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Comment by thdrdt | Hacker News Reader

I can't speak for Revit but people are looking to switch to Blender from 3dsMax.

The problem is not that Blender can't do what 3ds can but it lacks industry standard tooling compatibility.

But still a lot of people in the industry are starting the switch to Blender. So change is coming.

People are always talking about switching to Blender (me included) - but they don't. Because as sad as it is, once you start to actually work with it in serious projects, you noticed all the things that hobbyists who hail Blender as the second coming never care about. I wanted to give Blender another got at replacing Cinema 4D for us (since their new licensing). I got used to the UI, though it's not nearlly as intuitive as C4D, but when I started working with larger scenes, it came out that Undo steps in large scenes could take 20 seconds easily. I mean...wtf? That is probably one of the most essential functions you can have in an editor. Apparently they are working on fixing that. Eventually.

C4D is beautiful software - Blender is making strides, maybe 3 years it would take, but Blender is in feature acquisition mode, not improving the codebase/current functionality.

C4D is really good and Maxon has been decent in making updates for it imo. They are listening to their users and updating stuff, even if more slowly than people would like.

They’ve also done of the best lateral moves of all time by buying Redshift, which is slowly becoming a serious production renderer second only to Arnold imo.

I have no idea why people have such strong reactions against the subscription model - first of all you can still purchase a permanent license of C4D, second of all, the sub model is way cheaper and actually helped me a ton since I live in a poorer country.

I don't really have anything against it per se. It just had that Autodesk / Adobe feel to it that immediately provokes a kicking and screaming reaction in many :)

Which license change? Last year? Blender technical and financial situation has changed very much since then.

Last year was the transition period to the new UI, new renderer and everything else. 2.80 was not polished at all.

Since then they got access to way more funds from major FAANGs (NVIDIA, AMD, Microsoft, Intel...) and announced and release the first LTS which are the ones intended to be used by commercial studios for long-term projects.

Now they need the time to use that money to hire and speed up things. Future looks very, very bright for Blender.

The Cinema 4D licensing changed to subscription which caused many people to look for alternatives.

I'm not arguing against Blender being an alternative eventually, it has great features. It's just not there yet as a complete replacement. For me at least.

I was mainly replying to the "only used by hobbyists which don't know what they are talking about" argument.

If it were true, then they wouldn't have the $110k a month in funding they have now.

Out of interest : did you try 2.7x or 2.8x , the latter is a major step up.

That said, C4D has always been pretty performant when I still used it, more than Maya or Max.

2.8x

Yes, C4D is fast and more importantly, extremely stable. It's crazy how often I got Maya or even Houdini to crash, compared to Cinema (which basically only crashed due to Octane...)

I switched after 20 years of 3DSMax. Blender is definitely becoming more acceptable in professional settings.

Undo has certainly sped up in the latest version and the 2.9 build due for release at the end of this month but there's still a lot of room for improvement. I'm hopeful that the increasing number of large corporate backers are willing to pay for development and improvement of existing features (€30,000 gets you half a developer) which will focus the team on improving the quality of the basics rather just adding more shiny.

Agreed. Blender as of when I last used it (1.5 years ago) is not usable on serious projects.

It’s rarely the tool itself that’s the issue, it’s the fact that the entire workflow is built around that tool. Any potential rival must not only match what the incumbent provides, but exceed it so obviously that reworking decades old pipelines is worth it.

You're perfectly describing the reasons for hanging onto legacy <anything>. Manufacturing and distribution supply chains in and out of China being a pertinent large-scale example.

The pearl is the story, not the speck of grit.

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