Yeah, but he’s only doing some stuff for background computer screens. I don’t mean that as an attack on him, just that it doesn’t really count as state of the art. Even the fact Blender was used in the pre-viz for Spiderman wasn’t that impressive because pre-viz sequences aren’t all that advanced and I’m sure that was before they had the animation recode so with the performance the way it used to be, I doubt they were doing anything too intense. Another thing you will find is that people who would use Blender for production level films won’t be using the Blender renderer, so to say Blender can be used for a feature film is sort of misleading. I’m sure that Wings is used in making feature films too as well as a coffee machine and a pencil. OK, not quite the same deal but my point is that Blender has a lot of fundamental things needing improved whereas the high-end apps generally don’t. You can do great things with Maya 3.5, 4, 4.5, 5, 6, 6.5, 7. With Blender, you can only just do things adequately with version 2.4, which isn’t officially released yet.
At first, I thought Blender had massive potential and in many ways, I still do but the more I use it, the more I find pretty big problems. The main one recently is the Python API. I like the fact Blender uses a standard laguage instead of a custom one like Maya but Maya has a much more robust C-based plug-in architecture and a scripting language that actually works as you expect. The strength of the high-end apps is not the ability to do things by themselves but the way they allow us to do things our way and produce anything we can imagine. With Blender, it’s more that you fit the art to what the software is capable of - in many ways that is true of all packages but it isn’t noticeable in more powerful software. The flexibility is lacking somewhat. I hope it will come soon but at this moment in time, it isn’t there yet.
Concerning the thing about CGTalk:
Maybe I’m wrong here but didn’t the stats show there were more children here than adults? To be honest though, I get tired of reading CGTalk threads with all their “cool pic man, worship emoticon” responses so maybe there are children there too. I hate having to trawl through 20+ pages of meaningless crap to see the wires.
The reason why people probably compare the sites is because of the artists who go there - I’m sure others will have pointed that out already. That works in favour of the site. If pros started coming here then that would change but I see that as very unlikely given the current state of Blender and also the fact this is a forum dedicated to one piece of software. Again, here the art is more a showcase for the software than for the artwork itself. There are very few good artists round here - probably why I feel at home. Some seem to think that posting a picture of spheres, giving it an incomprehensible name and defining it abstract constitutes art for example or someone posting a turd ice-cream or a detached pair of buttocks excreting diarrhea in a field of carrots. But sure, we should all just accept it all eh? Everyone’s a n00b. Well maybe that’s one reason why the comparisons happen because people over at CGTalk act with a bit more professionalism wrt CG as an artform.
Anyway, I would say the following could sum up why I think there are comparisons to CGTalk.
Blender under construction -> less professional interest -> less good art -> less general interest -> people comparing to CGTalk and trying to advertise Blender