I know what I think, but I’m curious what YOU think about it, do you
think that Blender3D will become the major 3d application that
both moviecompanies, small studios, major-gaming companies
and aspiring 3d-students / hobbyists will be using as their main
choice in the near future?
The reason I ask, is the incredible rapid developement of the application.
I want to see what you feel. And be honest now!
I’m not sure if it would become “the” mainstream program considering the incredible head starts of some of the big budget apps. But it will likely become one of them.
It depends entirely on the developers. The thing is, because the commercial apps are being developed by the big companies, they are always going to get the bleeding edge code that pushes the boundaries of visual effects. The lag has been seen when comparing Blender to Instinctive Blender. The latter is developed in a company that uses Blender for its 3d work.
I believe Blender could make it eventually but only if some 3D gurus in animation work on the code or at least their code filters into the open source world.
In it’s present state, I think Blender might be falling a little short of what is required from a 3D package. Until those features are included, big companies would be hesitant to adapt their workflow to include it.
Tight integration with a first class renderer is a very big issue. It might be fine to do a small animation with some good quality but try to do a cinema quality movie with no artifacts and you could easily run into problems.
I think the main problem would be materials or shaders. Both yafray and Blender have fixed shader models that makes them fairly limited in what is achievable. For the required flexibility, some sort of unlimited hierarchical (Maya) or programmable (Renderman) shader model is essential. You need both that and the renderer so that you can render everything you ever saw.
Blender certainly has the potential but it needs some work. Even if that’s just some customization. But NURBs need quite a bit of work. But only the developers can really answer this question because they will have ideas about where they can reasonably take Blender with their 3D and development knowledge.
I’m not saying Blender isn’t good enough to become the main 3d app. I think it is, or at least it will be. What I’m saying is that I think it will continue to be mainly a hobbyist program. Let’s face it, despite the great business advantages, companies are afraid to be caught using something free, and are likely to think that it’s not as good. That’s not to say that they’re right, but this is why I think blender will never become top. Caught by its greatest feature- its lack of a price tag.
Hmmm, I don’t agree with that. There are many businesses who realise the advantages of open source software, especially 3D companies because they can access the source code.
Most of them use Linux and although they usually use Maya or whatever, they often prefer free open source plugins. WETA digital used the free open source liquidmaya exporter to export to renderman format from Maya instead of the pricey Renderman Artist Tools.
I think it’s just to do with certain features that are missing - things that it’s really not viable for a company to mess about with adding because it takes too long. Would you want to rewrite NURBs code from scratch?
the best way to make blender more mainstream is to learn python and contribute to the source code. blender has a handful of programmers. Ton Rosendaal is employed full time by the blender foundation, compared to commercial 3D apps who have many people employed full time.
Just a “note”:
Do not confuse Open Source software with GPL. All Open Source
software is not GPL. If you refer to Blender as beeing Free because
it’s OpenSource then that’s wrong. Yes - Blender is free under the GPL
license + the BF additional license AND OpenSource. It’s quite important
not to mix GPL and OpenSource.
/“Carved out in wood”
OpenSource means that the Source (the code/the program) is open
for everyone to see - even to make changes and suggestions.
OpenSource does NOT imply that it’s free for the taking, a company
might still own the source.
GPL is a license created to protect you the end-user & coder from
any-company/individuals who want’s to steal/own your code and take it away from you and the public.
the general public.
i think blender will first be used for visualisation purposes. but it still needs improvements. but the developements go realy fast so it wont take very long before people begin to notice that this program is good for their needs.
More programmers would benefit the program greatly as more features can be coded in a shorter amount of time. The current programmers have done many amazing things to improve the program. But the more programmers the faster it will grow.