Aside from all the usual and well-deserved high praise I'm seeing, I feel like there's something more worth pointing out:
Blender has made 3D work much more "mainstream". I see many videos/pictures/tutorials with views in the millions(!), and much more overall interest in using the software. Not just the pretty visuals and talented people, but the whole program itself seems to be gaining traction with the more "normie" crowd.
That also made me realize something else: Blender is now the default for anything that's not extremely high-end/resource-intensive. If you ever hear about anyone doing any kind of 3D work, they're probably using Blender.
And this has creeped into the mainstream in a way only very established brands like Coca-Cola have. Nowadays, "Blender" might as well mean 3D photoshop/illustrator for most people.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hah, it's a great answer, I did not even think that far, thinking of the ease of installation, updates and command line use, as well as configuration.
But indeed. MySQL's great weakness and great strength is that it's a somewhat limited SQL engine over a variety of storage backends. It can not be too smart, due to the sheer variety of what it supports.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Never worked in Southern Europe. In Germany, everyone had Macs in the companies I worked.
In Latin America... The last Mac I bought there was about half of my IT salary there, but that was 2012, a couple years before I left. So it was ok for companies to purchase them. Today? Probably not... I don't even know anyone who's still there and working for local companies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
The palaeontologists on the floor above mine have posters everywhere about using blender to study dinosaur locomotion. I think they do 3d scans of fossil bones and the. Try to recreate musculature. Blender is everywhere.
I've been learning Blender to make reference objects for my drawings, so this is definitely true. It's simultaneously pretty easy to learn the basics, and also extremely daunting because of the breadth of the features lol.
There’s Darktable which is a pretty good alternative to Lightroom. When I looked into it a couple years back, a friend with Darktable was able to get the same results as I with Lightroom, with the same amount of effort. But when I tried, well… The effort to re-learn was too big, cheaper to just keep paying Apple. I imagine now they lag on AI features too.
Darktable pretty messed up ux thanks to mismanagement, lack of direction and hobby programmers that often leave the project. (there is even someone trying to fix it with a fork https://https://ansel.photos/).
I applaud both Darktable's and Ansel's efforts, but they both have a looooong way to go with their UI. Spacing, contrast, fonts, it looks like they never received contributions from people with design skills. Blender looks way more polished in comparison.
Here I would like to also mention RawTherapee, also open-source, together with Darktable (with is more newb friendly) they are great software worth to spread.
Adobe for a loong time (up until CS6) didn't give a fuck about piracy. Everyone with an interest in media when I was in school had a keygen and learned Photoshop, some even started small solo businesses with a pirated version until they had enough money to buy the actual thing.
On top of that, developing for photo, video and audio is hard due to all the maths involved. The amount of brains capable of that wizardry is finite, the amount of brains able to do open source work in that field is even less, and other FOSS projects compete heavily for these brains.
I think the difficulty of media programming is overstated. It’s UX that kills the free alternatives. In the photo space Gimp, dark table, and rawtherapee often have more features than their commercial counterparts. For instance content aware fill was in gimp nearly a year before it appeared in photoshop. However this is often to their detriment of the software. Look at darktable, it’s a mess of visual algorithms and sliders that have names directly taken from the papers they implement and it’s a mess.
Yup, that is a massive factor as well. My go-to example is OpenStack. It's incredibly powerful and malleable, but it shows on every corner that it is built by university nerds for university nerds - you either need to have a massive amount of highly educated manpower to deploy it, or you need to have a source of cheap or free labor where you don't have to pay for the onboarding time.
Blender has made 3D work much more "mainstream". I see many videos/pictures/tutorials with views in the millions(!), and much more overall interest in using the software. Not just the pretty visuals and talented people, but the whole program itself seems to be gaining traction with the more "normie" crowd.
That also made me realize something else: Blender is now the default for anything that's not extremely high-end/resource-intensive. If you ever hear about anyone doing any kind of 3D work, they're probably using Blender.
And this has creeped into the mainstream in a way only very established brands like Coca-Cola have. Nowadays, "Blender" might as well mean 3D photoshop/illustrator for most people.