Our department (art and design) moved from 3ds Max to Blender last year, and have not looked back. The rapid pace of development is testament to the fact that Blender now has more than twice as many full time devs working on it than Max.
I really hope that Autodesk starts feeling some pressure from FOSS and cools off on the blatant anti-consumer moves. The whole "now you have to pay us $XXXX/year in perpetuity or you lose access to all of your business files" has killed a lot of the goodwill they once had.
I have been tempted to buy it, honestly, but it's a little bit too expensive. I use it for 3D printing, not milling, so I don't feel like I should have to pay for those features. So instead, I am gritting my teeth for the day that I have to jump to some open-source CAD tool, which will be annoying to relearn, but ultimately probably not a big deal after I pick what to use.
That's just not going to happen, it's in their DNA (and the DNA of many of the small companies they borgified over the years).
It's going to make them die, but it's going to take a loooong time (a generation of users who only know theri product and physically can't learn anything new will have to retire).
All of the drafters I work with are unhappy about the subscription licensing, know we're getting shafted from it, and wish there was a viable alternative. Maybe if Microsoft or some other tech giant decides to sponsor both opencascade and freecad we'd have something usable in a couple of years, but as it stands freecad is both the closest thing to and a _long_ way from even resembling a competitive product.
And freecad, ugh, sorry to be negative, but ... people in this thread are complaining about how bad the Blender UI was back in the days (not the case any more) ... they should try the freecad UI, it's truly, truly terrible ... if there ever was an app that deserves the label 'Kitchen Sink', freecad UI is it.
The team from Nuke consisted of one former Nuke developer and his wife. It was clear that he was a fan of the software as well as a user. Guess who got the contract.
Looks like the nodes selection for this first iteration is a little bare, but that's okay. Gotta start somewhere
Agreed, the support is a little bare currently but from what I understand the hard work has already been done and we should see lots more coming down the pipeline soon.
decades even, but I wonder what edge Houdini will keep in the coming years.
It is a huge inspiration to me for how open source could operate.
It’s been a long road and for a long time it wasn’t obvious that blender would succeed. Just goes to show if you stick with an open source project over the long haul good things can happen.
the collection of features in blender are second to none, and I've enjoyed learning them a lot, but I really wish some of the overall consistency of maya really keeps me away (same hotkeys across the entire app for one thing, multiple overlapping well thought out methods of interaction with systems... and of course "everything is a node" )
another thing that stands in the way is how easy maya is to understand as a beginning coder, every action is echoed perfectly in the script editor, easing the creation of code that simply does a series of action and anything more complicated is fairly simple. admittedly that's currently a MEL only advantage but I'm really hoping bifrost and other future maya extensions help that continue.
all that being said I'm heavily rooting for blender to succeed, both for spurring autodesk into adding some well needed features, and just to having another wonderful 3d package.