Blender has always been considered Generalist software - the Swiss army knife of 3D. And it can do just about everything so well. But big studios can afford the best and that means the very best specialist software & the best 3D artists & technicians. Blender is already the most popular choice in indie studios
It's not a case of tech support even, although that's definitely a factor. The fact is when you have a software that is industry standard, deviating from that standard can create headaches in your production pipeline especially when you're working with other companies, who are all familiar with the industry standard software.
@@Paul_Wardthat’s a part of it but if you look at the different packages you can get all of the major ones have one similar thing support. It’s vital for studios too have it.
Blender is by no means behind the "best" software. If anything the potential says otherwise, due to the general support. Lots of professionals, including top studios use it as well. The big reason it's not used by all of them is because they are used to other software, and more so the production and support behind it over the years they grown accustomed to it. The two comments above sum it up.
Another issue is that Blender is in contestant change and development. Thus the reason Blender had to make a Long Term Support version. (LTS). I've worked in studios were the main 3d software was 5 years out of date.The reason was they built thier pipeline and tools for that 5 year old program. They cannot afford to update the software and suddenly have everything stop working,
That is often overlooked point you made, because most people commenting here are not in such situation. But if you are on schedule to deliver work for major clients and you are part of the series of other studios, to have something crash on you or work not as expected would make paying for that much more expensive than it is to pay for fiver year old software that you know how it works and how realibe it is. And you know all the in house scripts will work, you know everyone on the team is trained on it and you know it will deliver. That is priceless. So while Blender might work for freelancers and casual users etc, for big studios its the advantages of Blender rapid release cycle and plug ins that make it a problem. Although I'm sure there are people in those studios who might use Blender or specific add-on for blender as a supplement to their main tools.
worked in a studio which mainly used blender and houdini, when we finally updated from 2.7 to 2.8 all our pipeline tools broke because python functioned were removed without any backwards compatibility. took a team of pipeline tds almost a year to debug and update even the bare bones of inhouse tools, it was a giant pain in the ass. and it just keeps happening, not just with python but also with geo nodes
That's being entrenched... you can get that way with Blender too. Nothing is forcing people to upgrade Blender... you can even have multiple versions installed simultaneously. I have some plugins that only work with some versions and not others
@@jeffsmith9384 Until LTS versions appearred, you did not have a guarantee, that bugs or security patches would be provided to you version of blender, which is kinda significant for a 5 year timespan of using.
The biggest problem I see why many of the newer independent creators don’t use Blender is that there has always been a stigma with new artists against any software that is not considered “industry standard” even if that software is better than what the industry may be using. This is especially the case for those that have Hollywood aspirations. They only adopt new software after some big name uses it. What most new artists fail to realize is that real professionals use whatever works and gets the job done.
this is the case, isn't it? "it isn't the car, its the driver", "The best weapons doesn't mean much if you don't have the skills". when it comes down it, it is the individual that makes the best of what they got.
Also depends if they got started in 3d on their own or via a college course. A lot of those still pushing students to 3DS or Maya cause "muh industry standard" And so it keeps feeding back into the loop and corralling new waves of 3D artists into the predatory subscription of Adobe and Autodesk.
The main problem with Blender is that it is a multi-tool. Yes, you can sculpt in it, but Zbrush makes it more convenient. Yes, you can create PBR materials in it, but Substance Painter/Designer is better. Yes, it has geometry nodes, but Houdini has better ones. Yes, you can do animation in it, but Maya is better for that. To draw an analogy, it’s like offering an experienced carpenter a swiss army knife instead of his toolbox, saying “with this thing, you can still do everything you do now.” Yes, I probably can, but I prefer separate tools for separate tasks.
As a solitary guy using it for his game, but one who USED to be in AAA? Yeah, this is it. Even as a sole creator, I COULD make PBR materials in Blender, but I opted to pay for Substance because it's just so much better at filling its' respective niche. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE Blender, and I came from the 3ds Max pipeline to it. But it tries to be all things to all users, and while it gets most of the way there... it's not the absolute it wants to be.
@@zhanucong4614 I got you, bro. I understand you perfectly, it is very convenient when you need to create a lot of different content without being distracted by the choice of software. But when you create studio-quality assets, you spend several days, and sometimes weeks, at one stage of creating a 3D model (for example, when working on a sculpture). In such situations, you don’t need a multitool, you need the most convenient tool for a specific task.
@@zhanucong4614 I have never tried making models for VR chat, but I am sure that their production pipeline does not differ from that of any other game models. Accordingly, the sculpting software should be chosen from what is available to you. Lucky for me, I had Zbrush, but Blender will also do the job.
Blender has an important role as a free option for smaller studios and hobbyists. A free option that performs well enough to get smaller jobs done and could theoretically by used by a studio creates competition for the big names and options for people with more limited income. If blender became a big, expensive industry standard it would hurt hobbyists like me. People who work in an unrelated industry but still want to be able to do the things blender can do on occassion.
I have seen it used for video games before the problem is only for mods and concepts of games. The actual problem is it just isn't taught in schools and companies don't want to hire an employee they have to train. The rise of the U Universal Scene Description file format might help it take off a bit as it allows people to work on different software and sync to one another instead of having to all work on the same software and export then import to get to another person's computer. It is a little more complicated but in short that is what it does. Works with Maya 3D MAX Blender and Unreal Engine last time i check so what the person learned at school will be able to be used at work no matter which one they learned. The hard part is they all have to be on a LAN OR VLAN so remote work will be harder as sync times will take longer if everyone is working through a VPN for all to be on the same logical subnet that the server will listen too. Longer sync time than export then import until you get to larger file sizes at which time sync will take less time than export then import over the internet. For a local network that everyone is physically on sync is quicker when set up properly. The reason why i think Blender will not become pay for it ever is right now you have 20ish different companies paying for it in the top tier with another 20 to 40 in the bottom tier. It is company supported thus how we got Apple silicon supported so quickly, ARM64 is supported so if you want to run it on your phone or IoT device or ARM laptop you can and how we got the newest version of the USD format so quick but why RISC-V is still a branch with little to no support. RISC-V none of the companies make products for so why support it? What you get when you donate to them is you are one of 100s of thousands of people who are paying into the part for basically the servers to keep on running. To host and keep up to date the online manuel and for the Blender demo movies to be made. For the developer conferences, for to try to keep to the road map without having to bend to the will of companies who are paying the big money to much, and of course pay the paid developers of blender to make and maintain the features of Blender. It is free for everyone to fork it and free for everyone and anyone to submit their changes for review. It still will go through a review process before being added. Another job i am unsure if paid or not. to The demo movies are cool but still cost money to pay the artists, 3D modeler, animator, etc. Some have overlap of those job titles too. Unsure if Blender pays or not the people who maintain the main-branch of Blender. So it is in part community but also in part major company funded. I can see why Apple would want it on Apple laptops and i can see why Microsoft will want it on Windows and the Linux Fountain wanting it on Linux.
I am a Maya user and I am alll for Blender doing well. I can see the jump in progress and super rad addons popping. I do wish that kind of dedication appeared in Maya, Max etc.
i used maya a fair bit in university. After leaving ive been switching to blender, but as someone with a TKL keyboard, the hot keys are really lacking. I really miss the radial menus of maya.
the radial menu for edit/object mode isnt quite what i mean, though. The maya radial menus have essentially all the tools you need for like 90% of your modeling@@ColinFox
it seems that people really underestimate the importance of "official support", besides the tradition aspect that is keeping studios hooked to their old pipelines, it feels really hard to invest millions in a project, and have one of your core software lacking official support.
small studio yeah, but big studio barely care for that as they get the chance to just modify and make a fork from it anytime from autodesk... I mean if that's the case, they can pretty much do the same with Blender since it's open source, just hire 1 - 2 dev and they can also contribute to the main core of Blender if they wish so
@@yasunakaikumi I disagree, especially for the "just hire a 1-2 dev", there is no way you will be able to create a core team that can compete in term of support and development against softwares that has been industry standard for 30 years now. Am not saying its impossible, am saying its a very hard pass, and the gain is almost meaningless when we talk about this sort of studio, an Autodesk License costs nothing relatively to the project. Your point will be very valid after 5~10 years from now though,
@@yasunakaikumi Nah, I used to be a tech artist that did 3dsmax scripting at a big studio. We had to ping their script engine developer a couple times. While I could 'hack' my way through the code, it'll get clobbered next update, or I'm stuck with maintaining a fork. And some of these things were artefacts by design, and having a pipe to their developer meant it became something on their radar and was going to be refactored in the near future. My time was better used to support the line artist instead of building that general component of the 3d package. In a way, we were 'hiring' that 1 extra dev, externally from Autodesk who specialized in the scripting engine if you want to look at it that way.
I don't know what support is like for Maya now. But it was truly useless most of the time during my career. Our calls to support were generally discovery of features that didn't work right, and we had to write our own tools to make up for the deficit. Worse, Maya didn't fix broken features, because adding new ones was more sexy. But big studios ended up using Maya and other software basically as an operating system, with their pipelines amounting to completely new 3D programs in their own right. The Maya used at Disney was completely different from the Maya you could buy back in the Chicken Little era. I can't imagine how different it must be now.
There's an article on a Japanese studio dropping 3ds max because they weren't happy with their support. Initially they looked into Maya but decided on Blender. Yes, Blender Foundation provide support to studios that back them.
It is pretty simple really; the reason why big studios use Maya is that it is far easier to write tools for it than other packages. If you open Maya in any major VFX house you will find many tools that have been written in-house for that studio's needs, often on a show-by-show basis. It is also true that Maya is so embedded into the Pipelines of these studios that changing their pipeline to accommodate other software is simply not cost-effective. Smaller houses are more agile and are more likely to have Generalists working for them, so Blender does have a place (and it is great, don't get me wrong), but in the bigger studio, it is only ever going to be used if there is no other solution to a particular issue.
Yeah pretty true. All the big studios I've ever worked at in the last 20 years use Autodesk products (max or maya). The only trouble is lately Autodesk has gotten extremely lazy at improving their software, due to the fact that not only do they essentially have a monopoly but also since they switched studios to a subscription service.. So there's no reason to add new features since everyone pays every year....no more convincing them to upgrade. Lately the 'new features' of Maya are laughable. Eventually if they stagnate long enough, the features of Blender (or even the features of animating directly in Unreal) will pass Maya and Max by miles and the studios will bite the bullet and retrain their artists and rewrite their tools. That is a ways off though. No matter what happens, competition is good for the industry and Autodesk deserves a massive kick in the ass to get them working again.
As a cinema 4d user , I find the development of Blender to be so exciting . So many amazing features . I wish i had started to learn blender first .. Now after years of tinkering around in the software , you sort of get tired of learning something new . But amazing work guys .. I will eventually start learning it .. that is sure
I'm working with Blender because I started on it and I'm too old and too busy to switch. It's ok for people I work with, all they want is the final images they paid for. I got to meet several people in different studios and they're two reasons why they don't use it. The first is obviously that in a professional context, most of the guys studied 3d and they were trained on other softwares. You can't ask a 40 or 45 years old artist who's an expert at 3DS Max + Vray to switch to Blender. It makes no sense. And the second reason is why they don't switch to Blender. And that's simple. Blender is an awesome free tool but it can't compete with the paid ones. The combo "experienced professional" + "industry standard softwares" can't be beaten by a hobbyist using Blender. I often oppose pros vs hobbyists which sounds irritating for a lot of people but that's the whole point. Blender has a community with a majority of passionate hobbyists who don't really want to face the reality of a high standard professional context. Many topics on Blender groups are "how can I earn money with Blender", "I made a donut", "look this procedural texture it's amazing". A hobbyist is more likely to accept things from the moment it's better than what he can achieve. As pros we're seeking for the best of the best image quality which Blender can't offer. As usual, I want to point that they're tons of incredible Blender artists. The point is not to talk about their skills but their tools. They're convinced, most of the time that Blender can do everything and only skills matter. But that's a hobbyist point of view... Blender is the best free software we've ever seen, its possibilities are just out of this world for the price tag but Cycles is way too limited. CAD tools are barely non existent, color management is not really accurate, lighting is fairly wrong and so on. "Ok Blender is amazing and it's free, can't studios accept some limitations to save money?" Sure, it works for small studios and Blender is nothing but a blessing for them. But big studios or big agencies don't care about the price tag. I'm talking for agencies I work with in France, softwares are just professional tools that are included in a budget and you can decrease taxes using them. Plus, "big agencies" mean "big clients" and "big money". Again these are two different universes. I can easily charge those companies for several thousands for a couple images (then I have taxes and so on), same goes with other artists, so paying for ten or twenty license is nothing for them. Final point, it may change in the future if the Blender Org concentrates on real features. Updates after updates they add funny things that we grow a custom to (like geo nodes) but nothing is game changing. Image quality is still the same, everything is based on making modeling easier. Which is great for the work flow, but I personaly don't need all those things, I can model hair, complexe meshes, I got my own library, I know how to optimize my scenes because that's my job. But I can't change the way illumination, colors, exposure or other stuffs are calculated. At one point you're limited and that's not about skills or understanding.
You just nailed it perfectly. I have tried several times to move away from 3dsMax/Vray/Gaea/Nuke/DaVinci but there are some features as well as reliability issues that Blender currently does not offer. I know Blender can do a lot of things but is the Master of none. As you said, there are incredible Blender artists out there. But the software is still lacking in several parts of the pipeline. The most annoying one for me at the moment being EXR Compositing. Blender crashes a lot, too slow to be used as a reliable tool for Comp and Live Playback is a nightmare. Nuke or Fusion are way ahead on this matter.
@@mr.j7899 100% I forgot that point. It reminds me something that happened to me last month. I was at the dentist, and the software his assistant was using (the software is called Julie) shut down. My dentist just took his phone and call the assitance, someone answered in roughly 30 seconds and the problem was solved in one minute. Imagine if he had a free software with no support at all. It simply can't work like this when you're a professional.
And that's why I use Maya now. Even though I have learned and started with the CG world by using blender in September 2019. There are a lot of things Blender lacks, you have totally forgotten to mention how bad Blender handles a very complex dense Geometry, or a scene with a lot of objects! It simply cannot handle a very high Polycount making it difficult to work with. Whereas Maya is able to handle 100 million polygons on my machine with zero issues! And my machine is beefy with a 16-core Ryzen 9 5950x and an RTX 3080 Ti GPU with 64GB of RAM and blender was still choking at 5-7 million LOL! That is the number one reason why most studios will never switch to Blender aside from support, and having already established profiency in industry standard software. People have to accept the fact that blender is indeed a CG student/hobbyist tool, and not a professional tool.
Indeed, if you’re driving a boat, there is a big difference between driving your own speedboat, and driving an ocean liner. The top studios are ocean liners, they need specialists and pipelines and everything that that entails. Blender will keep improving and gaining ground good on them.
I've been working in Computer Graphics and Animation for over 30 years. I've worked in AAA games, Product Visualisation and Motion Graphics. I've used pretty much every 3D package of the last 30 years..Max, Softimage, Cinema 4D, Maya, SketchUp, Houdini, Alias, NinGen, GameGen etc etc. I now teach on one of the leading Games Degree courses in the World. I discovered Blender about 4 years ago...its without the doubt the best modelling and look development tool I've ever worked with. Hugely scalable, very solid, and immensely powerful. I predict Blender will dominate most studios within the next 4 or 5 years, especially given many schools like our own are feeding kick ass Blender artists onto the job market. I absolutley love the tool...its nothing short of a work of genius in its design, functionality and application.
35 years in the industry, and my 4 latest productions here in France, all Blender! And all of those productions without an animation library, and with tons of add-ons; easy constraint, animation layers, a picker, a toggle soundtrack, frame f-curve, bone layers, wiggles etc... . And the same goes for the riggers and skinners; add-ons, add-ons for missing tools that should be standard. (not even the fancy ones-addons) It's just ooo soooo hard to get a character with a t-shirt and his backpack correctly skinned, together with the correct animation controllers. But I do like Blender, I do get things done but way not as easy and cheap as people might think.
I did not see your project... But I would suggest to make almost everything out of cloth simulation. It is what I am doing for my dancing MMD video. Like the entire girl body and even rigid object are also cloth sim. Basically I make a stiff material and inflate with pressure to make the rigid object after that they can be part of the same simulation. So it is one coherent simulation that handle everything. There is other use too. The feet can be made flexible and can collide and adapt to the floor. Muscle and giggle physic can be painted on the character skin, no need of additional bone or any add-ons.
I'm fairly involved with the process of platform choice decisions at various studios, and its very simple. Artists mostly get to decide what packages they want to use, The amount of highly capable artists that use packages like Maya vastly out number capable Blender users. This is the nr.1 reason, nr.2 is pipeline compatibility, support is rarely used, and the price is barely even discussed.
Support is such a big thing. Lots of smaller artists who didn't have to deal with some pretty hefty NDAs don't know how difficult help can be when you aren't allowed to ask anything online or even worse, when your machine isn't hooked on internet at all. You NEED that on site support for the bigger projects.
Because it isn't better than maya and max in SO many ways, especially speed. just compare making an FFD in max, may and blender. max 1 step. maya 2 steps, blender, what? 8? more than worth that 5% increase in cost to make peoples work 400% faster. Yes blender does some things very well, I use it all the time, but I'm kind of tired of all the blender fan boys saying its the second coming.
I love how blender is so good at many different aspects and I do use it for certain tasks. Basically an all in one package. As a professional animator in the in the VFX industry I would never switch to it for animation however. Maya has such a strong foundation and you can basically solve any problem in lots and lots of different ways. I often hear people complain about how Maya is too technical and too much going on behind the scenes which blender has smoothed out and made less complicated. Yes! It is exactly what makes Maya so strong. It's got all the technical grit and dirt under the hood that if you master it -you use to your advantage and enables you to work in multiple workflows and adapt to the situation. That's what I find lacking in blender. Also the graph editor in blender isn't as versitile as Maya. I always recommend younger artists to use blender however if they aren't sure what aspect of the industry they want to focus on. Blender lets them try everything.
I think if Blender Foundation add a support feature which studios could buy which will allow experienced people to work for support and earn and people who already know how to work with blender can also work for those studios as well so a win win for everyone.
As a small indie studio, I sometimes use blender but also mainly use Houdini Indie and 3DS Max Indie which is cheaper and no different to full versions (mainy because of our legacy files and I like to have options).
24 hour support is why. When you have multi million dollar contracts to service you better be able to get a TD on the phone at 2:40 am to solve a problem , even offering to have you upload your scene file and have them trouble shoot it when there is a show stopping issue. Spelunking through online Blender forums (that are mostly populated by hard surface modeling enthusiasts) just won’t cut it when there are client deadlines to meet.
As a Senior 3D Artist for 8 years, a simple explanation and my opinion is, Blender is good for startups. And other "old and been in the industry" applications are for those huge studios that has been around for a while now. Other big studios are starting to adapt Blender too. But right now, it's really in its early stages. I myself believe that Blender has huge potential and will 100% be used mostly in the future. I'm also using it for quite a while now, transferring back and fourth from Maya, Max, and Blender. Really, there are just some things that Blender is not capable as of this moment, but for sure, give it 3-5 years and it will be an insane software to use. Especially for studios, which in the first place wants to make money, and Blender is free. Others should understand this, especially those Blender stans. There's always a "but" on their main reason: "Blender is free"---"BUT". Because if you say Maya/Max is expensive BUT---we currently get everything that we need so it's worth it. Again, Blender is awesome. Can't wait to make it my 3D application in the VERY VERY near future.
The problem is really the same as why no new social media company ever works. Network effect. Autodesk already has the whole industry using it. It's what's taught in art schools. The biggest companies have their entire pipelines built around these products that can go back decades. Millions of dollars/man hours worth of development on custom tools. The fact that Blender is free means nothing if it would cost you millions to completely redo your pipeline and retrain all your 3D artists. Not to mention all things being equal, a pro sculptor will still typically choose Zbrush, a pro mograph artist will chose C4D, a pro animator will choose Maya, a pro VFX artist will still pick Houdini over Blender. It's awesome that it can do so much as well as it does it, but it still doesn't beat the big guys at their specializations.
Schools are often incentivised to teach software from companies willing to give these educators benefits and train them, of which provides an incentive to pay them higher under the connection with the industry norm. This takes time and training away from Blender, which makes it difficult from a completely human perspective to implement within pipelines.
reminds me of that teacher who teaches web design and at the same time sells his own domain and webhosting service, and that Filipino teacher who also sells her own filipino book. There should be a law against anti-competitive practices, school is a place to learn all the options not manipulate and to monopolize
Used Maya at work after been using Blender for years, and I noticed that I'm able to do things in Maya much faster than doing the same in Blender. Not to mention workflow with Maya to Unreal is much more reliable and faster than the messy workflow of Blender to Unreal, requiring addons, settings, and fixes that Blender Foundation would refuse to do. I'm considering switching to Maya full time.
I do know of some big game studios that have adopted Blender for studio use, but mainly most of the studios I have worked with in recent years allow artists to use their software of choice. Maya is still widely used for character animation, Zbrush for high poly modelling and MAX for enviro art. ( at least in my experience, don't want to speak for everyone) but Blender is gaining popularity among studios. And Blender is very accessible for newer studios on a budget. plus its just fun and easy to use if your in to 3d art, or even 2.5D art.
I work at a university that teaches game design and animation. We use Maya and Zbrush. Our biggest issue is after graduation when grads lose their subscription for maya, they get stuck and can’t work on their skills. We of course say “use blender” but they just spent years learning maya and are not encouraged to do another software. A lot will evolve and do it but a lot don’t. There is a maya addon for blender I’ve seen that makes blender more like maya when it comes to UI and setup to help make it easier for maya users to jump over…..but in the end we need to teach purely blender.
indie maya is reasonably priced As you say, there won't be any graduates who can study Photoshop. But no one says you can't study Photoshop. It doesn't make sense that you can't study Maya because it's expensive.
@@aiuhejvwvud8c99rjej yeah. But if they are passionate…..they will see their knowledge in maya can transfer to Blender and they could learn it. As I’m studying Computer Animation in college for a bachelor’s I’ll also be self learning Blender while they teach me Maya. This way I’m well versed in both when I graduate,
@@a420dro believe it or not, not many people know of that. Maybe a few percent do. The mass majority never knew it was a thing they can do. Even the average person doesn’t know that’s a thing.
That's something that's kind of bugged me to throughout my college classes. All these new faces getting into 3d modeling for the first time.. in Maya.. So unless they're willing to teach themselves another 3d program ,they either are forced to pay into the autodesk and adobe ecosystem to continue to use maya, or just never touch 3d again.
Almost everything is wrong in that video, and you really need to stop bringing-up Barnstorm because they completely shifted pipeline, 3 years ago they were looking for a generalist and no word about Blender in the job offer they were asking “must know maya very well”. They are rendering with Arnold, looking for houdini artist, nuke artist etc They were talking in a recent interview all the changes they had to do to work more efficiently. Because it was a small studio and young and they never worked anywhere else, and when they got experimented users in the team they started to change things like softwares etc. And don’t forget what happened to Tangent, despite what the community is trying to hide, the developers that worked at Tangent said on twitter that it was horrible trying to build a pipe around Blender, and nobody sain would do that. And you know what happened after to Tangent, they tried to shift but it was too late.
The only two reasons you gave are: -The studios already use Maya, and other paid software, so they dont want to change. -The price is like 5%< of the salary for one employee. No other reasons were given, you could have made a video/short about it, it would take less then 60 seconds to tell that. I am disappointed in why so many content creators stretch their video out for no reason. It is so sad that I begin to praise content creators who do make informative videos without stretching it.
I still unable to believe that such a magnificent software like blender is free, it enables me to create my own character from scratch from sculpting to rigging and animation. Sadly, I live in Africa and we have a very weak currency, I wish I could donate to their wonderful team for their huge contribution.
I know 3D artists in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, who donate to blender foundation regularly. You guys should stop using this "i live in africa" as an excuse or as a way to get sympathy. That doesn't work anymore. People all over the world are struggling. Also, I donated 20 dollars to blender last month. No one is asking you to donate 10 million dollars. Dont sit there and act like you do not have 10 dollars to donate.
Maybe you guys don't know just what he is talking, not all countries on Africa has faciliy on getting Visa and internacional payments I agree was not necessary mencionate Africa...but I kind of understand...so even if it was'nt necessary mencionate it you shouldnt judge as well Just saying :/
I think a big issue is the GNU General Public License: Any modifications you make to the Blender source code must also be released under the GPL or a compatible open-source license. This means that you can't create a proprietary version of Blender without releasing the source code for your modified version. This means it is more worth for some VFX Studios to pay money to Autodesk and avoid the competition can benefit from the inhouse development
You can actually. As long as it stays private and doesn't become a product. You can also create add-ons that use proprietary code as long as that code doesn't use blender's api to function. The bridge code needs to be gnu but past that you don't need to release it
And why it's issue? Also, GPL does not forbid inhouse development, it even encourages and guaranees that it's possible. I doubt even big companies can get source code from Autodesk.
This is the real reason. People have already developed a workflow and acquired assets for a particular 3D software so the incentive to change is not big if the alternative is not miles better. And as we all know, Blender still has some way to go before it comfortably beats other 3d packages in most areas.
And there an extra important factor, colleges, universities earn alot of money to teach the Industry Standart” programs. So as a person leaving from these educational places going to a company not will be going to learn another program. I know the feeling, but in the inverse process, i know a little in blender (Like the “pros” like to call, Hobbyist) and in the college I’m being forced to do the stuff in cinema 4D. And you know why? Because Maxxon pay the college to teach their program. Looking for that blender never will be a standard because the institution’s not earn money from a free program. Blender foundation not going to pay them to teach blender. And also these guys that are using these other programs for long years don’t will want to switch because is not convenient. Just my thoughts on that
Just recently it was announced that Blender 4.x is going with AGX as it's standard color management system, a system that no other VFX tool in the industry uses. That should tell you all about why exactly the 'industry' is not interested in Blender...
You should compare studios to ships. A small studio is like a small speed boat. It can turn at a snap of a finger. It can accelerate and stop pretty quickly. A Hollywood FX studio is like those giant Evergreen G-class container ships. It takes forever for these ships to accelerate, turn and stop. It's not that Blender is being ignored by giant studios. Is that they have contractual obligations to keep using Maya and Houdini. They can pivot to Blender if they wanted but they stand to lose millions of invested cash for years of software support service from Autodesk and Houdini. It takes time.
Usually studios fear change unless they go bankrupt, bought-out or merged. That's the only time they're open to other options when funds are running dry. It's not a big loss, your average indie dev is $1900 richer than someone who had sub one month later.
Well said, but its not just software support. Its also custom tools written at the studios for the software they use and a general asset and animation library that is really only useable via the software it was authored in. FBX only takes you so far. Plus retraining artists to use a totally new software set is a big ask. Like they said in the video, less than 5% of my salary pays for the software. Would forcing me to switch to Blender cost me 5% productivity, at least for the first year? Oh, easily. So, big studios don't take the risk. And maybe the stupidest reason? Its a prestige thing. I know for a long time (and probably now) ignorant Hollywood executives would use Maya as a buzzword, just assuming that particular software meant quality and everything else (Lightwave, Max, etc) was inferior.
@@MrAnim8orVideos What if people was actually suggesting try to dedicate a small team if not a few guys to make some shorts? then the shorts get longer and better, until it becomes a full blown movie. It would not affect production, cause it's a different team, can even be assigned to an offshore team in a low-cost of living country. And maybe the fees doesn't matter cause studios just offshore it to a low-cost of living country who just maybe if not most likely just pirates it. I know the refute of this would be "no one has the time nor money to make a test pipeline even offshoring it to a low-cost of living country" but that's why I'm saying the possibility of studios just offshoring it.
@@MangaGamified Maybe, but can't say I'm a fan of offshoring anything since it affects my job. Also, in order to know what tech you need you also need experience, so unless that foreign team had lots of experience its unlikely you'd end up with an effective pipeline.
Thanks for your thoughts about this. I think you have made some strong points. Support and perception of using the best-in-class tools all play a part in the larger enterprise's business, marketing, and technical strategies. I wholeheartedly agree with you that the Blender Artist and Dev community are affecting major change regarding the perception of what tools are best in-class issue. 👍👍
As a Maya user myself, the Industry of Light and magic was based on Maya technology, there have been written so many plugins and features that are only available in Maya despite its old software it still has cutting-edge technology built around it for Holywood quality animation film realistic rendering requirements. There are also a lot of industry veterans who have years of work experience working on the animation software, retraining those skills would take too much time, considering their preferences. One thing that blender lacks in quality is the quality of their animation tools, and Maya is a much stronger software in the animation department. In Maya you can Keyframe everything, and you can script everything. Because all software is run by mel script.
I've been using blender to make computer games since version 2.43. Of course, at the beginning I supported myself with other programs from the "big three", but for over 10 years I have been working only in it and I have not looked back. A lot of people who have worked with me have been convinced by it and it is being used more and more often in the production of "BIG" games. Which makes me very happy. Thanks to the Blender team for the awesome job.
We have a very specialized CAD workflow and spend a decade on custom tools. So bringing the hole functionality to blender would be a massive undertaking. But i really fed up with Maya so the switch will come sooner or later.
It's not about the price of the license but the cost to train existing employees, training new employees who come out of school with Maya/Max/C4D knowledge,, and retooling the pipeline (ie creating some way for Blender to talk with custom programs and tools). That is a lot of time and money that companies don't really want to spend when what they have now works.
One thing I was told was that it was because of licensing. A lot of features on blender uses plugins made by a range of users. It's a legal issue when a company might need permission to use a specific plugin. Don't know the full story to this or how it would fully work though.
Blender has a strong growth in the gaming industry, where it is a go to solution, often in combination with Houdini. Following the node approach, it may even become the single solution here, but yet, there is a plugin for Unity and Unreal mission to import generator graphs into the engine, like Houdini provides. There are some solutions, but not sufficient ones yet.
It's really simple: Most profitable business don't mind sticking to normal expensive industry tools because it's a business experience. A tax write-off. I really doesn't matter for them, but I'm sure it makes a difference for smaller shops, indies etc
It really has changed a lot. I found this program some time around 2008. It was ugly, but it was a 3d program, and free. It was exciting to find out about then. And still exciting to hear about now.
One major issue that you didn't mention - which is probably what is holding Blender back - is that the Software is "clunky". It's extremely powerful - free - can do everything. But it's a very clunky tool to use - it's power is basically locked behind a lot of weird things you just need to "know" about. Main issue being - shortcuts. Even though you have a UI now, most tutorials online speak of using Shortcut buttons to perform some function - and over the years as I've been looking around, it's a 50-50 in any Online tutorial, video or post online whether the shortcut will actually work. Most "industry Standard" software either has a "Toolbar" where every single tool of the software is shown (and hovering your mouse over it will show a description of what it does and how to use it) - or have a universal "Right Click button -> Opens full menu of every option for the tool". Additionally - some software HIDES functions that are not required in the current scope - to ease on the clutter. For example, 3D Coat when you are UVMapping will hide Painting and Retopology functions. Blender has "rooms" that are sort-of prepared for work in a certain scope, but you can still use whatever other function of the software in each room. Also - FBX/OBJ exporter/importer cause a lot of issues between software packages. Due to all of this - retraining your staff to use Blender, if they were using other software is SUPER time-consuming. Cause you need to not only learn the software BUT also find the ACTUALLY CORRECT tutorials & set up the whole pipeline. And if you get some kind of weird "Blender behavior" like "for some reason it adds an extra bone to the root - which breaks all existing animations in your game project and animations made in Blender are not functioning correctly" -> you are pretty much losing days or weeks trying to figure out how to overcome it. And Big Studios care about TIME - cause paying their whole team for each Day of Development is way more than any license for "Industry Standard Software" that comes with a phone hotline Support in case "you have a problem" with it. If there was some Central hub for "absolutely 100% correct tutorials on any feature" + "known bugs" section WITH Answers to them & there was just some UI cleanup done -> Blender would EAT its competition alive.
@@bunnyfreakz No. ZBrush's UI is designed like it was made for Aliens - but it follows a certain logic that once explained, is smooth to use. That of course would be a deal-breaker -> if not for the fact you have courses, teachers and official ZBrush videos that explain everything. And the Videos - always work. Once they tell you how to use something, it will work the way it was told in the video. What holds Blender back - is lack of that "Explanation Support" while being "clunky" to use as I explained before. Basically Blender needs to have an "easily accessed" resource of "How do I do X in Blender" that is up to Date and 100% certain to work. Cause if someone tells me to select a Bone then press a shortcut to use a function -> and I follow that and nothing happens -> that is now extra wasted time for troubleshooting and seeking how to use the function I need. This is why Big Studios don't use Blender. Wasting TIME costs a lot more money when you run a big Studio with hundreds of people working. And right now, as of 18.10.2023 - Blender still does a lot of "Wasting Time". The moment that gets fixed - Blender will overtake a lot of the market.
I have primarily used 3D-programs like 3DS-MAX, MAYA and Blender for hobby-projects, but I agree... the interface is too clunky. I've lost count over the number of times, thinking "This would be such a simple process in MAX or MAYA".
@@doctorweile Yeah - that feeling happens a lot whenever I absolutely have to use Blender. It just wastes a lot of time - and time is money, especially when you are on the clock. I just wish this was a more spoken-about problem, cause maybe someone with actual coding skills (mine aren't good enough...) could look into the issue and just fix a bit of the "clunk" instead of adding new feature after new feature. Blender fans don't help either - going purely into "Absolute Defensive Mode" trying to cite Blender's strengths (free / can do everything / powerful) completely ignoring that one, MAJOR flaw - that technically could be fixed relatively quickly if just given attention. (UI toolbox like other software, tool description with shortcut keys shown if hovered over with a mouse - dedicated rooms that disable non-important features from menu/UI) Afterwards - one good source of Documentation/Learning for the software and it might become top-tier.
I work in the game industry, doing this for 30+ years now, and there is more than one big problem 85% of the blender users aren't aware of, and one of it is the lack of knowledge about the industry standards regarding modelling & other techniques, which spill over into everything else later, like animation, if properly rigged and weighted and so on. This is all done by hand and not via AutoRig - click and you're "done" !And there are good reasons why that is the case. A blender guru mostly doesn't come with industry knowledge. Beside that, then there are all the already working interfaces and their workflows to each plugin and definitely also hardware, motion capture tools, software/linkage/workflow, what about that?. But here comes the biggest nut cracker, coming from the business perspective: You would have to rebuild the entire workflow of the whole company, just so that the employee can work with Blender, to provide you what blender can offer? For what reason? And I would say this is the #1 question for such decision making, for every company. Only new companies will use Blender, with wise foresight. These new companies will automatically adopt or learn all the old industry standards from their own failures, with time. And that will then be the turning point from which there is no going back and where the few old compannies that have survived will switch over. But oldies won't jump on a faster horse, because someone wants to use the new stuff, EXCEPT they find something that only blender can do, which still then only advances to a hybrid-workflow but never to a complete transition.
I use Maya because it’s what I learned on. It would take me 1-2 years to get as knowledgeable about Blender as I am with Maya. That’s a steep price to pay. In addition my company would have to change our pipeline, purchase and install all the necessary software. Not everything we use with Maya works in Blender. It’s like turning the Titanic.
Yeah, exactly the same at the places I've worked at. Its a shame that Maya has stagnated so much lately due to lack of competition though. The best thing about Blender and Unreal's new animation features is the may eventually force Autodesk to return to innovating instead of just collecting subscription fees lazily every year.
There are really good points here. I think support and trust are the major ones followed close by some integrated technologies like motion capture, vfx and many third-party solutions that rely on one or two major apps.
Studios have invested thousands of dollars on Maya and Max it's bread into their pipeline, when studios start to realize it's getting to expensive, Blender will start to take hold it just takes time.
This is the reason why the studio I work in are kind of stuck with Maya. Every single thing in our pipeline has been built around it and it has taken years, it's always being improved for each project. Everything ties up from Modelling->Rigging->Animation under the hood for the artists. Since we go from one movie to another and we might not be the biggest studio it's hard to find the resources to pay the TD's and the Pipeline people months of salary just to focus on switching when we constantly need them in the productions of our features as well. There are definitely new artist coming into the studio with blender knowledge from their studies, at least 3d artist. But they're kind of pushed into using Maya at the studio.
@@bjarmismundsson3501 But still for 3D artist, it si not that important to use Maya for modeling and UVs (I don't know any masochist who would do UVs in Blender) for example, they can do it in other pieces of software like Blender, but still in the end they have to use maya for finalization. Animators would be fools if they didn't use Maya and same for riggers and TD. Usually lots of Blender users are looking on it like, it is not big deal they're using Blender, why not everybody else, they do not understand that VFX pipilines are not just modeling and animations, but lots of other stuff,what Bledner cannot do or do not support.
Unimaginable that Blender is older than me even though I've been using it for more than 14 years now (since version 2.49 - that's two GUI changes!). Okay, it's only been available to the public since 2002 but still, the code base is from 1994/1995!
The primary reason is tech support. Put features aside, existing pipeline entrenchment, price, performance, etc. Large studios expect official tech support. Deadlines are so tight that studios can't afford breakdowns. The 'free' aspect doesn't really matter as the software is a business expense/tax write off.
Canonical is Ubuntu's Developer, so they're one of the two Largest corporate backed commercial distros for Linux. And Open Source companies are often left with the question of trusting IBM/RedHat, Canonical/Ubuntu, or Debian which is run by a nonprofit organization.
I realize that Blender is not every tool for every job. But there was a time I was sure it was, that there was nothing I could not do with Blender for 3D. But I realize that trying that would just frustrate me to no end. It did. It's like using vice grips to unbolt every nut and bolt. You can, but not the right tool all the time.
Its like everywhere, use the tool you can achieve the best result (and of course that is in your budget). While Blender has fantatstic Modelling tools, I really dont like the feeling of sculpting in it.
A lot of it comes down to the studios having already invested the time of their employees to learn, and the plugins and investment in money for the purchase for the more expensive stuff (Maya, for example, used to have a price in the 10k-20k range…).
very good points. I think it takes more time, to bring Blender into the pipeline of the big studios. Autodesk, Adobe for instance, they work like heroin dealers. In schools, universities, they are mostly big inside. Who learns art, design will have their first contact with one of those mainstream programs. So the generation grow with this skill set on this software. Another aspect is. If you get told, that when you want to play in the pro league, you must learn maya, max a.s.o. Of course, many skill-sets can be ported to Blender, but for studios the most precious thing is time. At a 250 Mio Budget or more, for the CGI, they don't care if the software cost $1000 or zero. Can the tool provide in the given time and with the demanded quality? Yes No ..get the f out. Blender will raise more, and the industry will change. I support and recommend Blender, and mostly people are happy with it. Especially when they get rid of this damn subscriptions.
big companies all want to make the move to blender. the reasoning against it is who do we blame when things go wrong. its also the fact that people have spent their entire life getting used to one software and are reluctant to change. if you spent yourlife painting with paintbrushes the likely hood of you moving to clay is very unlikely.
Before watching I take the guess that while Blender is free, you don't really have the support. Sure you have massive community support. But what I mean is that when you buy an expensive tool, you uslually get expensive support. Where when the tool has a bug, the Support tries everything to make that program run again. With blender you can only hope to find a good Community member that fixes your issue in time. So paid programs have almost always that extra step of "Taking sure everything works" Edit: I knew it! (Sure, it's multiple aspects, just saying)
My guess is that the number one reason is comfortability. You take a decade to get really good with one piece of software, then switch. Its few of us that do it.
Blender is the google docs of 3d software. It's good at what it does, but it's very limited in features and power. Max and Maya are like Microsoft Word. Basic users don't know about its more powerful features, and probably don't need them for the simple things they do. Larger studios are doing things in production that smaller ones don't even know is possible, mainly because the larger studios have entire dedicated teams of engineers working on stuff.
Not only that, it needs features that other software have like baking animation, better or automatic retopology. Or even improve some other stuff like the video editor. Also, the companies is now trying to make stylized animation like Across the spiderverse, nimona and puss in boots 2 (even the Bethesda is trying it with Hi-Fi rush) Blender have to create better tools than only be fast with cycles.
My biggest issue with Blender is the interface is clunky, the shortcuts are also often unintuitive. In an effort to differentiate itself from the mainstream software packages, its made itself hard to learn for those used to maya/max
Wouldn't be too surprised if some studios get locked into longer term contracts for things like service support (it might lower the price beyond what's publicly stated by the same companies), such that they don't look into better options because they'd also lose out by canceling such an obligation. Combine that with certain pipeline stuff for organizing projects within a system, and that could explain why they're slow to adapt. Blender just being good doesn't quite give it enough to have hooks onto an industry.
really cool video, from a games perspective. companies especially in the UK which is where I am from allow the employee to use whatever they want most of the time as long as they can output it into a useable file type of way to integrate it into the project. for example now on basically all job listings for the game industry i have seen recently there is "proficient in 3Ds max, Maya or blender" because they know they are all powerful tools so there is no point limiting its use where it can be.
Do you work for any studio in this industry? I mean it's like job ads, that says fresh grads are welcome to apply and just waste their time and money (like for commute & food), and they just become quota for the HR.
@@MangaGamified I have worked with a few quite large companies and am a developer yea, I also know and am friends with quite a lot of people who also work in the industry.
Mostly the reason I have seen is that most studios already have custom script and toolset for Maya, and they have taken so much time and money into these custom workflows that they just see it too problematic to change it into another software like Blender
Actually lots of Indie game developer use it. Including indie game dev where I'm working and I also use it for my freelance job. But I was a max user, so I must admit that using blender is not as easy as 3ds Max. There's lots of feature that making my work easier in max that just isn't there in Blender, as matter a fact I'm still annoyed by the selecting system of Blender that I think it should not be as complex as this just to select some object that should have been done quickly. The user exp of blender is lousy as hell 😅 But nothing can beat Blender pricing, and Max is tremendously expensive specially for someone who is still trying to be successful and makes lots of money.
Learned some 3ds Max back in college for architecture back when it was still Discreet before being acquired by Autodesk. While I'm not in architecture now, I have started learning some 3D Modeling again and also render for clients unable to handle things - both of those things because of Blender! It's definitely come a long way from the pre 2.7 days when gosh, the UI was just terrible but I didn't touch it at the beginning. So cool to see what's coming for it down the road!
Cinema 4D has its downsides but it is accurate and reliable, while Blender does messy esports, messy transforms, messy folders, messy scales, poor mesh checking, poor sizing and snapping, but Blender of course has also many advantages, just not professionalism but versatility.
Well you missed a big point, blender dosent offer any sort of collaboration. Its not possible that 2 or more people work on the same scene at the same time, you cant batch/ network render, no way for scene states/ state sets, also got no default pipeline to work with other dcc or fileformats beyond alembic.
It's still not powerful enough in some specific cases like interior rendering. Yes it has unbiased path tracing but for the market time is more important because time is money. So blender should implement some non physically correct tricks to speed up rendering like biased engine like vray or corona, at least for GI precalculation to use it to further aproximate the final result more quickly.
I used to dabble in 3d modeling when I was younger and making game mods. I always used max. But this was back in the early 2000s. I haven't touched 3d stuff in over a decade. I tried blender out a couple of weeks ago and honestly couldn't figure out how to do basic shape transformations. I'd probably need to take some course on it if I really wanted to give it a fair shot. But I'm actually curious on how much Max has changed in the last 10 years.
Blender seems perfectly adequate and I'm also noting that users claim that it's better than alternatives like 3ds Max and Maya. However, when you've spent a decade or three working within a UI that's somewhat standard across multiple suites, you find Blender's uniqueness as the primary reason why the industry has refused to adopt it. Mastery of a particular system doesn't happen overnight so you're basically having to choose between resetting your art pipeline, losing productivity in the process, or staying the course. The old adage, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", applies here, especially when the cost effectiveness of a free, albeit a reportedly formidable, product would cost exceedingly more up front for down time due to having to retrain everyone along the pipeline to work with an entirely unique solution. For artists who have already mastered 3ds Max or Maya, for example, basically being asked to throw everything they know about 3d content creation out the window is an unreasonable ask.
I use Maya and 3Ds Max and the reason I do not use it is because I don't feel like learning it but if I ever have to I am sure I won't miss anything from Max or Maya but I just don't have time to slow my workflow down to learn a different software... However, I am planning on starting working at a different location where they use blender because it is free so I will have to learn it eventually
I can tell you the answer right now. Many studios have invested a ton of time and money into pipelines that require Autodesk software. They don’t want to switch because that means overhauling a lot of their systems. Blender is actually better than Maya at this point, they just don’t want to rip the bandaid off.
Correct me if i am wrong, Blender is free only for small organizations who don't make much money, if you are earnings using blender cross a certain amount (i believe it was 1 million USD the last time I read about it ) you are required to pay a reasonable royalty to Blender.
i wish i could find a in depth comparison on why people think blender is "way better" than other software's? all i find is the people biased on the blender community model, its free so whatever it can do is fine. Something that is not built in "we can find it in a add-on", well apart from being clustered with add-on's, has someone given an out of the box comparison why it is BEST? and it just gets hate without any reason? i'm just curious to know the actual statistics. without the free model bias.
Proprietary Software allows for liability of the owner if a bug or feature ruins a production. The production company can sue the proprietary software company for a settlement to recoup some of their losses in time and money. Open Source software has no owner (depending on the license) so there is no one to sue if a crash causes a production to lose unrecoverable work.
I customised my blender control scheme immediately after using Maya for a project. That was the only thing Maya is better at, and now (for me) it isn't. It's super easy. -Set your keymap to "Industry Compatible". It's close enough to Maya. -save default -customise/add keys as desired -save default
Simple: A) no time to learn new tools, or the benefit is not great enough to invest more time. B) No in-house proprietary tools developed over the years C) Don't want to invest into training new artists that join the studio, easier to just let them use what ever they want D)Niche tools that blender does not have for example: how do I copy vertex ids and vertex normals and uvs between meshes E)Maya animation tools, they are far too superior, also its rigging tools, and once you have a way of rigging animating exporting animation and importing mocap into an app you stay there
We do! SOME studios don't use it because they're incredibly invested in certain platforms, decades of custom programs, etc. You probably won't see ILM jumping on it, but an incredible number of indie VFX studios use Blender on a daily basis.
Honestly a big step in adoption is the introduction of the USD standard and the MaterialX standard. This will make the artist's tool of choice irrelevant in a studio environment. Now everything is tied with Maya/Max formats and FBX. and even transfers between Max or Maya is a headache.
you seem to completely ignore the artist pool. We would ditch maya without a thought, because it is the most bug infested software in all of human history. But when a new project gets a go and you need to find 40 animators or more you start to see the reason why we stick to maya, there are simply not enough artists yet in other dcc's to ensure that you will find the manpower needed to finish the movie in time. Switching pipeline is yeah one reason but bottom line switch to a different dcc is not that big of a deal.
Why blender isn't industry standard? You answered the question in your video. They don't offer big studios the support they need for long-term projects. Companies are not paying for the software, they paying for the support in case something goes wrong. And if people responsible for a certain software doesn't offer that support then big companies aren't going to use their product, it doesn't matter if it's free. Besides, I don't understand this devotion some people have over a piece of software. I can guarantee you, if blender somehow became industry standard, as a maya user, I would make the jump. A software doesn't define who I am as artist. I'm not a "maya artist", I'm a 3d artist, you're not a "blender artist" you're a 3d artist. Honestly, the tools we use shouldn't matter anyways. What matter is the art, and we're all capable of making art regardless of the tools we use. What matters is our skills, our ability to be creative and our passion for the craft. I don't care if blender does well, I don't care if maya does well. All I care about is making the best art I can make. All these tools are just means to an end
In the studio I work in, we do use blender but at least now we cannot switch to it completely even though there are quite a number of people who want it (including me), as we have tons of old projects in 3ds max and a lot of people who have used 3ds max for years and years and it's difficult for them to switch to other soft. Even for those who do complain about 3ds max from time to time. they say that they don't have enough time and afford to learn a new software. So we use 3ds max, blender and cinema4d. I think that in future we finally would get rid of 3ds max and stick with the other two softwires. We have many VFX artists and they prefer cinema. But for making models - right now we mostly use Blender. And then we convert it to cinema and 3ds max for those who make a final product.
Blender is old school ... Brings it to the world for free just to push design as far as possible. This is how it used to be ... and lives on in Blender. WE made this place all you know WE made that.
I use blender for my 2d games and the like. I also use it to add effects to certain things. Blender is way easier to use than say, Unity for these kinds of purposes and it also has a chance to be unique still due to randomization.
The biggest reason isn't the whole lack of trust studios have for Blender. The biggest reason why is because the leading studios that does 3D and VFX uses the so called "industry standard" 3D softwares. Namely studios like WetaFX and Pixar are considered to be the big dogs in the 3D scene and if they use Maya, Houdini, Unreal Engine 5 or even Unity for their shorts, everybody else follow their lead.
I love blender as a hobbyist but if I were ever to switch my career from graphic design to 3D all i know is blender and would need to learn a whole new ecosystem. I have C4d that comes with after effects but id rather focus and really learn Blender
Because blender is not there yet. Theres A LOT of features that big productions need that blender simply doesnt have yet. We use blender more and more, but for more complex tasks we go back to maya, unfortunately. For reference, blender is only now getting light linking, which is a very basic feature for production, also skin animation performance is a joke (its now being rewriten), no proxy files with defferred loading to render, which is also very basic, and the list goes on and on. Its getting there, we already reduced the number of maya licenses to a third of what we had, but, blender is not quite there yet.
Who said they don't use it ? I can explain to you how the adoption of Blender goes, since part of my job is consulting for animation studios to adopt Blender. To name a few just here in Spain: B-Water Studios, Kotoc Animation and KeyToon, the three are very important animation studios, focused in TV Series, and I cannot mention others that are prepairing their pipeline to make the shift. If you want to mention Feature Film animation studios, it's not their turn, with this I mean that Blender requires a few details to be adopted in feature film studios (and they are coming), also a pipeline shift cost is MAJOR, so it has to be done slowly, the smaller the company, the smaller the cost, right now medium sized studios are shifting, and the reason is not the cost, of course, but the licensing model... ooooh yes, that's a major issue, and not just that, there are other major reasons to make the shift. So far none of the studios that made the shift are looking back, the killer combo is Blender as the trunk app, Houdini as the side-wing app, killer combo. If you want another reason on why some studios are hesitant... third party render engines and it's implementation, with 4.0 and Hydra delegate that's gonna end, any render engine could be implemented using Hydra with a minimum platform specific development, as an example, Vray for Houdini works with Hydra, hence Vray is already compatible with Blender, it just requires a small UI implementation and that's it. So please, avoid this kind of missleading titles, for a studio, free or not is not the important part, and studios ARE actually shifting to Blender for many other reasons that is not the price tag.
I learned 3Dsmax from my friend's dad's computer when I was in primary school and I used it when I was in a AD company, now even are a hobbyists I still can't really transfer myself into blender, I have made some 3D print model in blender with success, but my brain still hurts to do so and as a hobbyists I really don't have much time to relearn all thing I need rather than grab an old version of 3DsMax and finish my one-time project quickly
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Blender has always been considered Generalist software - the Swiss army knife of 3D. And it can do just about everything so well. But big studios can afford the best and that means the very best specialist software & the best 3D artists & technicians. Blender is already the most popular choice in indie studios
@@cembaturkemikkiran4109 Open Source, you are tech support.
@@cembaturkemikkiran4109 Not quite, the Foundation partnered with Canonical to outsource tech support, with profits split 50/50.
It's not a case of tech support even, although that's definitely a factor. The fact is when you have a software that is industry standard, deviating from that standard can create headaches in your production pipeline especially when you're working with other companies, who are all familiar with the industry standard software.
@@Paul_Wardthat’s a part of it but if you look at the different packages you can get all of the major ones have one similar thing support. It’s vital for studios too have it.
Blender is by no means behind the "best" software. If anything the potential says otherwise, due to the general support. Lots of professionals, including top studios use it as well. The big reason it's not used by all of them is because they are used to other software, and more so the production and support behind it over the years they grown accustomed to it. The two comments above sum it up.
We at our VFX studio started using Blender quite a lot. It is our main 3D software now besides Houdini for simulations
@YoureNotBatman Our pipeline is shown in YT vid called "Pipeline, the best Blender workflow ever! EP29". from BlenderBob ;)
Must be an independent studio. Big studios sure aren't
@@NunYaBiz1313 It is. But we are working on big budgets with production companies on TV shows and movies
But doesn’t it’s RBD sims still really suck in comparison to Houdini?
Side FX is quite a small team
Another issue is that Blender is in contestant change and development. Thus the reason Blender had to make a Long Term Support version. (LTS). I've worked in studios were the main 3d software was 5 years out of date.The reason was they built thier pipeline and tools for that 5 year old program. They cannot afford to update the software and suddenly have everything stop working,
That is often overlooked point you made, because most people commenting here are not in such situation. But if you are on schedule to deliver work for major clients and you are part of the series of other studios, to have something crash on you or work not as expected would make paying for that much more expensive than it is to pay for fiver year old software that you know how it works and how realibe it is. And you know all the in house scripts will work, you know everyone on the team is trained on it and you know it will deliver. That is priceless. So while Blender might work for freelancers and casual users etc, for big studios its the advantages of Blender rapid release cycle and plug ins that make it a problem. Although I'm sure there are people in those studios who might use Blender or specific add-on for blender as a supplement to their main tools.
worked in a studio which mainly used blender and houdini, when we finally updated from 2.7 to 2.8 all our pipeline tools broke because python functioned were removed without any backwards compatibility.
took a team of pipeline tds almost a year to debug and update even the bare bones of inhouse tools, it was a giant pain in the ass.
and it just keeps happening, not just with python but also with geo nodes
That's being entrenched... you can get that way with Blender too. Nothing is forcing people to upgrade Blender... you can even have multiple versions installed simultaneously. I have some plugins that only work with some versions and not others
@@jeffsmith9384 Until LTS versions appearred, you did not have a guarantee, that bugs or security patches would be provided to you version of blender, which is kinda significant for a 5 year timespan of using.
This, I can't wait to know if Bethesda is still using 3Ds Max 2012, we'll know when the CK for Starfield drops.
The biggest problem I see why many of the newer independent creators don’t use Blender is that there has always been a stigma with new artists against any software that is not considered “industry standard” even if that software is better than what the industry may be using. This is especially the case for those that have Hollywood aspirations. They only adopt new software after some big name uses it. What most new artists fail to realize is that real professionals use whatever works and gets the job done.
this is the case, isn't it?
"it isn't the car, its the driver", "The best weapons doesn't mean much if you don't have the skills". when it comes down it, it is the individual that makes the best of what they got.
Also depends if they got started in 3d on their own or via a college course. A lot of those still pushing students to 3DS or Maya cause "muh industry standard"
And so it keeps feeding back into the loop and corralling new waves of 3D artists into the predatory subscription of Adobe and Autodesk.
"Need 5 years of 3DS Max experience" to get hired to Pixar or Disney is the main problem.
You do realise that when you're applying for a job they listed that you need to have experience "industry standard" softwares, never Blender
Independent creators don't use Blender? I thought especially the Indie scene uses Blender. That's exactly backwards from my expectations.
Because software licensing cost is irrelevant in large studios.
large + outsourcing to low-cost of living countries, look at the Flash 2023
yeah an tool port costs and artist retraining costs are larger I would assume.
@@MangaGamified
Especially the third world countries.
The main problem with Blender is that it is a multi-tool. Yes, you can sculpt in it, but Zbrush makes it more convenient. Yes, you can create PBR materials in it, but Substance Painter/Designer is better. Yes, it has geometry nodes, but Houdini has better ones. Yes, you can do animation in it, but Maya is better for that. To draw an analogy, it’s like offering an experienced carpenter a swiss army knife instead of his toolbox, saying “with this thing, you can still do everything you do now.” Yes, I probably can, but I prefer separate tools for separate tasks.
i kinda love having everything in one software,thats why i love arch because everything i need i can add
As a solitary guy using it for his game, but one who USED to be in AAA? Yeah, this is it. Even as a sole creator, I COULD make PBR materials in Blender, but I opted to pay for Substance because it's just so much better at filling its' respective niche. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE Blender, and I came from the 3ds Max pipeline to it. But it tries to be all things to all users, and while it gets most of the way there... it's not the absolute it wants to be.
@@zhanucong4614 I got you, bro. I understand you perfectly, it is very convenient when you need to create a lot of different content without being distracted by the choice of software. But when you create studio-quality assets, you spend several days, and sometimes weeks, at one stage of creating a 3D model (for example, when working on a sculpture). In such situations, you don’t need a multitool, you need the most convenient tool for a specific task.
@@Pavel_Gorbunov its also convenient for figuring out what type of career you want,also btw what software is good for sculpting vr chat models
@@zhanucong4614 I have never tried making models for VR chat, but I am sure that their production pipeline does not differ from that of any other game models. Accordingly, the sculpting software should be chosen from what is available to you. Lucky for me, I had Zbrush, but Blender will also do the job.
Blender has an important role as a free option for smaller studios and hobbyists.
A free option that performs well enough to get smaller jobs done and could theoretically by used by a studio creates competition for the big names and options for people with more limited income.
If blender became a big, expensive industry standard it would hurt hobbyists like me. People who work in an unrelated industry but still want to be able to do the things blender can do on occassion.
I have seen it used for video games before the problem is only for mods and concepts of games. The actual problem is it just isn't taught in schools and companies don't want to hire an employee they have to train. The rise of the U Universal Scene Description file format might help it take off a bit as it allows people to work on different software and sync to one another instead of having to all work on the same software and export then import to get to another person's computer. It is a little more complicated but in short that is what it does. Works with Maya 3D MAX Blender and Unreal Engine last time i check so what the person learned at school will be able to be used at work no matter which one they learned.
The hard part is they all have to be on a LAN OR VLAN so remote work will be harder as sync times will take longer if everyone is working through a VPN for all to be on the same logical subnet that the server will listen too. Longer sync time than export then import until you get to larger file sizes at which time sync will take less time than export then import over the internet. For a local network that everyone is physically on sync is quicker when set up properly.
The reason why i think Blender will not become pay for it ever is right now you have 20ish different companies paying for it in the top tier with another 20 to 40 in the bottom tier. It is company supported thus how we got Apple silicon supported so quickly, ARM64 is supported so if you want to run it on your phone or IoT device or ARM laptop you can and how we got the newest version of the USD format so quick but why RISC-V is still a branch with little to no support. RISC-V none of the companies make products for so why support it?
What you get when you donate to them is you are one of 100s of thousands of people who are paying into the part for basically the servers to keep on running. To host and keep up to date the online manuel and for the Blender demo movies to be made. For the developer conferences, for to try to keep to the road map without having to bend to the will of companies who are paying the big money to much, and of course pay the paid developers of blender to make and maintain the features of Blender. It is free for everyone to fork it and free for everyone and anyone to submit their changes for review. It still will go through a review process before being added. Another job i am unsure if paid or not.
to The demo movies are cool but still cost money to pay the artists, 3D modeler, animator, etc. Some have overlap of those job titles too. Unsure if Blender pays or not the people who maintain the main-branch of Blender.
So it is in part community but also in part major company funded. I can see why Apple would want it on Apple laptops and i can see why Microsoft will want it on Windows and the Linux Fountain wanting it on Linux.
I am a Maya user and I am alll for Blender doing well. I can see the jump in progress and super rad addons popping. I do wish that kind of dedication appeared in Maya, Max etc.
i used maya a fair bit in university. After leaving ive been switching to blender, but as someone with a TKL keyboard, the hot keys are really lacking. I really miss the radial menus of maya.
I am sorry you are an Autocad pay pig.
@@LeHoserYou can have radial menus in Blender
the radial menu for edit/object mode isnt quite what i mean, though. The maya radial menus have essentially all the tools you need for like 90% of your modeling@@ColinFox
didn't old maya devs join the blender foundation like 3yrs ago?
it seems that people really underestimate the importance of "official support", besides the tradition aspect that is keeping studios hooked to their old pipelines, it feels really hard to invest millions in a project, and have one of your core software lacking official support.
small studio yeah, but big studio barely care for that as they get the chance to just modify and make a fork from it anytime from autodesk... I mean if that's the case, they can pretty much do the same with Blender since it's open source, just hire 1 - 2 dev and they can also contribute to the main core of Blender if they wish so
@@yasunakaikumi I disagree, especially for the "just hire a 1-2 dev", there is no way you will be able to create a core team that can compete in term of support and development against softwares that has been industry standard for 30 years now.
Am not saying its impossible, am saying its a very hard pass, and the gain is almost meaningless when we talk about this sort of studio, an Autodesk License costs nothing relatively to the project.
Your point will be very valid after 5~10 years from now though,
@@yasunakaikumi Nah, I used to be a tech artist that did 3dsmax scripting at a big studio. We had to ping their script engine developer a couple times. While I could 'hack' my way through the code, it'll get clobbered next update, or I'm stuck with maintaining a fork. And some of these things were artefacts by design, and having a pipe to their developer meant it became something on their radar and was going to be refactored in the near future. My time was better used to support the line artist instead of building that general component of the 3d package. In a way, we were 'hiring' that 1 extra dev, externally from Autodesk who specialized in the scripting engine if you want to look at it that way.
I don't know what support is like for Maya now. But it was truly useless most of the time during my career. Our calls to support were generally discovery of features that didn't work right, and we had to write our own tools to make up for the deficit. Worse, Maya didn't fix broken features, because adding new ones was more sexy. But big studios ended up using Maya and other software basically as an operating system, with their pipelines amounting to completely new 3D programs in their own right. The Maya used at Disney was completely different from the Maya you could buy back in the Chicken Little era. I can't imagine how different it must be now.
There's an article on a Japanese studio dropping 3ds max because they weren't happy with their support. Initially they looked into Maya but decided on Blender. Yes, Blender Foundation provide support to studios that back them.
It is pretty simple really; the reason why big studios use Maya is that it is far easier to write tools for it than other packages. If you open Maya in any major VFX house you will find many tools that have been written in-house for that studio's needs, often on a show-by-show basis. It is also true that Maya is so embedded into the Pipelines of these studios that changing their pipeline to accommodate other software is simply not cost-effective. Smaller houses are more agile and are more likely to have Generalists working for them, so Blender does have a place (and it is great, don't get me wrong), but in the bigger studio, it is only ever going to be used if there is no other solution to a particular issue.
Yeah pretty true. All the big studios I've ever worked at in the last 20 years use Autodesk products (max or maya). The only trouble is lately Autodesk has gotten extremely lazy at improving their software, due to the fact that not only do they essentially have a monopoly but also since they switched studios to a subscription service.. So there's no reason to add new features since everyone pays every year....no more convincing them to upgrade. Lately the 'new features' of Maya are laughable. Eventually if they stagnate long enough, the features of Blender (or even the features of animating directly in Unreal) will pass Maya and Max by miles and the studios will bite the bullet and retrain their artists and rewrite their tools. That is a ways off though. No matter what happens, competition is good for the industry and Autodesk deserves a massive kick in the ass to get them working again.
As a cinema 4d user , I find the development of Blender to be so exciting . So many amazing features . I wish i had started to learn blender first .. Now after years of tinkering around in the software , you sort of get tired of learning something new . But amazing work guys .. I will eventually start learning it .. that is sure
same with me as a maya user
If you do 1 thing at a time and export it to C4D, eventually you will be desintoxicated.
I was in the same loop of c4d for the ease of use. Been using blender for 2 months now. It’s worth the jump
@@roro6209 Why is it worth it? What´s the big difference?
He, he, you will be surprised with Blender... but not necessarily pleasantly surprised. However, is wort your time.
I'm working with Blender because I started on it and I'm too old and too busy to switch. It's ok for people I work with, all they want is the final images they paid for. I got to meet several people in different studios and they're two reasons why they don't use it. The first is obviously that in a professional context, most of the guys studied 3d and they were trained on other softwares. You can't ask a 40 or 45 years old artist who's an expert at 3DS Max + Vray to switch to Blender. It makes no sense. And the second reason is why they don't switch to Blender. And that's simple. Blender is an awesome free tool but it can't compete with the paid ones. The combo "experienced professional" + "industry standard softwares" can't be beaten by a hobbyist using Blender.
I often oppose pros vs hobbyists which sounds irritating for a lot of people but that's the whole point. Blender has a community with a majority of passionate hobbyists who don't really want to face the reality of a high standard professional context. Many topics on Blender groups are "how can I earn money with Blender", "I made a donut", "look this procedural texture it's amazing". A hobbyist is more likely to accept things from the moment it's better than what he can achieve. As pros we're seeking for the best of the best image quality which Blender can't offer. As usual, I want to point that they're tons of incredible Blender artists. The point is not to talk about their skills but their tools. They're convinced, most of the time that Blender can do everything and only skills matter. But that's a hobbyist point of view... Blender is the best free software we've ever seen, its possibilities are just out of this world for the price tag but Cycles is way too limited. CAD tools are barely non existent, color management is not really accurate, lighting is fairly wrong and so on.
"Ok Blender is amazing and it's free, can't studios accept some limitations to save money?" Sure, it works for small studios and Blender is nothing but a blessing for them. But big studios or big agencies don't care about the price tag. I'm talking for agencies I work with in France, softwares are just professional tools that are included in a budget and you can decrease taxes using them. Plus, "big agencies" mean "big clients" and "big money". Again these are two different universes. I can easily charge those companies for several thousands for a couple images (then I have taxes and so on), same goes with other artists, so paying for ten or twenty license is nothing for them.
Final point, it may change in the future if the Blender Org concentrates on real features. Updates after updates they add funny things that we grow a custom to (like geo nodes) but nothing is game changing. Image quality is still the same, everything is based on making modeling easier. Which is great for the work flow, but I personaly don't need all those things, I can model hair, complexe meshes, I got my own library, I know how to optimize my scenes because that's my job. But I can't change the way illumination, colors, exposure or other stuffs are calculated. At one point you're limited and that's not about skills or understanding.
You just nailed it perfectly. I have tried several times to move away from 3dsMax/Vray/Gaea/Nuke/DaVinci but there are some features as well as reliability issues that Blender currently does not offer. I know Blender can do a lot of things but is the Master of none. As you said, there are incredible Blender artists out there. But the software is still lacking in several parts of the pipeline. The most annoying one for me at the moment being EXR Compositing. Blender crashes a lot, too slow to be used as a reliable tool for Comp and Live Playback is a nightmare. Nuke or Fusion are way ahead on this matter.
Blender also doesn't have a dedicated tech support. Many big industries who deeply rely on the tools they're using can't risk that.
@@mr.j7899 100% I forgot that point. It reminds me something that happened to me last month. I was at the dentist, and the software his assistant was using (the software is called Julie) shut down. My dentist just took his phone and call the assitance, someone answered in roughly 30 seconds and the problem was solved in one minute. Imagine if he had a free software with no support at all. It simply can't work like this when you're a professional.
And that's why I use Maya now. Even though I have learned and started with the CG world by using blender in September 2019. There are a lot of things Blender lacks, you have totally forgotten to mention how bad Blender handles a very complex dense Geometry, or a scene with a lot of objects! It simply cannot handle a very high Polycount making it difficult to work with. Whereas Maya is able to handle 100 million polygons on my machine with zero issues! And my machine is beefy with a 16-core Ryzen 9 5950x and an RTX 3080 Ti GPU with 64GB of RAM and blender was still choking at 5-7 million LOL!
That is the number one reason why most studios will never switch to Blender aside from support, and having already established profiency in industry standard software.
People have to accept the fact that blender is indeed a CG student/hobbyist tool, and not a professional tool.
Indeed, if you’re driving a boat, there is a big difference between driving your own speedboat, and driving an ocean liner. The top studios are ocean liners, they need specialists and pipelines and everything that that entails. Blender will keep improving and gaining ground good on them.
I've been working in Computer Graphics and Animation for over 30 years. I've worked in AAA games, Product Visualisation and Motion Graphics. I've used pretty much every 3D package of the last 30 years..Max, Softimage, Cinema 4D, Maya, SketchUp, Houdini, Alias, NinGen, GameGen etc etc. I now teach on one of the leading Games Degree courses in the World. I discovered Blender about 4 years ago...its without the doubt the best modelling and look development tool I've ever worked with. Hugely scalable, very solid, and immensely powerful. I predict Blender will dominate most studios within the next 4 or 5 years, especially given many schools like our own are feeding kick ass Blender artists onto the job market. I absolutley love the tool...its nothing short of a work of genius in its design, functionality and application.
35 years in the industry, and my 4 latest productions here in France, all Blender!
And all of those productions without an animation library, and with tons of add-ons; easy constraint, animation layers, a picker, a toggle soundtrack, frame f-curve, bone layers, wiggles etc... .
And the same goes for the riggers and skinners; add-ons, add-ons for missing tools that should be standard. (not even the fancy ones-addons)
It's just ooo soooo hard to get a character with a t-shirt and his backpack correctly skinned, together with the correct animation controllers.
But I do like Blender, I do get things done but way not as easy and cheap as people might think.
I did not see your project... But I would suggest to make almost everything out of cloth simulation. It is what I am doing for my dancing MMD video. Like the entire girl body and even rigid object are also cloth sim. Basically I make a stiff material and inflate with pressure to make the rigid object after that they can be part of the same simulation. So it is one coherent simulation that handle everything. There is other use too. The feet can be made flexible and can collide and adapt to the floor. Muscle and giggle physic can be painted on the character skin, no need of additional bone or any add-ons.
which picker are you using? I recently picked up DreamWall for maya, and I'm trying to find something similar for Blender.
I'm fairly involved with the process of platform choice decisions at various studios, and its very simple. Artists mostly get to decide what packages they want to use, The amount of highly capable artists that use packages like Maya vastly out number capable Blender users. This is the nr.1 reason, nr.2 is pipeline compatibility, support is rarely used, and the price is barely even discussed.
Support is such a big thing. Lots of smaller artists who didn't have to deal with some pretty hefty NDAs don't know how difficult help can be when you aren't allowed to ask anything online or even worse, when your machine isn't hooked on internet at all. You NEED that on site support for the bigger projects.
Because it isn't better than maya and max in SO many ways, especially speed. just compare making an FFD in max, may and blender. max 1 step. maya 2 steps, blender, what? 8? more than worth that 5% increase in cost to make peoples work 400% faster.
Yes blender does some things very well, I use it all the time, but I'm kind of tired of all the blender fan boys saying its the second coming.
I love how blender is so good at many different aspects and I do use it for certain tasks. Basically an all in one package. As a professional animator in the in the VFX industry I would never switch to it for animation however. Maya has such a strong foundation and you can basically solve any problem in lots and lots of different ways. I often hear people complain about how Maya is too technical and too much going on behind the scenes which blender has smoothed out and made less complicated. Yes! It is exactly what makes Maya so strong. It's got all the technical grit and dirt under the hood that if you master it -you use to your advantage and enables you to work in multiple workflows and adapt to the situation. That's what I find lacking in blender. Also the graph editor in blender isn't as versitile as Maya. I always recommend younger artists to use blender however if they aren't sure what aspect of the industry they want to focus on. Blender lets them try everything.
I think if Blender Foundation add a support feature which studios could buy which will allow experienced people to work for support and earn and people who already know how to work with blender can also work for those studios as well so a win win for everyone.
I had a stroke reading this
same@@squirrelman7262
Except for your use of commas, I agree with you on this. Creating more jobs + more Blender adoption is a great thing.
@@linhdanghoang2504 Ok, agreed. Lol, should've use those.
As a small indie studio, I sometimes use blender but also mainly use Houdini Indie and 3DS Max Indie which is cheaper and no different to full versions (mainy because of our legacy files and I like to have options).
24 hour support is why.
When you have multi million dollar contracts to service
you better be able to get a TD on the phone at 2:40 am to solve a problem , even offering to have you upload your scene file and have them trouble shoot it when there is a show stopping issue.
Spelunking through online Blender forums (that are mostly populated by hard surface modeling enthusiasts)
just won’t cut it when there are client deadlines to meet.
As a Senior 3D Artist for 8 years, a simple explanation and my opinion is, Blender is good for startups. And other "old and been in the industry" applications are for those huge studios that has been around for a while now. Other big studios are starting to adapt Blender too. But right now, it's really in its early stages. I myself believe that Blender has huge potential and will 100% be used mostly in the future. I'm also using it for quite a while now, transferring back and fourth from Maya, Max, and Blender. Really, there are just some things that Blender is not capable as of this moment, but for sure, give it 3-5 years and it will be an insane software to use. Especially for studios, which in the first place wants to make money, and Blender is free. Others should understand this, especially those Blender stans. There's always a "but" on their main reason: "Blender is free"---"BUT". Because if you say Maya/Max is expensive BUT---we currently get everything that we need so it's worth it. Again, Blender is awesome. Can't wait to make it my 3D application in the VERY VERY near future.
The problem is really the same as why no new social media company ever works. Network effect. Autodesk already has the whole industry using it. It's what's taught in art schools. The biggest companies have their entire pipelines built around these products that can go back decades. Millions of dollars/man hours worth of development on custom tools. The fact that Blender is free means nothing if it would cost you millions to completely redo your pipeline and retrain all your 3D artists. Not to mention all things being equal, a pro sculptor will still typically choose Zbrush, a pro mograph artist will chose C4D, a pro animator will choose Maya, a pro VFX artist will still pick Houdini over Blender. It's awesome that it can do so much as well as it does it, but it still doesn't beat the big guys at their specializations.
Schools are often incentivised to teach software from companies willing to give these educators benefits and train them, of which provides an incentive to pay them higher under the connection with the industry norm. This takes time and training away from Blender, which makes it difficult from a completely human perspective to implement within pipelines.
reminds me of that teacher who teaches web design and at the same time sells his own domain and webhosting service, and that Filipino teacher who also sells her own filipino book.
There should be a law against anti-competitive practices, school is a place to learn all the options not manipulate and to monopolize
Used Maya at work after been using Blender for years, and I noticed that I'm able to do things in Maya much faster than doing the same in Blender. Not to mention workflow with Maya to Unreal is much more reliable and faster than the messy workflow of Blender to Unreal, requiring addons, settings, and fixes that Blender Foundation would refuse to do.
I'm considering switching to Maya full time.
I do know of some big game studios that have adopted Blender for studio use, but mainly most of the studios I have worked with in recent years allow artists to use their software of choice. Maya is still widely used for character animation, Zbrush for high poly modelling and MAX for enviro art.
( at least in my experience, don't want to speak for everyone) but Blender is gaining popularity among studios. And Blender is very accessible for newer studios on a budget. plus its just fun and easy to use if your in to 3d art, or even 2.5D art.
You're average indie dev is also $1900 richer than someone who sub, one month later.
I work at a university that teaches game design and animation. We use Maya and Zbrush. Our biggest issue is after graduation when grads lose their subscription for maya, they get stuck and can’t work on their skills. We of course say “use blender” but they just spent years learning maya and are not encouraged to do another software. A lot will evolve and do it but a lot don’t. There is a maya addon for blender I’ve seen that makes blender more like maya when it comes to UI and setup to help make it easier for maya users to jump over…..but in the end we need to teach purely blender.
indie maya is reasonably priced
As you say, there won't be any graduates who can study Photoshop.
But no one says you can't study Photoshop.
It doesn't make sense that you can't study Maya because it's expensive.
@@aiuhejvwvud8c99rjej yeah. But if they are passionate…..they will see their knowledge in maya can transfer to Blender and they could learn it. As I’m studying Computer Animation in college for a bachelor’s I’ll also be self learning Blender while they teach me Maya. This way I’m well versed in both when I graduate,
umm? to work on their skills they can always sail the seas instead excuses
@@a420dro believe it or not, not many people know of that. Maybe a few percent do. The mass majority never knew it was a thing they can do. Even the average person doesn’t know that’s a thing.
That's something that's kind of bugged me to throughout my college classes. All these new faces getting into 3d modeling for the first time.. in Maya..
So unless they're willing to teach themselves another 3d program ,they either are forced to pay into the autodesk and adobe ecosystem to continue to use maya, or just never touch 3d again.
Almost everything is wrong in that video, and you really need to stop bringing-up Barnstorm because they completely shifted pipeline, 3 years ago they were looking for a generalist and no word about Blender in the job offer they were asking “must know maya very well”.
They are rendering with Arnold, looking for houdini artist, nuke artist etc
They were talking in a recent interview all the changes they had to do to work more efficiently.
Because it was a small studio and young and they never worked anywhere else, and when they got experimented users in the team they started to change things like softwares etc.
And don’t forget what happened to Tangent, despite what the community is trying to hide, the developers that worked at Tangent said on twitter that it was horrible trying to build a pipe around Blender, and nobody sain would do that. And you know what happened after to Tangent, they tried to shift but it was too late.
The only two reasons you gave are:
-The studios already use Maya, and other paid software, so they dont want to change.
-The price is like 5%< of the salary for one employee.
No other reasons were given, you could have made a video/short about it, it would take less then 60 seconds to tell that.
I am disappointed in why so many content creators stretch their video out for no reason.
It is so sad that I begin to praise content creators who do make informative videos without stretching it.
Lots of the UI learning problems for new Blender users can be fixed by using Blender for Artists. Basically replaces keyboard UI with mouse driven UI.
I still unable to believe that such a magnificent software like blender is free, it enables me to create my own character from scratch from sculpting to rigging and animation. Sadly, I live in Africa and we have a very weak currency, I wish I could donate to their wonderful team for their huge contribution.
was mentioning africa necessary?
@@isi_kebulanit's not an excuse not to donate, I agree
@@isi_kebulanhe's giving the reason why he can't donate is why he mentioned it
I know 3D artists in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, who donate to blender foundation regularly. You guys should stop using this "i live in africa" as an excuse or as a way to get sympathy. That doesn't work anymore. People all over the world are struggling. Also, I donated 20 dollars to blender last month. No one is asking you to donate 10 million dollars. Dont sit there and act like you do not have 10 dollars to donate.
Maybe you guys don't know just what he is talking, not all countries on Africa has faciliy on getting Visa and internacional payments
I agree was not necessary mencionate Africa...but I kind of understand...so even if it was'nt necessary mencionate it you shouldnt judge as well
Just saying :/
I think a big issue is the GNU General Public License:
Any modifications you make to the Blender source code must also be released under the GPL or a compatible open-source license. This means that you can't create a proprietary version of Blender without releasing the source code for your modified version.
This means it is more worth for some VFX Studios to pay money to Autodesk and avoid the competition can benefit from the inhouse development
You can actually. As long as it stays private and doesn't become a product.
You can also create add-ons that use proprietary code as long as that code doesn't use blender's api to function. The bridge code needs to be gnu but past that you don't need to release it
I don't think you can do that with Maya either?
How many studios do you think have access to Maya or Houdini source code?
Yeah, it would be horrifying if someone made a better Flash 2023 with their $1900 sub per month per seat.
And why it's issue? Also, GPL does not forbid inhouse development, it even encourages and guaranees that it's possible. I doubt even big companies can get source code from Autodesk.
from my limited experience as a young junior: People dont have the energy and time to learn something new when the old one is still working.
This is the real reason. People have already developed a workflow and acquired assets for a particular 3D software so the incentive to change is not big if the alternative is not miles better. And as we all know, Blender still has some way to go before it comfortably beats other 3d packages in most areas.
yup
And there an extra important factor, colleges, universities earn alot of money to teach the Industry Standart” programs. So as a person leaving from these educational places going to a company not will be going to learn another program. I know the feeling, but in the inverse process, i know a little in blender (Like the “pros” like to call, Hobbyist) and in the college I’m being forced to do the stuff in cinema 4D. And you know why? Because Maxxon pay the college to teach their program. Looking for that blender never will be a standard because the institution’s not earn money from a free program. Blender foundation not going to pay them to teach blender. And also these guys that are using these other programs for long years don’t will want to switch because is not convenient. Just my thoughts on that
Just recently it was announced that Blender 4.x is going with AGX as it's standard color management system, a system that no other VFX tool in the industry uses. That should tell you all about why exactly the 'industry' is not interested in Blender...
You should compare studios to ships.
A small studio is like a small speed boat. It can turn at a snap of a finger. It can accelerate and stop pretty quickly.
A Hollywood FX studio is like those giant Evergreen G-class container ships. It takes forever for these ships to accelerate, turn and stop.
It's not that Blender is being ignored by giant studios. Is that they have contractual obligations to keep using Maya and Houdini.
They can pivot to Blender if they wanted but they stand to lose millions of invested cash for years of software support service from Autodesk and Houdini.
It takes time.
Usually studios fear change unless they go bankrupt, bought-out or merged. That's the only time they're open to other options when funds are running dry.
It's not a big loss, your average indie dev is $1900 richer than someone who had sub one month later.
Well said, but its not just software support. Its also custom tools written at the studios for the software they use and a general asset and animation library that is really only useable via the software it was authored in. FBX only takes you so far. Plus retraining artists to use a totally new software set is a big ask. Like they said in the video, less than 5% of my salary pays for the software. Would forcing me to switch to Blender cost me 5% productivity, at least for the first year? Oh, easily. So, big studios don't take the risk. And maybe the stupidest reason? Its a prestige thing. I know for a long time (and probably now) ignorant Hollywood executives would use Maya as a buzzword, just assuming that particular software meant quality and everything else (Lightwave, Max, etc) was inferior.
@@MrAnim8orVideos What if people was actually suggesting try to dedicate a small team if not a few guys to make some shorts? then the shorts get longer and better, until it becomes a full blown movie. It would not affect production, cause it's a different team, can even be assigned to an offshore team in a low-cost of living country.
And maybe the fees doesn't matter cause studios just offshore it to a low-cost of living country who just maybe if not most likely just pirates it.
I know the refute of this would be "no one has the time nor money to make a test pipeline even offshoring it to a low-cost of living country" but that's why I'm saying the possibility of studios just offshoring it.
@@MangaGamified Maybe, but can't say I'm a fan of offshoring anything since it affects my job. Also, in order to know what tech you need you also need experience, so unless that foreign team had lots of experience its unlikely you'd end up with an effective pipeline.
Thanks for your thoughts about this. I think you have made some strong points. Support and perception of using the best-in-class tools all play a part in the larger enterprise's business, marketing, and technical strategies. I wholeheartedly agree with you that the Blender Artist and Dev community are affecting major change regarding the perception of what tools are best in-class issue. 👍👍
As a Maya user myself, the Industry of Light and magic was based on Maya technology, there have been written so many plugins and features that are only available in Maya despite its old software it still has cutting-edge technology built around it for Holywood quality animation film realistic rendering requirements. There are also a lot of industry veterans who have years of work experience working on the animation software, retraining those skills would take too much time, considering their preferences. One thing that blender lacks in quality is the quality of their animation tools, and Maya is a much stronger software in the animation department. In Maya you can Keyframe everything, and you can script everything. Because all software is run by mel script.
I've been using blender to make computer games since version 2.43. Of course, at the beginning I supported myself with other programs from the "big three", but for over 10 years I have been working only in it and I have not looked back. A lot of people who have worked with me have been convinced by it and it is being used more and more often in the production of "BIG" games. Which makes me very happy. Thanks to the Blender team for the awesome job.
Free for a non-commercial user doesn't mean free for a commercial license. Software licensing can be complicated, especially for larger organisations
We have a very specialized CAD workflow and spend a decade on custom tools. So bringing the hole functionality to blender would be a massive undertaking.
But i really fed up with Maya so the switch will come sooner or later.
It's not about the price of the license but the cost to train existing employees, training new employees who come out of school with Maya/Max/C4D knowledge,, and retooling the pipeline (ie creating some way for Blender to talk with custom programs and tools). That is a lot of time and money that companies don't really want to spend when what they have now works.
One thing I was told was that it was because of licensing. A lot of features on blender uses plugins made by a range of users. It's a legal issue when a company might need permission to use a specific plugin. Don't know the full story to this or how it would fully work though.
Blender has a strong growth in the gaming industry, where it is a go to solution, often in combination with Houdini. Following the node approach, it may even become the single solution here, but yet, there is a plugin for Unity and Unreal mission to import generator graphs into the engine, like Houdini provides. There are some solutions, but not sufficient ones yet.
It's really simple:
Most profitable business don't mind sticking to normal expensive industry tools because it's a business experience. A tax write-off.
I really doesn't matter for them, but I'm sure it makes a difference for smaller shops, indies etc
I started using blender when it was version 2.4 about 12 years ago. Its a completely different program now. Crazy to see how much it changed.
It really has changed a lot. I found this program some time around 2008. It was ugly, but it was a 3d program, and free. It was exciting to find out about then. And still exciting to hear about now.
One major issue that you didn't mention - which is probably what is holding Blender back - is that the Software is "clunky".
It's extremely powerful - free - can do everything.
But it's a very clunky tool to use - it's power is basically locked behind a lot of weird things you just need to "know" about.
Main issue being - shortcuts. Even though you have a UI now, most tutorials online speak of using Shortcut buttons to perform some function - and over the years as I've been looking around, it's a 50-50 in any Online tutorial, video or post online whether the shortcut will actually work.
Most "industry Standard" software either has a "Toolbar" where every single tool of the software is shown (and hovering your mouse over it will show a description of what it does and how to use it) - or have a universal "Right Click button -> Opens full menu of every option for the tool".
Additionally - some software HIDES functions that are not required in the current scope - to ease on the clutter.
For example, 3D Coat when you are UVMapping will hide Painting and Retopology functions. Blender has "rooms" that are sort-of prepared for work in a certain scope, but you can still use whatever other function of the software in each room.
Also - FBX/OBJ exporter/importer cause a lot of issues between software packages.
Due to all of this - retraining your staff to use Blender, if they were using other software is SUPER time-consuming. Cause you need to not only learn the software BUT also find the ACTUALLY CORRECT tutorials & set up the whole pipeline. And if you get some kind of weird "Blender behavior" like "for some reason it adds an extra bone to the root - which breaks all existing animations in your game project and animations made in Blender are not functioning correctly" -> you are pretty much losing days or weeks trying to figure out how to overcome it.
And Big Studios care about TIME - cause paying their whole team for each Day of Development is way more than any license for "Industry Standard Software" that comes with a phone hotline Support in case "you have a problem" with it.
If there was some Central hub for "absolutely 100% correct tutorials on any feature" + "known bugs" section WITH Answers to them & there was just some UI cleanup done -> Blender would EAT its competition alive.
Zbrush way more messy than Blender.
@@bunnyfreakz
No. ZBrush's UI is designed like it was made for Aliens - but it follows a certain logic that once explained, is smooth to use.
That of course would be a deal-breaker -> if not for the fact you have courses, teachers and official ZBrush videos that explain everything. And the Videos - always work. Once they tell you how to use something, it will work the way it was told in the video.
What holds Blender back - is lack of that "Explanation Support" while being "clunky" to use as I explained before.
Basically Blender needs to have an "easily accessed" resource of "How do I do X in Blender" that is up to Date and 100% certain to work. Cause if someone tells me to select a Bone then press a shortcut to use a function -> and I follow that and nothing happens -> that is now extra wasted time for troubleshooting and seeking how to use the function I need.
This is why Big Studios don't use Blender. Wasting TIME costs a lot more money when you run a big Studio with hundreds of people working.
And right now, as of 18.10.2023 - Blender still does a lot of "Wasting Time". The moment that gets fixed - Blender will overtake a lot of the market.
I have primarily used 3D-programs like 3DS-MAX, MAYA and Blender for hobby-projects, but I agree... the interface is too clunky. I've lost count over the number of times, thinking "This would be such a simple process in MAX or MAYA".
@@doctorweile Yeah - that feeling happens a lot whenever I absolutely have to use Blender. It just wastes a lot of time - and time is money, especially when you are on the clock. I just wish this was a more spoken-about problem, cause maybe someone with actual coding skills (mine aren't good enough...) could look into the issue and just fix a bit of the "clunk" instead of adding new feature after new feature.
Blender fans don't help either - going purely into "Absolute Defensive Mode" trying to cite Blender's strengths (free / can do everything / powerful) completely ignoring that one, MAJOR flaw - that technically could be fixed relatively quickly if just given attention. (UI toolbox like other software, tool description with shortcut keys shown if hovered over with a mouse - dedicated rooms that disable non-important features from menu/UI)
Afterwards - one good source of Documentation/Learning for the software and it might become top-tier.
I work in the game industry, doing this for 30+ years now, and there is more than one big problem 85% of the blender users aren't aware of, and one of it is the lack of knowledge about the industry standards regarding modelling & other techniques, which spill over into everything else later, like animation, if properly rigged and weighted and so on. This is all done by hand and not via AutoRig - click and you're "done" !And there are good reasons why that is the case. A blender guru mostly doesn't come with industry knowledge. Beside that, then there are all the already working interfaces and their workflows to each plugin and definitely also hardware, motion capture tools, software/linkage/workflow, what about that?. But here comes the biggest nut cracker, coming from the business perspective: You would have to rebuild the entire workflow of the whole company, just so that the employee can work with Blender, to provide you what blender can offer? For what reason? And I would say this is the #1 question for such decision making, for every company. Only new companies will use Blender, with wise foresight. These new companies will automatically adopt or learn all the old industry standards from their own failures, with time. And that will then be the turning point from which there is no going back and where the few old compannies that have survived will switch over. But oldies won't jump on a faster horse, because someone wants to use the new stuff, EXCEPT they find something that only blender can do, which still then only advances to a hybrid-workflow but never to a complete transition.
I use Maya because it’s what I learned on. It would take me 1-2 years to get as knowledgeable about Blender as I am with Maya. That’s a steep price to pay. In addition my company would have to change our pipeline, purchase and install all the necessary software. Not everything we use with Maya works in Blender. It’s like turning the Titanic.
Yeah, exactly the same at the places I've worked at. Its a shame that Maya has stagnated so much lately due to lack of competition though. The best thing about Blender and Unreal's new animation features is the may eventually force Autodesk to return to innovating instead of just collecting subscription fees lazily every year.
There are really good points here. I think support and trust are the major ones followed close by some integrated technologies like motion capture, vfx and many third-party solutions that rely on one or two major apps.
Studios have invested thousands of dollars on Maya and Max it's bread into their pipeline, when studios start to realize it's getting to expensive, Blender will start to take hold it just takes time.
For studios cost of software is not so big issue. Grown up, leave behind such childish "arguments".
@@radoman1234 "too expensive" doesn't play as much when the costs are passed down the chain to the consumer.
This is the reason why the studio I work in are kind of stuck with Maya. Every single thing in our pipeline has been built around it and it has taken years, it's always being improved for each project. Everything ties up from Modelling->Rigging->Animation under the hood for the artists.
Since we go from one movie to another and we might not be the biggest studio it's hard to find the resources to pay the TD's and the Pipeline people months of salary just to focus on switching when we constantly need them in the productions of our features as well. There are definitely new artist coming into the studio with blender knowledge from their studies, at least 3d artist. But they're kind of pushed into using Maya at the studio.
@@bjarmismundsson3501 But still for 3D artist, it si not that important to use Maya for modeling and UVs (I don't know any masochist who would do UVs in Blender) for example, they can do it in other pieces of software like Blender, but still in the end they have to use maya for finalization. Animators would be fools if they didn't use Maya and same for riggers and TD. Usually lots of Blender users are looking on it like, it is not big deal they're using Blender, why not everybody else, they do not understand that VFX pipilines are not just modeling and animations, but lots of other stuff,what Bledner cannot do or do not support.
Apparently I found that you can buy Maya indie which is $ 300 a year, very helpful (hope this helps some people)
Unimaginable that Blender is older than me even though I've been using it for more than 14 years now (since version 2.49 - that's two GUI changes!). Okay, it's only been available to the public since 2002 but still, the code base is from 1994/1995!
The primary reason is tech support. Put features aside, existing pipeline entrenchment, price, performance, etc. Large studios expect official tech support. Deadlines are so tight that studios can't afford breakdowns.
The 'free' aspect doesn't really matter as the software is a business expense/tax write off.
Canonical is Ubuntu's Developer, so they're one of the two Largest corporate backed commercial distros for Linux. And Open Source companies are often left with the question of trusting IBM/RedHat, Canonical/Ubuntu, or Debian which is run by a nonprofit organization.
I realize that Blender is not every tool for every job. But there was a time I was sure it was, that there was nothing I could not do with Blender for 3D. But I realize that trying that would just frustrate me to no end. It did. It's like using vice grips to unbolt every nut and bolt. You can, but not the right tool all the time.
Its like everywhere, use the tool you can achieve the best result (and of course that is in your budget). While Blender has fantatstic Modelling tools, I really dont like the feeling of sculpting in it.
@@bloodshoot1115 Me, it's everything to do with animation, they put off updating it and it shows.
Are you permanently employed in any studio?
@@MangaGamified Only my own, Dragon Skunk Studio.
I don't mind Blender, but after hours of tryna figure out how to use texture paint, I'm still not getting it right 😭
A lot of it comes down to the studios having already invested the time of their employees to learn, and the plugins and investment in money for the purchase for the more expensive stuff (Maya, for example, used to have a price in the 10k-20k range…).
very good points. I think it takes more time, to bring Blender into the pipeline of the big studios. Autodesk, Adobe for instance, they work like heroin dealers. In schools, universities, they are mostly big inside. Who learns art, design will have their first contact with one of those mainstream programs. So the generation grow with this skill set on this software. Another aspect is. If you get told, that when you want to play in the pro league, you must learn maya, max a.s.o.
Of course, many skill-sets can be ported to Blender, but for studios the most precious thing is time. At a 250 Mio Budget or more, for the CGI, they don't care if the software cost $1000 or zero. Can the tool provide in the given time and with the demanded quality? Yes No ..get the f out.
Blender will raise more, and the industry will change. I support and recommend Blender, and mostly people are happy with it. Especially when they get rid of this damn subscriptions.
big companies all want to make the move to blender. the reasoning against it is who do we blame when things go wrong. its also the fact that people have spent their entire life getting used to one software and are reluctant to change. if you spent yourlife painting with paintbrushes the likely hood of you moving to clay is very unlikely.
Before watching I take the guess that while Blender is free, you don't really have the support. Sure you have massive community support. But what I mean is that when you buy an expensive tool, you uslually get expensive support. Where when the tool has a bug, the Support tries everything to make that program run again. With blender you can only hope to find a good Community member that fixes your issue in time. So paid programs have almost always that extra step of "Taking sure everything works"
Edit: I knew it! (Sure, it's multiple aspects, just saying)
My guess is that the number one reason is comfortability. You take a decade to get really good with one piece of software, then switch. Its few of us that do it.
Blender is the google docs of 3d software. It's good at what it does, but it's very limited in features and power. Max and Maya are like Microsoft Word. Basic users don't know about its more powerful features, and probably don't need them for the simple things they do. Larger studios are doing things in production that smaller ones don't even know is possible, mainly because the larger studios have entire dedicated teams of engineers working on stuff.
Blender needs big improvement in Animation Speed in Viewport
Not only that, it needs features that other software have like baking animation, better or automatic retopology. Or even improve some other stuff like the video editor. Also, the companies is now trying to make stylized animation like Across the spiderverse, nimona and puss in boots 2 (even the Bethesda is trying it with Hi-Fi rush)
Blender have to create better tools than only be fast with cycles.
Well, if your scene is optimized without too much modifiers that need to refresh every frame, Blender is quite fast in my opinion !
@@Donminiac-OFFCIAL blender already have Animation Baking feature
@@paindavoine_design blender Animation playback is very slow even in good system
Maya is fast and better in animation
My biggest issue with Blender is the interface is clunky, the shortcuts are also often unintuitive. In an effort to differentiate itself from the mainstream software packages, its made itself hard to learn for those used to maya/max
Wouldn't be too surprised if some studios get locked into longer term contracts for things like service support (it might lower the price beyond what's publicly stated by the same companies), such that they don't look into better options because they'd also lose out by canceling such an obligation. Combine that with certain pipeline stuff for organizing projects within a system, and that could explain why they're slow to adapt. Blender just being good doesn't quite give it enough to have hooks onto an industry.
really cool video, from a games perspective. companies especially in the UK which is where I am from allow the employee to use whatever they want most of the time as long as they can output it into a useable file type of way to integrate it into the project.
for example now on basically all job listings for the game industry i have seen recently there is "proficient in 3Ds max, Maya or blender" because they know they are all powerful tools so there is no point limiting its use where it can be.
Do you work for any studio in this industry? I mean it's like job ads, that says fresh grads are welcome to apply and just waste their time and money (like for commute & food), and they just become quota for the HR.
@@MangaGamified I have worked with a few quite large companies and am a developer yea, I also know and am friends with quite a lot of people who also work in the industry.
Mostly the reason I have seen is that most studios already have custom script and toolset for Maya, and they have taken so much time and money into these custom workflows that they just see it too problematic to change it into another software like Blender
Actually lots of Indie game developer use it. Including indie game dev where I'm working and I also use it for my freelance job.
But I was a max user, so I must admit that using blender is not as easy as 3ds Max. There's lots of feature that making my work easier in max that just isn't there in Blender, as matter a fact I'm still annoyed by the selecting system of Blender that I think it should not be as complex as this just to select some object that should have been done quickly. The user exp of blender is lousy as hell 😅 But nothing can beat Blender pricing, and Max is tremendously expensive specially for someone who is still trying to be successful and makes lots of money.
It is a psychological thing. The fact that it is free creates dissonances in the corporate mindset.
Learned some 3ds Max back in college for architecture back when it was still Discreet before being acquired by Autodesk. While I'm not in architecture now, I have started learning some 3D Modeling again and also render for clients unable to handle things - both of those things because of Blender! It's definitely come a long way from the pre 2.7 days when gosh, the UI was just terrible but I didn't touch it at the beginning.
So cool to see what's coming for it down the road!
Sketchup gets used in some architecture.
Talked to a german VFX supervisor recently, he said Blender is cute, but we can only trust Cinema 4d🤷
C4D belongs to a german company.
Cinema 4D has its downsides but it is accurate and reliable, while Blender does messy esports, messy transforms, messy folders, messy scales, poor mesh checking, poor sizing and snapping, but Blender of course has also many advantages, just not professionalism but versatility.
@@Dead_Last I`m aware of that but he claimed that wasn`t the reason to choose it anyway
Well you missed a big point, blender dosent offer any sort of collaboration. Its not possible that 2 or more people work on the same scene at the same time, you cant batch/ network render, no way for scene states/ state sets, also got no default pipeline to work with other dcc or fileformats beyond alembic.
It's still not powerful enough in some specific cases like interior rendering. Yes it has unbiased path tracing but for the market time is more important because time is money. So blender should implement some non physically correct tricks to speed up rendering like biased engine like vray or corona, at least for GI precalculation to use it to further aproximate the final result more quickly.
I used to dabble in 3d modeling when I was younger and making game mods. I always used max. But this was back in the early 2000s. I haven't touched 3d stuff in over a decade.
I tried blender out a couple of weeks ago and honestly couldn't figure out how to do basic shape transformations. I'd probably need to take some course on it if I really wanted to give it a fair shot. But I'm actually curious on how much Max has changed in the last 10 years.
Blender seems perfectly adequate and I'm also noting that users claim that it's better than alternatives like 3ds Max and Maya. However, when you've spent a decade or three working within a UI that's somewhat standard across multiple suites, you find Blender's uniqueness as the primary reason why the industry has refused to adopt it. Mastery of a particular system doesn't happen overnight so you're basically having to choose between resetting your art pipeline, losing productivity in the process, or staying the course.
The old adage, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", applies here, especially when the cost effectiveness of a free, albeit a reportedly formidable, product would cost exceedingly more up front for down time due to having to retrain everyone along the pipeline to work with an entirely unique solution. For artists who have already mastered 3ds Max or Maya, for example, basically being asked to throw everything they know about 3d content creation out the window is an unreasonable ask.
I have a feeling that this question can be answered in less than 10:42 minutes.
Yep. Just copy-pasted the video title on google.
I use Maya and 3Ds Max and the reason I do not use it is because I don't feel like learning it but if I ever have to I am sure I won't miss anything from Max or Maya but I just don't have time to slow my workflow down to learn a different software... However, I am planning on starting working at a different location where they use blender because it is free so I will have to learn it eventually
Same, but sure you'll be fine and also miss the ingenuity that exists in Maya etc.
I can tell you the answer right now. Many studios have invested a ton of time and money into pipelines that require Autodesk software. They don’t want to switch because that means overhauling a lot of their systems. Blender is actually better than Maya at this point, they just don’t want to rip the bandaid off.
Correct me if i am wrong, Blender is free only for small organizations who don't make much money, if you are earnings using blender cross a certain amount (i believe it was 1 million USD the last time I read about it ) you are required to pay a reasonable royalty to Blender.
i wish i could find a in depth comparison on why people think blender is "way better" than other software's? all i find is the people biased on the blender community model, its free so whatever it can do is fine. Something that is not built in "we can find it in a add-on", well apart from being clustered with add-on's,
has someone given an out of the box comparison why it is BEST? and it just gets hate without any reason?
i'm just curious to know the actual statistics. without the free model bias.
Proprietary Software allows for liability of the owner if a bug or feature ruins a production. The production company can sue the proprietary software company for a settlement to recoup some of their losses in time and money. Open Source software has no owner (depending on the license) so there is no one to sue if a crash causes a production to lose unrecoverable work.
I'd be happy to switch from Maya to Blender if Blender's UI/UX weren't designed by drunk interns
I customised my blender control scheme immediately after using Maya for a project.
That was the only thing Maya is better at, and now (for me) it isn't.
It's super easy.
-Set your keymap to "Industry Compatible". It's close enough to Maya.
-save default
-customise/add keys as desired
-save default
@@robotsix6268keymap is not the same as ui
Simple: A) no time to learn new tools, or the benefit is not great enough to invest more time. B) No in-house proprietary tools developed over the years C) Don't want to invest into training new artists that join the studio, easier to just let them use what ever they want D)Niche tools that blender does not have for example: how do I copy vertex ids and vertex normals and uvs between meshes E)Maya animation tools, they are far too superior, also its rigging tools, and once you have a way of rigging animating exporting animation and importing mocap into an app you stay there
We do! SOME studios don't use it because they're incredibly invested in certain platforms, decades of custom programs, etc. You probably won't see ILM jumping on it, but an incredible number of indie VFX studios use Blender on a daily basis.
Honestly a big step in adoption is the introduction of the USD standard and the MaterialX standard. This will make the artist's tool of choice irrelevant in a studio environment.
Now everything is tied with Maya/Max formats and FBX. and even transfers between Max or Maya is a headache.
you seem to completely ignore the artist pool.
We would ditch maya without a thought, because it is the most bug infested software in all of human history.
But when a new project gets a go and you need to find 40 animators or more you start to see the reason why we stick to maya, there are simply not enough artists yet in other dcc's to ensure that you will find the manpower needed to finish the movie in time. Switching pipeline is yeah one reason but bottom line switch to a different dcc is not that big of a deal.
Ubisoft uses Blender as well :3 many artists use it and have group chats specifically for Blender support. :D
3:40 what UI is this, it looks sick
Why blender isn't industry standard? You answered the question in your video. They don't offer big studios the support they need for long-term projects. Companies are not paying for the software, they paying for the support in case something goes wrong. And if people responsible for a certain software doesn't offer that support then big companies aren't going to use their product, it doesn't matter if it's free. Besides, I don't understand this devotion some people have over a piece of software. I can guarantee you, if blender somehow became industry standard, as a maya user, I would make the jump. A software doesn't define who I am as artist. I'm not a "maya artist", I'm a 3d artist, you're not a "blender artist" you're a 3d artist. Honestly, the tools we use shouldn't matter anyways. What matter is the art, and we're all capable of making art regardless of the tools we use. What matters is our skills, our ability to be creative and our passion for the craft. I don't care if blender does well, I don't care if maya does well. All I care about is making the best art I can make. All these tools are just means to an end
Blender FBX export and import still broken to this day, from 2.79(2017) to 3.6(2023). There're no progress.
In the studio I work in, we do use blender but at least now we cannot switch to it completely even though there are quite a number of people who want it (including me), as we have tons of old projects in 3ds max and a lot of people who have used 3ds max for years and years and it's difficult for them to switch to other soft. Even for those who do complain about 3ds max from time to time. they say that they don't have enough time and afford to learn a new software. So we use 3ds max, blender and cinema4d. I think that in future we finally would get rid of 3ds max and stick with the other two softwires. We have many VFX artists and they prefer cinema. But for making models - right now we mostly use Blender. And then we convert it to cinema and 3ds max for those who make a final product.
Blender is old school ... Brings it to the world for free just to push design as far as possible. This is how it used to be ... and lives on in Blender. WE made this place all you know WE made that.
I use blender for my 2d games and the like. I also use it to add effects to certain things. Blender is way easier to use than say, Unity for these kinds of purposes and it also has a chance to be unique still due to randomization.
The biggest reason isn't the whole lack of trust studios have for Blender. The biggest reason why is because the leading studios that does 3D and VFX uses the so called "industry standard" 3D softwares. Namely studios like WetaFX and Pixar are considered to be the big dogs in the 3D scene and if they use Maya, Houdini, Unreal Engine 5 or even Unity for their shorts, everybody else follow their lead.
1:36 Henry Cavill casually supervising the FX team
I love blender as a hobbyist but if I were ever to switch my career from graphic design to 3D all i know is blender and would need to learn a whole new ecosystem. I have C4d that comes with after effects but id rather focus and really learn Blender
Because blender is not there yet. Theres A LOT of features that big productions need that blender simply doesnt have yet. We use blender more and more, but for more complex tasks we go back to maya, unfortunately. For reference, blender is only now getting light linking, which is a very basic feature for production, also skin animation performance is a joke (its now being rewriten), no proxy files with defferred loading to render, which is also very basic, and the list goes on and on.
Its getting there, we already reduced the number of maya licenses to a third of what we had, but, blender is not quite there yet.
Who said they don't use it ?
I can explain to you how the adoption of Blender goes, since part of my job is consulting for animation studios to adopt Blender.
To name a few just here in Spain: B-Water Studios, Kotoc Animation and KeyToon, the three are very important animation studios, focused in TV Series, and I cannot mention others that are prepairing their pipeline to make the shift.
If you want to mention Feature Film animation studios, it's not their turn, with this I mean that Blender requires a few details to be adopted in feature film studios (and they are coming), also a pipeline shift cost is MAJOR, so it has to be done slowly, the smaller the company, the smaller the cost, right now medium sized studios are shifting, and the reason is not the cost, of course, but the licensing model... ooooh yes, that's a major issue, and not just that, there are other major reasons to make the shift.
So far none of the studios that made the shift are looking back, the killer combo is Blender as the trunk app, Houdini as the side-wing app, killer combo.
If you want another reason on why some studios are hesitant... third party render engines and it's implementation, with 4.0 and Hydra delegate that's gonna end, any render engine could be implemented using Hydra with a minimum platform specific development, as an example, Vray for Houdini works with Hydra, hence Vray is already compatible with Blender, it just requires a small UI implementation and that's it.
So please, avoid this kind of missleading titles, for a studio, free or not is not the important part, and studios ARE actually shifting to Blender for many other reasons that is not the price tag.
I learned 3Dsmax from my friend's dad's computer when I was in primary school and I used it when I was in a AD company, now even are a hobbyists I still can't really transfer myself into blender, I have made some 3D print model in blender with success, but my brain still hurts to do so and as a hobbyists I really don't have much time to relearn all thing I need rather than grab an old version of 3DsMax and finish my one-time project quickly
I love your content, but in this video you didn't put subtitles :(