7 ms·

Blender 2.82

231 points by app4soft 7y ago

dagmx 7y ago
For those unfamiliar with Blender's versioning, the major number is effectively meaningless. The 8 is effectively the major number and the 2 the minor. Anyway the big items in this release IMHO are: - preliminary support for the Pixar USD format ( https://graphics.pixar.com/usd/docs/index.html https://graphics.pixar.com/usd/docs/index.html ) which is gaining large traction in film studios, gradually in game engines and is the format of choice for Apple's AR ecosystem - coming in line with the VFX reference platform ( https://vfxplatform.com/ https://vfxplatform.com/ ) The combination of both which means that Blender will be easier to integrate in existing pipelines rather than being a very interesting curiosity for large studios with preexisting pipelines. Blender is certainly very powerful, and with the 2.8x releases, I think they're really opening up appeal to a larger set of artists and studios. Just recently been talking to some large studios that are actively considering adding it to their toolset. An overview of some of the major features in this release with accompanying videos can be found here : https://www.blendernation.com/2020/02/14/the-five-key-features-in-blender-2-82/ https://www.blendernation.com/2020/02/14/the-five-key-featur...
- vadansky 7y ago
  How is it compared to ZBrush? I’ve seen a lot of the sculpting tools they’re showing and I’m wondering if they’re up to par yet?
  - dagmx 7y ago
    I don't sculpt much anymore but from talking to people who do it seems like zbrush is still more performant with better tools for sketching out ideas as well but with blender you get the convenience of not having to jump between applications.
    - wlesieutre 7y ago
      Though for really sketching , blender’s 3D grease pencil tool is pretty cool. That was in 2.8 I think.
      - snuxoll 7y ago
        The grease pencil has been around for longer than 2.8, but it got some serious love recently. The Blender Institute even made a 2D movie with it (Hero) as a showcase for the improvements.
  - Arcanum-XIII 7y ago
    Zbrush is it’s own thing. Nearly all 3D package can (and have) produced the equivalent. What you have with Zbrush is another way of looking at how to do 3D illustration and as a side effect 3D sculpting. So, blender was on par already for quite a while. And since the version 2.8, it seems that they’re more than on par with the rest of the industry.
    - cma 7y ago
      2.81 is what brought it near zbrush, not 2.80: https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-81/ https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-81/ https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.81/Sculpt https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.81/S... It was almost all focused on sculpting improvements, adding a voxel remesh workflow.
      - Arcanum-XIII 7y ago
        Honnestly, it's mostly the UI revamp that put Blender up to big gun: a familiar interface mean that every artist trained on other software can "easily" transfer. Sculpting improvement, are, well, an open discussion. Poly modelling with subdiv is still better in Mirai, a software dead for nearly 20 year now for example, and lot of artist using nurbs still miss Softimage 3D 4.
      - nineteen999 7y ago
        Thanks for pointing these out; I've avoided using Blender for sculpting for a long time since the performance wasn't even close to ZBrush and it didn't have equivalents for Dynamesh/ZRemesher. Maybe it's time for another look.
  - Daub 7y ago
    I have used it for minor sculpting jobs, and found it very agreeable. A bit buggy in the version I was using (problems with updating previews) but will definitely use again. Adaptive subdiv worked as advertised.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- fctorial 7y ago
  What changed in version 2.00
  - dagmx 7y ago
    Hard to find release notes as Blender 2.0 predates Blender being open sourced, where the company went under two decades ago now. An informal history can be found here https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/getting_started/about/history.html https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/getting_started/ab... But Blender 2 is where it eventually went open source so I tend to read the version as "Blender2 82" vs "Blender 2.82"
    - outadoc 7y ago
      From your link: "2.00 – August 2000: Interactive 3D and real-time engine."
      - dagmx 7y ago
        Yeah but I'm not sure that was all, or if it necessitated a major version bump.
    - spectramax 7y ago
      Why are software people so parsimonous when dealing with versioning? That "." in versioning scheme has a purpose, but it is completely useless here. You might as well make the version 82 (or even better 8.2) because the "2." is meaningless. The "." allows you to differentiate major, minor and patch versions. Blender should be using 8.2 instead of 2.82. That helps with legibility and understanding to the user. Remember, versioning and tagging your commit is for the user, not for the software developers. Let me make my point clear by exaggerating the issue at hand... Imagine if Blender treated version 2.8285218588190159 as "major" version 9, the last digit. The preceding 5 have a chance of changing may be once a decade. It's bad.
      - fctorial 7y ago
        Well, it is an end user application, not a library. As for 79 to 80 being a major change, it was probably a coincidence which had nothing to do with 7 and 8. We might see the next major update at version 87.
- app4soft 7y ago
  > For those unfamiliar with Blender's versioning, the major number is effectively meaningless. The 8 is effectively the major number and the 2 the minor. According to semantic versioning this would look like Blender v2.8.2. According web browsers versioning it will be Blender 28.2.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    No, semantic versioning applies a specific meaning (that’s what the ‘semantic’ bit means) to the major version number. If the 2 is meaningless then it isn’t a Semantic Versioning major version number.
  - dagmx 7y ago
    According to semantic versioning it would be Blender2 8.2.x IMHO According to how browsers version it would be Blender2 82 Ideally the initial 2 would be dropped off since it only has a vestigial reason to be there
- fsh 7y ago
  Despite the dumb name, the new "AI"-Denoiser is also a huge improvement over 2.81.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- arminiusreturns 7y ago
  Do you happen to have any thoughts on the relationship of gltf to USD? Are they complimentary or competitive?
  - ykl 7y ago
    I think they are very much complimentary. This vastly oversimplifies things, but you can can almost think of gltf is to USD like PNG is to a Photoshop file. gltf is meant to be a 3D publishing format, whereas USD is meant to be an asset interchange format between DCC applications. gltf is very minimal in the amount of runtime processing required to interpret and display it (much of gltf can more or less be directly mapped into GL buffers), whereas USD includes an extremely powerful schema and composition system that is highly expressive but much more complex to interpret in its fullest form (meant for sending entire editable scenegraphs between, say, Maya and Houdini and Blender and Presto). Both formats are really great at what they’re meant to do. I was somewhat surprised that Apple picked USD as the basis for their AR stuff, since gltf would have seen like a more natural fit. Maybe the fact that USD has taken the animation/VFX world by storm (many studios are shifting from proprietary internal interchange formats to USD en masse) helped Apple pick.
    - arminiusreturns 7y ago
      Thank you for the response and also very cool that the industry is moving towards open source formats. FBX is such a nightmare I'm happy to have moved all my assets to gltf.
      - snuxoll 7y ago
        Would be nice if Epic included a proper gltf importer in UE4, there’s an open source one but it is functionally limited compared to Epic’s built-in importers. Blender does a good job of exporting FBX, but it’s nowhere near perfect since they can’t use Autodesk’s proprietary SDK.
        naikrovek 7y ago
ur-whale 7y ago
Blender has become so good and so complete, my bet is it will become the de facto standard for all things 3D over the course of the next decade. It still is difficult to approach, but it has come a very very long way and is almost on par with commercial packages wrt usability.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  with the advent of so many open source libraries for physics, maths, geometry, rendering, whatever, blender seems to be the right sink to aggregate all of them.
  - knolan 7y ago
    I would like to port OpenFOAM over to Blender. It’s very powerful software but a mess of dependencies and rubbish documentation. An implementation within Blender would make life so much easier.
    - andygreenwell 7y ago
      You have to make due with 32-bit floating point accuracy for any vertices defined in Blender for the geometry to be passed along to any external libraries. In a prior gig where Blender was the primary development environment, I needed to do all kinds of gymnastics (converting floating point numbers provided by the user in the gui to strings then to Python floats or sometimes 32-bit or 64-bit numpy objects, then to the external package and back) in order to maintain double precision accuracy. Anything created or stored as a Blender FloatProperty is a 32-bit value on the C-side. But if you operate on that FloatProperty object within the embedded Python process you are operating on the 64-bit representation of the 32-bit pattern, since Python floats are all 64-bit values. I heard more than once during that gig that “Blender is not CAD” even though we were doing everything possible to bring it closer to being so. But with vertex values, those are created directly in Blender’s C layer, so no possibility to make those values have 64-bit accuracy if that is important to your application or external library. I am in agreement that Blender would make a fantastic environment to pull together many open source scientific and engineering libraries, but the vertex accuracy is the one major drawback there.
antome 7y ago
While not all the new features will be in this release, the rate of improvement for Blender's sculpting tools has been astounding. For example, the new cloth brush: ( https://twitter.com/pablodp606/status/1223663016811618307 https://twitter.com/pablodp606/status/1223663016811618307 , https://twitter.com/pablodp606/status/1223060180344147970 https://twitter.com/pablodp606/status/1223060180344147970 ) Available as an experimental build here: https://blender.community/c/graphicall/Sjbbbc/ https://blender.community/c/graphicall/Sjbbbc/
knolan 7y ago
I use Blender to make videos of fluid flow to make my teaching more accessible. I absolutely love it, I wish CFD tools had half the polish and capability. I’m going to do a summer workshop for my colleagues so they can start to make animations of their own, all these new usability features are very much welcome. A truly incredible open source project!
- nitrogen 7y ago
  I've long wanted to play with fluid simulatuons, but haven't had time for a 3D gfx hobby for a while. Could you recommend a good tutorial or set of documentation for a starting point with Blender's fluid dynamics?
  - knolan 7y ago
    This new version of Blender comes with a new fluid solver called MantaFlow. There should be tutorials popping up on YouTube as I type. I use the FLIP fluid add on which comes with good documentation.
    - thdrdt 7y ago
      Note that MantaFlow also has a FLIP solver, which is a combination of a volume and particle solver. This is nice because you can simulate how a fluid changes into a foam for example. FLIP: FLuid Implicit Particle
      - knolan 7y ago
        I haven’t had much time to try it. I like the add on because it handles viscosity and surface tension rather well.
- eric_t 7y ago
  I’m also teaching fluid dynamics, and use Blender quite a bit for geometry work. Would love to hear more about your use of Blender for visualization if you’re willing to share.
stateoff 7y ago
We're very excited about this new release. I'm pipeline lead at Tangent Animation. Blender was used for "NextGen" and our future projects. I may answer how it is to be part of the development (Blender/Cycles) while producing features, but better yet you can talk to us at the SparkFX in Vancouver if you happen to be there.
- samstave 7y ago
  Do you have any example work done either solely or mostly with blender for viewing?
  - phaemon 7y ago
    The "NextGen" they refer to is an animated film that was made in Blender.
  - dagmx 7y ago
    https://youtu.be/uf3ALGKgpGU https://youtu.be/uf3ALGKgpGU https://youtu.be/iZn3kCsw5D8 https://youtu.be/iZn3kCsw5D8
    - samstave 7y ago
      Those were great, thanks
  - Recursing 7y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhWc3b3KhnY&list=PLav47HAVZMjnTFVZL-aImCQIC0uLZtNCz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhWc3b3KhnY&list=PLav47HAVZM...
bitxbit 7y ago
2.8 was a game changer for Blender. I absolutely believe it will be a multi-industry standard for years to come.
rcarmo 7y ago
Me and my kids have been using it routinely since 2.80 (thanks to the shift to saner mouse button defaults and other UX tweaks), and there are loads of great YouTube tutorials out there these days, so I’d say it’s really helped 3D rendering become mainstream.
tayistay 7y ago
- Will Blender put the competition out of business? Maya, C4D, Modo, ZBrush, etc. are all rather expensive, and Blender covers so many workflows. - How could one build new and better 3D software when competing with free and good enough? - Does blender as a business generate good income for its developers? If you look at their Development Fund [0], it says $115k/mo for 20 developers. - What is the extent of contribution to Blender from unpaid contributors? [0]: https://fund.blender.org https://fund.blender.org
- snuxoll 7y ago
  > Will Blender put the competition out of business? Maya, C4D, Modo, ZBrush, etc. are all rather expensive, and Blender covers so many workflows. It’s happening, you have game studios like Ubisoft throwing money at the Blender Foundation and switching to it.
  - xvilka 7y ago
    Moreover, they also support other FOSS too, for example Krita. I hope these companies would support GIMP as well, and some FOSS video editing tools, like Shortcut.
- thdrdt 7y ago
  I think Maya and 3DsMax will have the most difficult future. There are almost no releases of new functionalities and bugfixes from Autodesk while the price is high. And Blender can do what those programs can.

231 points by app4soft 7y ago

For those unfamiliar with Blender's versioning, the major number is effectively meaningless. The 8 is effectively the major number and the 2 the minor. Anyway the big items in this release IMHO are: - preliminary support for the Pixar USD format ( https://graphics.pixar.com/usd/docs/index.html https://graphics.pixar.com/usd/docs/index.html ) which is gaining large traction in film studios, gradually in game engines and is the format of choice for Apple's AR ecosystem - coming in line with the VFX reference platform ( https://vfxplatform.com/ https://vfxplatform.com/ ) The combination of both which means that Blender will be easier to integrate in existing pipelines rather than being a very interesting curiosity for large studios with preexisting pipelines. Blender is certainly very powerful, and with the 2.8x releases, I think they're really opening up appeal to a larger set of artists and studios. Just recently been talking to some large studios that are actively considering adding it to their toolset. An overview of some of the major features in this release with accompanying videos can be found here : https://www.blendernation.com/2020/02/14/the-five-key-features-in-blender-2-82/ https://www.blendernation.com/2020/02/14/the-five-key-featur...

vadansky 7y ago
How is it compared to ZBrush? I’ve seen a lot of the sculpting tools they’re showing and I’m wondering if they’re up to par yet?
- dagmx 7y ago
  I don't sculpt much anymore but from talking to people who do it seems like zbrush is still more performant with better tools for sketching out ideas as well but with blender you get the convenience of not having to jump between applications.
  - wlesieutre 7y ago
    Though for really sketching , blender’s 3D grease pencil tool is pretty cool. That was in 2.8 I think.
    - snuxoll 7y ago
      The grease pencil has been around for longer than 2.8, but it got some serious love recently. The Blender Institute even made a 2D movie with it (Hero) as a showcase for the improvements.
- Arcanum-XIII 7y ago
  Zbrush is it’s own thing. Nearly all 3D package can (and have) produced the equivalent. What you have with Zbrush is another way of looking at how to do 3D illustration and as a side effect 3D sculpting. So, blender was on par already for quite a while. And since the version 2.8, it seems that they’re more than on par with the rest of the industry.
  - cma 7y ago
    2.81 is what brought it near zbrush, not 2.80: https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-81/ https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-81/ https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.81/Sculpt https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.81/S... It was almost all focused on sculpting improvements, adding a voxel remesh workflow.
    - Arcanum-XIII 7y ago
      Honnestly, it's mostly the UI revamp that put Blender up to big gun: a familiar interface mean that every artist trained on other software can "easily" transfer. Sculpting improvement, are, well, an open discussion. Poly modelling with subdiv is still better in Mirai, a software dead for nearly 20 year now for example, and lot of artist using nurbs still miss Softimage 3D 4.
    - nineteen999 7y ago
      Thanks for pointing these out; I've avoided using Blender for sculpting for a long time since the performance wasn't even close to ZBrush and it didn't have equivalents for Dynamesh/ZRemesher. Maybe it's time for another look.
- Daub 7y ago
  I have used it for minor sculpting jobs, and found it very agreeable. A bit buggy in the version I was using (problems with updating previews) but will definitely use again. Adaptive subdiv worked as advertised.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
fctorial 7y ago
What changed in version 2.00
- dagmx 7y ago
  Hard to find release notes as Blender 2.0 predates Blender being open sourced, where the company went under two decades ago now. An informal history can be found here https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/getting_started/about/history.html https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/getting_started/ab... But Blender 2 is where it eventually went open source so I tend to read the version as "Blender2 82" vs "Blender 2.82"
  - outadoc 7y ago
    From your link: "2.00 – August 2000: Interactive 3D and real-time engine."
    - dagmx 7y ago
      Yeah but I'm not sure that was all, or if it necessitated a major version bump.
  - spectramax 7y ago
    Why are software people so parsimonous when dealing with versioning? That "." in versioning scheme has a purpose, but it is completely useless here. You might as well make the version 82 (or even better 8.2) because the "2." is meaningless. The "." allows you to differentiate major, minor and patch versions. Blender should be using 8.2 instead of 2.82. That helps with legibility and understanding to the user. Remember, versioning and tagging your commit is for the user, not for the software developers. Let me make my point clear by exaggerating the issue at hand... Imagine if Blender treated version 2.8285218588190159 as "major" version 9, the last digit. The preceding 5 have a chance of changing may be once a decade. It's bad.
    - fctorial 7y ago
      Well, it is an end user application, not a library. As for 79 to 80 being a major change, it was probably a coincidence which had nothing to do with 7 and 8. We might see the next major update at version 87.
app4soft 7y ago
> For those unfamiliar with Blender's versioning, the major number is effectively meaningless. The 8 is effectively the major number and the 2 the minor. According to semantic versioning this would look like Blender v2.8.2. According web browsers versioning it will be Blender 28.2.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  No, semantic versioning applies a specific meaning (that’s what the ‘semantic’ bit means) to the major version number. If the 2 is meaningless then it isn’t a Semantic Versioning major version number.
- dagmx 7y ago
  According to semantic versioning it would be Blender2 8.2.x IMHO According to how browsers version it would be Blender2 82 Ideally the initial 2 would be dropped off since it only has a vestigial reason to be there
fsh 7y ago
Despite the dumb name, the new "AI"-Denoiser is also a huge improvement over 2.81.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
arminiusreturns 7y ago
Do you happen to have any thoughts on the relationship of gltf to USD? Are they complimentary or competitive?
- ykl 7y ago
  I think they are very much complimentary. This vastly oversimplifies things, but you can can almost think of gltf is to USD like PNG is to a Photoshop file. gltf is meant to be a 3D publishing format, whereas USD is meant to be an asset interchange format between DCC applications. gltf is very minimal in the amount of runtime processing required to interpret and display it (much of gltf can more or less be directly mapped into GL buffers), whereas USD includes an extremely powerful schema and composition system that is highly expressive but much more complex to interpret in its fullest form (meant for sending entire editable scenegraphs between, say, Maya and Houdini and Blender and Presto). Both formats are really great at what they’re meant to do. I was somewhat surprised that Apple picked USD as the basis for their AR stuff, since gltf would have seen like a more natural fit. Maybe the fact that USD has taken the animation/VFX world by storm (many studios are shifting from proprietary internal interchange formats to USD en masse) helped Apple pick.
  - arminiusreturns 7y ago
    Thank you for the response and also very cool that the industry is moving towards open source formats. FBX is such a nightmare I'm happy to have moved all my assets to gltf.
    - snuxoll 7y ago
      Would be nice if Epic included a proper gltf importer in UE4, there’s an open source one but it is functionally limited compared to Epic’s built-in importers. Blender does a good job of exporting FBX, but it’s nowhere near perfect since they can’t use Autodesk’s proprietary SDK.
      - naikrovek 7y ago

ur-whale 7y ago

Blender has become so good and so complete, my bet is it will become the de facto standard for all things 3D over the course of the next decade. It still is difficult to approach, but it has come a very very long way and is almost on par with commercial packages wrt usability.

agumonkey 7y ago
with the advent of so many open source libraries for physics, maths, geometry, rendering, whatever, blender seems to be the right sink to aggregate all of them.
- knolan 7y ago
  I would like to port OpenFOAM over to Blender. It’s very powerful software but a mess of dependencies and rubbish documentation. An implementation within Blender would make life so much easier.
  - andygreenwell 7y ago
    You have to make due with 32-bit floating point accuracy for any vertices defined in Blender for the geometry to be passed along to any external libraries. In a prior gig where Blender was the primary development environment, I needed to do all kinds of gymnastics (converting floating point numbers provided by the user in the gui to strings then to Python floats or sometimes 32-bit or 64-bit numpy objects, then to the external package and back) in order to maintain double precision accuracy. Anything created or stored as a Blender FloatProperty is a 32-bit value on the C-side. But if you operate on that FloatProperty object within the embedded Python process you are operating on the 64-bit representation of the 32-bit pattern, since Python floats are all 64-bit values. I heard more than once during that gig that “Blender is not CAD” even though we were doing everything possible to bring it closer to being so. But with vertex values, those are created directly in Blender’s C layer, so no possibility to make those values have 64-bit accuracy if that is important to your application or external library. I am in agreement that Blender would make a fantastic environment to pull together many open source scientific and engineering libraries, but the vertex accuracy is the one major drawback there.

antome 7y ago

While not all the new features will be in this release, the rate of improvement for Blender's sculpting tools has been astounding. For example, the new cloth brush: ( https://twitter.com/pablodp606/status/1223663016811618307 https://twitter.com/pablodp606/status/1223663016811618307 , https://twitter.com/pablodp606/status/1223060180344147970 https://twitter.com/pablodp606/status/1223060180344147970 ) Available as an experimental build here: https://blender.community/c/graphicall/Sjbbbc/ https://blender.community/c/graphicall/Sjbbbc/

knolan 7y ago

I use Blender to make videos of fluid flow to make my teaching more accessible. I absolutely love it, I wish CFD tools had half the polish and capability. I’m going to do a summer workshop for my colleagues so they can start to make animations of their own, all these new usability features are very much welcome. A truly incredible open source project!

nitrogen 7y ago
I've long wanted to play with fluid simulatuons, but haven't had time for a 3D gfx hobby for a while. Could you recommend a good tutorial or set of documentation for a starting point with Blender's fluid dynamics?
- knolan 7y ago
  This new version of Blender comes with a new fluid solver called MantaFlow. There should be tutorials popping up on YouTube as I type. I use the FLIP fluid add on which comes with good documentation.
  - thdrdt 7y ago
    Note that MantaFlow also has a FLIP solver, which is a combination of a volume and particle solver. This is nice because you can simulate how a fluid changes into a foam for example. FLIP: FLuid Implicit Particle
    - knolan 7y ago
      I haven’t had much time to try it. I like the add on because it handles viscosity and surface tension rather well.
eric_t 7y ago
I’m also teaching fluid dynamics, and use Blender quite a bit for geometry work. Would love to hear more about your use of Blender for visualization if you’re willing to share.

stateoff 7y ago

We're very excited about this new release. I'm pipeline lead at Tangent Animation. Blender was used for "NextGen" and our future projects. I may answer how it is to be part of the development (Blender/Cycles) while producing features, but better yet you can talk to us at the SparkFX in Vancouver if you happen to be there.

samstave 7y ago
Do you have any example work done either solely or mostly with blender for viewing?
- phaemon 7y ago
  The "NextGen" they refer to is an animated film that was made in Blender.
- dagmx 7y ago
  https://youtu.be/uf3ALGKgpGU https://youtu.be/uf3ALGKgpGU https://youtu.be/iZn3kCsw5D8 https://youtu.be/iZn3kCsw5D8
  - samstave 7y ago
    Those were great, thanks
- Recursing 7y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhWc3b3KhnY&list=PLav47HAVZMjnTFVZL-aImCQIC0uLZtNCz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhWc3b3KhnY&list=PLav47HAVZM...

bitxbit 7y ago

2.8 was a game changer for Blender. I absolutely believe it will be a multi-industry standard for years to come.

rcarmo 7y ago

Me and my kids have been using it routinely since 2.80 (thanks to the shift to saner mouse button defaults and other UX tweaks), and there are loads of great YouTube tutorials out there these days, so I’d say it’s really helped 3D rendering become mainstream.

tayistay 7y ago

- Will Blender put the competition out of business? Maya, C4D, Modo, ZBrush, etc. are all rather expensive, and Blender covers so many workflows. - How could one build new and better 3D software when competing with free and good enough? - Does blender as a business generate good income for its developers? If you look at their Development Fund [0], it says $115k/mo for 20 developers. - What is the extent of contribution to Blender from unpaid contributors? [0]: https://fund.blender.org https://fund.blender.org

snuxoll 7y ago
> Will Blender put the competition out of business? Maya, C4D, Modo, ZBrush, etc. are all rather expensive, and Blender covers so many workflows. It’s happening, you have game studios like Ubisoft throwing money at the Blender Foundation and switching to it.
- xvilka 7y ago
  Moreover, they also support other FOSS too, for example Krita. I hope these companies would support GIMP as well, and some FOSS video editing tools, like Shortcut.
thdrdt 7y ago
I think Maya and 3DsMax will have the most difficult future. There are almost no releases of new functionalities and bugfixes from Autodesk while the price is high. And Blender can do what those programs can.