Free Non-Commercial Renderman

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Given that it is free, you can just try it. :)

> I think that your browser based 3D package will likely serve as the entry point to 3D graphics for lots of people just like shitty shareware was for me in the 90's which is a really good thing.

The most common criticism of our tool is that it is too advanced and uses paradigms that are more familiar to experienced artists than new ones. We are working on solutions to this.

> What does "good enough for most tasks" mean to you? I'm guessing by a hobbyist definition you're probably already there. I can't imagine an FX house or a game development studio using something like this for real work.

One issue we've found is that it can be hard to work a cloud tool into a traditional desktop pipeline. But the advantages of our tool is that we have both a JavaScript plugin SDK as well as a rest API: https://clara.io/learn/sdk

> I'd give you some useful input but I don't know how to bound the search space. I don't really understand what the point of the tool is from an optimization perspective.

We generally know the features we are missing compared to Maya and 3DS Max. We are mostly modeling and rendering and publishing right now. We are adding more animation features next. Still no schedule for simulation features.

> It doesn't look like you've got a business model in place?

We are doing okay on that front. :)

> Krakatoa?? I thought that was Bobo Petrov?

I wrote the core of the actual renderer (the piece that generates the images) with help from Marc Wiebe. Bobo wrote the 3DS Max GUI -- which is very important as well. One of the first films to use Krakatoa was Wes Craven's Cursed: http://exocortex.org/siggraph/2005-2.html

I also created Deadline (a popular render manager), and started Frantic Films Software to sell it. Proof: http://cgpress.org/archives/frantic_films_software_releases_...

But I left that group in 2005 to start Exocortex, which has its own popular VFX-related products: http://exocortex.com

I've yet to see a 3D program where it's easy (except, maybe Google Sketchup). They are complicated beasts, so new users should expect a learning curve. In my experience, though, Blender gets easier once you master the basics (while most other packages let you do a "hello world" type project easily, but mire you down with their "friendly" UI for more advanced stuff).

Another important thing that sets Blender apart WRT learning curve, is the abundance of good tutorials and help (it's even got its own stack exchange site[1] - incredibly helpful!).

[1] http://blender.stackexchange.com

You practically never can when exporting in any format, from any program, since few formats are subsets of any others. The important thing is to be able to export the information you need. Most formats cover the same things, so chances are you can export what you need.

FWIW, I've seen a few projects that import blend files. Serialized memory dumps are not a bad thing and are easy to write loaders for (as long as they're documented sufficiently and/or have libraries available.)

I don't see why you would need to have a separate format. As long as .blend is fully documented up to the point of being able to recover all the application-agnostic data I don't see a benefit to splitting off another format. It might make sense to omit the Blender-specific UI data and so on, but I don't think that really needs a separate format to accomplish.

> and I had bad experience with the Blender exporters in the past on this point

Bad experiences with Blender exporters will probably never cease. Many of them are written by a single person to scratch an itch and do the minimum they need from it. That isn't to say you won't find quality ones, but unless and until all formats have exporters in-tree and are dutifully maintained, there will be occasional breakage. The good news is the quality tends upward, so exporters for common formats are probably a lot less disappointing today than when you last tried them.

So external formats become quite difficult to specify, and generally require that everything gets baked/bounced down to the lowest common denominator - eg per-frame animation channels, or EDL-level edits in a video.

The .blend format isn't actually that bad, if you really need to access it. I've seen a number of external libraries written in C or Python that do this, and it's one of those formats where you can skip over the unknowns (as indeed Blender itself does when loading files from the future).

If you want to do 3D interchange, this will depend much on your particular application. We have FBX for mesh, scene and animation data which is pretty good. OBJ is always there for the simplest of things. ABC (Alembic) support is coming to Blender for more complex geometry, and there's talk of OpenVDB for voxel data.

Other roads out include numerous exporters for various game platforms - THREE.js, the new Khronos gITF format or OpenGEX.

You'll generally see these pipelines depicted as editable, directed graphs (DAGs) in the application. Blender uses DAGs for a number of things - eg an image compositor, and for shading networks. It also provides modifier layers (like 3DS MAX) for geometry transformation. But it doesn't go down to the core of the application which is why you can get some problems when it comes to certain tasks in animation for instance. But they are working on this.

It's a bit like all these various architectures for the web - Flux, RxJS etc. They're making explicit the transformations and dependencies that happen, by means of a data flow graph (even if it is not visualised). This usually means less surprises and more opportunity for optimization.