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Comment by rl3 | Hacker News Reader

I've always been wary about learning Blender, since historically it's been written off by large swaths of the 3D community. However, every once and a while you see some truly fantastic work created with it.

The most recent that comes to mind is the Factorio team's use of Blender:

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-146

They have a fairly complex art pipeline that relies on Blender, and they continue to use it despite having had strong sales for some time now. A vote of confidence if I ever saw one.

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Historically it had a horrible interface and the devs denied that it mattered. Then they finally listened, completely revamped it, and much of the argument against Blender was instantly gone.

That isn't to say its interface is perfect. But it actually is perfectly fine now.

My experience: The original interface was something that I learned, used for a bit, then I stopped using it for a while. When I came back, I found I had to completely re-learn even the easiest bits, despite it not changing at all. This happened multiple times.

With the new interface, I learned it once and every time I've gone back, I've remembered basically everything I needed to use.

You'll find holdouts that still hate on it, but they do it blindly and often based on the old UI, instead of its current state.

Haha, true fact. I felt like I wasted all my learning from the initial versions after they redesigned their UI. Never bothered to learn the new one since I ended up focusing on programming instead.

Nevertheless, Blender is a fantastic project and I remember the whole movement to make it open source felt like bringing the ring to Mordor.

I'll second that, except I liked the first interface. It was horrific to get used to, especially as there were basically no docs and I had no idea how to do this 3D stuff, but once I got used to "one hand on keyboard and one hand on mouse" it was great. And by great I mean I had fun.

Then I didn't touch it for a few years, came back, and realized I had no idea how to use it again. But this time there were docs and the interface made sense. There's a lot to even like about it now!

Factorio is great. I have never been so absorbed by a game.

Once you've build a fairly complex art pipeline that suits you, why would you rip it up just because you're getting sales?

Using blender is free, when people start making money they usually want to spend it. (I have no idea if there is better things that blender, I'm not an artist.)

The cost of moving to new workflows is what keeps many shops from adopting new software. And people have been burned by Autodesk (e.g. their buying and sunsetting Softimage), so if you already have a working pipeline based on a popular open source tool, it would be very unwise to switch from it just because you now have money to spend on a propriatery package.

Professional artists are more likely to be proficient with the commercial apps. Said pipeline might have room for simplification or optimization. There could be a lot of reasons.

In Factorio's case, they've ended up remaking a lot of their art assets to a higher standard of quality, so that would have been as good a time as any if they had wanted to switch.

The rest of the dev blog is awesome, too: they often go into pretty interesting detail about the game.

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