This 100%. It’s a constant and tedious theme on the Max beta forums these past few years. Since I’ve started using Blender this year I’ve become a bit of an evangelist singing its praises on the Max beta forums. There are plenty of Max vets over there that are positive about blender and have actively been using it in their free time(like myself), but there are just as many who will oppose absolutely ANYTHING Blender related. These are 20-year pro vets who are stubbornly vehement in their resistance to change or modernisation. Stuck in outdated workflows that they’re comfortable with because ‘it works’. Calls for the complete modernisation and overhaul of the 20 year old Biped animation system…Nah, somebody somewhere is using it… It drives me crazy!
I remember when an SGI and a copy of Discrete(Adesk) Inferno was $500,000 and you couldn’t run the program without the machine.
Let’s not forget that 10 years ago Max was king in the game industry. At the time Biped and RTT(the first program to have a dedicated map baker) where cornerstones of many game studios.
Ubisoft AAA and new startup Embark Studios are seious banner bearers for a new wave of Blender-centric(partnered with Houdini) game dev pipelines.
Film/VFX is another matter. Most points have already been made above, but one big factor that hasn’t been mentioned is the render pipeline. For film/VFX Max/Maya have Arnold as their primary native renderer. This cannot be underestimated for film work.
At the moment Cycles is a great renderer, but it is let down by 2 major issues regarding film: UDIMs(on the way in the near future) and more importantly, a streaming, atlased texture system like the .TX file in Arnold. This is essential for the sort of rendering required by a ‘Hollywood’ FX house. Cycles badly needs this in the future. As it is Blender utterly fails when you throw large texture footprints at it.
Interop/asset management is another big factor, but I suspect when USD is eventually adopted universally that will be less of an issue. Just a matter of when.
Directly tied to that is performance. This is nowhere near acceptable and lags FAR behind Max and Maya; both in terms of dense geo modeling and animation playback/realtime rig performance.
It’s all well and good messing with a 50-bone rig on a 50K vert character…then have a look at the sort of insanely complex rigs and dynamic muscle systems being built in Maya for high-end film characters. It’s even moved beyond rendertime displacement maps for intricate facial animation and muscle/skin sliding. Modern film characters/creatures are much denser and the topology is relied on to get the effect that disp maps used to. This sort of set up would be impossible in Blender to the level of current high-end film house pipeline/workflow.
That’s where the bar is in terms of calling out Maya’s position as the industry leading animation program.
See my points above about performance and rendering. People keep forgetting that all this stuff has to be rendered in the end.
The video that Gleb did at Bcon this year was interesting, but also shows how far Blender has to go for VFX. In that demo he compared effects created in Max as he showed the process of trying to hack(in the sense that they used volumes in Blender) similar results as Max.
Houdini aside, Max is still a powerhouse in VFX with plugins like Thinking Particles, Krakatoa, Tyflow, FumeFX, PhoenixFD, Arnold, Vray, and the currently in development Bifrost procedural modeling system that will be built into Max.
Houdini has become a lot more approachable and open in recent years and isn’t the esoteric enigma it was once seen as.
I don’t assume that but it will take a long time for it to happen, Studios worry about outputs more than the cost of a Software not only that they have to retrain their Artists which isn’t cheap either, it’s Cost vs Risk situation and the heads of the Studio have to make the decision.
Chipp, thanks so much for your take on this - I was for some reason annoyed at the FN video while watching it, and other similar veins of discussion about the realities and “uphill battle” Blender would have etc.
The feeling was the kinda thing you notice, but not sure why or the cause.
Your Kodak analogy was a perfect analogy, especially about the saving of memories VS the technology used at the time to accomplish it - who cares frankly! (That lesson needs to be learned / remembered across a LOT of different areas of technology, frankly!)
I say BINGO on this post, I’m wishing this was also a video up on YT in response to any of those other similar videos!
If anything is disruptive about Blender in terms of features, I’d say it’s Grease Pencil. There are many artists from outside of the 3d world trying it out with some interesting results in 2d and mixed 2d & 3d animation. Grease Pencil provides new options for layout and storyboarding, as well as enabling artists to use new techniques to create interesting results that are difficult or impossible to obtain in other software.
Blender also has a far more positive and helpful community than most of the competition, which is very helpful for those starting out in 3d. Unless those users are tempted away by something Maya offers that Blender doesn’t, why stop using Blender?
I think as long as Blender is able to maintain the current levels of funding and not fall behind on important features, the userbase will continue to grow compared to proprietary software that doesn’t offer anything special.
I don’t agree at all with the vision of “industry standard” software. I really don’t care which software a large AAA international studio uses. I care about what I as a freelancer or indie studio can use in order to maximize my profits on a third world country with an ever increasing competition. We need to look at our industry on a more macro view, because we don’t live in the same place, neither work with the same AAA clients, nor have the same budget to talk about a “standard”.
Wow, off topic, but I’m shocked (but not surprised), to see Autodesk bought out Eagle?!!
I was an electronics engineer, in a prior lifetime (defecting to software engineering), and I was interested in getting back into designing some guitar preamps / parametric filters, and other small-ish circuits, and was looking at KiCAD.
Web based stuff usually built upon node.js, Angular/React (or whatever UI/binding lib you prefer), MongoDB for database, etc. Mostly for sites that are not overcustomized in visibility, there are easy to use templates and themes, so Dreamweaver not that needed. I don’t know its current state, but I guess it is only used when you’d like to create some custom stuff.
Say what you will, this is some wiggle room to work with for pipelines and addons if someone wished to have a fully commercial addon as part of a pipeline to work with blender, hell using UE4 I managed to make a craptastic multi user 3d painter program that could do an export that was blender friendly.
This is a good point and I’ve seen it myself as a freelancer over the years, particularly from India. Their quality is increasing, but they still work for rates that wouldn’t even keep your lights on in Europe or U.S or Australia. I don’t think free software is an issue in India though, I would say a vast majority of them are using pirated Maya/Max and whatever else they use in their workflow.
Blender and Gimp for starters. Project management tools, and vector illustration tools, not to mention non-linear editors. I’m sure there are others as well.
There are too many off-site modeling, rigging, texturing and animation studios to mention-- most are in places other than the US.
Hehe, this reminds me that of my old colleagues who are still using Max probably 50 percent refuse to use the slate material editor. I mean slate is not the most awesome material editor I’ve ever seen but it surely beats the compact edtior.
Sure but it is not just the cost of the license. Rendering on a commercial render farm is expensive while rendering on AWS with Blender is about 10 times cheaper. And even faster. In fact this is such a large expense that it makes sense to use Blender as a freelancer in first world countries.
Haha! That was me some years back. It wasn’t until I got into nodes in UE4 that I finally moved over to Slate. I knew the old compact editor inside out and just refused to leave it for so long. Slate could have been decent, but it still hasn’t been ported to the MCG/new PFlow(ironically called the Slate framework) UI and is still so slow and clunky, with all those horrible flickering/redraw issues Max UI still suffers from. That’s why 2.80 UI is such a joy for me to use. It feels so modern compared to Max.
True, but for me personally, I haven’t done any offline rendering work in quite some time as I moved across to the games industry. Another few years and we will probably see a decent chunk of offline jobs move to real-time, so this will be less of an issue. Certain shots are even being done in Unreal for high-end film and this is definitely going to become much more prevalent as RRRT becomes the standard.
and you couldn’t run the program without the machine.
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