I don’t want to detail this thread. But, I’m not saying it is failed from the technical point of view. It failed as a commercial renderer. What “a lot of VFX houses”? Maybe 10 years ago. As of now, it is mostly VRay and Arnold even for vfx houses. Outside if vfx, hardly no one uses Renderman.
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True, Most of the people I’ve talked to said VFX houses were only making 5% to 10% profit. Not sure about animation studios. But fixed bids and endless revisions are a recipe for disaster. Imagine rebuilding the same house 20 times because a producer can’t make up their mind.
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I disagree that it’s failed, even commercially, but you’re absolutely right that the render engine space is much more diverse nowadays. You’ll even see different render engines at the same studio depending on the department/project/etc. Some of the big guys just roll their own as well at this point.
Damn, would you stop?
What are you trying to achieve with those repeated senseless and untrue assumptions of yours?
This plus your claim that Tangent will “end up as a tale of how to not run a studio” just grinds my gears.
Tangent was among the most forward-thinking and innovative places I have ever had to pleasure to be involved in. To do what they did (yes, also pushing the adoption and improving Blender) needs quite some balls and they continued to push forward and innovate on all fronts!
The amount of talent at Tangent was truly mind-blowing and the work environment was more than amazing. I’m truly sad about what happened and that it came to this sudden and undeserved end.
Unfortunately, no one will see how epic our work on those projects was.
You don’t have all the information of what was going on and frankly, you truly have no idea what you’re talking about. You might enjoy stirring the fire on a forum but please show some respect to those ~400 people that made Tangent so special.
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Somewhat related but Phil Vischer of Big idea production (Veggie tales) goes into detail into what happened to his studio and what caused it to close.
https://philvischer.com/news/what-happened-to-big-idea-part-1/
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His book, “Me, Myself, and Bob” is pretty good, too if people want an inside look into Phil’s head during that time.
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You never worked. But, somehow you know it is “the most forward-thinking and innovative place”? right…
I’m leaning towards he may actually know what he’s talking about but sure, don’t let that stop you from tearing into people.
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I fully agree with you there. Maybe not so much in that they don’t comprehend, but you can’t seriously think that a production-intended tool is tested relying in that kind of numbers.
I work at a modest mid size studio doing a couple animated series, and even we are between 70-120 people at any given time.
The scale of the problems a studio faces in a production of 15 people and a studio with overlapping productions and +100 people are vastly different.
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Oh… sorry I think I misread “ever had to pleasure to be involved in” as “never had to pleasure to be involved in”. Gotta make font bigger!
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Or just read properly. If you want the font bigger, hold down control+zoom in with middle mouse wheel.
On topic:
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Sad news.
Typical doomsday pontificator. It’s not the end of the world - not for Blender or the foundation, not for Tangent’s former employees, nor anyone else (unless they literally died upon reading this news).
Stop assuming, stop exaggerating, and please stop being so dramatic.
To take your mind off the situation, maybe go make some art with the amazing construct that is Blender - which you only have knowledge of and access to because “the devs.” were willing, and even happy, to share it with us.
__
Having said that, this is indeed sad news. I wish the best for the talented artists who’ve entertained and inspired so many, while at the same time proving that Blender is quite capable - even if the software is not perfect, and never will be.
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Why is everyone fighting here? 400 people just got laid off and half the people here are trying to turn this in to their own pity party? I’m sure a significant amount of those 400 people have already found more work or have interviews lined up because they aren’t here complaining about the end of Blender… they are out there using Blender in production because there is no good reason they shouldn’t be.
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We’re in an information vacuum. I’ve only seen reports by three Tangent employees. One says Tangent was without fault. The other two were deeply critical. I’d like to know more - it would help the future of Blender to know, but employees must have other things on their mind and maybe under NDA. I’ve seen no statement from Tangent so far. but if they make one, we should expect PR instead of a candid warts and all tell all.
There’s a lot we don’t know, but we also can’t ignore it either.
I’m ex-3DSMAX ex-Maya. I produced on a pilot for a series a year ago using Blender. I was very happy with the end result, but it wasn’t easy.
Some Blender components and addons are awesome and far, far better than Maya, but other components very painful to work with.
The biggest problems were bugs - a lot of bugs, performance, and things not working as advertised.
Those problems cost a lot of time and money. I can’t understate that. You can still end up with a nice result, but hate the journey.
One problem was BF hyped new function which we relied on, but ultimately turned out to be buggy and incomplete.
Overrides are critical to any but the smallest productions, but these were very buggy. I thought overrides were still being worked on, but a year later a BF developer admitted they had barely touched it since. Cloth and Particle Systems terrible, and while you could eventually get very nice results with the animation tools, some things were very time consuming. Again, that costs money.
And bugs! So many bugs! I kept count - record is 36 crashes in one day. The non-crashing bugs are even worse: Some had been reported years ago and closed not because they were fixed but because they were old! Again, encountering and working around these cost time and money.
Some of these has been fixed I think. Overrides have improved and and maybe Geometry Nodes fix the problems with particle systems(?). But new bugs come out each release: With 2.93 one of our PCs now crashes if you create a material! That PC is now useless. On other PCs, bone selection has got crazy slow and we don’t know why. There doesn’t seem to be thorough testing before releases.
We are now continuing the series but I am wondering if Blender is the right choice to proceed. That’s why the Tangent situation concerns me. Are we trying to do something which is beyond Blender?
My concern is Blender has some major problems which need to be overcome for it to be used in larger productions.
I haven’t posted this before, because I don’t have time for flame wars. I do appreciate @AceDragon pushing performance improvements and his other comments would explain my own experiences and might explain why Tangent switched in part(?) to Maya and Houdini(?). But seeing one of the forum mods warn him for speculating about Tangent concerns me. Is positive speculation okay, but critical speculation can get you banned? Shutting down that conversation won’t make Blender better. It will make it worse.
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There is no shutting down of a conversation or even of speculation. There is no universe in which this sort of statement can be called speculation:
Having plenty of assumptions, shaking and mixing them and presenting the conclusion as fact is straight out bs. There is nothing to be concerned about. It would be concerning if that was okay.
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Well, the statement started with ‘So apparently’, so I think there is a case for this being presented as speculation.
Having said that, the picture Ace_Dragon tries to paint seem very much at odds with the information presented in this thread, and for people unfamiliar with Ace_Dragon, I can see them thinking this is just trolling, but my impression is that this is really what he thinks, and as such, as much as I disagree with it, I see no reason for why he shouldn’t be allowed give his view point.
Ace_Dragon is a conundrum to me, on one hand he seems incredibly passionate if not obsessive about Blender, on the other hand he often comes across as if he has an axe to grind.
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For me, speculations are usually within the realm of what could still reasonable be concluded. This goes way beyond that is is closer to being a fairytale.
There is pretty much no information available and making up this sort of narrative based on nothing and seemingly drawing conclusions out of it has literally no value or it can even be harmful. Linking the Blender development to a large studio shutting down is also highly disrespectful. As a reasonable human being, you just don’t do it, unless there is actual evidence.
This is far beyond what could be and either close to or actually in the land of conspiracy theories. There are enough places on the internet where that kind of bs can be discussed. I hope, this forum doesn’t allow it.
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In my opinion, a large operation may have it easier with Blender than a medium or small budget production.
Naturally, we ran into the limitations of Blender (and other software too, of course), but unlike smaller teams we had the resources to overcome at least some of them by either improving Blender directly or writing the necessary add-ones. In that situation, you can maintain a Blender fork as if it was just another in house tool and operate independently of the Foundation, should you need to. This is a luxury that not everyone can afford.
Certainly, when producing at the level that Tangent did, you’re in uncharted waters when using Blender. The final pictures however tell the story of how far you can take it, and it turns out that Blender can do impressive things when in the right hands.
Of course, I have a long, long list of issues and problems in Blender, but that doesn’t disqualify it from being a highly useful tool. At the current pace, I think many of these will be addressed sooner or later, either by the BF or by the studios using Blender.
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To clarify: They have already used Houdini for NextGen and Maya isn’t really capable to deal with high complexity from my experience. At the FMX and animago in 2019 people over and over again asked the same question at the conferences when the studio presented their amazing work: “How can Maya handle your projects?” “We use Maya mostly as a container for our own tools.”
I am running an animation studio in the 19th year and we replaced Softimage with Blender in 2016. Houdini and Blender is a great combination but I have to admit that we don’t this kind of complex projects of the film industry.
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At an operation of that size, and fully remote on top, very few people ever got to see the full picture. Everyone sees what’s going in their department, the problems that they deal with on a daily basis and the things that prevent them from doing their best. Those are all valid problems, but not necessary the ones that ultimately caused this situation.
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