I love Blender and was majorly responsible for getting our university to switch to Blender from 3Ds Max. I have written easily 100 pages of support for Blender and have been evangelical in converting my colleagues to it. Nonetheless we lost some things in this move.
I was speaking to someone who worked at a very large animation production studio. They took a serious look at Blender to see if they could accommodate it in their pipeline. This would have saved them a ton of money. Some of the reasons they did not I list below. At the top of the list are the things that affected us in our move.
- Max and Maya are insanely fast at loading large files. On our school computers, importing a 5 gb .obj can take minutes, as opposed to seconds in Max/Maya.
- In Blender Managing large files is similarly slow, only possible by using linked proxies.
- In Max/maya the Arnold render engine comes with proxy management that makes loading large textures manageable.
- May/max are much better for chartecter animation, though Blender seems to be catching up.
- If Max does become unresponsive, it has cool tools such as delaying the screen re-draw for a defined number of seconds.
For the studio in question
- any bug they encountered could be addressed overnight by Autodesk support. Maybe Blender has got close to this with their long term support plan. Don’t know.
- max/maya are comprehensively documented, Blender is not.
All that being said, Blender is certainly finding a place in smaller studios. Simply: it inspire love. The re-factor and UI re-design a few years ago kick-started this.
The artists I know have very little love for max/maya. They use it because they have to. There has been near zero new features in these apps for years and max in particular can be clunky to use. Developers like Tyson Ibele have taken over adding new features with their plugins (check out his tyflow add on which replaces pflow).
Houdini is another matter. Development has been fast and users love it. I believe that in a few years this will have taken a large chunk out of Autodesk’s business.
Houdini really is a different thing. Its procedural-only focus is all-encompassing, resource intensive, and difficult to combine with other paradigms. People that talk about Blender overtaking Houdini as a professional tool have no clue what they’re talking about. It’s not that it can’t, it shouldn’t because they’ve got totally different focuses that make for a pretty awkward fit. Blenders sims are making great strides but to shoot for feature parity would make blender a worse program. So much unnecessary complexity if you don’t need that niche toolkit.
I know more people that love Maya then love Max, which is funny because IMO Max is much better for modeling. Maya, however, really is great for spline-based animation, generally, but specifically character animation. Blender has been making big jumps there though. The reason I’m glad that I learned the big propriety clients in school— Houdini, Maya, Max, Zbrush, Nuke, Mari, etc.— is because it’s a much more marketable skill for big studios, and much more difficult to get that experience yourself. Our program’s tooling was entirely focused on getting students into the big studio career pipeline be it in vfx, animation, tech art, game design, etc. I guarantee that students would have come out of that program better artists, fundamentally, had they learned how to do all of that stuff in Blender. Given my career ambitions, I’m not sad I got what I got though.
Completely agree that Houdini is not currently in the same class as Blender, Maya, Max etc…. It is a different animal.
that being said, it is hard not to see how much their character animation tools are improving without seeing this as a direct threat on eastablished ‘trad’ 3d tools.
What fundamentally sets it apart is that (in my super limited experience) under the hood it closer to being a language than an app in the traditional sense. This makes it more future proof than its competitors. Lack of future proof is what has almost killed Modo, an app I adored. In the end, it proved far too slow and no amount of updates addressed this fact.
It’s not even like a language — it’s several languages spread across half a dozen purposes -built environments. I’m definitely interested to see where apex goes, but it’s going to need a lot of work in both the workflow and how they communicate its value before it gets any real adoption outside of some tech artists working on super complex skeletons and rigs. As of now, everything I’ve seen has been essentially a coding demo with visuals. Working with Advanced Skeleton in Maya is just so elegant and capable— between that and industry inertia, I have a hard time imagining it’s going to be the standard anytime soon. I think the real sleeper here is UE. You can model, make skeletons, rig, paint skin weights all right in there with a pretty smooth UI. I think they’re doing to lap everyone in like a decade.
I’m setting aside UE because Blender isn’t and was never trying to be a game engine. When it comes to high-end physics sims of any kind— particles, pyro, rbd, liquid, cloth, hair, etc– blender isn’t close to Houdini. The blender toolkit will get ‘something’, but the Houdini toolkit will get you ‘anything.’ More broadly, it’s so easy (well, “easy” like you don’t have to modify the program source. This stuff is going to be complex and fussy no matter what) to infinitely control absolutely anything using everything from node-based no-code stuff (VOPs)that compiles down to performant machine code, to their built-in c-like for performant calculations in complex networks (vex), to popping in nodes where you can write your own openCL if you really wanted to, all animatable using anything from key frames to their built-in non-time-bound math system (CHOPs… I know… the names…) originally built to process wave-level audio. If you’re clever enough, you can even use all of that to drive your geometry, audio and shaders to some extent simultaneously, without (textual) code. The geometry nodes in blender are cool, and they seem to be developing them the right way – ensuring quality rather than racing for feature parity with bifrost or Houdini or wherever — but last I checked you couldn’t even animate their parameters. Huge progress, a great tool, and many people’s preferred tool for modeling. Frankly you wouldn’t catch me dead sculpting in Houdini, and Houdini has a way to go before their compositor is on par with Blender’s, even if the procedural bent makes it more useful for some unusual use cases now. But for the really deep procedural stuff and simulations, anything involving volumes, and also fitting into complex pipelines, we’re talking etch-a-sketch vs oil paints. Imagine if blender started as a purely procedural tool and only focused on that use case? The differences would go so much deeper than the feature list would let on.
I think the differences are a lot less significant with other modeling-focused DCCs like Maya, Max, and C4D. All great programs in their own right. Maya really is an incredible tool for character animation, C4D is so killer for motion graphics type stuff… but they’re all much closer to blender for their intended use cases.
Oh and I forgot to mention that it’s all glued together with python, which replaced their previous non-compiled scripting language based on csh. (No shit. Yes, that csh. I do believe the first version of Houdini’s precursor came out in the late 80s. Wasn’t tcsh the application that spawned the turn-of-phrase ‘considered harmful?’) You can do pretty much anything with Python— not just glue work and making procedural parameters. But from what I gather, it’s not nearly as performant as vex or VOPs for doing per-particle or per-voxel operations when you’ve got more than a few million. I’ve never pushed Houdini’s Python that far, though, so that might be old news. Vex and VOPs are stricter on type, but are still garbage collected, etc so I don’t know where the efficiency lies.
> US automotive design standards are lax compared to those of Europe, where manufacturers must meet tough safety-first rules before mass-market “type approved” cars can be registered for use on public roads.
> 3. Eligibility: The Challenge is open to legal residents of the United States. Entrants must be 18 years of age or older as of their date of entry. The Challenge is subject to federal, state, and local laws and regulations and is void where prohibited by law. Employees and contractors of the MTA, its subsidiaries, affiliates, and directors (collectively the “Employees”), as well as members of an Employee’s immediate family and/or those living in the same household, are ineligible to participate in the Challenge.
> “point solution” in technology or business describes a specialized offering – it can be a piece of software, product, or tool designed to address one specific problem within an organization or enterprise.
Plenty of products start this way but due to success get hungrier/greedier and through internal and external pressures expand with additional SKUs to expand their TAM (total addressable market) and their value.
That second paragraph, "hungrier and greedier", is the problem with the entire capitalistic system. If only people stayed small, they'd be happier, have more time, and there would be a wider more diverse set of products available for the public. More importantly, staying small avoids many of the problems startups often hit. It's much easier to handle the culture and internal communications, you don't need investment, and you can focus on making a fantastic product for your much more cohesive set of customers.
Customers don’t generally want to manage many many small products that don’t talk to each other when they reach a certain size.
You might have a cohesive set of customers but the vast majority of micro startups just don’t get enough customers to sustain themselves which is why they move to attract larger customers.
As if this wasn't a problem in communism with its horrendous gigantic state owned companies with millions of employees that always completed the plan to 120% and yet couldn't ever provide a stable supply of basic necessities.
I think you're being unfair. It's clear what the authors intention is. They aren't speaking "down" regarding ICs, they're just making their intention clear in terms of the role they're in search of. Yes, ICs can absolutely be leaders in an organization (and _should_ be) but that doesn't change what the role of a leader is or what the author wants.
> The proof is flawed and I retract the claim that I proved that find + mkdir is Turing complete. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41117141. I will update the article if I could fix the proof.
I'd say it depends on the product and level of effort that goes into supporting either group but yes, I'd generally lean towards this as well but it can be very difficult for a business to maintain this depending on their stage.
The upside to having a healthy number of minnows is, assuming it's low effort to have them onboard in a mostly self-services manner, then they can help the business grow in a healthy way while the team focuses on the larger and more complicated opportunities that may easily lead to nothing. If all you have are the whales it becomes feast or famine but if you have a healthy combination of small and large you'll be well covered. And of course you're banking on a percentage of the smaller customers eventually growing too.
Again, it's about the product and selling motion. Back to the topic, in this instance Broadcom did the math and they simply don't have a product that lends itself well to smaller shops and just isn't worth their time and effort to pursue.
reply