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Yes, Blender is an amazing project and great 3D production software for being free. However there are many issues that remain unresolved after years. Viewport performance being one of them. There seems to be at least to an extent a mode of development where fun new things get done but old, boring, more critical issues will not.

I give all credit to Blender developers for doing the old, boring and important things. It's just very frustrating waiting for years and realizing that what was the vision a couple of years ago, very few things actually got done.

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A friend of mine in the industry who is now switching from Maya to Blender for concept art once said: "yeah, Blender is free... if you don't count the $200 in add-ons you need to buy to get anything done."

I wonder what percentage of Blender enthusiasts DON'T have Boxcutter and HardOps installed at a minimum.

You can purchase up to ~1500 USD a year on plugins/models/textures with Blender and it'll still be cheaper than a yearly subscription to Maya. It's not hard to understand why Blender is currently picking up a lot of momentum.

Viewport performance is one of the several major improvements demoed in the linked video by Brecht!

Brecht’s videos show off improved rendering. I think the person you’re replying to is instead referring to viewport performance in general: scene complexity and size, undo performance, framerate, responsiveness, that sort of thing.

Oh, makes sense. I do know improved dense mesh editing performance is on the roadmap for 3.1 - 3.3 era, so at least there's that :)

Presumably this happens because it’s mostly volunteer labour right? Hiring a person to solve those boring old but important-to-your-business issues seems like it could pay off at a certain number of maya licenses.

My guess is it mostly doesn’t happen because these shops aren’t in the software business and don’t want to be, so don’t know how to value engineers and don’t want to spend money on engineering they aren’t sure will pay off in this fiscal year.

Blender is mostly developed by paid devs I think.

I think there are quite a lot more developers contributing to the project than those employed by the Foundation or supported by developer grants [0]. However, the complex changes on the roadmap of Blender's development are planned and implemented by the core team.

[0]: https://www.blender.org/about/credits/

Huh, TIL, thank you

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