender on the job because I think it’s a good, solid package and I love the community and of course, it being open source is amazing.

So far I have used Blender on Call of Duty: Ghosts and am now using it here at DICE on the DLC for Battlefield 4. I’m a Lighting Artist so I don’t build a ton of assets but when I do, I use Blender. The guys I work with don’t mind as long as my objects are set up and exported correctly. The CoD guys were a little more weird about it but a super nice German guy wrote the plugin for exporting my stuff into the Radiant engine and that exporter actually worked better than the one they wrote in-house for Max and Maya. :smiley: Blender’s UVs would also not break out of 0 to 1 on the atlas which Max did all the time, breaking the object for lightmaps. So I worked faster than others who had to manually fix their UVs.

I’m wonder how many other professionals sneak Blender into their projects?

#2

I don’t exactly “sneak” it in, but we are a small Maya shop and I’ve been steadily introducing blender into the shop for a while now. The team has gone from “outright disdain” to “mildly interested” over the past couple of years. :slight_smile:

And I personally have been modeling, animating and rendering most of my output in blender, while at the same time working out some semi-smooth workflows for modeling in blender, animating in maya and round tripping back to blender (using point caching) for rendering in cycles.

The revolution has been slow, but it’s happening. :wink:

#3

Sneak was a bad word for it. I’m really open about what I’m using but Tools people will not support Blender if I’m the only guy using it so I use it “at my own risk” when it comes to fitting into the pipeline. Other artists are open to the idea but are pretty set in their ways. Mostly I get a “Oooh, I’ve been wanting to play with Blender but who has time”. I tell them to learn it for fun but it’s hard when you work all day building assets to come home and do the same. It’s easier for me because that’s not my main job so building stuff for me is kinda a treat.

Ton gave me that training dvd for 3d Artists which is really great. If you find someone interested in learning Blender, that is probably the best material for artists that use something else. They won’t have to spend 30 minutes listening to a guy explain what a polygon is before getting into the workflow. :stuck_out_tongue:

#4

I have used 3DS Max, Maya, and many other applications but 3d Blender has them all beat. Yes the Interface may be hard but if you where to use max or Maya the interface is really not that much different. all applications has their own techniques with in the application, Blender has implemented a lot of functions into one single application. and putting everything into one application fitting all the features in one interface is hard to do. I tip my hat to those developers for giving us such a program that can blow the market of 3D art away 3DS max and Maya are both good applications but blender is free and just as powerful or even more powerful. I have used blender for 8 years now and because I have not got the right type of training I could learn more about it but I am good at it.

#5

@tommywright I love that people do that! and why not if you’re able to do the work:)

I started using Blender years ago after catching the 3d bug from working in After Effects (actually 2.5d) and haven’t looked back. I do TV promos in a broadcast environment and thanks to Blender I was able to make my job a lot more interesting.

Even though my position had absolutely nothing to do with 3d graphics I was able to make elements myself and no one seemed to mind…even the designers weren’t using 3d at the time:) I still rely quite heavily on After Effects (minus the 3d), however I’d love if I could abandon it all together… Blender is getting more an more usable for motion graphics all the time, but it’s not quite there. All it’s missing are some good 3d view masking tools and better text tools IMHO, but it does green screen and tracking like a champ.

#6

Hey!

I use Blender for 3D creation exclusively at work and at home. I work alone in a small Studio for 3 years, doing commercials and adaptations of old ones. I guess my boss is happy that he doesnt have to pay for Maya anymore. :slight_smile:

I used Blender when i worked on films too. But mainly for modeling as there was a problem exporting whole scene to Maya at the time.

I love blender and i love the community.

Take care!

#7

Haha! Fellow ATVI guy. I worked there for a long time. I would sneak blender into web-assets that I was creating now and again. And of course use it in any down time that we had. Now I use Blender to work on AT&T commercials.

#8

Nice!

I was introduced to Blender at Naughty Dog by one of the programmers there. They use it at Naughty Dog to test small things over in the ICE department (their high-end programmers). I started playing with it when they changed the interface to be more friendly (2.5 I think). It’s a powerful little package.