Why blender is not used in AAA video game industry?

I know blender is very popular for indie game studios but why the big studios didn’t using?
It has to do with the animation capabilities of blender? Will 2.8 change that ?
I heard something about blender is not good at mocap data for animation

well blender 2.8 its gonna change the cg world for freelance artists. (and game studios as well they do really use it but its not so popular or too much used for big studios there are another program like from autodesk that are the most used, and zbrush, substance painter,etc) and there movies,shorts, and a lot of games that blender was used for them, fortunately it has a lot of really good features in this new coming version, but unfortunately there are not yet built in those really usefull addons for modelling workflow and a lot else of stuff that blender developers havent put in, but they need to be incorporate in blender (these are paid ones sadly but i hope they will freely built in into blender someday) in this page you can see the best addons ever https://blendermarket.com/

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I know all those things, big studios don’t have any problem purchasing paid addons whenever price is this,
They even can write addons for they own purpose it’s a typical process for this kind of softwares

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This has been discussed to death, but the three primary reasons are:

  1. inertia. pipelines are tough to change without a really good reason.
  2. talent availability. there are more Max/Maya artists in the job market.
  3. interoperability. blender is not very good at it because of both autodesk’s proprietary formats and the GPL.

Incidentally, for a big studio, Blender’s lack of licensing cost is barely a factor. When an employee is costing you 100k/year, adding on 1.5k/year for a Maya license is no big deal.

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If server based streaming services like Nvidia’s GeForce Now are successful, which allows players to run AAA games on subpar devices, then the market may change. Cost becomes a factor, for example it is estimated that 90% of ‘Hollywood’ VFX is rendered on Linux servers, because of per seat/CPU/VM licensing requirements. Each connected player will need a server side engine instance, which makes free/OSS much more attractive when developing a production pipeline. Many of the major CG software companies have Linux versions, despite Linux having little more than a one percent share of the desktop OS market.

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One thing I have notice is non of the indie game studios that use blender have made a successful product both in revenue and commercially
And this is really a big problem

When you say “that use blender”, are you talking about using blender for modeling, or the blender game engine? If you are talking about the game engine, then that has an entirely different set of issues that keeps studios from using it.

I seriously doubt there haven’t been any successful games that modeled their assets in blender. We really don’t have any means of finding out if a company built its game assets in blender. We would only know if they said something about it somewhere.

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I mean the blender itself not the game engine

Well, my guess is that there are some popular games that have used it, but there is no way to find out. I’ve heard different stories on this forum where people model something in blender, then export it out to obj or fbx and use that model in other software. Even if a company doesn’t officially use blender, there are bound to be some assets that were made in it.

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IMO, Blender did things differently than other 3d programs which put it in a disadvantage position but with 2.80 thing are getting better, Studios are reluctant to change their pipeline or Software if it doesn’t do the best job they want…game dev is very technical and requires many pieces to work togather including in-house tools,blender still has a long way to go but it’s heading into the right direction, with new UI,EEVEE, Left Click Default…etc is looking promising for game dev.

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If you want to see Blender on the Big AAA Leagues, I´d say it will be when 2.81 (solid) arrives because:
UDIMs
Native ASSET manager
Better retopo tools (at the moment Retopoflow take$ the cake).

I´d say in 2 more years we will definitely see a more competitive Blender 2.8 series on the AAA+ games arena. (not that it is not used right now)…

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Blender is used in plenty of places in a AAA capacity, but only where it makes sense: modeling and texturing. As others have said, limited interop prevents widespread use for many other aspects of the pipeline. But you’d be surprised how prevalent Blender is in the industry these days for modelers.

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If you’ve got a well-established business with a track record of delivering quality products, you’re not going to change that process casually. Of course you are aware of Blender, of Armory3D and so on, and you’re as interested as the next company in stuff that could give you an “edge,” but change happens slowly – as well it should. When you talk about pipeline changes, you’re talking about business risks that by definition “risk everything.” Before business adopt changes like that, they discuss it for a l-o-n-g time. (And, from the outside, you won’t see their explorations at all.)

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Lol about armory3d this program it’s a crap
It’s always give me a error report no matter what :frowning:

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It is not unused, but not widely used. If studio is less strict about which 3d package artist uses, it’s ultimately comes to artists preferences and there is blender users in some of big studios.

In addition most students getting education in this field learning in 3ds Max or Maya and ZBrush with zero promotion of Blender. So learning Blender is once again artists preferences and they have to do it on their own.

I worked with a couple of ATD’s recently, fresh out of collage, and they told me they’d been shown Blender as well as other packages. Generally as a guy who started back in the days when the only way learning 3D was on your own at home through some forums and early tutorials, I’m pretty impressed about the overall knowledge new students are getting to start their journey.

It’d be interesting to hear how many institutions are teaching Blender to at least some extent. It’ll catch on I think, the old UI threw a lot of people off (including me) but I hear more and more people at bigger companies talking/asking about it.

Businesses which have been around for a while have also seen every promise under the sun - faster, cheaper, better. And then failing in new and interesting ways, or disappearing after a couple of releases. They know better to jump in blind with both feet and no life preserver.

I closed my post with “…not that it is not used right now”.

Not many, and if it included somewhere it’s probably as elective class at best.

Many old veterans just had bad experience with Blender way back in time and never bothered to try it again. So they still describe Blender as “featureless package” despite not even being up to date with it tools.

One thing I have notice is non of the indie game studios that use blender have made a successful product both in revenue and commercially
And this is really a big problem

I guess selling over a million units before you leave early access and consistently being in the top 100 steam games sold for years, and also being the third highest rated game of all time just isn’t enough to be considered a successful use of Blender.

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