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by ksec·28d ago·view on hn ↗
Slightly Off topic: For those working inside the industry, Is the professional space still dominated by 3D Studio Max and Maya?

I just checked Lightwave 3D and Cinema 4D is still getting updated. Just found out Zbush got bought by Cinema 4D. And Foundry decided to wind down development of Modo. A lot of these names were big in late 90s and early 00s. I am wondering if everything is still pretty much the same.

Speaking of 3D Modelling software I am still pissed the whole CGtalk forum got deleted and decades of community knowledge wasn't even backed up or sold.

6 comments
The commercial Autodesk apps still dominate, as do Maxon apps like C4D for motion graphics and zbrush for sculpting.

The big problems are that license cost doesn’t outweigh the pain points. In production I can get support from Autodesk for specific bugs without rediverting my production resources to fixing it.

Blender has no C++ API and even the Python api is not stable version to version. Studios live by maximizing their competitive advantage and that takes the form of extending the DCCs with custom pipelines and high performance plugins. With blender I’d have to maintain a full fork.

Also blender’s ghost UI system is significantly worse than Qt. It also means I can’t share the Qt tools I built for the rest of the apps with blender.

And while Ton was still CEO he heavily told studios he didn’t want their business. He believed blender shouldn’t be part of a pipeline but be the whole pipeline. These were his explicit words in a presentation blender gave at SIGGRAPH.

For background, I was a lead engineer in the film industry and still am quite involved with industry development while also contributing to blenders code base. My partner also works for one of the big animation studios.

I think blender is great and it’s seeing adoption professionally but there’s a lot of fundamental things that need solving before it displaces the current status quo DCCs.

Games are still almost completely maya. At a studio I worked in, we had a handful of people who used blender but would export to maya because of all the tooling we had for maya.
was this all builtin maya features or a lot of commercial extensions for game artists ?
I have not tried building custom solutions in Blender, but Maya is built for custom solutions. The entire thing is a C++ engine and then the UI you see is built from scripts, scripts you can fork and edit. (or it was as I haven't actually used Maya in a while). And of course they there are plenty of examples of customizations or custom UIs included to help get started.

Note: Blender might have this too. I haven't tried. But, my impression so far is Blender didn't start this way and trying to add it in after the fact is difficult. Maya stays clean because any UI feature needs to buildable from scripts. By enforcing that rule on themselves, they keep it customizable.

oh yeah i remember how maya was architectured so well, and from the start indeed. i don't know the innards of blender but the python layer seems powerful.. yet afaik there's no derived computed attributes like $ball.x = $feet.x / 2 or that would require using some 2nd class objects (transformators or something like this), quite un-ergonomic.
It’s stuff like “we enforce a naming convention for all bones”, or “we do a coordinate flip” or “limit number of material references”. It’s all bespoke custom stuff that exists in every studio but is slightly different, and project specific.

I’m not an animator but I do know that mayas rigging support is second to none; we’re often working on characters with 100+ bones and 200k triangles being driven by said bones. The standards stay standard for a reason when working at that complexity.

So you're on the engineering side of the animation pipeline ?
Im on the engineering side of everything! But yep.
how are things in this industry ? are you doing low level cpp ? python glue code ?
The people writing the tools in maya are writing python. Most people on the game itself are writing C++. On a project with 30 engineers or so, you might have one, maybe two people writing “low level” c++, everyone else is writing “high level” gameplay code (in c++).
Nuke, Fusion and Houdini are the de-facto for animation and still very heavily used.

I've worked in the animation and currently the VFX realm.

I know games at least are still predominantly done in Maya. That's starting to change, with newcomers having learnt blender and anything indie-adjacent using blender for years, but large AAA studios have used Maya for so long switching still isn't worth it
I wish Blender was more popular but for the game industry I still think Maya and even Houdini are more common in my circles.

That said, Blender is respected. I think it'll get there but still has to battle through momentum.

It’d pretty much Houdini plus render engine of your choice. Blender will eventually get there especially if someone rolls out an AI module.