[Daub]

I love Blender and was majorly responsible for getting our university to switch to Blender from 3Ds Max. I have written easily 100 pages of support for Blender and have been evangelical in converting my colleagues to it. Nonetheless we lost some things in this move.

I was speaking to someone who worked at a very large animation production studio. They took a serious look at Blender to see if they could accommodate it in their pipeline. This would have saved them a ton of money. Some of the reasons they did not I list below. At the top of the list are the things that affected us in our move.

- Max and Maya are insanely fast at loading large files. On our school computers, importing a 5 gb .obj can take minutes, as opposed to seconds in Max/Maya.

- In Blender Managing large files is similarly slow, only possible by using linked proxies.

- In Max/maya the Arnold render engine comes with proxy management that makes loading large textures manageable.

- May/max are much better for chartecter animation, though Blender seems to be catching up.

- If Max does become unresponsive, it has cool tools such as delaying the screen re-draw for a defined number of seconds.

For the studio in question

- any bug they encountered could be addressed overnight by Autodesk support. Maybe Blender has got close to this with their long term support plan. Don’t know.

- max/maya are comprehensively documented, Blender is not.

All that being said, Blender is certainly finding a place in smaller studios. Simply: it inspire love. The re-factor and UI re-design a few years ago kick-started this.

The artists I know have very little love for max/maya. They use it because they have to. There has been near zero new features in these apps for years and max in particular can be clunky to use. Developers like Tyson Ibele have taken over adding new features with their plugins (check out his tyflow add on which replaces pflow).

Houdini is another matter. Development has been fast and users love it. I believe that in a few years this will have taken a large chunk out of Autodesk’s business.

[chefandy]

Houdini really is a different thing. Its procedural-only focus is all-encompassing, resource intensive, and difficult to combine with other paradigms. People that talk about Blender overtaking Houdini as a professional tool have no clue what they’re talking about. It’s not that it can’t, it shouldn’t because they’ve got totally different focuses that make for a pretty awkward fit. Blenders sims are making great strides but to shoot for feature parity would make blender a worse program. So much unnecessary complexity if you don’t need that niche toolkit.

I know more people that love Maya then love Max, which is funny because IMO Max is much better for modeling. Maya, however, really is great for spline-based animation, generally, but specifically character animation. Blender has been making big jumps there though. The reason I’m glad that I learned the big propriety clients in school— Houdini, Maya, Max, Zbrush, Nuke, Mari, etc.— is because it’s a much more marketable skill for big studios, and much more difficult to get that experience yourself. Our program’s tooling was entirely focused on getting students into the big studio career pipeline be it in vfx, animation, tech art, game design, etc. I guarantee that students would have come out of that program better artists, fundamentally, had they learned how to do all of that stuff in Blender. Given my career ambitions, I’m not sad I got what I got though.

[Daub]

Completely agree that Houdini is not currently in the same class as Blender, Maya, Max etc…. It is a different animal.

that being said, it is hard not to see how much their character animation tools are improving without seeing this as a direct threat on eastablished ‘trad’ 3d tools.

What fundamentally sets it apart is that (in my super limited experience) under the hood it closer to being a language than an app in the traditional sense. This makes it more future proof than its competitors. Lack of future proof is what has almost killed Modo, an app I adored. In the end, it proved far too slow and no amount of updates addressed this fact.

[chefandy]

It’s not even like a language — it’s several languages spread across half a dozen purposes -built environments. I’m definitely interested to see where apex goes, but it’s going to need a lot of work in both the workflow and how they communicate its value before it gets any real adoption outside of some tech artists working on super complex skeletons and rigs. As of now, everything I’ve seen has been essentially a coding demo with visuals. Working with Advanced Skeleton in Maya is just so elegant and capable— between that and industry inertia, I have a hard time imagining it’s going to be the standard anytime soon. I think the real sleeper here is UE. You can model, make skeletons, rig, paint skin weights all right in there with a pretty smooth UI. I think they’re doing to lap everyone in like a decade.