In 2000 Alias owned Maya and and Microsoft owned SoftImage. Autodesk acquired Alias in 2005 and Maya was already well on its way to “industry standard”. Not as familiar with SoftImage’s history but Microsoft owning them probably didn’t help at all.
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Softimage was acquired in 2008 by Autodesk. And, it was Autodesk who bought them and later killed the software. Not a disruption, but a commercial purchase of your competitor.
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While we would love to see that but imo Blender still has more steps to take, and i am not talking about just features but polishing the current ones…if you look at Maya & Blender from a broader view you can see that Blender can do alot more but the closer you look & scrutinize it then you realize the difference.
Maya went through alot of heavy use in production & Autodesk clearly focusing on what works for that but with the 2.80 Release and the rise of Blender we might see also a shift (we already had a taste with them releasing the indie version & making survey about Blender…etc), they are aware of Blender’s potential threat to their Softwares & will take any measures when needed.
Ton in his presentation said that the “Industry” reached out to him…etc but he wants them to join Blender not the way around so the Question is. will the Industry decide to make Blender part of it or will Blender always be the Dark horse that it will never ride?.
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Some great points for sure.
Still, you’re assuming the industry doesn’t change. All it takes is a major player using Blender to gain a substantial advantage and the rest will take notice.
The recent accomplishments by Blender’s new animation titles on Netflix, Next Gen and Spring, bode well for Blender and show a promise that has not gone unnoticed.
If I’m Netflix or Apple or Disney, and I can get three animation titles created for the price of one-- and I’m assured of the quality, then why do I care if the artists use Maya or Blender?
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Right now, If blender gets a VERY good import/export to most formats and a VERY good applink to most 3d programs (zbrush, substance etc) I can see blender going to places in no time!
as a 3d suite or a middle 3d program that connects all other programs.
for doing it from 0 to 100 in blender… no.
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Krita is also nipping at Adobes heels regarding painting.
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I think that in the near future, Blender will most likely make most of its conquest in the small animation studios, small local VFX houses and Indie 3d artists. Especially in emerging AudioVisual production markets like in 3rd world countries were the artists might have the passion but not the money for the license. I can see Blender integrating into those markets easier than for established big Hollywood studios.
The event that could mark the inevitable victory of Blender is if a Big VFX house, the type that likes to make its own tools, adopted Blender, and wins an award with it.
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Pretty much, exporting assets from blender can be a PITA to get the settings lined up for your target application.
The thing is, if you look at it based on solely startup time, faster user experience, it reduces daily costs in a way selling price can’t. I’m working in the games/other software development for 20 years now, and I know this: it’s damn expensive to have your employees waiting for something to happen. For example in a game studio I was working for lately, we used Max mostly for 3D, and it’s startup time with all the stuff going on was horrendously slow. If it’s 2 minutes (doesn’t sound like much), and you open Max multiple times a day (due to crashes or simply switching apps because you can run out of whatever memory you have while running other tools AND/OR the game as well), and also multiply it with the number of artists/users, it could easily go up to a point where you basically lose one or more man day per day, which is basically having a fully paid, phantom artist.
For a long time, industry saw Blender as a minor, independent effort with bad UI, quirky programmer tooltips, hard to understand functionality, etc. It gradually changed into the current version, where most of the UI is pretty well streamlined and cleaned up (tbh, Max is still using the late '90 windows controls and the UI is littered with all kinds of ugly popups). And Blender is blazingly fast compared to the top solutions we were (had to be) using.
One other thing. Industry professionals are damn f*cking lazy (sorry), most of them afraid of ANY change. That’s the sad truth. The longer they are in the business, the more resistant to learn new things. Thats not only bad for them, it’s also bad for developers, who simply can’t fix stupid, outdated mechanics in their application BECAUSE SOMEONE USED TO USE IT THAT WAY.
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As someone who use to be responsible for training contractors in an industry, I can understand why the powers that be frown on the prospect of training or retraining a crew. There is something about teaching a group of people that brings out those personalty defects that some individuals have in interesting and occasionally noteworthy ways. Teaching ten people a new system would mean that we would need 2-4 people to QC their work for about half a year in addition to the normal QC process (a thing that can cause and find strife), and if you have isolated departments they may and often will find differing solutions to the same problems and said solutions may conflict with one another. So that there is not just an age thing, I would consider it more of a ptsd thing.
But with all of that being said, I do think that soon we will start to see more UI customization options in our applications and perhaps hardware.
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Softimage was founded in 1986, sold to Microsoft in 1994 who sold it to Avid Technology in 1998… who sold it to Autodesk in 2008. With only 4 years of ownership, I don’t think this time MS has a lot to do with the fate of Softimage…
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I think what he ment to say is that studies switching is not how blender will win . It’s the fact that from out of nowhere, a lot more upstart new studies will rise and be able to compete and produce more for less . In a cut throat market of streaming and bulk production, the cost of the pipeline is important to save money…
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I understand your point, however I meant that (of course with exceptions) the typical artist don’t want to switch tools. It’s more like a general problem (I know a lot of programmers of the same mindset too, though their knowledge becomes technologically outdated much faster). So therefore it’s much harder to teach them a whole new tool or pipeline or something if their mentality is negative towards anything. Of course it’ll already become more expensive too.
I don’t want to trash on the industry, there are lot of people who are great, and always seeking new, more efficient and interesting ways to solve problems, but it’s the same as any other job - there are lots of mediocre people (larger the studio, larger the amount of them).
Personally, I don’t think that the fundamental issue here has to do with artists. It has to do with profit-making (“wage-paying …”) businesses, quite a few of which are subcontractors to much, much larger companies. The first thing that you do is to establish a pipeline that “reliably allows you to take the inputs that you’ll be given and to produce the outputs they’ll pay for … by deadline.” The second thing that you do is to stick with that, forever. End of story. 
In this light, questions of whether Product-X will “defeat” Product-Y are mostly irrelevant. You’ve got a contract to fulfill. You’ll get a six- or seven-figure check if you do it; and zero dollars if you don’t. Any questions?
Haha. You’d have made a wonderful employee at Kodak 
Looking from hi-end VFX production point (and more than 15 years of using Maya) there’s not much place for maya in the “industry” today:
- Modeling - many still use maya by inertia. But in modern pipeline (with alembic, and now USD) there’s no difference where you model - anybody could do 3d models anywhere. And maya is far from being best for that.
- Rigging/Animation - here maya is still a king. 1) It has connection to motionbuilder (industry standard application for mocap processing). 2) It has A LOT of tested solutions (like autorigs, plugins like ziva etc.) 3) It is being taught in most of animation schools as “one and only” software for animation.
- FX - I just don’t know people who still uses maya for that. It could be almost true to say that maya is NOT used for fx in the industry. For last 10 years It’s almost 100% houdini.
- Layout-Lighting-Render - it’s almost as with FX today. Maya just not fit to that task at all. It’s still used here and there but only because people are lazy to learn and integrate Katana or Houdini into their pipeline. IMHO houdini Solaris will be a king here (as Katana does now) in nearest years. There’s rumors that even Weta switches their pipeline to that (the used to use highly customized own tool based on Maya).
So, in general, is maya still used mostly because of animation. If Blender want to cut it’s share in the big industry it should invest more into rigging-animation tools. And performance (very IMPORTANT).
Modeling is already better than Maya’s.
FX - it is VERY hard to beat houdini here (almost impossible i think).
Layout-Render - If you seen houdini solaris presentation you’ll understand that it’ll take A LOT of time to create something like that
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Actually, Houdini’s node based, non-destructive modifier stack gives that extra edge which makes it so great and useful for FX and procedural stuff. At the moment Blender switches its modifiers to nodes, it’ll be hell of a ride. Of course it’s a really long way ahead, and it’s hard to compete with Houdini, but it’s not impossible at all, because it’s not too different to a shader editor under the hood.
This is where the license for blender may become a problem .
Right now you can use Houdini engine in maya or other applications as a plugin, but even if blender reach the same level as Houdini you can’t use it as a direct plugin for other software I think. maybe I’m wrong here though I’m not a lawyer
Of course with USD that will not be a deal breaker but still less than Houdini
it is sure possible to make tools that could be similar. And “everything nodes” project (hire of the Jacques Lucke) is a very right and wise move by BF.
But it will be extremely hard (almost impossible) to get industry FX artists from houdini.
But beat maya in modeling and animation field is quite possible )))
USD is a hot topic now and it should be very high priority for BF to get on that wagon. Fortunately Ton seems to understand it very well
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There maybe something in favour of blender Vs Houdini when it comes to VFX assuming that everything nodes can deliver.
That is the blender community . The culture of the community that have formed around blender is of sharing of knowledge. By all accounts that I have heard so far, this the exact opposite of Houdini where artist guard their secrets jealously .if blender can deliver, it will be much easier and probably cheaper to find artist who are good with blender than Houdini …
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