> Exactly. Blender still isn't the first choice for most animation and VFX jobs
And it doesn't need to be, it just needs to be a viable alternative. Everyone always looks at these projects like it's a winner takes all scenario, but it's not. There can be multiple programs that accomplish the same thing, some open-source, some not, so long as they're sustainable and have something unique to offer that's not a problem.
Sure, if we were living in my ideal fantasy all software would be fully open and free, but in this reality I'm just happy we have alternatives that are actually sustainable and don't feel like you're actively gimping yourself.
Depends on the market, for making the next pixar movie probably not (yet). However blender usage is way, way up and my game studio (Prehensile Tales) has no difficulty finding extremely talented blender users.
An open source project doesn't have to be the very most used thing from the beginning in order to eventually eat everyone's lunch :)
I have lived from my VFX freelance work for 4 years and worked soley with Blender for the 3D and much of the 2D part.
Blender has some parts where it is the best (the tracker for example easily beats all commercial trackers I have ever used) and other parts where it doesn't shine as much (e.g. fluid simulation — which is a non-issue because it integrates well with other tools).
I have been coming from 3dsMax and Maya and never have been looking back. Blender also has been getting so much in the past 5 years it feels ridiculous and makes you wonder what the likes of Adobe and Xo are doing with all their money.
> Exactly. Blender still isn't the first choice for most animation and VFX jobs.
It doesn't really need to be; being self-sustaining while being open-source beats Unity's model of being funded to cover operations while being closed-source.
TBH, it's only a matter of time before Blender is a choice for most animation and VFX, and then only a little more time before it's the first choice.
I'm afraid not. Its not as simple as that. We have a heavy competition in automobile industry but when it comes to gaming industry, it is(I mean was) mostly unreal or unity despite decades of technological advancement. The reason for this is because using a game engine to make games is no where as simple as driving a vehicle. It takes a lot of skill, knowledge(sometimes things are engine specific only to make things even more annoying) and the time to attain both of them with the engine they are working on to make good games.
You are grossly underestimating the complexity involved in game engines. It is not like a web app where devs don't have to worry about constraints like memory or frame rate and chill. Things need to happen in real time. A delay of even half a millisecond is not acceptable. And these "Things" involve changing of 3d objects' position w.r.t player's movement, calculating zero or tens or hundreds of NPC AI characters' position and finalizing their animation state, calculating the lighting on all the objects and a lot more. All this just to finally render and present one frame. Yes, hardware has gotten better over the years and memory constraints might not seem like an issue but that is not the case for games. Improved hardware only helps with improving the overall quality of the game. Game now will be able to afford to look better and do more things than games from 2003 and that's it. Games still need heavy optimizations.
Thanks for the better hardware, making 2D games now is neither expensive nor hard. So, Godot being more friendly than unity for making 2D games is quite possible to happen. But that is not the case when it come to comparing Godot with unreal. Unreal is already at a league of its own. I don't think Godot can integrate something like nanite or lumen inside its engine anytime soon. In the past few years, only unreal has been introducing ground breaking computer graphics tech inside a game engine. Unity is having a hard time to even keep up with unreal's tech like meta human. It doesn't matter how many google, amazon or apple contribute to godot, it'd be a big surprise if Godot is at least able to hold its ground against O3DE IMHO.
There's zero risk of this happening.
Godot is going to become Blender for gaming and eventually eat into Tim's margins. (Unreal isn't even his cash cow.)
Unreal might be significantly ahead now, but when Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. contribute to Godot, it's game over.