The target audience for blender are artists for movie, video and games. And these industries are very capital intensive and highly regulated by limited distributors. If you tell ppl you can only do blender instead of maya or other big names, it's like a programmer tells ppl he can only do perl. Good luck for finding a job. Just like programming industry without microservice architecture, if the whole team use one language, you have to use that. Just do a job search.

Game engine is similar. If you don't use unity or unreal. No aaa game for you. (Indie games are better in my personal opinion) So game assets made by blender is always second citizens.

Because of the above factors, third parties market place products' price are always low. It's good for buyers, but sucks for indie sellers. Compare the catalog between blender market place and daz3d's market place.

Universities will only teach products like maya instead of blender, just like java. Policy makers don't care about the best interest of students. Their policy is usually only outdated. Why java? They should only allow to use Nokia.

Unlike games, you can hardly try the indie route for movie. It's either go big or go die. When do you see a blender movie being shown in your local cinema?

blender is the only free less professional choice. The problem is their target audience is so broke.

[–] th3raid0r@tucson.social 11 points 4 days ago

I think this take is starting to be a bit outdated. There have been numerous films to use Blender. The "biggest" recent one is RRR - https://www.blender.org/user-stories/visual-effects-for-the-indian-blockbuster-rrr/

Man in the High Castle is also another notable "professional" example - https://www.blender.org/user-stories/visual-effects-for-the-man-in-the-high-castle/

It's been slow, but Blender is starting to break into the larger industry. With bigger productions tending to come from non-U.S. producers.

There is something to be said about the tooling exclusivity in U.S. studios and backroom deals. But ultimately money talks and Autodesk only has so much money to secure those rights and studios only have so much money to spend on licensing.

I've been following blender since 2008 - what we have now is unimaginable in comparison to then. Real commercial viability has been reached (as a tool). What stands in the way now is a combination of entrenched interests and money. Intel shows how that's a tenuous market position at best, and actively self destructive at worst.

Ultimately I think your claim that it's not used by real studios is patently and proveably false. But I will concede that it's still an uphill battle and moneyed interests are almost impossible to defeat. They typically need to defeat themselves first sorta like Intel did.

[–] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

btw, my university (EU) teaches blender

[–] grapemix@lemmy.ml 4 points 4 days ago

Good for you. Lucky guy/girl.

Good things for blender is the community is really strong and friendly. And lots of free high quality tutorials in YouTube and even in other streaming platform. Go donuts. We should cherish what the community have built and achieved.