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Comment by osrec | Hacker News Reader

If you want to get into 3d art, I would definitely give Blender a look. Literally everything you need in one executable, albeit with a steep learning curve (but that's the case with most 3d software).

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What I find remarkable about Blender is how much it's used by professionals for side projects. These are the types of people who would be very proficient in Maya and could use it for outside work (for basically nothing last I heard). Given how much the industry relies on open source it's only a matter of time until it gains wider use for big budget work.

Edit: I'm mainly talking about what I've seen in VFX here. No idea if this also applies to games.

From all the artists I talk to, Maya is still much preferred. That said, Blender is still respected. The reputation is that they're fairly close, unlike say, Photoshop and Gimp where many would not even give Gimp a chance.

Blender has been converging more towards industry standard UX practices, while GIMP sticks to its tried and true idiosyncratic way of doing things. It’s good GIMP exists, but it’s a failure in the sense of that it remains a programmers idea of what an UI should be. GIMP could have a had a lot more uptake if it wasn’t so stubborn. Something the folks at Blender understood at some point.

Management of Blender by Ton Roosendaal has been really good.

Ton Roosendaal has been a great steward for Blender. It has been one of the best examples on how to manage an opensource project.

I was active in Godot community (well still am) and I always pushed for a similar model, and it seems Godot is also well managed.

You would wish something like this for GIMP.

> but it’s a failure in the sense of that it remains a programmers idea of what an UI should be

Exactly, but that was also the problem with Blender for 15 years too.

Developers should have enough humility to let the UX design to designers and listen to them. Unfortunately, that's rarely the case according to my experience. The web sector is an anomaly in software development, because better UX translates directly into more revenue.

Maya is preferred because it's the industry standard in VFX. Studios have invested literally years and millions of dollars building their pipelines, and ripping out Maya in favor of Blender isn't going to happen, even if it saves a bunch of money on Autodesk licenses.

Not just side projects. We did two feature animations using Blender, more projects in the pipeline: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iZn3kCsw5D8

A friend of mine who spent the last 7 years as a Maya modeler (at ILM, DNEG, MPC, etc.) is now switching to Blender... for concept art. It's really taking off there, since concept is outside the production pipeline and can use pretty much whatever tools they want.

Production modelling is still overwhelmingly on Maya, mostly because of the pipeline, but also because Blender has some scaling issues with production-scale models.

For guys in the industry, how is Houdini faring there ?

Happy to hear that Maya is still kicking strong.

Renderman 24 which is currently in beta and planned for release in 2021 will support Blender as a full authoring 'bridge' tool (same as Maya, Houdini and Katana).

Blender has gotten considerably better. I think it will keep going strong due to the huge Unity crowd. Unreal shops are more likely able to afford commercial licenses on famous software.

I argue that Blender is right up there in terms of importance and significance in the OS world.

Please consider donating to Blender. I have pledged at least a low 6 digit figure over the past 20 years and I've loved seeing it grow. I don't get any returns obviously just glad I played a small role.

https://www.blender.org/foundation/donation-payment/

Not sure why people would downvote this. I guess supporting OS with donations is frowned upon here. Meanwhile everybody is more than happy to use free software here. I find this disgusting.

"Literally everything you need" except for Boxcutter, Hardops, Atmosphere, and the other $200 in add-ons you need to buy to really be productive in Blender.

Maybe for a very specific workflow, but you don't need paid addons to be productive in general. I've put together quite a few massive projects quickly in Blender without spending a cent -- I'm sure those addons are extremely time saving for the specific use cases they're intended for, but vanilla Blender does have everything you need to get into (and even do professionally) 3D

That's fair. The problem is that Blender is very much a 'jack-of-all-trades' application. It tries to do everything from modeling to sculpting to texture painting to particle systems to rendering... that's something like 3-4 different commercial applications.

If someone is doing hard surface modelling in Blender, I would be shocked if they didn't have Hardops and Boxcutter (and MACHIN3Tools, but that's free). If they're doing environments or characters, maybe not (although auto-rig pro for character work is magic).

Totally agree. Blender does feel a little thinly-spread at times. In being ultra-flexible it's also not quite fully featured in many of its workflows. For someone like me, who just does generalist and VFX work, it's fantastic, but I could totally see where it might be lacking for a specialized application like hard-surface modeling.

Nah, I never used any of these addons although I know what they do, so they are far from essential. I use "Sverchock" for procedural modelling and "Animation Nodes" for procedural animation on the other hand both are free. Furthermore, the basic Blender distribution ships with a tons of free addons at first place.

Now should Blender improve their topology tools? Of course and I have no doubt with all the grants Blender foundation got that they will.

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