There's a great lesson here. People will want to use what they learned, and if they can't learn on your software, they won't be inclined to try it later. It doesn't really matter for the first five years or so of your company, and that's longer than most startups exist, but once you're #1, you need to start thinking about the pipeline of new people. There's not a lot of motivation for individual employees (even CEOs) to think this way because they probably won't be in the role by the time it matters, but it's important.

Would Blender have taken off as fast if Maya had a free tier? I doubt it.

I remember hearing about Maya when I was studying in college. It's was so expensive and essentially unobtainable unless you were in the industry. Blender has democratized 3D modeling and animation so much.

For me 20 years ago there was also the fight between Maya and Max. But yes Maya was the standard. Our company switched also to blender which would have been crazy 10 years ago. It’s an awesome story for Blender and it community and of course the people given their heart and some into this software.

I started doing 3D on the Amiga so I grew up using for the most part Lightwave and later moved to Softimage (until those cunts at Autodesk killed it). I also managed to get a copy of Maya 1.0 beta (it was 0.9x something) from a friend that had friends at a big studio.

I remember how everyone was very into 3DSMax for the longest time. Then everyone was into Maya. Briefly some people even switched to Modo.

Blender has come a long way from v2.x where some people started to use it. It's brilliant seeing how many people have adopted it. I also noticed a strange shift in knowledge. Like something has been lost in translation. Many 3D concepts are getting rediscovered today by a generation that never heard of 3DSMax, LW, SI, etc. It's a fascinating.

No love for Cinema4D? I don't do 3D professionally, but I've played with it since the 90s (Strata 3D, Infini-D, RenderMan, Playmation). I've subbed in as an artist on some motion graphics projects here and there. I've never found anything as comfortable as Cinema4D, to me. For software with such a vast number of options, Maxon makes the UI somehow fairly comfortable. And every time I've tried to play with Blender, it seems extremely daunting.

Maya was always pirated by amateurs. The reason it fell out of fashion is probably because torrenting/pirating stopped being seen as "appropriate" for amateurs or learners.

Obviously Autodesk is massive beyond Maya and animation.

Do you expect this to influence their profits significantly? If yes when?

Did they already "react" to Blender (e.g. by speeding up development)?

Looking at you Adobe (¬⤙¬ )

Blender has a setting for industry standard hotkeys. I hope we see a time when other software gives us a Blender setting.

There’s Darktable which is a pretty good alternative to Lightroom. When I looked into it a couple years back, a friend with Darktable was able to get the same results as I with Lightroom, with the same amount of effort. But when I tried, well… The effort to re-learn was too big, cheaper to just keep paying Apple. I imagine now they lag on AI features too.

Adobe for a loong time (up until CS6) didn't give a fuck about piracy. Everyone with an interest in media when I was in school had a keygen and learned Photoshop, some even started small solo businesses with a pirated version until they had enough money to buy the actual thing.

On top of that, developing for photo, video and audio is hard due to all the maths involved. The amount of brains capable of that wizardry is finite, the amount of brains able to do open source work in that field is even less, and other FOSS projects compete heavily for these brains.

> I remember using Blender when everyone was saying how terrible of a UX it was.

I remember those days too, and I also remember that once I actually adapted to how Blender worked, it turned out it was superior in many ways to other 3D software of that time period. The workflow was just too different for a lotta folks to adapt to. Fast forward a couple major version numbers, and Blender's mostly kept everything that was great about how it worked, and managed to cater in many ways to those who could not adapt to how different it was. It's been so much ongoing massive improvement without all the usual destruction of everything that it was already doing right that we so often see.

UX and math wise they're regularly pushing their limits in serious ways

I don't know what ingredient made their community so vibrant but it's worth writing it down

It’s far from perfect but it’s miles from where it was. It still has some quirks I’d like to see closed up. Side tool panels vs side bar properties panels is confusing to new users who are looking for their “thing”. Texture painting needs some TLC but it’s usable. All in all, Blender 4 is a completely different animal than Blender 2 and you can tell. Grease pencil is a game changer. Sculpting too. You don’t need anything but Blender (maybe Krita).

I switched from 3DSMax to Blender and I’ll never go back. Rigify still makes tons of shapes (max has a bipedal model to represent the bones) but it’s finally one-click rigged. Very rarely do I need to modify weights or get into the weeds of the rig.

Blender was proprietary and ultimately purchased and released under the GPL.

Is that the solution to other creative tools? Identifying other cross platform capable proprietary software that can be purchased and relicensed.

Thing is... UX is terrible everywhere in the 3D editing space. That's not even criticism of Blender as far as I can tell!

How has Blender succeeded here where Gimp failed? Is there some unsung heroic person who has imbued Blender with a sense of taste?

Not defending anyone here, and I don’t disagree that the commercial products are hugely expensive, but it’s better now than it was at the turn of the century. Licenses cost in the tens of thousands per seat, rendering software was similarly expensive and rarely included. To add insult to injury, artists needed high powered workstations that also cost tens of thousands! Blender has definitely had an influence on the status quo.

Is their a central place where other open source people or just programmers in general can get a breakdown on how they improved the UI/UX?

The 'Industry Standard' option in keymaps, made a huge difference to many.

The UX is still quite different to all the others, but absolutely approachable now, and not the complete brainFun that ZBrush is, for example.

It is crazy that the industry is still charging so much, but with Blender (and Unreal) catching up every day, their days are numbered.

I really wish GIMP could take a page from their playbook. The GIMP 3.0 release was such a disappointment (and also unusable... Switch between brush types and it crashes).

> I remember using Blender when everyone was saying how terrible of a UX it was.

It isn't terrible anymore but still bad.

> They've turned it around

Eh, the same complaints are the same as always. Expectations have improved, tho! I think that's what we're seeing here.

FFMPEG is another. Any online video platform probably uses it.

Inkscape makes so much more sense to me than Adobe Illustrator ever made. Maybe it's how I use it, or what I'm looking for as output, but I've been happy with Inkscape since around 2006/2007.

Blender is amazing, and miles ahead of Gimp and other FOSS editors.

That said, I can't help but feel that all of the current generation of leading 3D software (Blender, Unreal, etc. ) is going to be replaced by something just around the corner. The progress in 3D AI is nothing short of phenomenal. It feels like soon nobody will ever have to worry about sculpting or retopologizing or rigging. An entirely new class of tool will take over.

It's not just 3D. It feels like the current generation of artistic tools (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) are about to be wholesale replaced with Gen AI tooling.

AI plugins (eg. the Krita plugin) are too steeped in the old world of editing. New tools will probably be AI native and prefer AI workflows for reaching the same coarse- and fine-grained outcomes.

I don't expect these tools to be used by the masses that are prompting AI slop like "50's Panavision Wes Anderson", but rather by working artists. Genuine Gen AI tools for artists.

I've been making short films on the weekends with Blender, ComfyUI, and a mix of custom software. The AI pieces are doing the heavy lifting, and my productivity is 10x what it was before Gen AI.

as wonderful as Linux is, it started as a Unix clone and a lot of its initial popularity can be attributed to providing a free version of something that used to cost money.

Blender and Ghidra were started from scratch and are considered top tier in their niches. So I feel a sense of community pride for them more than I do for Linux.

The question is flawed, though, because the best OSS software is obviously Emacs ;)

This is a real "daddy or chips" question, because they all do completely different things. Blender possibly best in terms of "compared to an expensive commercial product". Ghidra is incredibly powerful but has a weird look and feel. Linux is undoubtedly the most influential of those three, but if it had never been invented perhaps we'd be using a BSD instead?

"Best" in terms of "achievement by a single programmer (almost)" is Fabrice Bellard's ffmpeg and QEMU.

Probably Linux if I had to pick one, partly because of how many tools were written for or on it and the ecosystem it's built up.

to answer your question its probably git.

Oh, I’m plenty used to it, being from Australia. It’s just so painfully common for northern-hemisphereans to use seasons or other vague cultural elements¹ to anchor things (southern-hemisphereans don’t really do it, in my experience), that it’s refreshing to find a case of people using it but being aware.

(These days I have a new difficulty: I moved to India last year, and although the seasons are closer to the northern temperate and sub-arctic seasons, they don’t match exactly.)

—⁂—

¹ I don’t count “Christmas” as this, because it’s a specific term for a particular time… well, apart from certain Eastern churches and Julian calendar users. I mean things like using “holiday” as a time of year, which completely baffled me in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23244207.

I think you misinterpreted the comment you are replying to. It didn’t say anything about the phrase being discriminatory.

oh I was assuming it was tongue in cheeks praise for the outstanding visual presentation of the outstanding new release

Open source rules the hidden parts of nearly everything (servers, programming languages, etc). It's atypical for user facing software to be open source and "world class". Of course there are exceptions (like Blender, for example) but generally the commercial version of user facing software is more advanced/well liked/industry standard.

Different tools for different purposes. Blender is in the Maya paradigm, and doing pretty well in that. Houdini is more like a DSL for computer graphics and can end up being both the most low level and the most high level tool in the industry. There's no mystery about why the industry has mostly settled on Houdini + one other complimentary DCC.

Anything procedural works so much better in Houdini I find. I was excited about the geometry nodes in Blender and had some fun with them, but always hit a wall where things in Houdini are much better designed and much more powerful and flexible. But it's a steep learning curve and I forgot most things again because I don't really have to use it regularly.

I had the indie license for a while (purchased privately) and just making things shatter and explode was satisfaction enough. I did this mostly for learning and fun

I would love to check out touchdesigner some day, I'm a Houdini pipeline TD (and creative too) and Touch started as a fork of Houdini from quite some time ago specialised for real-time (and the real-time-ness of demoscene is one of my favourite things ever!) However iiuc Touch is Windows-only.

I wonder whether under wine it might benefit from the 'ntsync' thing that just got added to the Linux kernel (as a module) (Currently also on hn front-page) as long as there's a free training version of Touch I'll definitely check it out once the new kernel gets into Gentoo!