alt Hacker NewsSlightly Off topic: For those working inside the industry, Is the professional space still dominated by 3D Studio Max and Maya?
I just checked Lightwave 3D and Cinema 4D is still getting updated. Just found out Zbush got bought by Cinema 4D. And Foundry decided to wind down development of Modo. A lot of these names were big in late 90s and early 00s. I am wondering if everything is still pretty much the same.
Speaking of 3D Modelling software I am still pissed the whole CGtalk forum got deleted and decades of community knowledge wasn't even backed up or sold.
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Games are still almost completely maya. At a studio I worked in, we had a handful of people who used blender but would export to maya because of all the tooling we had for maya.
I wish Blender was more popular but for the game industry I still think Maya and even Houdini are more common in my circles.
That said, Blender is respected. I think it'll get there but still has to battle through momentum.
Nuke, Fusion and Houdini are the de-facto for animation and still very heavily used.
I've worked in the animation and currently the VFX realm.
It’d pretty much Houdini plus render engine of your choice. Blender will eventually get there especially if someone rolls out an AI module.
The commercial Autodesk apps still dominate, as do Maxon apps like C4D for motion graphics and zbrush for sculpting.
The big problems are that license cost doesn’t outweigh the pain points. In production I can get support from Autodesk for specific bugs without rediverting my production resources to fixing it.
Blender has no C++ API and even the Python api is not stable version to version. Studios live by maximizing their competitive advantage and that takes the form of extending the DCCs with custom pipelines and high performance plugins. With blender I’d have to maintain a full fork.
Also blender’s ghost UI system is significantly worse than Qt. It also means I can’t share the Qt tools I built for the rest of the apps with blender.
And while Ton was still CEO he heavily told studios he didn’t want their business. He believed blender shouldn’t be part of a pipeline but be the whole pipeline. These were his explicit words in a presentation blender gave at SIGGRAPH.
For background, I was a lead engineer in the film industry and still am quite involved with industry development while also contributing to blenders code base. My partner also works for one of the big animation studios.
I think blender is great and it’s seeing adoption professionally but there’s a lot of fundamental things that need solving before it displaces the current status quo DCCs.