[greenknight]

I have been working in the CG / 3D industry for quite some time... when i first started about 15 years ago... Maya was the default... everyone knew it, it was THE default. That being said we have been on blender since 2.5 days.

I was talking to someone on the weekend, and found out they were studying animation... i was like oh so youre using Maya? they were like whats maya?

There has been a massive shift. I think there was a new era brought about when 2.8 was released. With it, they really pushed their dev fund, which helped them to get better, which made them bigger, which got them more donations, which made them get better. Cyclical loop.

Im excited to see where they go next.

[CobrastanJorji]

There's a great lesson here. People will want to use what they learned, and if they can't learn on your software, they won't be inclined to try it later. It doesn't really matter for the first five years or so of your company, and that's longer than most startups exist, but once you're #1, you need to start thinking about the pipeline of new people. There's not a lot of motivation for individual employees (even CEOs) to think this way because they probably won't be in the role by the time it matters, but it's important.

Would Blender have taken off as fast if Maya had a free tier? I doubt it.

[ryanjshaw]

Whenever I encounter an interesting non-niche new technology with "contact us for a demo/pricing" language, I bounce.

When a new project comes along and we need to make a technology decision we will, as a matter of due diligence, reach out to all the relevant vendors. But there is an "existing experience in team" evaluation criteria for these technology decisions, and the "contact us" vendors fail miserably there - their tech needs to be extra impressive to overcome that hurdle.

[andriesm]

This has always been my own mantra too, but then I never represented an enterprise buyer so maybe it is effective to screen out buyera like me, but I can imagine even as an "large enterprise level buyer" I would not want to deal with this. It just smacks of dishonesty when you will not provide ANY pricing indication whatsoever. I am surprised "contact us for pricing" still works in current year? I assume it does, because one still sees it sometimes. Maybe if almost everyone started shunning this (and I expect those in younger generations than me probably will!) this tactic will die out. I can sortoff understand it for cases where you want yo relicense your product/data to become part of someone elses product/service and these deals might be custom negotiated. But for normal use of a product or service? hell no!

[rolandog]

Yes. I highly recommend watching this video [0] — "For-Profit (Creative) Software" by EndVertex — about how some essential programs price out regular people with their insane licensing models... In turn making people's skills nontransferable.

[0]: https://youtu.be/I4mdMMu-3fc

[baq]

> People will want to use what they learned, and if they can't learn on your software, they won't be inclined to try it later.

This is why Microsoft never seriously pursued piracy of Windows and this is also why Windows was never a market leader on servers. This is why Postgres won databases even though it’s clearly an inferior product to Oracle, MSSQL and DB2. This is why CUDA is the defacto standard in GPGPU. This is why every saas business must have a free tier. Etc.

[thyristan]

Well, not really. There is a multitude of factors in those, and I'd say some examples are just plain wrong.

Postgres won out because it was better than the others considering the money you pay and the features you (in the end) don't need or couldn't afford with the others. If it just were down to learning, MySQL/MariaDB would have won. Back in the days, everyone knew MySQL, nobody knew Postgres.

With CUDA, it also isn't what people know, it rather is the existing heap of software that only runs properly, quickly, efficiently in CUDA. People buying Nvidia cards and CUDA-based software don't care about CUDA and don't know any CUDA, they are usually higher level, but the availability of software is what drives the popularity there.

[baq]

You're agreeing with me. MySQL vs postgres doesn't change the overall point at all - both were good enough free as in beer products that a generation of developers grew up on and had no reason to switch to paid offerings later.

With CUDA, you're even highlighting my point:

> the availability of software is what drives the popularity there

Like, there isn't anything more to it. That's all that matters. Again, a free, good enough product that evolved into a best in class software and hardware package together with a generation of GPGPU developers who don't know and don't really care about anything else.

[thyristan]

Ah, sorry, yes. I misunderstood and we are in total agreement.

I've over-interpreted the quotation in your post about what people have learned to mean that it is only about the tools you know, nothing else. In hindsight, I should have read your post more carefully.

[sam_lowry_]

MySQL is a much better choice for sysadmins than Postgres. Postgres won because it was easier to migrate from Oracle.

[carlos_rpn]

Honest question: why is MySQL better for sysadmins?

[asyx]

It’s much easier to deploy and has a much older high availability story that has been battle tested for a decade or two. It also has a more linear regression. The query optimizer doesn’t try to be clever. It only works with the query and the schema. So if your query is bad, it will get worse with data size. Double the data in prod compared to your test instance? Double the bad query. Postgres tries to get clever with data size so it might switch to a different plan with more data resulting in your one customer with a lot of data all of a sudden getting really bad query times but nobody can reproduce it locally. So now you as the admin have to go into the database and pull a dump that for once actually trigger the same query plan as it did in production but your devs might not be allowed to see all the data or have it locally. This is one annoying thing at least you don’t have to do with MySQL.

Oh, also, MySQL just updates in place without bitching. Postgres wants you do install both versions side by side and migrate the data directory. That is annoying with docker.

Also, vacuuming.

[IsTom]

Postgres is worse from admin side, but it feels like the only one that cares about developer sanity and doing things right.

[tobr]

On topic, this excellent video essay (?) that’s been making the rounds recently[1]. Highly recommended.

1: ”For-Profit (Creative) Software” by EndVertex https://youtu.be/I4mdMMu-3fc

[Ray20]

I think this is a very weak essay. The author has zero ability to analyze, self-reflect, and think through her actions even one step ahead.

The video literally starts off by complaining about how expensive the software is while simultaneously talking about how heavily she invested in learning it in college (knowing how expensive it is). And then, for some reason, she says that her instrument was taken away from her (the conditions were transparent from the very beginning).

Furthermore, after graduating from college, when it became obvious that studying expensive software had been a huge mistake, what does she do? SHE STARTS TEACHING IT! Thus moving from the category of victim (doubtful, but okay) to the category of part of the problem.

[tobr]

Classic victim blaming this. She’s trying to enter an industry where certain tools are considered the professional choice. Her skills become tangled up in those tools, and then she’s priced out of using them. Using another tool probably wasn’t an option as an attempt to start a professional career. This is exactly the problem the video is all about, in so many ways.

[rolandog]

Ahh, sorry, didn't see you had also mentioned this excellent essay. D'oh.

[_fizz_buzz_]

I think this is also one of the reasons that KiCad is making such in-roads into the electronics industry. For 90% of companies it does all the stuff you need and hobbyist can afford it and learn it and experiment with it.

[paradox460]

It's also starting to get features previously only super high end packages like atium would have. Why pay for the gimped eagle when you can just use kicad and get more

[flohofwoe]

Autodesk tried that from time to time. AFAIK as a student you can still get a free Maya, and there also was a very cheap (but massively stripped down) version for indie game devs. But there was always one or another string attached.

IMHO what really killed Maya wasn't necessarily Blender itself, but Autodesk's strategy of first becoming a defacto monopolist in the area of commercial 3D software and then tightening the subscription screws on their existing users. Of course that strategy doesn't work when there's a free alternative to migrate to.

[terribleperson]

From what I recall, the strings were substantial. The student version of Maya had a bunch of features disabled, to the point where you couldn't follow tutorials with it.

They might as well not have bothered.

This was years ago, so I may have misremembered.

[sbuk]

Both the education and indie versions are full versions. The educational version can only be licensed for a year and can only be relicensed a set number of times. The indie version is restricted solely based on income. If the licensee (studio or individual) makes <= 100000 USD per year, then they can use the indie version. There may be slightly different file formats for each.

[flohofwoe]

I remember that at one point there was a Maya LT version which only allowed polygon modelling and some limited animation features, and which didn't allow loading plugins (except a small number of whitelisted plugins). Maybe I confused that with the indie/student license.

[stevage]

That's why a lot of companies like this offer big education discounts, so that university students get to use it for free and get hooked.

[pjmlp]

Also why the change on making .NET and Swift open source, universities adoption has been exactly one of the adoption pain points, and VSCode being the entry point into Microsoft technologies as well.

[swiftcoder]

> Would Blender have taken off as fast if Maya had a free tier? I doubt it.

Maya's own success was heavily based around a cheap license for students. IIRC it was only about $100, as opposed to nearly a grand for the professional license.

[twelvechairs]

Maya had to unseat 3d studio. Both were bought by Autodesk (1997 for 3ds and 2005 for maya iirc) who have that habit of exploiting market dominance and not innovating but then buying the up and coming product (similarly they bought revit when it outperformed their own autocad)

[noduerme]

Unless you're Adobe, in which case you just keep making your software worse every year and everyone still has to learn it.

[brulard]

Not anymore. I was a Photoshop user from around 2000, I knew every corner of it from version 5.5 until CS-2 or something. You are quite right about Adobe making it worse and worse with every version. Today, although i still pay for subscription, I'll do anything more quickly with PhotoPea, Affinty Photo or Pixelmator, regardless my much more limited exposure to these. Its a shame. Adobe deserves to be forgotten, and it is getting there. As others pointed out, Figma, Canva and the tools I mentioned are gradually replacing it. Today its absolutely fine for a designer having no experience with Photoshop. Even Illustrator is slowly fading away as even inkscape is getting more and more usable with every new version.

[whstl]

I feel like tools like Sketch and Figma ate a big chunk of Adobe's lunch, though.

20 years ago every designer I knew were using Photoshop, Flash, Fireworks. Those were taught in universities. Some designers I work with started there. Today I know exactly zero designers using those.

Sure there is XD but Adobe is merely playing catch up here. I have worked with a single person who uses it, and it was right before they were transitioning to Figma.

It is also funny seeing some co-workers (including designers!) using Photopea instead of Photoshop.

[noduerme]

Still working on the print design side... I work with lots of designers who use other tools for photo editing and illustration. As do I. For vector art and for finalizing work for pre-press, though, everyone is really still stuck with Adobe. Their closed standards dominate the industry. If you don't deliver work in PDF or AI format... then what? You don't deliver 8 meter wide billboards as PNG files. And trying to edit PDFs saved from other software is really difficult. Trying to import AI files to other software often loses layers, path groups, blendings and effects. The truth is, for anyone art directing print work, your designers and illustrators may be allowed to use whatever suits them, but at the end of the day everything that goes out has to go in Adobe's formats.

[pjmlp]

Sketch is only relevant in US, and a few other places on the planet where devs use Macs.

Figma is the champion to look out for, hence why Adobe tried to acquire them.

[brulard]

I feel sketch fell out of favor as well. 12 years ago it was everywhere. I have seen it replaced by figma and very rarely mentioned nowadays. And I say it as a frontend dev who worked with different designers over the years.

[whstl]

Yep. Sketch was the first real competitor Adobe had, but Figma was a different ball game.

[whstl]

I never worked in the US, but Sketch was huge in the two places I worked (Europe and Latin America), to the point companies that worked together with Microsoft (a couple shops I worked for) were purchasing Macs just to run it.

Figma pretty much replaced it overnight.

[pjmlp]

I bet those two places were swimming in money then, as Southern Europe and Latin America are not regions where most developers are swimming in money, US style.

To put this in perspective, in Portugal that would be about two months salary, assuming running expenses, where minimum wage is about 800 euros, and top jobs in IT pay around 1 500 euros after taxes.

Everyone that owns a Mac tends to buy them in on credit, or with bundles with their mobile/cable operator, which are anyway credits in disguise.

[pidgeon_lover]

I've liked Icons8's Lunacy as a free alternative to Sketch and Figma. It works with Sketch files and Figma projects, and isn't Mac-exclusive or a website like Figma.

[brulard]

Photopea has implemented surprisingly large fraction of photoshops features, and having it implemented in a way familiar to photoshop users makes it very useful tool already. And that without installing, just as a web app? Or PWA if you want? Very nice.

[worthless-trash]

That is mainly because older designers can be quite inflexible and didnt want to learn new things.

[noduerme]

That's not really the reason. The print industry still runs exclusively on Adobe.

[HenryBemis]

> on Adobe

I will add: and Mac.

[worthless-trash]

You've told me what happens, you haven't disagreed with why.

[omcnoe]

See also Microsoft's struggle to maintain mindshare in the early 00's/10's, when the only way to develop on Windows was to pay thousands of dollars for VS licenses and platform documentation.

[thaumasiotes]

From 2004, which some might argue should count as the early 2000-2010s:

> But they really want to give away the development tools. Through their Empower ISV program you can get five complete sets of MSDN Universal (otherwise known as “basically every Microsoft product except Flight Simulator“) for about $375. Command line compilers for the .NET languages are included with the free .NET runtime… also free. The C++ compiler is now free.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...

[pjmlp]

And eventually they open sourced .NET, VC++ standard library, adopted clang, Go, Java (ironically), started contributing to Rust.

DevDiv nowadays is much more than .NET and C++, and not always takes decisions into .NET favour, see Typescript rewrite decision.

[xmprt]

I remember hearing about Maya when I was studying in college. It's was so expensive and essentially unobtainable unless you were in the industry. Blender has democratized 3D modeling and animation so much.

[Cthulhu_]

Everyone I heard about that did graphics or 3d modeling as a non-pro pirated the software. In hindsight, these companies priced themselves out of the market, because you can't compete with free. And they underestimated hobbyists.

[Keyframe]

I would argue it was Amiga and PC (windows NT) that did that due to affordability of the machines and rampant piracy. I worked with 9.5 versions of software (Poweranimator) that later became next iteration of it called Maya 1.0. Poweranimator, later Maya, and Softimage (retroactively called SI|3D since there was XSI later) were the golden standard. One for animation (Softimage) the other for everything else. Prices were similar. This is mid to late 90's - ~$15k for base software and then around the same for each of the modules like Kinemation and Dynamation. You'd run up, with discounts, to like 30-40k in 90's bucks without SGI machine itself. You were basically facing a $100k investment per workstation if it were Indigo2 or later Octane. To top it off, there were things like IFFS from Autodesk like Flame which were ~3-5 as much. On the other hand you had an Amiga with Lightwave or Cinema4D or later Windows NT box with 3dsmax which were, everything accounted for, ~2-8k all around. Blender started out on SGI btw.

I've exited the space since, since it's a crap and nasty business, but kept it as a hobby. Personally, I've had a lot of problems getting into Blender over the years, especially since the great UI consolidation of all of major 3D apps in early 2000's. Blender was just different, but not Zbrush different. There was just something off with it that made my muscle memory angry. Somewhat like Gimp. However, recently that has changed. Revamp of few key areas in Blender made it actually quite easy to get into it and knowledge of all the other apps over the years made it a one-week transition.

I still prefer animation in Maya though. It's an old friend, after all. We'll see until when.

[larusso]

For me 20 years ago there was also the fight between Maya and Max. But yes Maya was the standard. Our company switched also to blender which would have been crazy 10 years ago. It’s an awesome story for Blender and it community and of course the people given their heart and some into this software.

[0xbs0d]

I started doing 3D on the Amiga so I grew up using for the most part Lightwave and later moved to Softimage (until those cunts at Autodesk killed it). I also managed to get a copy of Maya 1.0 beta (it was 0.9x something) from a friend that had friends at a big studio.

I remember how everyone was very into 3DSMax for the longest time. Then everyone was into Maya. Briefly some people even switched to Modo.

Blender has come a long way from v2.x where some people started to use it. It's brilliant seeing how many people have adopted it. I also noticed a strange shift in knowledge. Like something has been lost in translation. Many 3D concepts are getting rediscovered today by a generation that never heard of 3DSMax, LW, SI, etc. It's a fascinating.

[noduerme]

No love for Cinema4D? I don't do 3D professionally, but I've played with it since the 90s (Strata 3D, Infini-D, RenderMan, Playmation). I've subbed in as an artist on some motion graphics projects here and there. I've never found anything as comfortable as Cinema4D, to me. For software with such a vast number of options, Maxon makes the UI somehow fairly comfortable. And every time I've tried to play with Blender, it seems extremely daunting.

[brulard]

25 years ago as a teenager, having no access to hi-end software, I downloaded manual for Cinema 4D and read it start to end. I used imagine 3D on my Amiga at that time. It took minutes just for the preview of the material to render. Few years later when finally got a pirated copy of Cinema 4D I found myself understanding the software quite well just from the manual and until today I find the interface very nice and user friendly. I'm glad current Blender is quite similar in this regard.

[dagw]

I used to work in the field and Cinema4D seemed to be the go to tool for just about every solo freelancer in the business. Yet I basically never saw it at any studio I ever ran across.

[noduerme]

That's very interesting. I have a friend who runs a small studio (4-5 motion designers) and turns out work for dozens of TV and streaming shows, (as well as major sports events and awards shows). They only use Cinema4D. But I think it's more comfortable for people who come from 2D motion graphics (AfterEffects). Also, I think once you're locked into Octane rendering servers you would not want to change.

[yobbo]

Maya was always pirated by amateurs. The reason it fell out of fashion is probably because torrenting/pirating stopped being seen as "appropriate" for amateurs or learners.

[Vespasian]

Obviously Autodesk is massive beyond Maya and animation.

Do you expect this to influence their profits significantly? If yes when?

Did they already "react" to Blender (e.g. by speeding up development)?

[raincole]

Autodesk changed their pricing model in 2019 (added an indie tier). That was their reaction to the competition.

Besides that, Maya did get quite some animation features lately. But in the end Blender has got "good enough and free" state and there is nothing Maya can do about that.

That being said, Maya isn't going away anytime soon. There are just way too many Python scripts called Maya API in the industry.

[mistercheph]

No matter how large the lead may be today, autodesk (and next-in-line Adobe) are case studies in why OSS will always win given enough time because although OSS can suffer from many chronic and debilitating diseases, they rarely catch the fatal ones that plague commercial software development.

Yes, the OSS development structure leads to projects that lag behind proprietary solutions for amounts of time that are measured in decades, but nobody will ever have to re-write GIMP from scratch because the market had a bad hair day and somebody got acquired by a sovereign wealth fund that gets bored and runs the project into the ground. That doesn't change anything about the fact that e.g. GIMP, or freeCAD suck today, but someone(s) will almost certainly still be carrying those torches in 50 years, or the torches of superior FOSS competitors. And in the next 50 years, Adobe and Autodesk will almost certainly suffer total death or become skeleton crews that only service legacy clients, and when that happens, all of the collective human talent that went into building those tools and human experience into mastering their use will burn up into the screaming void while GIMP chugs along, putting out a release candidate for their GTK4 port.

[Shorel]

> but nobody will ever have to re-write GIMP from scratch

IMO, they should

If current trends follow, GIMP and Photoshop replacement will be a web application like Pixlr and Photopea.

[ginko]

>If current trends follow, GIMP and Photoshop replacement will be a web application like Pixlr and Photopea.

pukes

[Voultapher]

> or the torches of superior FOSS competitors

GIMP is just hot garbage, speaking from personal experience. All workflows are destructive, the layer workflow is pointy and annoying in so many small and big ways. Performance is bad as well. Small example, take a piece of text and rotate it. After you have rotated it, it no longer is a piece of text it's a slightly blurry piece of pixels. Want to rotate it again? It's now an even more blurry piece of pixels, getting blurrier every time you rotate it. Want to change the text? Start from scratch. Like come on those are the basics and they suck. Personally I don't see it getting a fundamental overhaul, simply because many users are used to the existing workflows and would be upset. I see real competition coming from other projects. But who knows, in general I agree with the sentiment that OSS' endurance is much better.

[dagw]

Personally I don't see it getting a fundamental overhaul

Have you looked at latest release of GIMP? It's just gotten a fundamental overhaul, including support for non-destructive workflows and better text tools. Still has a long way to go obviously and is moving very slowly, but changes are happening.

[mistercheph]

I don't know whether it will pan out, or whether other major issues will prevent GIMP from ever reaching the status that Blender has gotten to, but GIMP 3 has started shipping some non destructive filters (https://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-3.0.html#non-destruc...) and I (from a distance) understand moving to NDE to be a long term goal of the project

[tough]

It will probably just be AI as per ChatGPT 4o image generations / edition capabilities

[baq]

On the contrary I wouldn’t write Autodesk off anytime soon. I’ve recently gotten into the 3d printing hobby and Fusion is not miles ahead of oss offerings, it’s in a different galaxy and it has a very generous free tier for folks like me.

Most importantly I don’t see a cross section between oss developers and cad teams to drive the collaborative features. I don’t think the critical mass to get this going exists.

[therein]

> Most importantly I don’t see a cross section between oss developers and cad teams to drive the collaborative features. I don’t think the critical mass to get this going exists.

Replace CAD with 3D modelling and animation and that was my genuine opinion 15 years ago about Blender.

That being said, OSS projects can definitely go in the wrong direction but since history is preserved, at least someone else can come and fork before the codebase takes the wrong direction.

[leoedin]

Open source CAD has improved a lot in the last few years. You can use FreeCAD for modelling simple parts today and it mostly works. That wasn’t the case a few years ago.

There was a time KiCAD was a buggy mess. And no doubt blender as well.

[thyristan]

Blender is rock-solid and very smoothly usable, and as a beginner, I won't find anything missing or buggy. It would take a beginner years to get to the limitations, corner cases and broken things.

KiCAD is solid, very usable, but not totally smooth. The workflow is still far away from blender-like total integration and bliss. Where ten years ago you could find the occasional bug, a beginner won't find any nowadays.

FreeCAD only just last year started shipping releases that don't nullpointer after 2 minutes. Even a beginner with a trivial project will stumble over bugs, limitations, problems and design flaws.

There is a huge difference in quality, and KiCAD will get to Blender levels certainly. But FreeCAD will take forever, if the pace continues like that.

[criddell]

FreeCAD is built on top of Open Cascade and I think that’s what’s going to limit them. It was a fast way to get to v1, but there’s only so much that project can do to work around the limitations of the library they built on.

[edanm]

> Do you expect this to influence their profits significantly? If yes when?

(Context - former Autodesk employee, though obviously all views here are my own, and I'm not commenting on anything I had any involvement in or direct knowledge of - only publicly available information.)

Look up where Autodesk's profits come from sometime, and you'll see that 3d animation is close to meaningless to Autodesks's bottom line, at least in terms of direct profits. I just asked ChatGPT and assuming it's accurate (I haven't double checked but it fits with what I vaguely remember), the Media & Entertainment product families, which include 3ds Max, Maya etc, make up only 5% of total revenue, as opposed to: Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) (48% of revenue), AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT (25% of revenue) and Manufacturing (MFG) (20% of revenue).

[n3storm]

Looking at you Adobe (¬⤙¬ )