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Comment by edgarvaldes | Hacker News Reader

One thing I always loved about Blender is the installer size. It blows my mind that a 3D modeling software is under 100 MB.

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I wonder if there's a consumer perception around big file sizes for expensive software, e.g. they're getting more for their money.

The commercial 3D programs bundle a lot, including: extensive documentation, video training, example files, material/light databases, example textures and assets, 3rd-party software (e.g. additional renderers). Arguably those things do provide value.

Blender Foundation puts a lot of their training materials (which are very good) behind a subscription paywall.

Good on them, seems like a good business model

I'd always wondered how they made money. I've had the (outsider) impression that Blender was substandard in comparison the the paid suites (3Ds Max, Maya) in part because of my interactions with GIMP—my impression has been its lower quality in comparison to PS is a result a of its lack of funding.

Could the GIMP foundation follow Blenders example or is it politically untenable?

I'm not sure about their revenue model but I completely concur with the GIMP experience. When I use it I feel like the wheels are going to come off, and they often do. Photoshop, while a bit bloated at 29 years old, is pretty amazing software.

I think the same thing every time I download it. I hope the Blender foundation is able to keep it that way, as things do tend to get more and more bloated over time.

Funny you say that, i remember years ago thinking that Blender was becoming bloated after the download reached ~20MB :-P.

Ton Roosendaal started out as a programmer on the Amiga. I'm probably somewhat biased here, but I expect that he has strong feelings about avoiding bloatware

That's apparently also why blender had such unusual UX (like right click to select) - it's rooted in Amiga conventions.

I think it would be a good use of space to include some default assets (models, textures, etc.) for beginners to play with, even if it doubled the size of the download

There are already tons of demo files you can mess around with and learn from: https://www.blender.org/download/demo-files/ :)

I would make a "ultimate" flavor that comes with a kitchen sink for people who have no clue and would think a larger download is a sign of good software.

What is really funny, is that for blender, historically speaking, 2.8 is massive. Have a look at the file sizes of some of the early work - https://download.blender.org/release/

I got curious, so I made a graph with the average of sizes above 10KB per version (to exclude the checksum files).

  2006 1.0          1 MB |x
  2006 1.60         1 MB |x
  2003 1.73         2 MB |x
  2003 1.80         1 MB |x
  2003 2.04         2 MB |x
  2003 2.26         2 MB |x
  2003 2.27         3 MB |x
  2003 2.27-newpy   3 MB |x
  2003 2.28         3 MB |x
  2003 2.28a        3 MB |x
  2003 2.28c        2 MB |x
  2003 2.30         3 MB |x
  2003 2.31         3 MB |x
  2003 2.31a        3 MB |x
  2004 2.32         3 MB |x
  2004 2.33         4 MB |x
  2004 2.33a        4 MB |x
  2004 2.34         5 MB |x
  2004 2.35         5 MB |x
  2004 2.36         5 MB |x
  2005 2.37         6 MB | x
  2005 2.37a        6 MB | x
  2005 2.39         7 MB | x
  2005 2.40         7 MB | x
  2006 2.41         7 MB | x
  2006 2.42        10 MB | x
  2007 2.43        11 MB | x
  2007 2.44        12 MB |  x
  2007 2.45        13 MB |  x
  2008 2.46        15 MB |  x
  2008 2.47        15 MB |  x
  2008 2.48        17 MB |  x
  2008 2.48a       15 MB |  x
  2009 2.49        19 MB |   x
  2009 2.49a       21 MB |   x
  2009 2.49b       17 MB |  x
  2009 2.50alpha   20 MB |   x
  2010 2.53beta    21 MB |   x
  2010 2.54beta    24 MB |    x
  2010 2.55beta    24 MB |    x
  2011 2.56abeta   23 MB |   x
  2010 2.56beta    23 MB |   x
  2011 2.57        25 MB |    x
  2011 2.58        27 MB |    x
  2011 2.59        30 MB |     x
  2011 2.60        34 MB |     x
  2011 2.61        41 MB |      x
  2012 2.62        40 MB |      x
  2012 2.63        40 MB |      x
  2012 2.64        45 MB |       x
  2012 2.65        53 MB |        x
  2013 2.66        55 MB |         x
  2013 2.67        65 MB |          x
  2013 2.68        64 MB |          x
  2013 2.69        67 MB |           x
  2014 2.70        67 MB |           x
  2014 2.71        81 MB |             x
  2014 2.72        83 MB |             x
  2015 2.73        86 MB |              x
  2015 2.74        88 MB |              x
  2015 2.75        90 MB |               x
  2015 2.76        92 MB |               x
  2016 2.77       108 MB |                  x
  2016 2.78       116 MB |                   x
  2017 2.79       121 MB |                    x
  2019 2.80       117 MB |                   x

Do you have years to go along with that? Might be fun to compare it to relative storage capacity :)

I was wondering if I should put a date column or if it would make it too wide. I'm away from the computer right now, but I'll put it in an hour or so.

EDIT: You know, it would probably be too wide. You can look at the dates in inflatableDodo's link (the parent post to mine). If I were to add the dates I would only be able to see the dates on my phone without scrolling horizontally. In the link, the dates are already listed in the same order so there isn't much to gain in adding them here.

decrease in size because the game engine got deleted ?

And the Blender internal rendering engine.

As a kid, i used to muck around with a 3d modelling tool called anim8or - it was around 2mb. Seems that they're still around - (http://anim8or.com/). Current zip download is 4.7mb - No installation just an exe in a zip file. :)

I think a lot of commercial applications include assets that quickly eat up space.

yeah, it's always been the case. flagships were in the 100-400MB top, the rest was tutorials, massive docs, textures etc etc

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