There have been a number of conversations lately with regard to Blender’s inability to be adopted by mainstream AAA or industry film studios. In particular: Flipped Normal’s Youtube conversation, “Why Blender Isn’t 3D Industry Standard” and Grant Abbitt’s reply, " Will Blender Take Over as the Industry Standard."
While both are very worthwhile views, neither approaches the topic from a macro-economic perspective-- one which forces change in all industries: the very real concept of Disruption.
Clayton Christensen talks about KODAK in his famous book, “The Innovators Dilemma,” and points out KODAK was too involved with their distribution pipeline to be able to react quickly enough to the upcoming digital photography tsunami. They dismissed quickly the fact digital photos were of poor quality and incorrectly believed they would amount to no competition.
Their partners were a huge and monolithic supply chain consisting of chemical companies, paper manufacturers, film and camera corporations and a host of other symbiotic relationships-- all too intertwined to be able to shift quickly to a new paradigm.
Listening to the Flipped Normal video and their insistence that Blender had no place in “the pipeline” because there were better applications at every step of the way, I couldn’t help but picture KODAK and the obvious similarities.
One thing Christensen points out is KODAK thought they were in the photography business, but didn’t understand until it was too late, they were in the memory saving business. Their eventual competitors would be the MySpaces and Facebooks along with photo sharing apps and texting photos.
Industry studios should also strive to understand what business they are in as well. As economics around movies change, so must they.
Larger studios may be too invested in years old pipelines to be able to move quick enough to keep from being disrupted by quicker, faster, and more efficient smaller teams with less expensive tools and training budgets. Just look how Video Copilot has created a generation of users who now compete at top industry levels with non-industry standard tools.
It is now obvious to everyone the strong trend in creating more movies and shows for less. Netflix, Amazon, Disney and now Apple are throwing their considerable weight into mass production of consumable moving pictures. Those studios who can produce at the appropriate quality levels with efficiency and speed will thrive.
Of course there are a number of big studios which will still be financed to create the next mega-Avenger movies-- but even these are providing less return in a hit-based model that is seeing fewer and fewer hits.
So, it is up to the studios now to become nimble, or else be disrupted by the new upcoming smaller studios using more efficient and less costly workflows. As the quality of FOSS continues to rise, it would make sense for these new companies to use them, especially if they do anything where the economics of scale are concerned.
Marry this with the multiple trends: realtime video is getting close to film quality, free tools abound and virtual studios are on the rise, and it becomes clear to me there is a huge opportunity for disruption.
Oats Studios ( oatsstudios.com ) is one such nextgen studio with an A-List director, Neill Blomkamp, at the helm. There are surely more to follow. Check out their release of ADAM part 2, entirely created and rendered in realtime in Unity:
Just my two cents as someone who has been involved with digital graphics and 3D since the early 80’s.
You know…when google search results starts to put the freeware version before your paid version there might be a problem. Blender use to show up on the page 2 of most searches for 3d animation softwares and now…yeah. Granted Google is just using a bit of AI to handle the layout of these search results but it is telling none the less.
