Animation, visual effects, simulation, texture painting, video editing and sculpting are all I blender but there are better solutions out there.
Blender can be used for these and is close to improving in all these areas but it’s not the go to choice
In no particular order:
A usable asset/linking/proxy/versioning system
A C/C++ API
A rock-solid multires modifier (the current one isn’t production-safe at all)
UDIM support (although this is currently being worked on)
Several modern animation utilities (Good, efficient, tweakable motion paths, onion skins, etc.)
A well-documented render API
A modern, stable physics system
A modern, stable particle system
A modern, stable hair system
Modern, stable fluid sim tools
Support for OpenVDB
Full OpenSubdiv support
A robust option(s) for cross-app workflows
A unified color space pipeline
A user-friendly network rendering framework
And plenty of others that are smaller issues that add up to lots of general workflow frustration.
I love Blender, but it’s foolish to pretend that it can compete/interact with established workflows and pipelines on all levels. It still needs a ton of dev love before it’s ready to really shine and turn heads as the tool that it wants to be.
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And one more, quite important think IMHO - lack of proper support. Don’t get me wrong, blender has a very good community, but it is not the same.
They must be improved for wider use of blender.
Unfortunately, this will take years to do because the BF does not have the resources to hire as many developers as it needs. The only way it could possibly be done faster is if the BF was able to do a three month Code Quest event at least 1 or 2 times a year (it could actually be possible if the community is ultimately blown away by the improvements this first one makes).
As for Autodesk fading away, I doubt it would be anytime soon. Houdini is still pretty difficult for many artists and C4D and Modo, last I’ve seen, are not exactly taking a lot of marketshare away with the way they are being developed.
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C4d and Modo can’t take a lot of marketshare because it is evidently not the goal of its producers/devs.
Maxon feels quite well with its walled garden/blackbox (which doesn’t play in the same league as Maya or Max), a perfect match for their (mostly) Apple users.
Modo is not a full-fledged DCC, despite what Foundry implies, since the animation tools are not that great, same with simulation tools.
Houdini gets better and simpler any release, by the time version 20 drops, Autodesk might be in full-panic mode. Also if Houdini is too hard, then you are too soft. 
Code Quest 2 or more times per year is the way to go.
@m9105826
I would like to add something but my brain doesn’t give me anything.
Good list.
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@Luca_Rood wrote an OpenVDB import modifier for Tangent Animation, thanks to the GPL (
) the code is public for anyone to use.
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Actually it’s publicly available because the kind people at Tangent Animation decided to share it. They could perfectly and legally develop and use it only in house and nobody ever even would have known. The GPL has absolutely nothing to do with this.
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I’m not going to get into details about who, what, when something happened that counts as distribution under the GPL. My main point was that things that people have on their “can’t do production without this” list are being worked on and published already - by people doing production work with Blender.
Now I bet someone is going to show up with a “no true production is relying on Blender”-argument.
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Perfectly valid. I am with you on that. I just had to address that GPL thing since you emphasized it as if the GPL was the reason that TA made this available.
I am willing to bet by version 4 , Blender will turn into a fully fledged OS running on GPL licensed hardware using VR/AR as its latest UI. Judging by the rate of improvement and the amount of stuff that got added in. It’s already far more than 3d Graphics software and is code base its not getting any smaller. 2 million lines of coding and growing exponentially.
one big problem for me is that a program that called 3d modelling and animation suite it doesnt have dedicated developer for animation tools this is the reason why i allways keep my hands on maya no matter how much i love blender
The reason a lot of software has become industry standard is because those companies made an effort to make them the industry standard. Autodesk is notorious for giving away free 3-4 year educational licenses, which makes it very practical for poor students to get their hands on. I can only really speak to AutoCAD, but they made a big push in the 80s and 90s to get AutoCAD in schools (both directly to students and also as part of the curriculum). Now everyone uses it in the industry, which means students have to learn it to get hired, which means everyone continues to use it, etc. Pretty much everyone agrees AutoCAD is buggy, messy, and unintuitive, but we all have to use it because that’s just the way things are.
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Software does not need to match hardest of movie criteria to be successful. Central to every production is the little guy - artist. Development done right now affects and benefits 99.9% of blender users and that deserves praise. Artists and studios care for quality, capability, productivity. As long as Blender is compatible to the pipeline, it will be used by artists with growing popularity (just as Modo or Zbrush).
Another question is should Blender be central to workflow where everything can be done and assembled. Should it have the best fluid simulation tools? Personally I do not think so as such features are very exotic and expensive to develop in depth. Instead flexibility is key (openvdb, nodal everything/scripted modifiers) to create circumstance where any problem can be solved ( importing if needed). Quite honestly a professional studio, even individuals can solve these issues already.
Further more, in my subjective opinion rented softwares like Maya have become hostages to the very situation some of us here are eyeballing. Consider, Blender is ever changing. It would be hard to envision such indepth changes with any adsk software as we have seen with 2.7>2.8. It would turn studio pipelines upside down and halt the production especially as it’s “rental”. Do we envy these shackles?
Also consider that paradigms are shifting, ancient pipelines are changing. From one hand we have “scene assembly” solutions like Clarisse from Isotropix. Perhaps more interestingly we see Realtime playing ever more important role and Blender’s quite well positioned here. In a year or two I would not be surprised to see some movies or a like rendered out with Eevee just as we have seen with UE:
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Hm its not entirely correct though, Autodesk (autocad ) and inventor are teached because they attribute to jobs such as engineering. Blender is not aimed at engineering (not double precision possitions), however, there is a group of architects using blender these days, the’re getting aware of what Blender can do.
I kinda hoped that adoption in that area would grow a bit faster, (as lack of double precision is not a huge issue), because its group of people that thinks in 3d, and it would be nice if they met the Art world.
Despite the popularity of Autodesk, there are not that much companies who love it, most companies i have spoken feel forced to use it, (they’re proud of what they make, not proud and happy to draw)
And quite a few of them have drifted away to other drawing programs, companies tend to use more complex tools better aimed at “projects”, “simulation” and calculation.
As Blender supports python (numpy is faster in some areas where mathlab is used now), calculations, and the next key area to expand would be project management, to combine stuff, create construction part libraries. (there is a bit of attention for such libraries now), but to calculate steel and concrete floors, roofs / bridges etc, all we need for that are some architects adding such math to Blender, and blender could then make big popularity jumps, it could happen anytime, just like once BGE was added totally unexpected.
Or perhaps some freecad developer exchange or so
3d apps became industry standard because of one reason
Features
The history is actually quite long and turbulant with the rise and fall of 3d apps.
3d Studio history has always been connected with their Autocad history that dates back to 1977 even though very first version of Autocad released around 1982, Autodesk already had established itself as a big name in the architectural 3d modeling area. 3d studio was released for DOS back in 1988 a key year not only because it was the year I got my first computer but also because was the beginning of the end for home computers and the rise of PCs (although the term pc was very general term with very different meaning back then). In home computers the king was Amiga and especially Amiga 500 brought exceptional graphics in a very cheap package. Lightwave dominated the market at the time and closely connected itself with Amiga. Amiga was introduced in 1985 and it kept releasing models until 1996. It was far from being the first computer computer, but it was THE home computer and probably the best computer to ever exist. Mainly because it offered features that made it light years ahead of its competition at insanely low price. Something that not even Apple with iPhone managed to repeat.
At the time time PCs , especially IBM , completely underestimated the power of computer games and thought that they only belong to consoles like Atari. But Amiga was the one to popularize the term home computer , a computer used primarily for playing games but also for serious business software.
A home computer it was a computer made software and hardware from one company, although the components usually like PCs originated from other companies, they had a lot of custom made components and the software was platform specific.
Even though Amiga did not have the processing power of a pc , it had one huge advantage.
The first GPU
Amiga had a dedicate processor for graphics alone, unthinkable at the time, which is what made 3d graphics a viable option back then. On the contrary PCs were a no go for games and 3d graphics mainly because they did not even support color graphics very well and Amiga was one of the first to support 17 million color graphics. PCs on the other hand had around 1 million times less colors. So Amiga was light years ahead. The massive difference of course was because of the GPU and some clever graphics techniques that are even used today. Lightwave was the first 3d graphics package on the Amiga and quickly became popular. Of course graphics was not the only bonus, Amiga did great with sound and the company invested in games and software development and offered the first multi tasking GUI OS, Amiga OS.
However after 1988 PC seeing Europe completely dominated by home computers and especially Amiga start to make the first GPUs to be used by DOS games, the dominant OS at the time. Autodesk was quick to embrace the platform and finally make the jump from Architectural modeling to full blown 3d graphics, already having success and expertise in modeling in general. Other’s were not so quick to embrace the platform and took DOS another 8 years to really bury home computers with the discontinuation of the Amiga line. Bun finally the reign of Amiga came to an end , not able to compete with tons and tons of manufacturers poping GPUs like mushrooms at lower and lower prices. Amiga however managed to keep the edge on graphics till its very end. One of the last huge projects to happen on Lightwave and Amiga was Babylon 5 in 1994 which chose to go with Amiga and its very popular external graphics card (in addition to its internal GPU), video toaster , season 2 switched to PCs.
It was around 1994 that I was introduced to 3d studio , on DOS. It was already a very good 3d modeler. In 1998 when I took my first serious try at 3d graphics and at the time 3D Studio MAX R1 was and considered by many the top package for 3d modeling , it also came with extensive material library, a powerful material editor and video effects like lens flare which was widely popular at the time. But at the time the field was not so clear with tons of 3d packages to choose from and with Lightwave and Softimage still dominating the movie industry.
After 2000 we see the introduction of Blender and a ton of other 3d applications but also the rise of rather obscure 3d app you may have heard known as “Maya” that took the film industry by storm. What made Maya so extremely successful, probably the most rapid rise of popularity of in 3d app ever , was the fact that Maya did not have the modeling tools of 3ds but it had the highest price for 3d app.
The reason ?
It was the first to include hair simulation, fluids and a wealth of other features that at the time was unthinkable to exist in a 3d app and could be bought only as plugins. So Maya was the first to popularise the very idea that Blender follow the multipurpose workflow at a time when plugins really prevailed. The movie industry could not resist, 3DS could not catch up. The rest of the decade its the deadly dance between Maya and 3ds , 3ds dominating the games, Maya the films. The games had little use for hairs and fluids at the time.
Unfortunately for Maya, the game industry outgrow the movie industry which fueled the dominance of Autodesk in 3d graphics. Which allowed them to make an offer to Maya that could not resist.
At the same time another obscure app appeared to become the third big player much later on.
ZBrush.
ZBrush was the first 3d app for me to actually buy, the rest were just pirate copies, cause of insane pricing I could not afford even the dream of buying them. Taken away from the concept of digital sculpting and consider it to be the future of organic modeling in general , I saw it as an investment since ZBrush was the first to offer the unthinkable, free updates for life. It was 2002 and I bought of course version 1.55. Probably the first widely available version of ZBrush. Unfortunately even though ZBrush got some really nice reviews the industry failed to see its importance as well as the bad idea of ZBrush to put too much emphasis in its 2.5 features, its 3d pixel that named , “pixol” and considered so important , the most important feature, named even the company after it as Pixologic. Alas 3d world was not convinced and at the time proportionate modeling was already popularised and ZBrush quite limited in sculpting features for people to see what the big deal was with sculpting in general. It was after version 2 when Zbrush swift focus from the pixol to sculpting and memory management, it made the app capable of handling insane amount of polygons by compressing memory and using other “cheats” and of course expanding the capabilities of its sculpting. Year after year of constant focus on sculpting tools finally people got the message loud and clear, Softimage being one of the first to offer integration with Zbrush and its million polygon architecture because at the time 3d apps could not really handle such high polies which was another barrier for Zbrush. To this date very few people actually care about the pixol.
In the mean time Blender had become open source. As an app I was introduced at it back in version 1 in 2000 , still closed source and commercial, but it was hate at first sight, for the same criticisms it was getting in reviews, really terrible UI. Blender had one of the worst GUIs second to maybe only Amapi , another short lived 3d app. A trend that continued until 2.49 when finally Ton decided to do the obvious and really improve the GUI which made Blender really take off in popularity. The year was 2010 and it was a key moment with Autodesk giving up on the battle vs Maya , 3DS lost the movie industry to Maya, but Autodesk bought Maya in the mean time. At the time news broke out that it also bought Softimage and once more I saw the clear signs that was time to abandon ship.
Having no reason anymore to stay away from Blender , when finally the UI became reasonable even though still quite messy, I made the jump and the rest as they say its history.
So the juice of the story is that many of those popular apps become that popular because they really improved heavily feature wise and not because of clever marketing and business strategies. Lightwave and Softimage used to be the top dogs but the first I no idea if it still exists, the second is RIP. 3DS took a decade to really dominate the game industry and took ages for Maya to dominate the movie industry. Many other’s simply could not keep up with the times and disappeared or were lost in the deep pit of low popularity.
Autodesk was always a big company , with an oversized marketing department, on 3d but took them decades to really dominate the market because they had some serious competition in term of features and ease of usage.
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Slightly disagree it became a standards due to architects leaving their pencils.
In the early days it wasnt even about rendering,.
Its also a reason why i think Blender should reach out to architects / engineers as well. If they turn to blend files, industry might follow as they might like our mesh editing tools too. ( there are more 3d creators besides artists ).
I like the work on eevee, etc but i think it good be a game changer if blender had measurements by default as nicely integreated as overlays in eevee.
And have a paper based view layout output system (ea render vector to printer).
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how about this fork ?
This becomes an interesting chat ( I once started with autocad 3 and after 10 i got other interests, by that time i had coded a shape generator and menu’s using visualbasic… eventually i becamme a programmer, in non graphic areas vision/robotics/ai etc )
I think all large 3d programs scare at first, all those options overwhelm people.
I’m wearing multiple hats as well, from engineering marketing but mostly i’m a industrial developer (i code) for exotic hardware. Which reminds me, today i was programming for a 9000fps camera, there was some config tool around it. Which just had 3 modes (starter mediate and advanced), despite that i went straight to advanced from day one. something alike that might perhaps be an idea to Limit the GUI for starters.
That way they can focus on the more general 3D tasks (while other options are set to some default value).
In Basic mode one might not have knife tools no sculpt tools, no background texture, no baking etc, …just simple mesh editing.
I actually work in architecture full-time, so I speak with some experience on the topic of AutoCAD etc.
People are moving to BIM platforms, which is why Revit is becoming quite popular. It bridges the gap a lot between the engineering/budgeting half of architecture and the design half of architecture. 3D is really not that important for anyone besides marketing/sales who like to show clients beautiful renders. The kind of drawings we pass around in-house vs the ones that clients see are two completely different worlds.
But basically, AutoCAD (or Revit) has been the standard for in-house architecture because it is so compatible with engineering. Consultants are extremely expensive (literally hundreds of dollars an hour), so you want to keep as much stuff in-house as possible. Being able to trade drawings between departments without having to have someone translate the work is very valuable in both time and money.
My company is relatively small as far as architecture goes, and so we wear a lot of hats. No one exclusively works on design or construction (though we have our specialties), and so we need programs that are simple and easy to exchange. We also frequently trade off on projects so legibility is important. We are not programmers. AutoCAD is practical for both construction and initial design. SketchUp can be used by both the engineers and the designers for both purposes. Lumion handles SketchUp files for rendering with relative ease, and the real-time rendering cuts down on our production times a lot. When we’re competing with other companies for the same job, being the first to produce a design is a big deal. If we were a larger firm, we would probably have dedicated visualizers who work in 3DSMax, which integrates with AutoCAD, and don’t have to worry about others not being able to pick up where they left off. That being said, there are large firms who work almost exclusively with Lumion (perhaps a touch of Photoshop).
Tl;DR: Blender is a big scary program and it’s just not feasible for smaller firms at least. The Autodesk ecosystem is strong.
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