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I've kept an eye on Blender for the last 15 years and tried it again recently after having almost exclusively used Maya. It's continually improved in just abou

I've kept an eye on Blender for the last 15 years and tried it again recently after having almost exclusively used Maya. It's continually improved in just about every way, is relatively easy to use with just a trackpad, and it performs really well. In contrast, Maya is has more features overall but is... a piece of shit in many ways. It doesn't matter what hardware I've used; it's a rule that Maya has to crash randomly when doing basic things. I used to be able to just open the Hypershade, but with Maya 2020 merely opening it causes the entire application to crash. So I've decided to ditch it for Blender. I'm not doing character animation anymore, but I still enjoy modeling and rigging some things I want to conceptualize in 3D space, as well as create 3D printables, and Blender is absolutely up to the task. It kind of baffles me how little interest the motion picture and television industries have had in Blender. Big studios are still using Maya, which I know also crashes for them and has performance issues. They could pour all their money into improving Blender and eventually not have to pay Autodesk anymore for licenses for poorly managed software that seems to rarely receive bug fixes.

bredren 6y ago
Thanks for this feedback. Maya has been around forever. I think I had the initial release crash on me when in the late 90s. I figured it was the warez back then! Would you mind sharing what kind of character work you've done previously (hobby or pro) and what types of topics or projects drive you to use Blender for conceptualization?
- ravenstine 6y ago
  Probably not because it was warez. I know people who work with Maya in productions; everybody knows that Maya is crash prone to varying extents. It's the least reliable software I've ever used. It does a TON, and it's otherwise pretty awesome, but it's embarrassingly buggy. I never really got to work with it in a professional space, but before software development I wanted to do character animation and went to school for it. Outside of assignments, I did a bunch of hobby projects both with just animation and sculpting. I was particularly interested in mixing CGI with live action, and there were some things I did with modeling and rigging things like monsters, filming footage, resolving camera motion, and compositing rendered animation into the video. Was both a lot of fun and horribly difficult. These days I it's much easier since software for resolving camera motion has improved by orders of magnitude. There was a studio I worked at briefly, but it was a pretty crappy deal and I decided to just ditch that field for software development, which I am much better at anyway.
  - bredren 6y ago
    :) It was hard to tell what was what back then. Thanks for sharing those notes on your character animation background. I'm curious what drove you to be interested in mixing CGI / live action. Jurassic Park, perhaps? When I was a kid Roger Rabbit and Cool World were amazing to me. JP's CGI seemed different, as though the dinosaurs were real.
    - ravenstine 6y ago
      It was The Incredibles. That and my father was and still is an animator. But The Incredibles really got me interested because it was both pretty advanced for its time and had what I still consider to be a more mature storyline than even most animated films today. I definitely know what you mean about Roger Rabbit!
    - ravenstine 6y ago
      Oh, I also didn't catch this: > what types of topics or projects drive you to use Blender for conceptualization? So I often have hobby projects (that I sometimes complete, heh) where I would rather sketch it out in Blender so I could more easily figure out what it is I want to build. Sure, I could be using something like Solidworks, but I've just never felt like I needed a full on CAD suite to do what I need. The process helps me design physical objects and decide what parts I'll need to either buy or 3D print. One such example is a 16mm film scanner I've been meaning to build. I have a 16mm projector and collect 16mm films, and some films you can find on eBay are kind of obscure. So I thought it would be fun to build something to scan them since it would use my programming talent and involve controlling stepper motors. That was actually where I gave up on Maya completely. I had used Blender for some things already so the transition was pretty easy, but I have more experience in Maya overall. After having it crash on something basic, not even potentially weird operations like booleans (which every other 3D software package gets right), I decided to abandon Maya entirely and hopefully I won't ever have to look back.
monkmartinez 6y ago
Just an observation and a point of discussion regarding the big studios. Disclaimer, I am not in this space professionally, but I listen to a LOT of podcasts about VR/AR which spills into all of these topics. Do you see a push away from Maya and 3DS max for a more platform agnostic modeling environment? Blender seems to be mentioned all over the place for beginners. From what I am hearing on podcasts, Unreal Game engine is making a big push into film/animation production in addition to its impressive game credits. As long as you can export an FBX file UE4/5 should be a great pipeline, or do I have it wrong?
- gmueckl 6y ago
  The problem with UE4 in film/animation is about the the place it should occupy in the pipeline. Being a game engine at its core, it's fundamentally designed to ingest models and render images. So its natural place is at the end of the pipeline. There's no really good roundtrip capabilties that let you e.g. export a scene that was created in UE for use in other tools. So despite the interactivity that would let you e.g. block out a scene with awesome real time feedback, there's no good way to get the data out into a different animation or lighting tool for final touchups before it goes to an offline renderer. This is why some big animiation studios have invested a lot of effort into in-house realtime preview renderers that attach to their tool pipelines with less friction.
  - ravenstine 6y ago
    That's an excellent point about why they would rather write their own in-house software. Of course they then get saddled with having to support all of that software and may struggle to do so, which is another problem in itself.
- ravenstine 6y ago
  I'm not in the field myself, though animation was my original career and I know people who work in feature animation. To answer your question, the field has been sloooowly diversifying in some ways, as you say with Unreal (particularly since Unreal's engine is fast and good for real-time previews), but I don't see a huge push for moving away from does-it-all packages like Maya or 3DS Max. The economic incentive isn't there. Studios have figured out how to make their money and are comfortable with the pipelines that they already have. This isn't to say their pipelines are good. In fact, many of you would be shocked at just how bad most animation pipelines are at big studios. Not only are they way too vendor-locked (as is kind of the case with Maya), but they don't want to pay an adequate salary for qualified software engineers who can build better pipelines and write more software that's agnostic. Of course, I'm making sweeping generalizations, but this is the kind of story I've heard more often than not. Pixar is known for having good practices and they write (and sell) their own software, but I don't closely know anyone who has worked there. It's going to take a decline in the field of animation before studios realize that they're basically stuck in 2006 in terms of how their artists are working to make their content. I won't mention them here, but people at certain major studios have been trying to get things like Unreal for 10+ years and never get approval to receive licenses for it and they never do because higher ups don't believe they'd see a monetary return on investment. Their content is so profitable that the people in charge don't really give a fuck. In case I didn't make it clear, I'm pretty much an outsider at this point, so I'm sure there may be some more relevant viewpoints here that would contradict mine. I don't intend to be authoritative.
weinzierl 6y ago
> is relatively easy to use with just a trackpad The last time I tried Blender - which admittedly is a while - it was practically unusable with a trackpad. Has this changed?
- ravenstine 6y ago
  Try using Maya or Cinema 4D with just a trackpad and you'll realize how well Blender works with a trackpad. ;) With Blender, it's not only a matter of learning the key combos, but it even has on-screen controls by default so you can at least use that. Maya used to have something similar, but they pretty much got rid of it. It's possible to configure Maya to make it easier to use with a trackpad, but the configuration for doing so is horribly obtuse and messes with mouse usage.
- blensor 6y ago
  I admit I am a bit of a masochist in that area but I am almost exclusively using blender on my laptop for many years and once you get used to it and have setup your keys correctly, it works
  - regularfry 6y ago
    It's not the trackpad that gets me, it's the reliance on having a number pad that catches me out. Ok, it's not a reliance per se because you can control the view with the on-screen UI, but it's far less immediate that way.
    - bradrn 6y ago
      There’s a setting for that: Edit → Preferences → Input → Emulate Numpad (‘Main 1 to 0 keys act as the numpad ones’). I don’t use Blender often, but I always enable this setting on the rare occasions when I use it on a laptop.
- rideontime 6y ago
  It's surprisingly good on a Mac trackpad, with support for lots of multi-touch gestures. Can't speak for other OSes.
gmueckl 6y ago
Maya was an amazing piece of software once. It is falling behind only because Autodesk seems to be content to just let it slowly rot. The funny thing is that there are litanies of complaints about many core Autodesk products that echo the same chorus: the software is poorly maintained, bugfixes are promised "for the next released" (paid upgrade, of course) and yet, they never appear. Customer feature requests are completely ignored and each release feels like it's just a version number bump with a few token changes here and there so that sales can act as if they created a meaningful new release.
- mroche 6y ago
  Some of us admins in the field like to joke that Autodesk isn't a software vendor, they are a licensing company. And to be honest some of their changes with regards to Named User Licensing is going to be a PITA for many studios. I've gotten the chance to have a few conversations with some on the Maya team before, and they are great people. But they are fairly hamstrung by a company focused on sales and growth than development, one where M&E is less than 10% of their company revenue[0] (those numbers, which are an increase in revenue, can likely be attributed to the forcing of subscriptions), and having to cover a lot of ground re-architecting an application with a ton of technical and legacy debt. The historical idea of Maya being a Fraken-app exists for a reason. [0] https://investors.autodesk.com/static-files/749abc95-16be-4c43-aefb-d1303672e78f https://investors.autodesk.com/static-files/749abc95-16be-4c...
  - gmueckl 6y ago
    Media & Entertainment being a tiny part of their revenue fits with the general wisdom that the market for general purpose 3D software is virtually non-existent. The software is costly to build and maintain and combined with a small customer base and thus high licencing prices, this is a killer.
    - nine_k 6y ago
      For some reason, enough resources is infused into Blender for it to be competitive, even though it does not bring any sales or licensing revenue. I wonder if the market is that small.
qwertox 6y ago
I learned Maya on Irix, then purchased a License for Plug In development on Windows around 2004, which was pre-Python support. I really got to knew the DAG very well, as well as rendering custom helper tools in the viewport. It was extremely flexible to extend. I've also kept an eye on Blender since then, and no other piece of OSS causes me so much joy to see the improvements it makes version after version, specially because they are usually linked to small movies which demonstrate the capabilities. But the few times I've taken a look at the Python SDK, I've felt a bit turned off. It somehow felt a bit like Cinema4D, where you had this huge API to code against, but never ended up with small modules (DAG nodes) which were pretty much stand-alone utilities which you could then connect to anything Maya had to offer. I've seen that Blender lately has something which feels a bit similar, but it appears to be limited to shading pipelines (Shader Nodes). There are no such transform, group, deformer nodes and stuff like that which allows you to manipulate geometry, correct? I mean, in Maya I'd build a simple data node (in C++) which had an input, and I'd route the xyz of an object to the xzy-input of my data node, and then apply particle physics to that object and hit play, and the data node would then obtain a "data stream" in its xyz-input representing the object's position, as a very trivial example. Even vertices could be "streamed" into such data nodes. How would I do such a thing in Blender (with Python)?
- haldean 6y ago
  There’s Geometry Nodes now which let you write smaller procedurals that you can combine together the way you’re describing: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/geometry_nodes/index.html https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/geometry_... They’re extremely new (2.92 I think) so the framework is there but there aren’t many nodes yet; 2.93 introduced a whole bunch of new nodes though.
  - qwertox 6y ago
    Excellent! The fact that there's something as basic as the Boolean Math node [1] kind of shows that this is something evolving into that direction. I will definitely look at it and search for the C-code on GitHub. Thanks. [1] https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/geometry_nodes/utilities/boolean_math.html https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/geometry_... Edit: Hmm, it appears to not have a C++ API.
jpm48 6y ago
I think one of the main issues for Big studios is the whole pipeline is based around Maya / Houdini and it is easy to get artists who know these tools. It's hard to switch and takes time (see how many studios are still using Python 2.x as a switch to 3 will break so much). I know a lot of people are beginning to look at blender (mainly due to cost and the new licensing models from Autodesk). It is really expensive for studios to use now.
dagmx 6y ago
Blender has a lot of things lacking however: * It too is crash happy just in different ways. However Maya scales better with large scenes than Blender does and that's key * Blenders licensing is a deterrent. Very few people want to deal with GPL. * Blender is not good for extensibility if you're looking for performance. The API is unstable and exposed only via Python. Studios need to extend the DCCs and Blender doesn't allow for it in the way they need unless they fork the whole app. *Blender has no professional support contract. This is very important for studios. I think Blender is awesome, but a lot of the stuff that makes it appeal to freelancers doesn't appeal to big studios. In some cases like the licensing, it pushes them away.
- actinium226 6y ago
  > * Blenders licensing is a deterrent. Very few people want to deal with GPL. Why would a studio care about this? A tech firm would certainly care, but the entertainment industry? They probably don't know what GPL is and would probably just associate it with "free"
  - mroche 6y ago
    I can assure you that legal teams in studios are just as aware as those in the tech field, even with the (for the most part) distinct lack of apparent software distribution. Even if it's just for internal consumption, legal likes to know what's going on and where it might impact them later. However, the GPL and other copyleft software will not for the most part have much of an effect on studios unless they sharing some of their IP they've created with the broader community, partners, and/or proprietary software vendors.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    GPL may as well mean radioactive as far as legal is concerned. A friend worked at a company where they banned GIMP as they feared that editing logos and other trademarks in it could invalidate them. Even working for a tech company, I don't think I would suggest using anything GPL as it would cause a fuss.
    - 6y ago
127 6y ago
Yes, Blender is an amazing project and great 3D production software for being free. However there are many issues that remain unresolved after years. Viewport performance being one of them. There seems to be at least to an extent a mode of development where fun new things get done but old, boring, more critical issues will not. I give all credit to Blender developers for doing the old, boring and important things. It's just very frustrating waiting for years and realizing that what was the vision a couple of years ago, very few things actually got done.
- mattnewton 6y ago
  Presumably this happens because it’s mostly volunteer labour right? Hiring a person to solve those boring old but important-to-your-business issues seems like it could pay off at a certain number of maya licenses. My guess is it mostly doesn’t happen because these shops aren’t in the software business and don’t want to be, so don’t know how to value engineers and don’t want to spend money on engineering they aren’t sure will pay off in this fiscal year.
  - edflsafoiewq 6y ago
    Blender is mostly developed by paid devs I think.
    - rguetzkow 6y ago
      I think there are quite a lot more developers contributing to the project than those employed by the Foundation or supported by developer grants [0]. However, the complex changes on the roadmap of Blender's development are planned and implemented by the core team. [0]: https://www.blender.org/about/credits/ https://www.blender.org/about/credits/
      - mattnewton 6y ago
        Huh, TIL, thank you
- mkaic 6y ago
Olumde 6y ago
Maya's grip on the VFX companies is, I suspect, in part due to how Maya has been built into the pipelines and tools that many companies use, which is only possible because of Maya's fantastic API. I haven't used the API in anger in about 10 years, but it was amazing back them. Very well designed. Now if Blender had a comparable API that VFX studios could build on Blender would have a better shot at eating Maya's lunch. I predict that smaller companies with smaller budgets and almost no custom software will be the early adopters of Blenders and will pave the way for bigger companies.
abledon 6y ago
Maya's UI is like it is stuck on Windows95 and can't get up

bredren 6y ago

Thanks for this feedback. Maya has been around forever. I think I had the initial release crash on me when in the late 90s. I figured it was the warez back then! Would you mind sharing what kind of character work you've done previously (hobby or pro) and what types of topics or projects drive you to use Blender for conceptualization?

ravenstine 6y ago
Probably not because it was warez. I know people who work with Maya in productions; everybody knows that Maya is crash prone to varying extents. It's the least reliable software I've ever used. It does a TON, and it's otherwise pretty awesome, but it's embarrassingly buggy. I never really got to work with it in a professional space, but before software development I wanted to do character animation and went to school for it. Outside of assignments, I did a bunch of hobby projects both with just animation and sculpting. I was particularly interested in mixing CGI with live action, and there were some things I did with modeling and rigging things like monsters, filming footage, resolving camera motion, and compositing rendered animation into the video. Was both a lot of fun and horribly difficult. These days I it's much easier since software for resolving camera motion has improved by orders of magnitude. There was a studio I worked at briefly, but it was a pretty crappy deal and I decided to just ditch that field for software development, which I am much better at anyway.
- bredren 6y ago
  :) It was hard to tell what was what back then. Thanks for sharing those notes on your character animation background. I'm curious what drove you to be interested in mixing CGI / live action. Jurassic Park, perhaps? When I was a kid Roger Rabbit and Cool World were amazing to me. JP's CGI seemed different, as though the dinosaurs were real.
  - ravenstine 6y ago
    It was The Incredibles. That and my father was and still is an animator. But The Incredibles really got me interested because it was both pretty advanced for its time and had what I still consider to be a more mature storyline than even most animated films today. I definitely know what you mean about Roger Rabbit!
  - ravenstine 6y ago
    Oh, I also didn't catch this: > what types of topics or projects drive you to use Blender for conceptualization? So I often have hobby projects (that I sometimes complete, heh) where I would rather sketch it out in Blender so I could more easily figure out what it is I want to build. Sure, I could be using something like Solidworks, but I've just never felt like I needed a full on CAD suite to do what I need. The process helps me design physical objects and decide what parts I'll need to either buy or 3D print. One such example is a 16mm film scanner I've been meaning to build. I have a 16mm projector and collect 16mm films, and some films you can find on eBay are kind of obscure. So I thought it would be fun to build something to scan them since it would use my programming talent and involve controlling stepper motors. That was actually where I gave up on Maya completely. I had used Blender for some things already so the transition was pretty easy, but I have more experience in Maya overall. After having it crash on something basic, not even potentially weird operations like booleans (which every other 3D software package gets right), I decided to abandon Maya entirely and hopefully I won't ever have to look back.

monkmartinez 6y ago

Just an observation and a point of discussion regarding the big studios. Disclaimer, I am not in this space professionally, but I listen to a LOT of podcasts about VR/AR which spills into all of these topics. Do you see a push away from Maya and 3DS max for a more platform agnostic modeling environment? Blender seems to be mentioned all over the place for beginners. From what I am hearing on podcasts, Unreal Game engine is making a big push into film/animation production in addition to its impressive game credits. As long as you can export an FBX file UE4/5 should be a great pipeline, or do I have it wrong?

gmueckl 6y ago
The problem with UE4 in film/animation is about the the place it should occupy in the pipeline. Being a game engine at its core, it's fundamentally designed to ingest models and render images. So its natural place is at the end of the pipeline. There's no really good roundtrip capabilties that let you e.g. export a scene that was created in UE for use in other tools. So despite the interactivity that would let you e.g. block out a scene with awesome real time feedback, there's no good way to get the data out into a different animation or lighting tool for final touchups before it goes to an offline renderer. This is why some big animiation studios have invested a lot of effort into in-house realtime preview renderers that attach to their tool pipelines with less friction.
- ravenstine 6y ago
  That's an excellent point about why they would rather write their own in-house software. Of course they then get saddled with having to support all of that software and may struggle to do so, which is another problem in itself.
ravenstine 6y ago
I'm not in the field myself, though animation was my original career and I know people who work in feature animation. To answer your question, the field has been sloooowly diversifying in some ways, as you say with Unreal (particularly since Unreal's engine is fast and good for real-time previews), but I don't see a huge push for moving away from does-it-all packages like Maya or 3DS Max. The economic incentive isn't there. Studios have figured out how to make their money and are comfortable with the pipelines that they already have. This isn't to say their pipelines are good. In fact, many of you would be shocked at just how bad most animation pipelines are at big studios. Not only are they way too vendor-locked (as is kind of the case with Maya), but they don't want to pay an adequate salary for qualified software engineers who can build better pipelines and write more software that's agnostic. Of course, I'm making sweeping generalizations, but this is the kind of story I've heard more often than not. Pixar is known for having good practices and they write (and sell) their own software, but I don't closely know anyone who has worked there. It's going to take a decline in the field of animation before studios realize that they're basically stuck in 2006 in terms of how their artists are working to make their content. I won't mention them here, but people at certain major studios have been trying to get things like Unreal for 10+ years and never get approval to receive licenses for it and they never do because higher ups don't believe they'd see a monetary return on investment. Their content is so profitable that the people in charge don't really give a fuck. In case I didn't make it clear, I'm pretty much an outsider at this point, so I'm sure there may be some more relevant viewpoints here that would contradict mine. I don't intend to be authoritative.

weinzierl 6y ago

> is relatively easy to use with just a trackpad The last time I tried Blender - which admittedly is a while - it was practically unusable with a trackpad. Has this changed?

ravenstine 6y ago
Try using Maya or Cinema 4D with just a trackpad and you'll realize how well Blender works with a trackpad. ;) With Blender, it's not only a matter of learning the key combos, but it even has on-screen controls by default so you can at least use that. Maya used to have something similar, but they pretty much got rid of it. It's possible to configure Maya to make it easier to use with a trackpad, but the configuration for doing so is horribly obtuse and messes with mouse usage.
blensor 6y ago
I admit I am a bit of a masochist in that area but I am almost exclusively using blender on my laptop for many years and once you get used to it and have setup your keys correctly, it works
- regularfry 6y ago
  It's not the trackpad that gets me, it's the reliance on having a number pad that catches me out. Ok, it's not a reliance per se because you can control the view with the on-screen UI, but it's far less immediate that way.
  - bradrn 6y ago
    There’s a setting for that: Edit → Preferences → Input → Emulate Numpad (‘Main 1 to 0 keys act as the numpad ones’). I don’t use Blender often, but I always enable this setting on the rare occasions when I use it on a laptop.
rideontime 6y ago
It's surprisingly good on a Mac trackpad, with support for lots of multi-touch gestures. Can't speak for other OSes.

gmueckl 6y ago

Maya was an amazing piece of software once. It is falling behind only because Autodesk seems to be content to just let it slowly rot. The funny thing is that there are litanies of complaints about many core Autodesk products that echo the same chorus: the software is poorly maintained, bugfixes are promised "for the next released" (paid upgrade, of course) and yet, they never appear. Customer feature requests are completely ignored and each release feels like it's just a version number bump with a few token changes here and there so that sales can act as if they created a meaningful new release.

mroche 6y ago
Some of us admins in the field like to joke that Autodesk isn't a software vendor, they are a licensing company. And to be honest some of their changes with regards to Named User Licensing is going to be a PITA for many studios. I've gotten the chance to have a few conversations with some on the Maya team before, and they are great people. But they are fairly hamstrung by a company focused on sales and growth than development, one where M&E is less than 10% of their company revenue[0] (those numbers, which are an increase in revenue, can likely be attributed to the forcing of subscriptions), and having to cover a lot of ground re-architecting an application with a ton of technical and legacy debt. The historical idea of Maya being a Fraken-app exists for a reason. [0] https://investors.autodesk.com/static-files/749abc95-16be-4c43-aefb-d1303672e78f https://investors.autodesk.com/static-files/749abc95-16be-4c...
- gmueckl 6y ago
  Media & Entertainment being a tiny part of their revenue fits with the general wisdom that the market for general purpose 3D software is virtually non-existent. The software is costly to build and maintain and combined with a small customer base and thus high licencing prices, this is a killer.
  - nine_k 6y ago
    For some reason, enough resources is infused into Blender for it to be competitive, even though it does not bring any sales or licensing revenue. I wonder if the market is that small.

qwertox 6y ago

I learned Maya on Irix, then purchased a License for Plug In development on Windows around 2004, which was pre-Python support. I really got to knew the DAG very well, as well as rendering custom helper tools in the viewport. It was extremely flexible to extend. I've also kept an eye on Blender since then, and no other piece of OSS causes me so much joy to see the improvements it makes version after version, specially because they are usually linked to small movies which demonstrate the capabilities. But the few times I've taken a look at the Python SDK, I've felt a bit turned off. It somehow felt a bit like Cinema4D, where you had this huge API to code against, but never ended up with small modules (DAG nodes) which were pretty much stand-alone utilities which you could then connect to anything Maya had to offer. I've seen that Blender lately has something which feels a bit similar, but it appears to be limited to shading pipelines (Shader Nodes). There are no such transform, group, deformer nodes and stuff like that which allows you to manipulate geometry, correct? I mean, in Maya I'd build a simple data node (in C++) which had an input, and I'd route the xyz of an object to the xzy-input of my data node, and then apply particle physics to that object and hit play, and the data node would then obtain a "data stream" in its xyz-input representing the object's position, as a very trivial example. Even vertices could be "streamed" into such data nodes. How would I do such a thing in Blender (with Python)?

haldean 6y ago
There’s Geometry Nodes now which let you write smaller procedurals that you can combine together the way you’re describing: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/geometry_nodes/index.html https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/geometry_... They’re extremely new (2.92 I think) so the framework is there but there aren’t many nodes yet; 2.93 introduced a whole bunch of new nodes though.
- qwertox 6y ago
  Excellent! The fact that there's something as basic as the Boolean Math node [1] kind of shows that this is something evolving into that direction. I will definitely look at it and search for the C-code on GitHub. Thanks. [1] https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/geometry_nodes/utilities/boolean_math.html https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/geometry_... Edit: Hmm, it appears to not have a C++ API.

jpm48 6y ago

I think one of the main issues for Big studios is the whole pipeline is based around Maya / Houdini and it is easy to get artists who know these tools. It's hard to switch and takes time (see how many studios are still using Python 2.x as a switch to 3 will break so much). I know a lot of people are beginning to look at blender (mainly due to cost and the new licensing models from Autodesk). It is really expensive for studios to use now.

dagmx 6y ago

Blender has a lot of things lacking however: * It too is crash happy just in different ways. However Maya scales better with large scenes than Blender does and that's key * Blenders licensing is a deterrent. Very few people want to deal with GPL. * Blender is not good for extensibility if you're looking for performance. The API is unstable and exposed only via Python. Studios need to extend the DCCs and Blender doesn't allow for it in the way they need unless they fork the whole app. *Blender has no professional support contract. This is very important for studios. I think Blender is awesome, but a lot of the stuff that makes it appeal to freelancers doesn't appeal to big studios. In some cases like the licensing, it pushes them away.

actinium226 6y ago
> * Blenders licensing is a deterrent. Very few people want to deal with GPL. Why would a studio care about this? A tech firm would certainly care, but the entertainment industry? They probably don't know what GPL is and would probably just associate it with "free"
- mroche 6y ago
  I can assure you that legal teams in studios are just as aware as those in the tech field, even with the (for the most part) distinct lack of apparent software distribution. Even if it's just for internal consumption, legal likes to know what's going on and where it might impact them later. However, the GPL and other copyleft software will not for the most part have much of an effect on studios unless they sharing some of their IP they've created with the broader community, partners, and/or proprietary software vendors.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  GPL may as well mean radioactive as far as legal is concerned. A friend worked at a company where they banned GIMP as they feared that editing logos and other trademarks in it could invalidate them. Even working for a tech company, I don't think I would suggest using anything GPL as it would cause a fuss.
  - 6y ago

127 6y ago

Yes, Blender is an amazing project and great 3D production software for being free. However there are many issues that remain unresolved after years. Viewport performance being one of them. There seems to be at least to an extent a mode of development where fun new things get done but old, boring, more critical issues will not. I give all credit to Blender developers for doing the old, boring and important things. It's just very frustrating waiting for years and realizing that what was the vision a couple of years ago, very few things actually got done.

mattnewton 6y ago
Presumably this happens because it’s mostly volunteer labour right? Hiring a person to solve those boring old but important-to-your-business issues seems like it could pay off at a certain number of maya licenses. My guess is it mostly doesn’t happen because these shops aren’t in the software business and don’t want to be, so don’t know how to value engineers and don’t want to spend money on engineering they aren’t sure will pay off in this fiscal year.
- edflsafoiewq 6y ago
  Blender is mostly developed by paid devs I think.
  - rguetzkow 6y ago
    I think there are quite a lot more developers contributing to the project than those employed by the Foundation or supported by developer grants [0]. However, the complex changes on the roadmap of Blender's development are planned and implemented by the core team. [0]: https://www.blender.org/about/credits/ https://www.blender.org/about/credits/
    - mattnewton 6y ago
      Huh, TIL, thank you
mkaic 6y ago

Olumde 6y ago

Maya's grip on the VFX companies is, I suspect, in part due to how Maya has been built into the pipelines and tools that many companies use, which is only possible because of Maya's fantastic API. I haven't used the API in anger in about 10 years, but it was amazing back them. Very well designed. Now if Blender had a comparable API that VFX studios could build on Blender would have a better shot at eating Maya's lunch. I predict that smaller companies with smaller budgets and almost no custom software will be the early adopters of Blenders and will pave the way for bigger companies.

abledon 6y ago

Maya's UI is like it is stuck on Windows95 and can't get up