Will blender 2.8 become the most powerfull 3d package in the industry?

General Forums Blender Development Discussion
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i mean overall the most powerfull
not by adoption by the industry neither by the fans or the community
but from the brute force point of view

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Short answer! No.

longer answer:
power is power to do what you need.
Q: Will it be more powerful than industry leading specialist programs in specific workflows?
A: not without a lot more work.

Eg zbrush is king of sculpting, blender is a good sculpting package but the breadth and depth of Zbrush is a long way off

Substance painter: Blender can do similar things but there is a ton of work to match the breadth and depth on the paint side. Ditto for substance designer


Simulations: Will it beat Houdini? no


I could go on listing stuff but you get the point

That said as an all around general package blender is “good enough” in lots of areas
 and improving all the time but it will take years more development to compete with specialised packages capabilities right now
 and after years and years they will still be ahead as the specialist packages are getting actively developed and progressing all the time

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Isn’t that kind of an unfair comparison, though? It seems to be pitting Blender against multiple programs strengths while ignoring their weaknesses.

I think for overall featureset, Blender is certainly up there.

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Will blender 2.8 be came the most powerfull 3d package in the industry?

Not while Houidini is still around

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No, it’s not an unfair comparison, because that is exactly the comparison that companies in the cg industry are making and it is the only relevant comparison exept maybe when it comes to a few small studios.

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Did anyone even ask Ton and Blender developers if they have in mind to achieve the goal of being the best or most powerful?
Otherwise, all the discussion and flame war that will be in this thread seems to me nonsense.

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For me Blender is the most powerfull indeed
 as I never used any other, I doubt I can do anything with other software that ain’t Blender :smile:

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Aye, I think that’s true. I work in web development so my requirements and budgets are obviously quite a bit lower than a typical James Cameron movie. So perhaps I’m dealing with some bias

More what I meant, though:

  • Zbrush can’t do 2d animation at all, so avoids being compared to 2d animation packages.
  • ToonBoom can’t do 3d sculpting, so avoids being compared to 3d sculpting packages.
  • Blender does 3d sculpting and 2d animation. Rather than it being added value it becomes a burden. It comes up short against Zbrush and ToonBoom—as long as you ignore everything Blender can do that they can’t.

I’d agree in saying Blender isn’t a market leader yet. But I think a case can be made that it’s one of the most powerful 3d packages.

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The everything nodes project from Jaques and the (possible) future merge of the fracture modifier will deliver a great boost to Blender’s VFX tools, but everything the BF throws at that area will not be able to beat Houdini’s dedicated development team for just that kind of functionality.

Now it’s quite possible that Blender 2.8 will get close to the commercial solutions if we look at generalist DCC packages, but the BF kind of got a lucky break when the Autodesk monopoly led to a slowdown in the total innovation rate (which made it far easier to avoid a future of falling ever farther behind). The death and/or stagnation of the midrange to lower-end 3D applications helped a bit too.

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the power comes to the hand of Artist’s skills, the tools are just for helping achieve that faster
Blender itself is very powerful in many areas that other specific 3d packages lack, it’s base code is much more cleaner, that’s why it’s only 300 mb and loads in less than a second
i think if the dev team was bigger and each group working on a certain area, it will definitely beat them all but that’s my wish , personally i come from maya working on it for 6 years before switching to blender and i can tell you, i like blender more than maya, there is little things in blender that speeds my work 10x that maya dn’t have :slight_smile:

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By this definition it already is. Because the things that drive acceptance by the industry, fans and a community are great tools.

And so an app becomes most powerful by offering the best tools.

Examples of the most powerful tools in their respective category would be Zbrush, Maya and Houdini. Most powerful tools. Largest adoption in the industry, fans and community.

So since you have categorically dismissed this into the equation all that is left is the fact that it is the best and most accessable, free open source 3D tool.

I would say that qualifies as brute force as there is nothing the competition can do to stop its growth.

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all power corrupts
it reaches the max then it falls again and again
 panta rhei

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Ton’s put it quite nicely at Siggraph last year ‘We don’t want blender in Hollywood, but we’d like a little bit of Hollywood in blender’ (it’s been a year so that’s not word for word)

in reply to the OP
You should spend some time considering the sheer amount of hard work that goes into blender, and then consider that they’re getting a fraction of the resources one of the main DCC’s get. The blender developers are doing an fantastic job but they’re not magicians.

You also have to consider the fact that the individual apps are architect-ed towards certain tasks. For instance Blender cant, and probably wont ever be able to compete with Katana as a lighting/rendering platform. This isn’t because of a lack of ‘power’ its based on the design choices, and the trade-offs both apps developers have made.

All that really matters so far as blender is concerned is that it offers small studios a great toolset for getting their work done.

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As a all in one app/ swiss army knife toolbox blender seems to me the best application.
I’m not sure about what do you mean by brute force, to me this sounds more like Houdini.

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exactly,these companies for years develop their programs for a certain task and they gain millions of dollars each year, which they can put some of it back into development but blender on the other hand relies on donations and help from the community with no sustainable revenues and it’s doing pretty good even better than some of them.

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Also 5600euro donations per month it’s a joke
For the importance of the program and the development power needs,

I don’t know if donations go up to 15000 Euros per month it will make blenders feature more bright

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Some things are unmeasurable or difficult to estimate at least. Amount of private time devoted by volunteers for instance.

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Holy cow
 that looks fantastic.

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Blender dominates, in my opinion, in character animation, especially if I compare it to softwares mentioned above (Houdini, Maya)

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Much of the BF’s revenue comes from the subscriptions to their cloud service. The majority of users choose that route because even though some of the money goes to Open Movie projects, they get a lot of content they can download, learn from, and use in return. This also includes addons and teaching material.

The development fund is for people who want to see their money go only towards development.