Anime Studio, Khara, Is Planning To Use Open-Source Blender Software (neowin.net) 20
The Japanese anime studio, Khara, is moving to Blender, the the open-source 3D creation software. "It'll begin partially using the software for its current development 'EVANGELION:3.0+1.0' but will make the full switch once that project is finished," reports Neowin. "The current project is expected to end in June next year, so after that point, its employees will start using Blender for the majority of their work." From the report: At the moment, Khara uses 3ds Max from Autodesk on a subscription basis; however, the company found that it had to reach out to small and medium-sized businesses for its projects. Due to the limitations of those companies, it's harder for them to afford 3ds Max. By switching to Blender, Khara says it can work better with external firms.
While Blender will be used for the bulk of the work, Khara does have a backup plan if there's anything Blender struggles with; Hiroyasu Kobayashi, General Manager of Digital Dpt. and Director of Board of Khara, said: "There are currently some areas where Blender cannot take care of our needs, but we can solve it with the combination with Unity. Unity is usually enough to cover 3ds Max and Maya as well. Unity can be a bridge among environments."
While Blender will be used for the bulk of the work, Khara does have a backup plan if there's anything Blender struggles with; Hiroyasu Kobayashi, General Manager of Digital Dpt. and Director of Board of Khara, said: "There are currently some areas where Blender cannot take care of our needs, but we can solve it with the combination with Unity. Unity is usually enough to cover 3ds Max and Maya as well. Unity can be a bridge among environments."
That's great (Score:2)
That's great, our blender uses closed-source software, and when you accidentally don't turn the speed control down it ramps up way too quickly, you can hear the backlash. Ugh. I only wish I could fix that.
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Not surprising (Score:5, Informative)
I can't speak for volume licensing, but Autodesk Max or Maya typically runs $1700 / year per seat.
( We won't even talk about what the plugins run. Assuming they're not subscriptions also. )
They're both powerful in what they do, but Maya is a mess in my opinion and I just let my subscription to it expire.
Too expensive an option for smaller studios who don't have crazy budgets at their disposal.
What these studios need to realize is all Blender needs is funding. Funding allows developers to make it better and
add those features you want / need that are currently missing.
I believe, with enough funding available to them, Blender will eventually become something that Autodesk will have to
take seriously.
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How much more "powerful" to make the sale back to every seat again?
How much more productive can "subscription" software get per skilled human before "free" software is not able to do art needed on time?
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I am among the group of persistent license owners that recently received a notification that activation would be unavailable after the end of August. I had to scramble and get a new machine specifically for the purpose of preserving Max and Maya (have copies of both - cost $7000 back in 2009) for as long as possible while I make the switch to Blender. Screw Autodesk - they are shooting themselves in the foot.
As for funding, Ubisoft and Epic are both contributing funds to the project, so ...
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I admit, I don't know what Japan pays its animators, but I'm sure it's a lot more than $1700/year. Granted, it's subcontractors, but I'm still assuming they're paid fairly high, at least equivalent to the Western pay for such people.
Then again, if $1700/year is too much comparatively speaking, perhaps they really aren't paid all that much at all that $1700/year is a major cost.
Either that or it's not a common p
A quick search of YouTube (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:A quick search of YouTube (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
This was made with the new blender 2.8 which is currently being readied for release. This is the quality of work you can turn out with blender.
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Blender 2.8 has a new 2D mode that is just what you are looking for Well it's new to me because I've never noticed it before. If you are looking to learn Blender, best to start with 2.8. The UI has been completely redone so best to start there.
I like the new UI.
Good for costs, art per hour? (Score:1)
More art, more product, more money as projects are ready sooner.
Why pay for huge software brands to do art when open-source 3D creation software is ready to do the same?
Keep the software money and hire more staff? Fund a new project per year? Put the "software" money per year into hardware?
Any CPU, GPU, color, production limitations? If no, use open-source 3D creation software and make more art per year.
Win, win, win.
People who sell softwar
Blender has reached critical mass (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been close to the blender community for two decades now, even got the commercial pro license for 250â during the short NaN period and I've long since known that blenders day would come. With the good news on widespread industry adoption of blender pulling up these days it's good to see that day has finally come.
Two thumbs up and standing ovations for the blender team the blender fountain and Ton.
You guys rock. Enjoy your big month!
We're looking into it as well (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure how seriously we're considering it, but we could potentially save about half a million dollars a year switching from Max/Maya to Blender.
Of course, there are different problems at different parts of the pipeline.
For modeling, it's mainly about the artists' familiarity with the software, having to retrain them and hiring new people familiar with Blender, transferring the files is not a problem since it's just a collection of polygons and UVs.
For rigging, we'd have to rebuild the rigs for all our assets, and rigging is a pretty technical field so they would have to be familiar with the software in depth, and rigs are not really transferable between applications, also plugins like hair systems would be different.
For animation, should be fine, as long as they know how to set keyframes and navigate the scene there shouldn't be much difference, once animation is done we export it in a cached format that should be transferable between applications.
For shading and rendering, shouldn't be too much of a problem, the texturing is done on external software anyway and it looks like the renderer we use, Vray, is available for Blender, but then we get render node licenses for free because we use licenses for the artists.
Our overall pipeline is written in Python, which can run both inside Maya and as a standalone application, so it shouldn't be too difficult to modify it.
So it'd say rigging is the biggest issue and we could probably nibble at the edges to remove some unneeded licenses.
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That's great! I know I'm probably stating the obvious here, but I'm sure you could write a rig converter script that would remove most (if not all) of the work such that you wouldn't have to rebuild them from scratch. Maya, Max, and Blender all have sufficiently rich SDKs and while their respective rigging systems have various differences, you could manually rebuild a few of your rigs in Blender and from that process deduce some conversion rules / procedures that would eliminate large chunks of work.
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Yeah, it's definitely worth looking into.
I mainly work on the general pipeline, so I haven't really been exposed to the specific requirements in rigging, if there are any fundamental differences in how the different applications behave.
I think the main issues for us right now would be that we have a small team of junior-mid riggers who only know Maya, and keep getting new work all the time, so they can't afford the performance hit of trying to learn new software, converting hundreds of assets, etc, in the m
I'd like to learn it (Score:2)
Performance issues holding Blender back (Score:2)
Editor performance is also about 10 years b