Blender is probably one of the most successful OSS projects since Linux. In the span of five years, you wouldn't be caught dead using it over Maya. Now, its visa versa.

It is espacially amazing given:

- the problem blender is solving is super hard

- the competition was way ahead

- FOSS don't have great track record for this kind of challenge (gimp has never replaced photoshop nor LibreOffice MSO)

- they don't have that much resources

- professionals are very demanding

- the graphic space is not really foss friendly

- the amount of work they poured into this is incredible

They are heroes really.

One of the reasons for their success are the Open Movie and Open Game projects[0]. It forces them to actually accommodate the needs of working artists and designers in their tool. It also showcases the power of Blender and gets the attention of potential users. The production values are actually pretty good for the projects which get's peoples attention.

[0]: https://www.blender.org/features/projects/

I think the main reason is good software design.

It's so modular that it's very easy to extend.

A new fluid sim algorithm? A few months later Blender is shipping it.

That's also the reason it's fast. It starts in one or two seconds.

I can't talk about the specifics of the software design.

But if you take into account how the Blender project is handled with consideration of how to sustain itself via the Blender Foundation, and all the related projects, you can observe how an outlier it is compared to all similar ambitious projects that are not doing so well.

This is a bad and a good sign: it makes evident how little FOSS projects take in account it's sustainability over time, on the other hand it presents an opportunity for huge improvements in this area.

"- professionals are very demanding"

My hunch is Professionals as users might also be a benefit as they will tend to put up with bigger learning curves if they see benefits in the end. Also professionals don't tend to care as much about look of the UI (harder to do without dedicated design resources) vs efficiency of using it.

- FOSS don't have great track record for this kind of challenge (gimp has never replaced photoshop nor LibreOffice MSO)

That's like saying Linux doesn't have a great track record cause it hasn't replaced MS Windows. To be successful, they don't have to replace, just service a different niche / enable new or additional uses (e.g. I don't have $$$, I need better support&customization)

Gimp was used for a few movies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CinePaint

Linux is an exception in the non programming professional world. Accounting, project management, book edition, magazine layout, architecture, 3D object design... They are all eaten by proprietary software.

A few successful examples of usage of X (like Gimp) in the industry doesn't make it remotely in the same league as proprietary star Y (like Photoshop). Don't try to create a reality out of the thing we all wish were true. FOSS is not winning those battles yet.

The true heroes dragged the Blender code base away from SubVersion and on to Git. Makes it significantly easier for people to contribute.

I don't animate these days, but I remember the day I first tried Blender back when it was version 1.4 (I think - it fit on a floppy then). What caught my eye was that the entire UI was rendered in OpenGL, one could pan and zoom everything, even the 2d tool panels. That little detail hinted at good design. And I loved the tiling UI so much. I used Blender for several animation commissions at a time when studios had never heard of it. The Blender community was always one of the friendliest, most helpful I've ever had the pleasure of being part of. The Blender institute, under the direction of Blender's original author is a superb example of how to grow a successful project and community.

I remember downloading it on the internet connection at school, copying it to a floppy, and bringing it home. My school had some classes in 3D Studio Max, but there was no way I could get a copy of that. So Blender and another program called Nendo were my toys. I didn't have any money when they were paying to open source it, but I was definitely cheering from the sidelines!

> In the span of five years, you wouldn't be caught dead using it over Maya. Now, its visa versa.

Is this true in professional environments? I thought Maya was still far ahead...

The vfx in Amazon's Man in the High Castle were done in Blender. There's a pretty big cultural shift that would need to happen for Blender to become common place in the film industry, but I'm starting to feel optimistic.

https://www.blendernation.com/2017/02/23/man-high-castle-sea...

I must have missed that news, that showreel is phenomenal! Linked in the comments was a Reddit AMA with the VFX creators, including this really interesting reply on their choice of Blender:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5rvwo2/comment/dddidn...

Thanks for the data point and link, incredibly interesting!

Disney and Weta are both big on Maya for animation. Pixar uses their own custom software (Presto?) for animation, but I think character modeling is mainly in Maya. Also a bit of Z-Brush and Modo thrown in across the board, plus all the random software from The Foundry.

For effects most shops use Houdini.

I'm not aware of any major studios or effects houses using Blender, but that would be cool!

Everywhere I've ever worked has been strictly (and almost religiously) a Maya shop. It's more than likely inertia since your content creators are almost always completely slammed and making them change up their workflows just isn't viable but I've definitely never seen professional animators use Blender.

> In the span of five years, you wouldn't be caught dead using it over Maya. Now, its visa versa.

Agreed on Maya, but Houdini's node based workflow has ruined me on essentially any other piece of 3D/CAD software. As a programmer it is so obviously the right way to do 95% of the things...

I think the Maya thing is hyperbole, I just couldn't justify the price tag after I got out of school, but it's still def a standard.

But really, as much as I like blender and open source, you hit the nail on the head, Houdini is on another level of awesomeness. Basically functional modelling done right.

I just wish that it had as good of tools for NURBS as it does for polygons, but at that point it basically becomes Rhino/Grasshopper, and that's not really what Houdini's for. I also kind of wish that VEX wasn't a thing, I don't really want to have to learn an entire mini language to get into the guts. I try to do all of that in VOPs unless it gets complicated.

Houdini has always intrigued me. Is there a good video/article I can look at to get a good overview of the powerful aspects of the node based stuff? (without having to spend dozens of hours learning the program!)

I don't know of any good videos, off the top of my head, but at a high level, all operations that one performs (creating geometry, editing objects, etc) are compositions of functions (nodes). So, after a long editing session, you can pop up the node graph and see exactly what operations/functions were performed and in what order. This allows one to programmatically modify the chain of operations later, or to package up the session as a script that can be shared with other users. You can also easily write your own bits of functionality and inject them into the sequence of function calls. It is super powerful, makes workflows reproducible, and way more.

I just wish they'd put some more effort into letting the renderer be used standalone --- I'm not particularly interested in the modeller, but I would really like a renderer with a C++ API that would allow me to play with procedural volumetric effects.

Technically you can use it standalone, but it's not a great experience. There are no binaries, it's painful to build, and the only way to interact with it is via an undocumented XML format; and I haven't found any way to do truly procedural volumes or geometry (i.e. via a density function callback specified by the user).

Right now I have an extremely patched version of Povray, but I'd love to switch to something faster.

Look at LuxRender. It's a very capable, free (open-source), GPU-based, standalone renderer.

I did look at it, but the API appears to be completely undocumented, there aren't any precompiled libraries for it (the ordinary binaries don't contain the API), and it's painfully complicated to build.

The nicest renderer I've found, API-wise, was OSPRay, which was simple and elegant to use... but doesn't support volumetric rendering in any way. I have in the past got this working, more or less, with Mitsuba with some custom code but I'd rather like to avoid customisations. They're too much work to maintain.

Not heard of OSPRay, interesting.

I personally think Mitsuba is the dark horse of free renderers. Blazing fast, good highly modular design, good docs, super easy Python bindings, GPU preview. The only problem is it's a one-man show, and the one man seems to have been doing other things lately. Nevertheless it's the renderer I think deserves to become the "standard".

I don't know about API access, but there are a couple more external renderers listed here: https://www.blender.org/download/external-renderers/