They're not really in financial trouble. They just need more money to develop new tools to compete with industry standard software like Autodesk, Maya, Houdini, etc.

[–] pemptago@lemmy.ml 16 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Autodesk Maya. Autodesk being the company, Maya the software. I disagree with the framing that Blender needs to develop (more) new tools [for the purpose of] competing. Maya is industry standard in animation mostly due to monopolistic practices (EG: purchasing competitors), not innovation or development. Blender needs more money to develop more tools. Full stop. Many professionals have been disappointed with Autodesk's offerings and development, and look to Blender for innovation.

[–] hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Autodesk Maya

Well there's maya, but technically there's also others like 3dsmax and Arnold that arguably fill the scope blender is in as well. We're getting real granular here, but depending on how to compare, you'd either have to take them individually or look at the product suite as a whole.

[–] Adalast@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

Ummm, 3DS is owned by Autodesk, so you may as well consider them the same thing for this conversation, and Arnold is a renderer (also owned by Autodesk) and not a DCC, so not really relevant unless you are specifically comparing Blender's built-in render engines to it. The reason I am not is that there are lots of plugins for Blender which can output .ass files to be rendered by Arnold, so it can be utilized if you want to pay the subscription.

Blender is a DCC. Not one that I am super familiar with, I'm a Houdini guy myself, but honestly it is better in a lot of ways than the steaming piles of shit that Autodesk puts out. The question is not one of quality or feature at this point, but one of capital and market share where it counts. If they could figure out what is needed to get the likes of Disney or MPC on board, or even smaller (though arguably still very large/high profile) houses on-board, then they would be seeing much more investment.

[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 4 points 4 days ago

Yeah, at this point Blender is ahead in a lot of areas already. It's just that companies are slow to change and also (I assume) they think it looks less professional to use the free software, regardless of the massive advantages like new employees already being familiar with it.

[–] pmarcilus@discuss.tchncs.de 36 points 4 days ago

tldr: Blender only raised 3m last year, while trying to keep up to industrial standard such as Vulkan. These amount of money is not enough to pay for the development of the software. Other features they are trying to push are AI tool (for noise removal), built-in manual for tech support, extension support, online collaboration etc.

[–] rudyharrelson@lemmy.radio 29 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

I follow Blender on Mastodon and, about a month ago, they started this campaign to see if they could double the amount of donations (from approximately 1% of users to 2% of users), and it's been decently successful so far just by putting "Can you donate?" banners in more places (and posting memes about donating on their social media).

Here's a short video they put out about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v7Uhoot4Qg

I think the funding campaign only lasts a month, so it's probably about over (though donations are always accepted, this is just a brief social media campaign to increase development funds for FY2025).

[–] Xyre@lemmus.org 30 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Actually useful bot idea where it transcribes the video and posts it as a comment.

[–] hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

I think they tried it with YouTube and it's dog shit still.

I don't know if the bottleneck is on the AI or the subtitles tho.