My view (take that for what it’s worth) is that Blender is relatively young compared to Maya/Houdini/etc., and look at its presence in the global 3D realm. You have to admit that it’s not a bit player anymore despite its somewhat short lifespan. Compare that to programs like Lightwave, which was one of the first full-production 3D apps and is now on its last legs, or even Maya, which is the 800lb gorilla but is steadily being challenged by Blender in production houses. Now tell me Blender isn’t making strides in full-production environments.
Does it need more work? Absolutely, but don’t tell me that it’s stagnated or that it won’t ever get better than it is right now.
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What is the big fuzz all about?
Tangent animation has shown in the past that they can deliver quality using their Blender/Houdini/Nuke pipeline - this fiasco looks like upper management failure to me, nothing the tools used in the pipeline or the artists working there have anything to do with directly.
Changing a pipeline while being swamped with work always has the potential to kill a production house, there are many cases where this was the case.
If you can’t deliver work in a situation where you should, the other party who is expecting results will drop the shoe eventually.
Whatever brought them into the situation we can rule out that it 1) isn’t an problem with their artists. 2) isn’t a problem with either a mainly Blender or Maya pipeline since both can demonstratively produce good work.
Why do people project their doom and gloom on Blender when this case showed no sign of any fault related to it?
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Yes please 
I hope that the foundation can one day create a truly feasible collaborative project with the studios to be able to hire more developers and work together with the goal of improving Blender according to the studios’ needs.
This news makes me sad. I wish all the best to the Tangent employees, and I hope you’ll find new jobs quickly.
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Fully agreed. Just saw this thread and the direction it took after reading through it all is absolutely bonkers.
Anyway, sad to hear about Tangent shutting down. I enjoyed what they did with Next Gen and their contributions towards Blender I appreciate. Best of luck to everyone at the company.
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But that should tell you all you need to know about why Maya is so heavily used in the industry. Large studios want a tool they can change and add things too. They actually want a container for their own tools. Maya was designed with this in mind from the get go, because that as the feedback they got from Disney and ILM when they were creating the application. That is what people don’t understand about Maya. Maya is a stable development environment, the backend doesn’t change often, the SDK is stable. Blender has a long way to go to say the same. Blender could be great container for development too but the licensing and the way the software keeps changing constantly with no stable api/SDK is why it can’t really compete with Maya in that regard.
If you are a large studio you don’t want your tools to break from one version to the next. The BF only started doing LTS versions and organizing themselves to better address these things fairly recently.
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Speaking of Bugs, we, users would like things to be fixed immediately, according to our needs, and some think bugs as stains on glass and that a little cleaning work is enough to get rid of them, but unfortunately it’s not as simple as cleaning stains, but it takes a work of investigation to understand where it is and then intellectual skills to implement a solution or fix that does not create damage, these qualities unfortunately are not possessed by everyone, in addition to having the incentives to do a tedious and not very funny job, that said bugs are also present in Maya since there are myriads of funny memes that refer to this problem, as with Nuke, that said, Blender has a high number of bugs fixed and it is known that there is also a great listening towards users of any level, which is rare with other software.
The news is still confusing to me as probably to many others what exactly caused the shutdown of the studio.
But the other interesting yet confusing news is from the same day as well:
The Academy Software Foundation, a platform that allows open-source software developers to share resources and collaborate on technologies, welcomes Maxon and Tangent Animation as their members.
Maxon, the company behind Cinema 4D and Redshift, two major applications used in the industry, is planning to “support the great work the Foundation is doing to further expand the capabilities of the creative industries we all serve.” Tangent Animation, a Canadian CG feature film production company, is going “to support open software as an Academy Software Foundation member and by open-sourcing its in-house production USD render engine Blackbird.”
Is this still happening? Is this the result of the closure and they just want to salvage the technologies and donate them to the open source communities or it was planned before the closure of the studio? If so will it affect these plans?
If anyone has more insight on the situation I’d love to know more because currently I don’t understand if this is still happening or not.
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All the discussion about “blender in the pipeline” should first watch @skw 's presentation which talks directly about this in Tangent:
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The worst consequences of the Tangent closure is that Blender lost the production house which is willing to spend more money to pursue a Blender based pipeline.
If you only care about the cost, the salary for one C++ programmer would cost far more than paying Maya licenses. Same for Cycles, they may save the license cost. But, they will lose money from longer render time.
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In fact, Blender has lost a lot from this event, but the worst is for people involved, however I believe also many other opportunity will come out in future, recently I discovered a YouTube channel managed by Robert Rioux the graphic supervisor of Real By Fake, and he promotes Blender. Videos are fun too.
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Funnily enough I remember in an interview Jeff saying that Tangent has custom solutions for lights that they implemented in Blender. If an ex-Tangent employee could confirm this and let us know if it was an addon or a custom branch it would be swell.
Tangent forked Cycles into Blackbird, and has many features you can checkout the video above posted by bsavery and presented by Stefan Warner.
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An excellent,though sad presentation. I really hope that as much of this gets open sourced as possible and that some life will survive. Good luck to all the staff affected.
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Cartoon Brew’s article posted in original post of the thread is incriminating “celebrity producers who lack extensive knowledge of animation production”.
Animation production is so complicated that people in charge with a lack of understanding of the process, role of members of team and without a clue on how and when to solve issues is sufficient to obtain a costly deceiving result.
My opinion is that a full feature length animated movie should not be entrusted to somebody who don’t already have an experience with several short animated movies.
That is awful to see happening this kind of event with consequences for hundreds of people because of a lack of prudence from leaders.
I agree that hype around 2.8 was misleading. Ton discourse was ambiguous when he was asking for financial support to make a reality of 2.80 release at the end of the year 2018, when open publicly available workboard of redesign for following 10 years.
We know that there are plans for Blender’s mutation. But events are constantly remodelling them. (new developers, pandemy, development driven by financial support of patrons)
Before 2.8, Blender’s releases cycle was already quick with 2 or 3 releases per year.
Instead of being slowed down, it has been has been sped up, to rush 2.8 and 2.9 series in order to reach a blender 3.0 release, a few years after 2.80.
Volunteers testers have few weeks to detect bugs. That is too short.
That is why the Long Term Support series has been put in place. You are supposed to update your 2.93 release, every 2 weeks.
But we already know that Blender 3.0 will not contain Cycles X. We know that UI workshops are scheduled before Blender 3.0 release and will determine expectations for series 3.x.
When Cycles X will be established, experienced developers will be available to unlock several situations. But that probably will be the case only after 3.2, so, series 3.x should be included in the first phase of mutation of Blender with series 2.8 and 2.9.
Without a doubt, Blender 3.0 will contain less obstacles than Blender 2.93 and Blender 3.3 less than Blender 3.0. But will obstascles remain ? Yes ! What will they be ? We can not be sure.
By precaution, you should not expect things that are annoying you, now, to be solved in the 2 upcoming years.
If you are annoyed by particles and cloths, don’t expect a change in those areas and search for alternatives. Is it better to combine Blender with Houdini or Marvelous designer and a Particles Software or to switch to Maya ? that is a decision that is yours.
But for sure, you will not see physics accelerated by GPU, in a near future, in official Blender.
I would have trouble believing it’s Stephen Chows fault but I am super biased, Shaolin Soccer is my favorite movie.
It would be interesting to know more but normally we never know cause people are scare of being sued if they talk.
There was a thread split talking about Blender not being production ready, maybe you guys continue talking about Blender release cycle not being efficient there?
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Good call. I’ve moved the relevant posts there.
That’s a silly thing to say in context with Stephen Chow. This dude is an actor with over 70 movies under his belt, a director/writer/producer who did his last movies in this triple role, movies that where choke full with CGI and who made an brilliant live action anime/cartoon movie 17 years ago that holds up great to this day (Kung Fu Hustle).
He knows how to handle CGI as director and producer, delivering great results with smaller budgets.
On top of it he is an expert when it comes to the theme of the monkey king having made 4 movies about this character.
All in all he was perfect for the role as producer for this particular movie. I am willing to bet he had nothing at all to do with its failure.
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