4 ms·

At some point in the last 5-8 years Blender went from being "the gimp of 3D" no one seemed to really want to use (like Gimp) given the alternatives to actually

by Jach 8y ago

At some point in the last 5-8 years Blender went from being "the gimp of 3D" no one seemed to really want to use (like Gimp) given the alternatives to actually being a competitor. I'm not sure what happened but it's on the list of things to discuss if I ever sit down with an industry veteran in the modeling space...

slondr 8y ago
What happened is Blender followed a linear development trajectory, constantly adding new features and fixing bugs at a reasonable pace. GIMP, on the other hand, adds a handful of features once every year and a half. Marketing was also a factor. Years ago, Blender was similar to how OpenShot is now --- pretty much unknown to the general public, but it shows up in blog posts a lot, and those who use it think it has potential. As time went on and it became more featureful, the news about Blender changed from "This promising project is working on making a modeling suite..." to "This software can replace 3DS Max right now and it's completely free". GIMP's publicity has only gotten worse over the years as it suffers from perceived bit rot and an inability to add requested features over the course of a decade.
kakarot 8y ago
What happened was the interface was insanely improved from the unnavigable mess of the early 2000's, sculpting was added, and a host of other features brought Blender to parity with its non-free brethren.
dylan-m 8y ago
One thing which helps Blender is that its target audience is better equipped to write code, or at least think about code enough to connect with the "project" side of open source software. That doesn't mean Blender users need to do that to be productive, but it definitely gives actual users a stronger voice. I find free software generally doesn't work as well when there's a hard split between the developers and the users, unless those developers are incredibly empathetic, clever, and well funded. (Or just fully aware of the problem they're solving, but it's hard to find a large sample of people that can write a really good vector graphic editor, have a clue about UI design, and are also keenly aware of the problems people deal with when they're drawing a graphic novel). You can see that process working well with Blender's open movie projects (https://www.blender.org/about/projects/ https://www.blender.org/about/projects/). I haven't paid attention to them recently, but in the past they have been structured around building some new feature in Blender, such as improving the video editor and motion tracking experience (Tears of Steel), or rendering and sculpting (Sintel).
Shish2k 8y ago
One of the things that happened is the Blender team hired a bunch of professional artists to make real commercial quality movies using blender, and when the artists had a complaint, the developers were in the same room to get the issue fixed in real time. Meanwhile GIMP has a reputation of being written by software developers for software developers, and being actively hostile to suggestions from artists...
- prokoudine 8y ago
  > Meanwhile GIMP has a reputation of being written by software developers for software developers, and being actively hostile to suggestions from artists... Actively hostile how?
  - Shish2k 8y ago
    TBH my anecdotes are probably somewhat out-of-date; last time I was looking into this was back when single-window mode was a controversial idea, being rejected for years, with users who requested it being told "it's not our fault that your window manager sucks, just switch to a window manager which handles multi-window mode elegantly" (which at the time excluded users of windows, osx, and most mainstream linux distros :P)
    - prokoudine 8y ago
      "Somewhat out of date" would be at least 10 years ago.
- boudewijnrempt 8y ago
  That was a turning point for us as well. We had a sprint at the blender institute in Amsterdam and had invited artists to come as well. And we sat down a whole Saturday, taping them while they were painting and complaining. Us developers, we weren't allowed to chat back, we were just there to look and listen. Very illuminating, and fun for the artists.
  - prokoudine 8y ago

by Jach 8y ago

slondr 8y ago

What happened is Blender followed a linear development trajectory, constantly adding new features and fixing bugs at a reasonable pace. GIMP, on the other hand, adds a handful of features once every year and a half. Marketing was also a factor. Years ago, Blender was similar to how OpenShot is now --- pretty much unknown to the general public, but it shows up in blog posts a lot, and those who use it think it has potential. As time went on and it became more featureful, the news about Blender changed from "This promising project is working on making a modeling suite..." to "This software can replace 3DS Max right now and it's completely free". GIMP's publicity has only gotten worse over the years as it suffers from perceived bit rot and an inability to add requested features over the course of a decade.

kakarot 8y ago

What happened was the interface was insanely improved from the unnavigable mess of the early 2000's, sculpting was added, and a host of other features brought Blender to parity with its non-free brethren.

dylan-m 8y ago

One thing which helps Blender is that its target audience is better equipped to write code, or at least think about code enough to connect with the "project" side of open source software. That doesn't mean Blender users need to do that to be productive, but it definitely gives actual users a stronger voice. I find free software generally doesn't work as well when there's a hard split between the developers and the users, unless those developers are incredibly empathetic, clever, and well funded. (Or just fully aware of the problem they're solving, but it's hard to find a large sample of people that can write a really good vector graphic editor, have a clue about UI design, and are also keenly aware of the problems people deal with when they're drawing a graphic novel). You can see that process working well with Blender's open movie projects (https://www.blender.org/about/projects/ https://www.blender.org/about/projects/). I haven't paid attention to them recently, but in the past they have been structured around building some new feature in Blender, such as improving the video editor and motion tracking experience (Tears of Steel), or rendering and sculpting (Sintel).

Shish2k 8y ago

One of the things that happened is the Blender team hired a bunch of professional artists to make real commercial quality movies using blender, and when the artists had a complaint, the developers were in the same room to get the issue fixed in real time. Meanwhile GIMP has a reputation of being written by software developers for software developers, and being actively hostile to suggestions from artists...

prokoudine 8y ago
> Meanwhile GIMP has a reputation of being written by software developers for software developers, and being actively hostile to suggestions from artists... Actively hostile how?
- Shish2k 8y ago
  TBH my anecdotes are probably somewhat out-of-date; last time I was looking into this was back when single-window mode was a controversial idea, being rejected for years, with users who requested it being told "it's not our fault that your window manager sucks, just switch to a window manager which handles multi-window mode elegantly" (which at the time excluded users of windows, osx, and most mainstream linux distros :P)
  - prokoudine 8y ago
    "Somewhat out of date" would be at least 10 years ago.
boudewijnrempt 8y ago
That was a turning point for us as well. We had a sprint at the blender institute in Amsterdam and had invited artists to come as well. And we sat down a whole Saturday, taping them while they were painting and complaining. Us developers, we weren't allowed to chat back, we were just there to look and listen. Very illuminating, and fun for the artists.
- prokoudine 8y ago