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Comment by mekster | Hacker News Reader

How is blender compared to competitors? Are people starting to use it as a professional tool?

I work in feature film and game cinematics, where Blender is still a toy.

An increasingly interesting toy since 2.80, but it'll take a killer-feature to tear a studio or artist away from their tool of choice. Houdini for FX is still unmatched, Maya for character animation is still unmatched, ZBrush for sculpting is still unmatched, and so forth. As of this writing, Blender does each of those increasingly well but not as well, and certainly not well enough to warrant a transition.

That said, ZBrush started as a really good hobbyist tool and grew from there. I wouldn't be surprised if Blender took a similar route.

Even if Blender can't match any of these point solutions at their respective niches, I have to imagine there would be a ton of value in a team that all mostly works in a common tool they all know well a pipeline of Maya, C4D, Modo, Nuke, Houdini, Zbrush, etc strung together.

I'm just starting to learn Houdini, but with the OpenVDB support in Blender it seems like the most elegant workflow for someone without existing experience is run simulations in Houdini and then just export the volumetric data to Blender and work with it there.

It has significant professional following nowadays, including media studios - for example, Hideaki Anno's studio that was responsible for the Rebuild movies AFAIK switched 3D modelling fully to Blender for the last movie, including pledging non-trivial amounts of money to development of Blender itself.

The reasoning included the part where they can simply sponsor features earlier for specific needs.

I work exclusively using Blender doing professional product visualization. It’s really an incredible triumph of open-source software.

EDIT: I actually haven’t tried Max or Maya, but then again, I haven’t needed to. Blender’s feature set has been perfectly capable for my needs and use cases.

I think that Blender has pushed Autodesk and Side-Effects to recently offer vastly-reduced price "indie" licenses for Maya, Max and Houdini. There are some limitations, of course, particularly a maximum revenue limit of $100K/yr, the licenses can't be used in the same pipeline as full-license seats, etc.

It was used fairly extensively on Amazon's "The Man in the High Castle":

https://www.blender.org/user-stories/visual-effects-for-the-...

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5rvwo2/we_produced_th...

Most people like to stick with what they know, e.g. 3DS-Max is still very popular, despite being a slow, outdated bugfest with a terrible interface.

More and more studios are starting to use Blender. For instance Tangent Animation used it for their movie "Next Gen" that is on Netflix.

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