Is blender really going to take over Maya?
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I only use Maya and I heard everyone currently studying are being taught blender, however I have mixed views, because AAA studios are not really using blender and have no intentions as their artists are all trained up on Maya and they don’t have time to retrain staff. I wondered what others thought of Blender; is it going to be the next big thing, or just another software that probably won’t last and get discontinued like softimage?
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What small Studios need is not the same that big Studios need. If you ask a vfx supervisor what is the bottleneck in the production he wont say we need better modeling tools. Its mostly scene complexity, datamanagement and working in parallel.
Im sure Blender will grow and Autodesk has to adopt. Im sure Blender will take modeling departments in big Studios. But it wont kill Maya or Houdini.
AMD, Apple, and NVIDIA want Blender to run on their hardware, and are willing to put down the (relatively inconsequential) amount of money in donations to make it happen. They would not care if they didn't think Blender was going to drive sales beyond the simple hobbyist. Maybe. Apple's investment is suspect, because the idea of any serious 3D firm using apple hardware is still somewhat suspect.
The one thing about blender that worries me is it's nodes system. While it has great capabilities, it also has one of the worst designs I've ever used. Finnicky pins, unclear logic about whether or not and how unlike inputs and outputs will handle each other, and worst of all, the fact you can't drag a pin to the edge of the screen to get the workspace to scroll. Working in blender's nodes is extremely painful, which is a shame, because unlike it's shader nodes, it's geometry nodes are showing serious promise.
With the exception of epic's fortnite team (who outsource most of their artwork) none of them run an art production pipeline as a major part of their business and in the case of epic especially they profit directly from amateurs playing around at home and buying crap off their marketplace.
There is a huge difference between what the hobbyist and YouTube influencer market prioritises and what a genuine production environment prioritises.
We don't use Maya because it's good, we use it because we've been using it for 20+ years and all our tools are built around it. That's not going to change any time soon and when it does change, nobody with any sense is going to develop another application dependent pipeline.
The future is in application agnostic transport formats - be that USD or whatever - not in specific apps
Namely the rigging and animation front. I know there is a few plugins but from what I can tell it just doesn't compete. Rigging and animation are both very tedious and time consuming so when I got to do them I want the fastest, most mature tools.
I'm all for the cheap/free options and everybody loves underdog but if productivity is a concern I always recommend the indie license for maya. It's like $200 a year which is basically nothing if you think about time it saves you with certain tools. Of course it depends on your needs but I think a lot of hobbyist or beginners just default to blender because it is free, but I think in longer run it pays to use the tools which help you do your work easiest and fastest.
(in addition to default rig/anim toolset in maya, if you use animBot, advanced skeleton, and NG skin tools you can do that work extremely fast and easy. It makes it hard to want to use anything else.)
And don't forget it's not only the core software. But also the periphery. And the GPL is still a big hurdle in this regards. Most professional programmers usually keep their hands away from this license.
You can imho not blame Max for having a bad UV Mapping. Max and Maya are the base software. The power in this software comes from third party. And Blender was also never superior in this area. There were and are still tools around that does the job much better. Blender has really catched up a lot. But there is still no area where it really shines.
The occasional freelancer does use blender, but as the animation pipeline is based on maya, that is where it's at.
Yes yes, Blender can use FBX, but the import/export functionality for it is reverse engineered and janky. You can do static asset creation without much trouble, but its not reliable for animation and rigging, AFAIK.
Blender and Maya can trace their roots back nearly 30 years. Maya's dominance and foothold is really an issue of timing more than anything else.
In Maya's case, it origins go as far back as 1988's PowerAnimator from Alias. So, by the time Autodesk released Maya v1.0 in 1999, the underlying core had already been battle hardened and field tested for nearly a decade. Maya's pedigree extends far beyond its v1.0.
In Blender's case, yes, it technically has been around since 1994 - almost 28 years now. However, Blender wasn't anywhere close to being production ready by that time. Yes. While some projects (eg. "Spider-Man 2") used it on a limited basis, Blender wasn't really powerful enough until v2.5x in 2011. The UI/UX alone was far too clunky before that.
The fact remains that Blender has only reached a point of relative maturity 10 years ago. So, while just Blender was starting to get used in real movie and game productions, Maya (and PowerAnimator before it) already had skin in the game for a good 20+ years.
If anything, though both apps have been for nearly as long, Blender's journey is really only starting. Blender as it exists today, is a FAR different beast both technologically and cosmetically than it was pre-v2.49. Maya, by comparison, still retains some of its design and core aesthetic from as far back as 1997's PowerAnimator v8.
What does this mean for Blender? I guess that all depends on Autodesk, right?
If they continue to fail to see Blender as a viable alternative to their own kit then Maya will start to stagnate and even lag behind. It's one thing to get to the top of the mountain. Staying there is even harder. Autodesk needs to be more responsive. It needs to address lingering customer complaints; to fix what's broken or outdated.
That doesn't mean that Blender will dethrone Maya. In fact, it's not that binary. They can share the hill. However, whether or not Blender is allowed to share that same rarified space really depends on how much room Maya inadvertantly creates for competition. IMO, I don't see Maya going anywhere, but I do see them becoming a little complacent and unfocused. So assured of their market dominance. A little too so, tbh.
FWIW, I say this as a Maya and Blender user for the past 10 years; I've actually been doing CG professionally for nearly 30, but that's another story.
In the end, I would like to believe that there's room for multiple apps on any given project. After all, the results and satisfaction of the customer/client are really what matter most. Big team or small, if the issue of interoperability and the nuances data interchange can be worked out, there doesn't have to be an app war. Whether or not the team leaders or studio structure will allow for such flexibility is another issue entirely.
Apps come and go. Blender will die eventually and so too will Maya. It's the nature of the beast. As an artist, you have to adapt to the ever changing landscape. Skill and experience will carry you far. It makes no sense to be in love with any one app. It certainly won't love you back. Provided that your circumstances will allow it, use whatever gets the job done.
I think that, as far as Blender and the future are concerned, learning it is certainly better than not. Even if you're a Maya loyalist and believe that Maya will remain the future forever more, ignoring a powerful tool is a mistake. Just make sure that you've mastered one before you move onto the next.
As far as trueSpace goes... They were pioneers to a certain extent. However, in truth, Caligari were really just the masters of starting features and not defining, refining, or fixing them. I was a trueSpace user for all 7 versions, alongside with C4D. Since as early as v4, trueSpace was often too broken and unfinished to use without constant saving or workarounds. It looked amazing - as an app - on a spec sheet and the promotional material, but trueSpace was largely held together by duct tape. More than that, you could never address the issue with Caligari support. I literally had 2 incidents where their staff had viciously berated me and even accused me (a paying customer) of piracy. So happy their gone. Not many other developers that unresponsive and hostile to its base. (A few, but I won't call them out here.)
At the end of the day though, no software is taking over anything, because it just doesn't work that way, and no one should want it to - More options = more competition = more innovation.
Implementing an FBX exporter/importer for blender using the Autodesk SDK would be trivial. If a studio seriously wants to push Blender into their pipeline they'll write their own - which they can because they're not beholden to the terms of the license.
I have been dealing with UE4/5 and Blender for a few years now, working with character content natively compatible with the Epic Male Mannequin and didn't even need the special third-party exporter once. The provided one has been working as intended for as long as I have been using it (2.7x). I do not animate, but can confirm that as far as skeletal meshes are concerned, everything is functionning.
Of course that doesn't mean that this reverse engineered exporter has *always* been working as expected. But at this current time, it absolutely does (at least in the context of UE).
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As for the OP : for Batman's sake, there's zero need to worry about that kind of stuff or speculate about things you've "heard". Try what's available and use what you feel is the most fitting to your workflow *today*. Then make great work with it, and ... that's it really.
As for "will it last" : of course it will, it is open source. Had XSI been open source you'd have 1000s of people using it today (and some programmers maintaining it) if only just because of the popularity of Vitaly Bulgarov's work.
Great, glad to hear it. Pretty sure I qualified my post with ''As far as I know'' because I am not an animator or rigger, so I guess my second hand info was out of date.
Frankly I loathe Blender, so maybe I sounded defensive. That doesn't mean I don't want it to be an option for others however. Maya is my go-to, but I'm well aware of its flaws.