Aside the fact that I believe the blender’s galaxy of tools is underrated just because of professionists not knowing it, (yeah, you take for granted that many people know it, but it’s far from being true), I don’t see any attempt to take any kind of “industry”‘s market share.
I see just attempt to move puppets but with an absolute care to not upset the moving puppets’ industry, because you know… reasons.
And since this topic goes usually into a “poor BI/BF so nice,kind and pure of heart”, “you disgraceful”, “trolls everywhere”…
well, this is all I have to say.
Blender has become a great tool that has inspired many other applications by only using the GPL. If Blender only copied other apps and only using API’s from commercial companies then we would still have Blender 2.0 and not going to 2.8.
GPL’s limitation makes progress within Blender. Not the fastest progress but Blender is not about short term profit.
"Did anyone ever consider that it’s not the intention or goal of Blender to ‘take over the industry’?
I agree with this the blender foundation doesnt look to “take over the industry”, it’s goal is to empower artists to be able to work with freedom.
Blender doesn’t need conventional advertising, things that are good and last, don’t need other marketing than word of mouth, so what you did is exactly the kind of marketing that blender needs, it’s users spreading the word, if people like it they’ll use it, if they dont, well there are paid alternatives.
some companies are either too lazy or theire pipeline is too custom so changing will either never happen or be very slow, and that’s fine, we don’t need everyone using blender, blender is just an open choice.
you said “open source” usually meant bad stuff to you, well if blender wasn’t open source, IT WOULD NOT BE AS GOOD.
Lucky that you have the GPL. The GPL means that you don’t have to listen to Ton and are free to modify Blender as you please, including linking in non-free SDKs such as Autodesk’s FBX. Only when you distribute your modified version the restrictions of the GPL apply, but still, you’re not bound to Ton’s point of view.
There is a discussion, whether dynamically linking non-GPL libraries violates the GPL or not. If you distribute a modified blender you have to distribute it under the GPL and if you dynamically link a non GPL library you may theoretically get sued for it.
But there are blender addons that you need to buy, so it seems to be possible to write and distribute blender addons with a different licensing model than GPL. Anyone can write an fbx addon that dynamically links autodesks api (that little python code isn’t even that difficult) and distribute it for example with a LGPL license. But the users would need to download it manually, as LGPL plugins can’t be part of the default blender installation.
A Substance integration (changing the parameters of a Substance directly in Blender) is more difficult, because Blender doesn’t have a C/C++ plugin interface and passing textures through a python interface wouldn’t be performant. You could probably write a non-realtime plugin that could do that und publish it, like an FBX plugin, but Allegorithmic won’t invest in writing a plugin that can’t create the expected user experience.
Upbge fork exists, but they are focused on weaponizing the bge for game dev.
Fbx is nice and all, but I think once PBR is in UPBGE with forward+ rendering, and blender gets multiple channel texture painting… why will there be a need to export at all?
Need fast native code? Add it, the bge is open source and has been refactoring for a number of years.
As for offline rendering,
You can use renderman, cycles, and many others.
Why is maya even a thing anymore?
I here it crashes constantly, and the ui is a cluttered iconic mess, and you pay every month for it?
It would seem each studio could pay a blender dev to add features or streamline stuff instead.
Maya is very entrenched in the industry and many studios see it as a expensive process to change the pipeline, entrenched tools are also very hard to dislodge.
Autodesk gives excellent customer support for its large clients (and the studios will pay big money for priority service).
A lot of studios don’t use Maya as it comes out of the box, but heavily modify it with proprietary and specialized technology and tools (the application’s expansive C++ API for extensions is a major selling point).
The larger studios won’t care so much about Blender not simply because it’s incapable of doing professional work, but because there’s no much in it that would be seen as the best (which the likes of ILM and Weta demand). In the last 15 years, the only applications that have managed to become go-to applications for the largest of the large are specialized tools like Zbrush. The only application that came close to unseating Maya was XSI (due to its extremely advanced tools and rapid development) and it died a slow death under Autodesk.
Not to worry though, Blender is slowly making headway in the lower tiers (and should only improve with 2.8 if everything goes as planned).
I don’t completely agree with this, moving images around is really fast, even in slow interfaces. Images are just not that big in general. The Octane plugin moves images around and doesn’t have any issues at all and is very fast. Even faster than Cycles and it’s built directly into Blender. I have a feeling that Allegorithmic thinks that it wouldn’t be fast enough, but I think it just might be. Also it could be that they don’t want to create a server version of their software just for Blender. This is how Octane gets around the GPL by having a server running that the open source plugin talks to. Otoy did the server route because then they can use it for other things like running on slave computers, etc.
Why do you think that is the case? A license change won’t make developers appear out of nothing - in other areas, we see the GPL projects getting more developer support than their BSD licensed equivalents (Linux vs *BSD).
Even if the FBX SDK was GPL licensed, you would still need a developer willing to devote their time to writing an im-/exporter for Blender.
I had a similar story in a 3ds/maya dominated video game studio. There were several 10+year veterans who were very impressed to put it mildly. A guy even switched who works in very prestigious company now, I also know several started learning and there were even echos of trying to make the software more central in studio pipeline. I did list here the pros and cons, but erased it as noone cares and things get a bit long… What I want to say though is that from studios point of view, max and maya are entrenched and will not go anywhere in short time. Luckily they are just the destination of final asset so just as you work with Zbrush and export to your 3D app of choice, it’s the same thing with Blender.
Personally I do believe knowing Blender properly will give you big competitive advantage when it comes to execution speed and quality - these are related because no matter what you do, you will be under time pressure. The more efficient you are, the better things you can make. Subjectively I think I’m several times faster with Blender(that I have used for 2-3 years) vs maya and max (with nearly 2 decade of use)
Now what is the problem? New artists struggle with Blenders very different paradigms and mainly navigation/hotkey preset. In a studio where pipeline is established, well documented and you can always ask your lead to help you, to use Blender is to sail uncharted territores. You will run into problems that you have to solve yourself.
For example I had issues where exporting from Blender to maya fuses UV shells. FBX glitch? So had to develop a specific workaround. Weighted normals need to transfer from Blender to max or maya + do not work with modifiers. Can only use FBX for that or bakes will be corrupt. Then there’s the smoothing groups / sharp edges / edge hardness confusion that is perfect in Blender, but again upon export with incorrect settings can cause all sorts of issues. I have even recompiled Blender to shift UV shells out of UV 0-1 space so Baking in substance would be possible (for mirror modifier and UV warp) + avoid UV shell merger. Baking is a bit difficult in Blender(+ no AA?)… List goes on and on and at times might appear daunting forcing a new artist to crawl back to software where he knows how to get things done.
To summarize, Blender has it all under the hood and it is exceptionally efficient, but it will take some frustration to establish a solid workflow while max/maya have gone through any and all production challenges having needed tools and documentation available. I also believe that the biggest roadblock for any new artist is infact the Hotkey preset that is very unique compared to anything out there. Max/maya presets do not fully work and are glitched. I must admit that I do not know default hotkeys at all. I am sure they are efficient, but it was just too different to what I already knew + working with multiple softwares you need some overlap. A lot of artists simply do not have the time to relearn all and some effort should be made to allow a smoother transition.
In my experience the difference in productions times could 1/2 up to 1/3
Now what is the problem? New artists struggle with Blenders very different paradigms and mainly navigation/hotkey preset. In a studio where pipeline is established, well documented and you can always ask your lead to help you, to use Blender is to sail uncharted territores. You will run into problems that you have to solve yourself.
The worst thing in blender is the right click; the use of 1,2,3 in edit mode for layers, no for edit mode; and the few documentation that have the user when you open the program the first time. In other software like houdini and modo the have a lot of free video tutorials to learn to use the interface. In blender you must search in google, or find the “manual” link that is little and the documentation is more for programmers instead artist. And the video to max users is a pay video.