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It's nice a high profile project such as Blender speaks about freedom to push back against the "source available" movement. I've always wondered why niche spec

It's nice a high profile project such as Blender speaks about freedom to push back against the "source available" movement. I've always wondered why niche specific software such as Blender doesn't have a ton of industry backing. Any medium sized graphics shop could have a full developer on the payroll for a fraction of the repeated licensing costs of proprietary solutions, that is, someone who works full time on Blender and whom you can directly approach, in-house, for features and fixes. And it wouldn't even interfere with their competitive edge, since the software isn't their business. They don't have to care about the GPL as long as the software does what they want. I think it has something to do with appealing to an employee's vanity, where getting a very expensive software package "for free" to do your job makes one feel appreciated.

heavenlyblue 7y ago
It’s risk management - it’s better to pay a bit more for a packaged product and accept it’s drawbacks than hire a developer who may or may never deliver.
- weberc2 7y ago
  I would think the obvious way a corporation could contribute would be financially.
  - fsloth 7y ago
    That's what they do to contribute financially to software development. It's called buying a license. Sure, sometimes they buy closed sourcr licenses, but as a corporation providing services to a third party you don't care about the license - you care very much the software adds the value to the output of the employee who uses it.
    - weberc2 7y ago
      The GP was talking about hiring a developer to contribute. I pointed out that financial support is an option. Yes, licensing is one model, but a check is also valid.
  - phkahler 7y ago
    But it's voluntary. When a company (or most individuals) get the product for free, there is little incentive to pay anything. I think the notion that people (and companies) pay for proprietary software because there is support or some other reasons are complete BS. They pay for software because they have to in order to use it. It's just a cost of doing business. As free software has become viable (high quality) in some areas, business folks are more willing to allow it. The primary concern is "can it do the job". The second is how much will it cost me?
    - weberc2 7y ago
      We were discussing “hire a developer to contribute” vs “financial contribution”. Of course it’s voluntary and the incentive is low, but that’s off topic.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  > ...than hire a developer who may or may never deliver. I don't really see the difference between this and "accept its drawbacks", except that if your developer turns out to be productive, you have something a lot more valuable on your hands, and if the developer fails, you can replace them (whereas for a given proprietary product, you typically can not replace the vendor while keeping the licensing agreement and investment in training [this last bit being a big part of why in-house developers make sense for Blender, as they always have for 3D animation studios]).
  - la_barba 7y ago
    >I don't really see the difference between this and "accept its drawbacks" The difference is one is known, and the other is unknown. When you're evaluating existing software you can evaluate multiple competitors based on their finished product. You can't do that when you're hiring a developer. >and if the developer fails, you can replace them (whereas for a given proprietary product, you typically can not replace the vendor while keeping the licensing agreement and investment in training [this last bit being a big part of why in-house developers make sense for Blender, as they always have for 3D animation studios]). I'd say this argument supports using only existing established successful products, to avoid being burnt.
    - microcolonel 7y ago
      > one is known Only if the software you're buying meets all of your current and future requirements, and is maintained indefinitely. If new requirements come up, they're at least not any more helpful than in-house resources (unless a lot of people suddenly have the same requirements at the same time); and if they stop maintaining it, there's a good chance you literally can't do anything about that. You just have a different set of unknowns, one of which seems more manageable (which is probably why it is more popular), and probably is more manageable in some subset of use cases.
      - la_barba 7y ago
        >Only if the software you're buying meets all of your current and future requirements, and is maintained indefinitely. Nobody expects 3d design software to be maintained indefinitely or expects 3d design software to satisfy future requirements magically. You buy a 3d design software to make you money by creating content. Either it makes you money or it doesn't. The easiest thing to do is to simply buy what everyone else is using because it makes it easier to hire talent from a pre-existing pool of experts, or if need be, train them on a software for which training programs already exist because its popular. >If new requirements come up, they're at least not any more helpful than in-house resources (unless a lot of people suddenly have the same requirements at the same time); Well, wait a minute. Before you even get there, you not only have to be good at producing 3D art/content (or atleast good enough to make a decent chunk of change), you have to now hire dev/test/pm folks and successfully run a software development team in-house. I don't find this to be a realistic proposition. >and if they stop maintaining it, there's a good chance you literally can't do anything about that. A vendor for any software that you rely on can go out of business. Do you plan to run independent software development teams for your OS, accounting software, browser, IDE, etc ? The answer obviously is no. And the same reasoning applies to your 3d design software. >You just have a different set of unknowns, one of which seems more manageable (which is probably why it is more popular), and probably is more manageable in some subset of use cases. I don't agree at all. I think it actually is more manageable.
- bsavery 7y ago
  I think what you're referring to is paying for -support- There is no blender version of "Red Hat" that companies can rely on to deliver fixes or support.
chii 7y ago
It's more likely that the SFX industry has their training done on proprietary software, and shops that don't use the industry standard ones like Maya would have trouble hiring. Plus the after market plugins tend to be commercial in nature and won't want to sell with a GPL licence.
- micmil 7y ago
  Bullshit. This is like saying someone that trained in Java will struggle learning Python, or someone that learned with C will have a hard time picking up Rust. With a few exceptions (Houdini probably being the prime example) all 3d graphics tools work in the same fashion. The concepts and techniques are universal, the only difference is the implementation. If you have even a modicum of experience with one thing, you can pick the other up in an afternoon and be up to speed within a week.
  - la_barba 7y ago
    >If you have even a modicum of experience with one thing, you can pick the other up in an afternoon and be up to speed within a week. Have you found this to be true in your experience?
  - chii 7y ago
    > The concepts and techniques are universal, the only difference is the implementation. only someone who hasn't really used the tool in anger and mastered it would claim this. I can't even switch to eclipse from intellij and not have a huge productivity hit for several months. and that's just typing code! A real 3D modeller would have so much muscle memory for their modelling app of choice it't not funny.
    - damon_c 7y ago
      Yes, exactly this. As someone who had a prior career in VFX using mostly Autodesk and Adobe software, there are people who spend their whole career in one of these packages and have a lot of difficulty becoming fluent in a second one. They are designed with completely different metaphors and workflows and yes, the end result is always pixels, but learning multiple high end creative software is nothing like learning different programming languages.
smellsdonkey 7y ago
Tangent Animation is trying to change this! They use almost 100% Blender, have some developers and contribute back to the community. See "Next-Gen" on Netflix for their latest movie. Disclaimer: Worked for them as a Blender developer on Next-Gen
- voltagex_ 7y ago
  Are you able to talk about anything you did there? I only get to work on open source in my spare time (and nothing as complex as Blender). What did a normal day look like for you?
  - diggan 7y ago
    BlenderConf 2018 had a talk from the co-founder of Tangent (Jeff Bell) about how Blender was used for Next Gen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZn3kCsw5D8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZn3kCsw5D8
    - voltagex_ 7y ago
      Thank you, too.
  - swerner 7y ago
    Our repository is public. You can look at every single commit we did: https://github.com/tangent-animation/blender278/commits/master https://github.com/tangent-animation/blender278/commits/mast... "Normal days" changed during the course of the project. In the beginning, it was work on new features for months if necessary, towards the end it were overnight patches for "frame x in shot y looks wrong/crashes/takes forever".
    - voltagex_ 7y ago
      Thank you!
- iamcreasy 7y ago
  The whole movie is made by Blender? What was the pitfall? Is there any dev blog I can read?
forrestthewoods 7y ago
> I've always wondered why niche specific software such as Blender doesn't have a ton of industry backing. Because prior to Blender 2.8 it was really really bad software compared to commercial alternatives. Blender is becoming quite good. Which impresses the hell out of me. But it’s taken a long, long time to get there.
- tech_man7 7y ago
  What's great along with Blender, is the availability of very very inexpensive rendering using https://golemgrid.com/ https://golemgrid.com/. It's name your own price and can be had for 1/10th the cost of using a render farm.
- fsloth 7y ago
  What changed to 2.8 to make it compare favorably to commercial alternatives? Is it just the UI?
  - Washuu 7y ago
    User interface, discoverability(That whole UX thing), and a new reasonable sane default control scheme.(Which can be toggled back to the old one.)
fsloth 7y ago
Statistically speaking software development is extremely risky from the point of view that n units of work will create x units of deliverables. If you are not a software shop you really would like to outsource those risks. Hence, they pay the capital cost to get a fixed, known deliverable. Developing new software is hard and risky. Sure, if you can get the right team for the job it can work out wonderfully but this just creates another level of risk - you need to find the right developers.
- kgwxd 7y ago
  If someone wants fixed, known deliverables, the last thing they should be looking at is proprietary software, where a seemingly stable product suddenly updates and everything is different and the license changes retroactively, e.g Photoshop. Version controlled, open source means you can check out any version you might need, at any time, now and forever. Seems worth throwing some money at such a promise.
  - micmil 7y ago
    Spoken like someone that doesn't own a business. You do not throw money at promises. You throw money at solutions.
    - gridspy 7y ago
      Possibly a better phrasing would be "An open source ecosystem is worth investing in to hedge against the risk of license and source changes by the vendor"
    - type0 7y ago
      If you are short sighted enough to only care about day to day operations and don't see competence in software usage as an investment that will bring competitive advantages in the long run.
      - micmil 7y ago
        Your competitive advantage is your staff, not your software. A company like Pixar only has so many proprietary tools because they've been around so damn long that rolling their own was the only way to go to get the results they wanted. Even then, Pixar's advantage was the people they hired and allowed to thrive... not Renderman.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
carlmr 7y ago
>And it wouldn't even interfere with their competitive edge, since the software isn't their business. They don't have to care about the GPL as long as the software does what they want. Most developers know this, but company managers that forbid open source contribution don't understand this. That's why I'm personally not too much against source available licensing. It's the only language old companies understand.
- bad_user 7y ago
  “Source available” licensing is useless. Many companies and many developers have tried to misappropriate the term “Open Source”, to make it be understood as “source available”, because Open Source / Free Software have sex appeal for developers, so they are trying to have their cake and eat it too. Don’t fall into that trap. The freedoms provided by both Open Source and Free Software licensing are well defined and mean (1) the right to use the program for whatever purpose and (2) the right to fork. Anything else is unacceptable. As for what language companies understand, many of us don’t give a fuck. If they are good citizens and distribute software under FOSS compatible licenses all is good, otherwise we’re not interested, because the availability of the source code is not the point, the right to use that source code is ;-)
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    The recent reaction of those developers how non-copyleft licenses are being "abused" kind of speaks otherwise.
    - hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
      Which reaction?
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        Being enranged that companies just made what MIT style licenses allow them to do to start with, and creating derived licenses to work around it.
peterwwillis 7y ago
> Any medium sized graphics shop could have a full developer on the payroll for a fraction of the repeated licensing costs of proprietary solutions, that is, someone who works full time on Blender and whom you can directly approach, in-house, for features and fixes. DIY is time-consuming, difficult, and doesn't scale. Small companies often start out with as cheap a solution as they can, but as they grow they'll find they're doing way more work just to support the DIY solution, and features are difficult and time-consuming to produce. If you have the money and you need a feature now, licensing makes sense.
overgard 7y ago
I like the idea but I don’t think it scales. How many developers are qualified to work on Blender? It would be hard to hire for. Also you need someone that both works in your organisation and that fits in well with the blender developers so their patches get accepted etc. I don’t think the popularity of proprietary solutions is vanity, it’s rather that switching between 3d modellers is really hard. It might be months before you’re even close to productive again. Also interoperability between packages is a huge problem. Blender only really started to get a good UI this decade, and I think you’re more likely to see it get picked up in new shops rather than old shops migrating.
- micmil 7y ago
  "Switching between 3d modellers" undersells the issue. COMPLETELY ALTERING YOUR PRODUCTION PIPELINE TO ACCOMMODATE ONE PACKAGE gets the point across a little bit better. There are studios out there that have decades of in-house scripts and programs built around a given set of software. If you do a lot of architectural rendering you may have your own outdoor lighting systems. If you focus primarily on title sequences you may have certain effects that you developed. Having to completely rewrite all of that in-house code would be a MASSIVE undertaking.
jsty 7y ago
"Any medium sized graphics shop could have a full developer on the payroll for a fraction of the repeated licensing costs of proprietary solutions" If the returns to the particular company that employed the developer was higher than the opportunity cost of expending that money elsewhere in the company, then you'd have a strong case for that. However, most medium sized graphics shops are probably concerned that they'd effectively be subsidising their competitors' production costs, since the 'exclusive' returns to the shop employing the developer are likely minimal compared to any other user of the feature they develop. The free rider problem / tragedy of the commons strikes again.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  > However, most medium sized graphics shops are probably concerned that they'd effectively be subsidising their competitors' production costs, since the 'exclusive' returns to the shop employing the developer are likely minimal compared to any other user of the feature they develop. What causes most usage of big proprietary software is that the software has 10,000 features and every customer only needs five of them, but for each customer it's a different five. That makes it hard for a free competitor to get users because adding five features only gets one customer; it scales poorly without revenue. But as the customer yourself, having your developer add the five things you yourself need is completely feasible, and doesn't help your competitors that much because the five things they need are different.
  - phkahler 7y ago
    Nobody wants to wait for a developer to implement the things they want. If they have work to do, they need a solution NOW. Pick what's available and pay what it costs. For commercial software that's some $$$ and for Free software that's $0.00. Then once the purchase has been made, the question of paying someone to work on it is a separate issue. Most rational people would say "why would I do that?" Comparing paying a FLOSS developer to paying for commercial software doesn't make sense. Companies don't see themselves as funding development either way.
    - 7y ago
weinzierl 7y ago
> I think it has something to do with appealing to an employee's vanity, where getting a very expensive software package "for free" to do your job makes one feel appreciated. It learned 3D modelling with one of those "very expensive software packages" and it made me feel appreciated at the time. The knowledge however is now completely useless for me because the software, while still existing, is totally niche now. Blender would have been a lifetime investment...
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  Remember doing bits and bobs with Alias studio (more than 15 years ago) when I was a kid. I think it used to cost about $100K, which to me,at the time, was something out of this world. The principles behind these packages are almost always the same so they are relatively transferable.Of course, understanding new interface and software itself is a step one would need to take when transitioning.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
  This! If people think that getting to use expensive proprietary software is somehow appreciation, that seems like a massive failure of education in basics of economics? Getting to learn skills that you can't use unless you continue to pay for the expensive right to use those skills should be valued negatively by a rational economic agent.
lozenge 7y ago
Maybe they don't have time to wait for features to be developed? Only the biggest projects have people saying "we'll need new fur/hair/dragon breath/water effects" early on and have a long or flexible timeline. Whereas your average project just need to work with what they already have. Even GoT which had a huge budget must have tight delivery deadlines that will make a project manager think twice before putting software development on their critical path.
rolltiide 7y ago
Large backers for open source donations barely exist because their spouses won't let them. People and their foundations barely have complete discretion over their money. So when it comes to donations their spouses want to pretend to be the next Bill and Melinda Gates and drop money into a black hole in Africa than a software tool. More awareness is possible. Different people in Africa contribute to open source too, big place.
- dang 7y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait to Hacker News so we don't have to ban you again? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - rolltiide 7y ago
    I guess I just wish you guys would break down what you feel is unsubstantive "and/or flamebait". I feel like A LOT of assumptions about a fairly articulate comment are needed to make that conclusion. A quick re-reading I think that you made assumptions about who the spouse is, assumptions about Africa, or maybe misreading the black hole part when the context is Africa. Super meta vicariously offended someone expecting other people to be vicariously offended, while foundation directors and recipients in African countries aren't offended at all? The real question being: was the comment inaccurate? Can we just discuss that? I know how Foundations and Donor Advised Funds make their decisions, people that aspire to support open source dont have the discretion. Everytime I ask for clarity I just get immediately shadowbanned like "this guy questioned our authority thats the last straw"
    - dang 7y ago
      The idea of that comment being accurate or not doesn't even arise. Is anyone going to do a statistically significant survey of "large backers for open source donations"? Even if you did, you wouldn't get access to their conversations with their spouses, nor will anyone give you accurate information about what they want to "pretend to be". So there's no question of such a comment being a serious contribution to discussion. What it does fit—begging your pardon—is the genre of internet bullshit: someone making up a grand, provocative generalization because they're good at making up grand, provocative generalizations, that being the craft that a certain sort of internet commenter works on perfecting. If you post in that genre to HN, we're going to moderate you, because there's no thoughtful conversation to be had there—one can only pile on or fight back. It's a move in a game that doesn't lead to more interesting moves. That's what I mean by unsubstantive in this context. As for flamebait, you could start by not making casually insulting dismissals like "drop money into a blackhole in Africa". Saying that signals that you're trolling. Maybe you didn't mean to? Ok, but that actually doesn't matter, because an internet comment consists of how people read it and the effects that it has. Let's look at it the other way. Let's say your intention is to contribute to thoughtful conversation and that you indeed know a lot about "how foundations make their decisions". I'm quite willing to believe that. In that case, though, you should make your contribution in a 180-degree different way. You need to explain what you know in terms that aren't grandiose and provocative, but rather, scrupulously accurate. You need to explain how you know it. You need to tie it to the topic at hand in a way that explains why it's relevant. And you need to somehow include the limits of what you know, to leave some oxygen for anyone who might know different things than you do. All that is not hard to do, but it requires a different genre of comment: more information, less grandstanding.
micmil 7y ago
It has nothing to do with "employee vanity" and that's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. There's a simple reason Blender doesn't see much use in film production: Support. There is no way the Blender Foundation could provide the level of support that a company like Autodesk does. When you run into problems you call your enterprise support team and get it fixed. This is why you pay them the big bucks. Their support staff does nothing but fix problems, where anyone that you could hire to do the same would necessarily spend most of their time sitting on their ass doing nothing since stuff just doesn't go wrong all that often. That alone will keep Blender out of a LOT of shops, especially those that are just large enough to be working on major projects. The idea that a company should just hire a programmer they don't otherwise need just so they can make some software work is asinine. That's like saying a home builder should hire a full time auto mechanic instead of taking their work vehicles to the shop when they break down. No, hiring a guy will not offset the cost of purchasing licenses and support. This is especially true when you hit one of those moments where things get so shredded that the cost of enterprise support seems like a bargain. There are other, more technical, issues that keep Blender from being used much. Chief among them is that it isn't really exceptional at anything. It's not uncommon for things to be modeled in one program, textured in another, then imported into another for animation, and then brought into a final one for lighting and rendering. There are better programs for modeling than Blender. There are better programs for rendering, texturing, animation. Blender is oatmeal. It's there, it works, but it's not really great at anything and as a result has never found a niche. Because, ultimately, that's what it's all about.
- DoctorOetker 7y ago
  uh, couldn't a (or multiple) blender foundation(s) sell support? the software remaining FOSS, but feature requests / bug fixes being paid services. Feature and bug attention would be driven by the big commercial users, and the community would profit. Since the shops can choose which blender support team they buy support from, they get competitive pricing too.
- craigsmansion 7y ago
  > The idea that a company should just hire a programmer they don't otherwise need just so they can make some software work is asinine Weren't you just saying the magic ingredient was "support"? Do you believe a first line help-desk is going to provide better support than a guy whose livelihood depends on it and you can call to your desk? >That's like saying a home builder should hire a full time auto mechanic In this specific case, it's more like fairly large transporters having their own mechanics, which they have, because it's cheaper, and better, and faster, and generally very convenient all round.
sprafa 7y ago
There’s lots of small shops transitioning to Blender or using Blender. The studio that makes A Man in A high Castle VFX used Blender and there’s some animation studios in Spain using Blender. The reason why it’s not used more: as good as it is Blender is still not Maya or Cinema 4D. Each 3D application has its own strengths and Maya has a LOT of tools that are application specific and that other applications might struggle to copy because they are so intertwined into its UX/UI and of course lots of proprietary R&D. There’s also the question of pipeline - .fbx file format is the standard in the industry and for good or for bad it’s ruled by Autodesk afaik. Other applications have to adversarially replicate it (i think?) a bit like .doc files going onto iWork And on your comment of having employees working on Blender - I believe Disney has a few people who contribute to Blender. But lots of the other applications like Maya and Katana are also extensible and studios like ILM have extensively modified Maya and others so to answer your question - they do extend other applications like Maya, Katana and NUKe and they have people on staff working on those extensions. The thing those extensions or plugins turn out to often be excellent competitive advantage against other studios so it’s actually helpful to keep them in house. All the big VFX studios have multiple proprietary technologies that they don’t share them with anyone at all - unless it becomes advantageous to sell it to others, in which try often spin it off or sell it to The Foundry.
cosmodisk 7y ago
The main reason why Blender,GIMP and the likes don't get a lot of backing from the industry is because pricing is just a small puece of the overall picture. If a shop is anything but some random visualisations for real estate, there are budgets, decent salaries and etc., so even spending a few grand on Maya or 3DS Max doesn't quite change anything. Development in such a niche and complex field takes time.I doubt one developer would be able to do much,even full time,apart from fixing some small bugs..
- keyle 7y ago
  I've used extensively Blender and HAD TO use Gimp. I strongly disagree the correlation. Although it is one you could make on paper, Blender is a fantastic piece of software and highly usable. Gimp is gimp.
_mikel_ 7y ago
The big issue with blender compared to some of the other options on the market is the cluttered ui- it doesn't look friendly to artists/tech artists and the controls are very unintuitive for someone who uses other 3d softwares. I'm curious as to why the community working on it hasn't taken steps to change this- the software is equally if not more functional than alternatives like Maya and making it a bit more familiar to industry professionals could go a long way
LeifCarrotson 7y ago
I think it's more about vendor support. There's a big difference between having a person on your payroll who can add a feature and having a help desk and applications engineers who are under contract to make sure the software works for you.
pjmlp 7y ago
The "source available" movement was already a thing back in old days, before the rise of GPL. I bought plenty of commercial software, specially developer tools, that had source available on the installation floppies. If anything we are turning back to those days, after many are starting to realize how hard it is to keep a business living from donations and occasional consulting gigs.

heavenlyblue 7y ago

It’s risk management - it’s better to pay a bit more for a packaged product and accept it’s drawbacks than hire a developer who may or may never deliver.

weberc2 7y ago
I would think the obvious way a corporation could contribute would be financially.
- fsloth 7y ago
  That's what they do to contribute financially to software development. It's called buying a license. Sure, sometimes they buy closed sourcr licenses, but as a corporation providing services to a third party you don't care about the license - you care very much the software adds the value to the output of the employee who uses it.
  - weberc2 7y ago
    The GP was talking about hiring a developer to contribute. I pointed out that financial support is an option. Yes, licensing is one model, but a check is also valid.
- phkahler 7y ago
  But it's voluntary. When a company (or most individuals) get the product for free, there is little incentive to pay anything. I think the notion that people (and companies) pay for proprietary software because there is support or some other reasons are complete BS. They pay for software because they have to in order to use it. It's just a cost of doing business. As free software has become viable (high quality) in some areas, business folks are more willing to allow it. The primary concern is "can it do the job". The second is how much will it cost me?
  - weberc2 7y ago
    We were discussing “hire a developer to contribute” vs “financial contribution”. Of course it’s voluntary and the incentive is low, but that’s off topic.
microcolonel 7y ago
> ...than hire a developer who may or may never deliver. I don't really see the difference between this and "accept its drawbacks", except that if your developer turns out to be productive, you have something a lot more valuable on your hands, and if the developer fails, you can replace them (whereas for a given proprietary product, you typically can not replace the vendor while keeping the licensing agreement and investment in training [this last bit being a big part of why in-house developers make sense for Blender, as they always have for 3D animation studios]).
- la_barba 7y ago
  >I don't really see the difference between this and "accept its drawbacks" The difference is one is known, and the other is unknown. When you're evaluating existing software you can evaluate multiple competitors based on their finished product. You can't do that when you're hiring a developer. >and if the developer fails, you can replace them (whereas for a given proprietary product, you typically can not replace the vendor while keeping the licensing agreement and investment in training [this last bit being a big part of why in-house developers make sense for Blender, as they always have for 3D animation studios]). I'd say this argument supports using only existing established successful products, to avoid being burnt.
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    > one is known Only if the software you're buying meets all of your current and future requirements, and is maintained indefinitely. If new requirements come up, they're at least not any more helpful than in-house resources (unless a lot of people suddenly have the same requirements at the same time); and if they stop maintaining it, there's a good chance you literally can't do anything about that. You just have a different set of unknowns, one of which seems more manageable (which is probably why it is more popular), and probably is more manageable in some subset of use cases.
    - la_barba 7y ago
      >Only if the software you're buying meets all of your current and future requirements, and is maintained indefinitely. Nobody expects 3d design software to be maintained indefinitely or expects 3d design software to satisfy future requirements magically. You buy a 3d design software to make you money by creating content. Either it makes you money or it doesn't. The easiest thing to do is to simply buy what everyone else is using because it makes it easier to hire talent from a pre-existing pool of experts, or if need be, train them on a software for which training programs already exist because its popular. >If new requirements come up, they're at least not any more helpful than in-house resources (unless a lot of people suddenly have the same requirements at the same time); Well, wait a minute. Before you even get there, you not only have to be good at producing 3D art/content (or atleast good enough to make a decent chunk of change), you have to now hire dev/test/pm folks and successfully run a software development team in-house. I don't find this to be a realistic proposition. >and if they stop maintaining it, there's a good chance you literally can't do anything about that. A vendor for any software that you rely on can go out of business. Do you plan to run independent software development teams for your OS, accounting software, browser, IDE, etc ? The answer obviously is no. And the same reasoning applies to your 3d design software. >You just have a different set of unknowns, one of which seems more manageable (which is probably why it is more popular), and probably is more manageable in some subset of use cases. I don't agree at all. I think it actually is more manageable.
bsavery 7y ago
I think what you're referring to is paying for -support- There is no blender version of "Red Hat" that companies can rely on to deliver fixes or support.

chii 7y ago

It's more likely that the SFX industry has their training done on proprietary software, and shops that don't use the industry standard ones like Maya would have trouble hiring. Plus the after market plugins tend to be commercial in nature and won't want to sell with a GPL licence.

micmil 7y ago
Bullshit. This is like saying someone that trained in Java will struggle learning Python, or someone that learned with C will have a hard time picking up Rust. With a few exceptions (Houdini probably being the prime example) all 3d graphics tools work in the same fashion. The concepts and techniques are universal, the only difference is the implementation. If you have even a modicum of experience with one thing, you can pick the other up in an afternoon and be up to speed within a week.
- la_barba 7y ago
  >If you have even a modicum of experience with one thing, you can pick the other up in an afternoon and be up to speed within a week. Have you found this to be true in your experience?
- chii 7y ago
  > The concepts and techniques are universal, the only difference is the implementation. only someone who hasn't really used the tool in anger and mastered it would claim this. I can't even switch to eclipse from intellij and not have a huge productivity hit for several months. and that's just typing code! A real 3D modeller would have so much muscle memory for their modelling app of choice it't not funny.
  - damon_c 7y ago
    Yes, exactly this. As someone who had a prior career in VFX using mostly Autodesk and Adobe software, there are people who spend their whole career in one of these packages and have a lot of difficulty becoming fluent in a second one. They are designed with completely different metaphors and workflows and yes, the end result is always pixels, but learning multiple high end creative software is nothing like learning different programming languages.

smellsdonkey 7y ago

Tangent Animation is trying to change this! They use almost 100% Blender, have some developers and contribute back to the community. See "Next-Gen" on Netflix for their latest movie. Disclaimer: Worked for them as a Blender developer on Next-Gen

voltagex_ 7y ago
Are you able to talk about anything you did there? I only get to work on open source in my spare time (and nothing as complex as Blender). What did a normal day look like for you?
- diggan 7y ago
  BlenderConf 2018 had a talk from the co-founder of Tangent (Jeff Bell) about how Blender was used for Next Gen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZn3kCsw5D8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZn3kCsw5D8
  - voltagex_ 7y ago
    Thank you, too.
- swerner 7y ago
  Our repository is public. You can look at every single commit we did: https://github.com/tangent-animation/blender278/commits/master https://github.com/tangent-animation/blender278/commits/mast... "Normal days" changed during the course of the project. In the beginning, it was work on new features for months if necessary, towards the end it were overnight patches for "frame x in shot y looks wrong/crashes/takes forever".
  - voltagex_ 7y ago
    Thank you!
iamcreasy 7y ago
The whole movie is made by Blender? What was the pitfall? Is there any dev blog I can read?

forrestthewoods 7y ago

> I've always wondered why niche specific software such as Blender doesn't have a ton of industry backing. Because prior to Blender 2.8 it was really really bad software compared to commercial alternatives. Blender is becoming quite good. Which impresses the hell out of me. But it’s taken a long, long time to get there.

tech_man7 7y ago
What's great along with Blender, is the availability of very very inexpensive rendering using https://golemgrid.com/ https://golemgrid.com/. It's name your own price and can be had for 1/10th the cost of using a render farm.
fsloth 7y ago
What changed to 2.8 to make it compare favorably to commercial alternatives? Is it just the UI?
- Washuu 7y ago
  User interface, discoverability(That whole UX thing), and a new reasonable sane default control scheme.(Which can be toggled back to the old one.)

fsloth 7y ago

Statistically speaking software development is extremely risky from the point of view that n units of work will create x units of deliverables. If you are not a software shop you really would like to outsource those risks. Hence, they pay the capital cost to get a fixed, known deliverable. Developing new software is hard and risky. Sure, if you can get the right team for the job it can work out wonderfully but this just creates another level of risk - you need to find the right developers.

kgwxd 7y ago
If someone wants fixed, known deliverables, the last thing they should be looking at is proprietary software, where a seemingly stable product suddenly updates and everything is different and the license changes retroactively, e.g Photoshop. Version controlled, open source means you can check out any version you might need, at any time, now and forever. Seems worth throwing some money at such a promise.
- micmil 7y ago
  Spoken like someone that doesn't own a business. You do not throw money at promises. You throw money at solutions.
  - gridspy 7y ago
    Possibly a better phrasing would be "An open source ecosystem is worth investing in to hedge against the risk of license and source changes by the vendor"
  - type0 7y ago
    If you are short sighted enough to only care about day to day operations and don't see competence in software usage as an investment that will bring competitive advantages in the long run.
    - micmil 7y ago
      Your competitive advantage is your staff, not your software. A company like Pixar only has so many proprietary tools because they've been around so damn long that rolling their own was the only way to go to get the results they wanted. Even then, Pixar's advantage was the people they hired and allowed to thrive... not Renderman.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

carlmr 7y ago

>And it wouldn't even interfere with their competitive edge, since the software isn't their business. They don't have to care about the GPL as long as the software does what they want. Most developers know this, but company managers that forbid open source contribution don't understand this. That's why I'm personally not too much against source available licensing. It's the only language old companies understand.

bad_user 7y ago
“Source available” licensing is useless. Many companies and many developers have tried to misappropriate the term “Open Source”, to make it be understood as “source available”, because Open Source / Free Software have sex appeal for developers, so they are trying to have their cake and eat it too. Don’t fall into that trap. The freedoms provided by both Open Source and Free Software licensing are well defined and mean (1) the right to use the program for whatever purpose and (2) the right to fork. Anything else is unacceptable. As for what language companies understand, many of us don’t give a fuck. If they are good citizens and distribute software under FOSS compatible licenses all is good, otherwise we’re not interested, because the availability of the source code is not the point, the right to use that source code is ;-)
- pjmlp 7y ago
  The recent reaction of those developers how non-copyleft licenses are being "abused" kind of speaks otherwise.
  - hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
    Which reaction?
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      Being enranged that companies just made what MIT style licenses allow them to do to start with, and creating derived licenses to work around it.

peterwwillis 7y ago

> Any medium sized graphics shop could have a full developer on the payroll for a fraction of the repeated licensing costs of proprietary solutions, that is, someone who works full time on Blender and whom you can directly approach, in-house, for features and fixes. DIY is time-consuming, difficult, and doesn't scale. Small companies often start out with as cheap a solution as they can, but as they grow they'll find they're doing way more work just to support the DIY solution, and features are difficult and time-consuming to produce. If you have the money and you need a feature now, licensing makes sense.

overgard 7y ago

I like the idea but I don’t think it scales. How many developers are qualified to work on Blender? It would be hard to hire for. Also you need someone that both works in your organisation and that fits in well with the blender developers so their patches get accepted etc. I don’t think the popularity of proprietary solutions is vanity, it’s rather that switching between 3d modellers is really hard. It might be months before you’re even close to productive again. Also interoperability between packages is a huge problem. Blender only really started to get a good UI this decade, and I think you’re more likely to see it get picked up in new shops rather than old shops migrating.

micmil 7y ago
"Switching between 3d modellers" undersells the issue. COMPLETELY ALTERING YOUR PRODUCTION PIPELINE TO ACCOMMODATE ONE PACKAGE gets the point across a little bit better. There are studios out there that have decades of in-house scripts and programs built around a given set of software. If you do a lot of architectural rendering you may have your own outdoor lighting systems. If you focus primarily on title sequences you may have certain effects that you developed. Having to completely rewrite all of that in-house code would be a MASSIVE undertaking.

jsty 7y ago

"Any medium sized graphics shop could have a full developer on the payroll for a fraction of the repeated licensing costs of proprietary solutions" If the returns to the particular company that employed the developer was higher than the opportunity cost of expending that money elsewhere in the company, then you'd have a strong case for that. However, most medium sized graphics shops are probably concerned that they'd effectively be subsidising their competitors' production costs, since the 'exclusive' returns to the shop employing the developer are likely minimal compared to any other user of the feature they develop. The free rider problem / tragedy of the commons strikes again.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> However, most medium sized graphics shops are probably concerned that they'd effectively be subsidising their competitors' production costs, since the 'exclusive' returns to the shop employing the developer are likely minimal compared to any other user of the feature they develop. What causes most usage of big proprietary software is that the software has 10,000 features and every customer only needs five of them, but for each customer it's a different five. That makes it hard for a free competitor to get users because adding five features only gets one customer; it scales poorly without revenue. But as the customer yourself, having your developer add the five things you yourself need is completely feasible, and doesn't help your competitors that much because the five things they need are different.
- phkahler 7y ago
  Nobody wants to wait for a developer to implement the things they want. If they have work to do, they need a solution NOW. Pick what's available and pay what it costs. For commercial software that's some $$$ and for Free software that's $0.00. Then once the purchase has been made, the question of paying someone to work on it is a separate issue. Most rational people would say "why would I do that?" Comparing paying a FLOSS developer to paying for commercial software doesn't make sense. Companies don't see themselves as funding development either way.
  - 7y ago

weinzierl 7y ago

> I think it has something to do with appealing to an employee's vanity, where getting a very expensive software package "for free" to do your job makes one feel appreciated. It learned 3D modelling with one of those "very expensive software packages" and it made me feel appreciated at the time. The knowledge however is now completely useless for me because the software, while still existing, is totally niche now. Blender would have been a lifetime investment...

cosmodisk 7y ago
Remember doing bits and bobs with Alias studio (more than 15 years ago) when I was a kid. I think it used to cost about $100K, which to me,at the time, was something out of this world. The principles behind these packages are almost always the same so they are relatively transferable.Of course, understanding new interface and software itself is a step one would need to take when transitioning.
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
This! If people think that getting to use expensive proprietary software is somehow appreciation, that seems like a massive failure of education in basics of economics? Getting to learn skills that you can't use unless you continue to pay for the expensive right to use those skills should be valued negatively by a rational economic agent.

lozenge 7y ago

Maybe they don't have time to wait for features to be developed? Only the biggest projects have people saying "we'll need new fur/hair/dragon breath/water effects" early on and have a long or flexible timeline. Whereas your average project just need to work with what they already have. Even GoT which had a huge budget must have tight delivery deadlines that will make a project manager think twice before putting software development on their critical path.

rolltiide 7y ago

Large backers for open source donations barely exist because their spouses won't let them. People and their foundations barely have complete discretion over their money. So when it comes to donations their spouses want to pretend to be the next Bill and Melinda Gates and drop money into a black hole in Africa than a software tool. More awareness is possible. Different people in Africa contribute to open source too, big place.

dang 7y ago
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait to Hacker News so we don't have to ban you again? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- rolltiide 7y ago
  I guess I just wish you guys would break down what you feel is unsubstantive "and/or flamebait". I feel like A LOT of assumptions about a fairly articulate comment are needed to make that conclusion. A quick re-reading I think that you made assumptions about who the spouse is, assumptions about Africa, or maybe misreading the black hole part when the context is Africa. Super meta vicariously offended someone expecting other people to be vicariously offended, while foundation directors and recipients in African countries aren't offended at all? The real question being: was the comment inaccurate? Can we just discuss that? I know how Foundations and Donor Advised Funds make their decisions, people that aspire to support open source dont have the discretion. Everytime I ask for clarity I just get immediately shadowbanned like "this guy questioned our authority thats the last straw"
  - dang 7y ago
    The idea of that comment being accurate or not doesn't even arise. Is anyone going to do a statistically significant survey of "large backers for open source donations"? Even if you did, you wouldn't get access to their conversations with their spouses, nor will anyone give you accurate information about what they want to "pretend to be". So there's no question of such a comment being a serious contribution to discussion. What it does fit—begging your pardon—is the genre of internet bullshit: someone making up a grand, provocative generalization because they're good at making up grand, provocative generalizations, that being the craft that a certain sort of internet commenter works on perfecting. If you post in that genre to HN, we're going to moderate you, because there's no thoughtful conversation to be had there—one can only pile on or fight back. It's a move in a game that doesn't lead to more interesting moves. That's what I mean by unsubstantive in this context. As for flamebait, you could start by not making casually insulting dismissals like "drop money into a blackhole in Africa". Saying that signals that you're trolling. Maybe you didn't mean to? Ok, but that actually doesn't matter, because an internet comment consists of how people read it and the effects that it has. Let's look at it the other way. Let's say your intention is to contribute to thoughtful conversation and that you indeed know a lot about "how foundations make their decisions". I'm quite willing to believe that. In that case, though, you should make your contribution in a 180-degree different way. You need to explain what you know in terms that aren't grandiose and provocative, but rather, scrupulously accurate. You need to explain how you know it. You need to tie it to the topic at hand in a way that explains why it's relevant. And you need to somehow include the limits of what you know, to leave some oxygen for anyone who might know different things than you do. All that is not hard to do, but it requires a different genre of comment: more information, less grandstanding.

micmil 7y ago

It has nothing to do with "employee vanity" and that's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. There's a simple reason Blender doesn't see much use in film production: Support. There is no way the Blender Foundation could provide the level of support that a company like Autodesk does. When you run into problems you call your enterprise support team and get it fixed. This is why you pay them the big bucks. Their support staff does nothing but fix problems, where anyone that you could hire to do the same would necessarily spend most of their time sitting on their ass doing nothing since stuff just doesn't go wrong all that often. That alone will keep Blender out of a LOT of shops, especially those that are just large enough to be working on major projects. The idea that a company should just hire a programmer they don't otherwise need just so they can make some software work is asinine. That's like saying a home builder should hire a full time auto mechanic instead of taking their work vehicles to the shop when they break down. No, hiring a guy will not offset the cost of purchasing licenses and support. This is especially true when you hit one of those moments where things get so shredded that the cost of enterprise support seems like a bargain. There are other, more technical, issues that keep Blender from being used much. Chief among them is that it isn't really exceptional at anything. It's not uncommon for things to be modeled in one program, textured in another, then imported into another for animation, and then brought into a final one for lighting and rendering. There are better programs for modeling than Blender. There are better programs for rendering, texturing, animation. Blender is oatmeal. It's there, it works, but it's not really great at anything and as a result has never found a niche. Because, ultimately, that's what it's all about.

DoctorOetker 7y ago
uh, couldn't a (or multiple) blender foundation(s) sell support? the software remaining FOSS, but feature requests / bug fixes being paid services. Feature and bug attention would be driven by the big commercial users, and the community would profit. Since the shops can choose which blender support team they buy support from, they get competitive pricing too.
craigsmansion 7y ago
> The idea that a company should just hire a programmer they don't otherwise need just so they can make some software work is asinine Weren't you just saying the magic ingredient was "support"? Do you believe a first line help-desk is going to provide better support than a guy whose livelihood depends on it and you can call to your desk? >That's like saying a home builder should hire a full time auto mechanic In this specific case, it's more like fairly large transporters having their own mechanics, which they have, because it's cheaper, and better, and faster, and generally very convenient all round.

sprafa 7y ago

There’s lots of small shops transitioning to Blender or using Blender. The studio that makes A Man in A high Castle VFX used Blender and there’s some animation studios in Spain using Blender. The reason why it’s not used more: as good as it is Blender is still not Maya or Cinema 4D. Each 3D application has its own strengths and Maya has a LOT of tools that are application specific and that other applications might struggle to copy because they are so intertwined into its UX/UI and of course lots of proprietary R&D. There’s also the question of pipeline - .fbx file format is the standard in the industry and for good or for bad it’s ruled by Autodesk afaik. Other applications have to adversarially replicate it (i think?) a bit like .doc files going onto iWork And on your comment of having employees working on Blender - I believe Disney has a few people who contribute to Blender. But lots of the other applications like Maya and Katana are also extensible and studios like ILM have extensively modified Maya and others so to answer your question - they do extend other applications like Maya, Katana and NUKe and they have people on staff working on those extensions. The thing those extensions or plugins turn out to often be excellent competitive advantage against other studios so it’s actually helpful to keep them in house. All the big VFX studios have multiple proprietary technologies that they don’t share them with anyone at all - unless it becomes advantageous to sell it to others, in which try often spin it off or sell it to The Foundry.

cosmodisk 7y ago

The main reason why Blender,GIMP and the likes don't get a lot of backing from the industry is because pricing is just a small puece of the overall picture. If a shop is anything but some random visualisations for real estate, there are budgets, decent salaries and etc., so even spending a few grand on Maya or 3DS Max doesn't quite change anything. Development in such a niche and complex field takes time.I doubt one developer would be able to do much,even full time,apart from fixing some small bugs..

keyle 7y ago
I've used extensively Blender and HAD TO use Gimp. I strongly disagree the correlation. Although it is one you could make on paper, Blender is a fantastic piece of software and highly usable. Gimp is gimp.

_mikel_ 7y ago

The big issue with blender compared to some of the other options on the market is the cluttered ui- it doesn't look friendly to artists/tech artists and the controls are very unintuitive for someone who uses other 3d softwares. I'm curious as to why the community working on it hasn't taken steps to change this- the software is equally if not more functional than alternatives like Maya and making it a bit more familiar to industry professionals could go a long way

LeifCarrotson 7y ago

I think it's more about vendor support. There's a big difference between having a person on your payroll who can add a feature and having a help desk and applications engineers who are under contract to make sure the software works for you.

pjmlp 7y ago

The "source available" movement was already a thing back in old days, before the rise of GPL. I bought plenty of commercial software, specially developer tools, that had source available on the installation floppies. If anything we are turning back to those days, after many are starting to realize how hard it is to keep a business living from donations and occasional consulting gigs.