Hello, i’m sorry if it’s not the good place for this, but i have a question abount the industry.
I’m asking why Blender isn’t use by the video games industry, or the animation industry, and in extension what are the functionalities that 3ds max or maya have that blender don’t have?
i’m asking that because blender is free (as a free beer and as a free speech 
) so why industries use softwares wich cost a lot !
Two big reasons come to mind that have nothing to do with starting another Blender VS Max/Maya flame war.
-
Studios have set production pipelines that take a lot of time and money to change. Blender may be free but pipelines engineers and lost production time are not.
-
The pool of professional quality artist available for Blender is small compared to the competition. Retraining a Max/Maya artist to use Blender costs more time and money than simply buying another copy of Max/Maya.
Once Blender pulls way ahead of the pack in terms of features, polish, and ease of integration into a studio pipeline we will start to see things change, but it would still take several years.
- The pool of professional quality artist available for Blender is small compared to the competition. Retraining a Max/Maya artist to use Blender costs more time and money than simply buying another copy of Max/Maya.
True. Furthermore, when you have a bigger pool to draw from, those artists in that pool all have less market leverage. Using Blender, right now, could give Blender artists way more leverage than the average studio feels comfortable with.
I totally agree - my experience comes from the CAD industry where, it is rarely the price of the software that plays a role. Perhaps only in a relatively small shop. Key deciding factors are often:
- User base - often hard to verify, as I believe that many software vendors offer some bit for free, and count the down loaders as part of the user base
- The amount of money invested in current methods
- Any external requirements - what do their Customers demand, and what if any are the regulatory requirements.
Unless there is some compelling reason to change (almost never the price of the software or functionality / features), it is often very hard for one software to “unseat” another.
I have found that the biggest problem with Blender is in the Import Export side of Blender.
Blender itself is a great tool second to none but that is not enough if you can’t get your work
from Blender into another tool in your pipeline or you have to jump through four or five hoops.
Maybe blender is not used in big studios pipelines because of the lack of ‘‘official’’ support.
Big studios have a lot of 3dsmax and maya trained ppl and it would be a waste of time and money to convert them all to blender.
But i think it realy fits into small studios because it’s an all-in-one package and it’s free. You can do a big project (short movie or even a film) just with blender and maybe gimp…and you wouldn’t pay a cent. BBB and ED proves it.
Actually there are increasing accounts of blender being used in the industry:
“As an animatic artist working in the storyboard department of Spider-Man 2, I used Blender’s 3D modeling and character animation tools to enhance the storyboards, re-creating sets and props, and putting into motion action and camera moves in 3D space to help make Sam’s vision as clear to other departments as possible.” [9] - Anthony Zierhut, Animatic Artist, Los Angeles
It may not be part of the main pipeline but people are still finding uses for the program. In a few years when the GUI and pipeline is patched up (as 2.5 promises to enable) it should become more popular.
Don’t forget the documentation! Without properly documenting everything the new user will still be in the same boat with 2.5.
No FBX import and the particles are sub standard compared to Cinema4D, Maya and Max.
I think particles are pretty good…
But yes, with 2.5 and full docs it would be more accesible.