“I am actually tired of see blender been looked down upon from the industry”
Its actually not looked down upon as much as you might think, especially now that its gotten better. 2.8 is attracting quite a bit of attention. Quite a few professionals, even in professional environments, have either began to switch to blender or continuously try it out to see how far it has come.
One VFX house I am familiar with (they have done some Marvel related work, just to show you where they are on the industry ladder), has Blender installed on most of their work stations. While this does not necessarily mean the software gets used by everyone, it is still present to some degree.
Most of the flack Blender has gotten on an industry level occurred because of two things in particular.
The first was that Blender was designed in such a way where it rejected industry standards, it was simply too difficult to use or unnecessarily convoluted. Right click select was obviously a big downer for many.
The second was the user base. Lets face it, Blender’s user base in the past pissed a lot of people off. They were simply obnoxious on a fanboy level, and it left a bad impression. There is a reason there is a stickied thread here about not being a fanboy. Thankfully, that is largely in the past, and the community has not only attracted some familiar figures, but has also grown up quite a bit internally.
Both of those issues are things of the past, 2.8 is a great representation of that. This leads to the next point: Blender’s success.
Once the bad impression over the community went away and Blender became more industry standard, smarter on a design level, magically most of the resistance towards it went away. Now all you have is appeal. Really all it took was some good art work, some solid plugins + industry standard concessions and some feature that were at or surpassed industry expectations.
As long as Blender continues the path its taking with 2.8, seriously tries to compete with existing (often times stagnating) applications, it will continue to grow exponentially.
Users want to stop using Autodesk products, they would love to find alternatives to the software they use now for the most part. They just won’t make the switch if their productivity will take a hit, and that is largely diminishing.
As for Blender doing something different, it really doesn’t have to. In fact it should try to match and surpass whats out there now, however that alone makes it different due to the development culture. It is open, where as everything else is closed. That alone sets it apart.
Don’t worry about Blender’s future, it will grow as long as the developers do not go back to old habits. =)
