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Comment by tjpnz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

Happy to hear that Maya is still kicking strong.

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