Blender is really an amazing case study of open source software. Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche. It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete.
Meanwhile, in other niches, Microsoft Office still beats open source office suites like LibreOffice; Photoshop isn't about to give up its crown to GIMP; Lightroom isn't losing to Darktable; and FreeCAD isn't even in the rear view mirror of Solidworks.
I wonder what will be the next category of open source to pull ahead? Godot is rapidly gaining users/mindshare while Unity seems to be collapsing, but Unreal is still the king of game engines for now. Krita is a viable alternative for digital painting.
> I wonder what will be the next category of open source to pull ahead?
KiCad, for PCB design. They have been making massive improvements over the last few years, and with proprietary solutions shutting down (Eagle) or being unaffordable (Altium) Kicad is now by far the best option for both hobbyists and small companies.
With the release of KiCad 5 in 2018 it went from being "a pain to use to, but technically sufficient" to being a genuine option for less-demanding professionals. Since then they've been absolutely killing it, with major releases happening once a year and bringing enough quality-of-life improvements that it is actually hard to keep track of all of them.
From the type of new features it is very obvious that a lot of professional users are now showing interest in the application, and as we've seen with Blender a trickle of professional adoption can quickly turn into a flood which takes over the entire market.
KiCad still has a long way to go when it comes to complex high-speed boards (nobody in their right mind would use it to design an EPYC motherboard, for example), but it is absolutely going to steamroll the competition when it comes to the cookie-cutter 2/4/6 layer PCBs in all the everyday consumer products.
the epiphany moment was when the dev team stopped listening to the neckbeards that wanted things different for the sake of them being different, and started listening to professionals that wanted more sane workflows. There must be a reason if all industry does things simillar ways, other than inertia.
Guess what, user adoption increased dramatically, because it became pleasant (or tolerable) to use by people that used literally any other program.
V8 included in the core many things that were plugins before, and replaced the old utilities that the neckbeards in the forum were crying to keep, or else! (or else more adoption.)
V9 had even more many improvements, but also many regressions, over V8. V10 might be the release that truly consolidates the core of the suite and then they can start really focus on high speed designs.
I've navigated many programs over my career, and unless a future employer mandates me to use Altium, or purely technical reasons (8+ layer, high speed designs) requires me to use Cadence, only kicad for me.
Incidentally, it feels like this past two years freeCAD GIMP and Inkscape have started moving away from listening to noisy members of the community, to useful members of the community. I'm seeing a slow but steady progress that will eventually accelerate and make both toold true alternatives, as it happened with KiCAD (though it will really be tough for GIMP, even if it's perfectly usable for many, many tasks, any graphic designer will kick and scream if they're not given the adobe suite, pity.)
Myself, i do very little basic graphics like replicate buttons and such things to not bother my colleague, or apply correction to my photos, i proudly do that in GIMP and inkscape.
"Complaining neckbeards" are a part of the problem, but the bigger issue is often developer-users that has oversight (or preference due to "control") with shitty UI-decisions that have little interest or agency in fixing them. The non-movment complainers are more of an alibi for those developers with little UI improvement interests.
GIMP is just bad sadly even when it comes to basics, it has nothing to do with wanting Adobe products but more about GIMP just being a "coders-tool".
Every time in the last decade I checked, i still had to input a resolution when creating a new image layer.. that's a fundamental operation that hasn't been that clumsy in Photoshop since the 90s (Photoshop has "infinite" layers, they can be larger than the image, yes it's "bloated" but that's what you want as an artist 90% of the time.. not an annoying border).
> The non-movment complainers are more of an alibi for those developers with little UI improvement interests.
True, but i also remember vehement discussions on everybody else in the world that wanted the scroll / zoom to work as in every other software in the world, and a few vocal users that would spam every thread and discussion insisting that we (the rest of the world) should have been using other software instead.
You know, the usual hostile attitude open source communities are famous for. I guess that for GIMP the moment that will change everything is when they will add a proper circle tool /s
GIMP and Inkscape are already moving in the right direction with the new UIs, fingers crossed
Blender went from a shitshow way worse than GIMP to almost killing the competition. Those working on GIMP took notice (and perhaps those that had felt sidelined before dared speak up).
KiCad is awesome. Combined with git I have CI/CD pipeline in gitlab[1] that builds my fabrication files for the different fabs automatically including PiP and parts CSVs I can directly upload to LCSC. I also generate PDFs of the schematic and iBom[2] htmls files all automatically.
The thing I miss is being able to rotate a IC by 45 degrees.
KiCAD becomes better and better, but one limitation embedded into its DNA is very annoying: one project - one schematic - one PCB.
It is very kludgy and cumbersome to split project into several PCB (for example, stack of PCBs connected by backplane or headers, like Arduino & Shield for it) and/or to have variations of the PCBs for one schematics, like TH and SMD variants of the PCB for exactly same schematics.
Even in my very modest almost-electrical (as opposed to electronic) projects I need one or another from time to time.
As far as I understand it is limitation which is not easy to fix, because all architecture of KiCAD is based on this 1-1-1 principle.
My workaround for multiple PCB's for one schematic is to have the schematic as a top level sheet which can then be imported into sub-level projects. so each PCB becomes it's own project but use the common schematic sheet
For those switching from an $EXPENSIVE tool to KiCad, may I humbly recommend donating to the project, or sponsoring the development/improvement of a feature you need? Even if it's much less than your current $EXPENSIVE license, it will make a huge difference.
Yeah, KiCad has improved immensely in the past 5 years. It still has a long way to go to really compete with Altium et. al. though. The thing is: Altium is basically finished software. They keep trying to add features to it but I'm certain if you polled the users the only thing they really want is fewer crashes and bugs. Every year KiCad gets closer and closer.
> Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche.
I can think of a few more: Git obsoleted an entire category of commercial software seemingly almost overnight, VSCode has become by far the most widely used IDE (not entirely open source, though), TeX still dominates mathematical typesetting AFAIK (as it has for as long as computers have been used for that), (lib)ffmpeg is used everywhere for video/audio transcoding and between them nginx and apache still account for the majority of webservers. Most popular programming language compilers/interpreters/runtimes are open source too, of course.
TeX is arguably the only application amongst these, as opposed to tool (and that’s debatable). OSS definitely dominates in tooling, but successful open source end-user applications are rarer.
It’s debatable. Everything is layered, and one layer’s application/product is the higher layer’s tool/platform.
In the context of understanding where and why OSS is dominant, I think the tool/app distinction is whether the thing solves a software problem or whether it solves a business problem.
Through that lens, Photoshop is an application, while VSCode is a tool.
So if we turn the clock back ten years, Visual Studio (the behemoth sold by MS to C# and C++ developers) would be an application, wouldn't it? It solves a clear business need, otherwise why would businesses pay so much money for it (more than for Photoshop). MSSQL and Oracle DBMS clearly solve business problems, they have slick UIs and sale people with powerpoint decks. Perforce P4 is an application that solves business needs for creatives (and also comes with P4V for a slick UI and costs photoshop-level money)
But at the same time Visual Studio is in the same category of software as VS Code, Oracle DBMS in the same category as postgresql, Perforce P4 in the same category as git. Surely that can't be it?
I'd agree in a heartbeat that developers are better at solving problems for developers. The less disconnect there is between developer and customer the better development goes, and the disconnect doesn't get lower than building developer tooling. But those things aren't any less apps or more tools than the things artists or technical writers or accountants use
Why is not Photoshop considered a tool? You use it to [...], as a tool. But then I do not see the difference between application, like an application can be a tool, can it not? It makes my head spin and English is not my native language.
> I can think of a few more: Git obsoleted an entire category of commercial software seemingly almost overnight
Hmm, what commercial software would that be? Visual SourceSafe (lol)? ;)
Git mostly replaced SVN, and that is free and open too. But in scenarios where specialized version control software (like Perforce) is needed, git (and git lfs) breaks down too, and quicker than SVN does - e.g. for versioning large binary files git has actually been a massive step backwards and without a real solution showing up in 2 decades.
Git was created to replace BitKeeper. There used to be a whole industry of commercial version control software. I grabbed the following list from Wikipedia (but I image there where even more companies around):
- AccuRev SCM (2002)
- Azure DevOps Server (via TFVC) (2005)
- ClearCase (1992)
- CMVC (1994)
- Dimensions CM (1980s)
- DSEE (1984)
- Integrity (2001)
- Perforce Helix (1995)
- SCLM (1980s?)
- Software Change Manager (1970s)
- StarTeam (1995)
- Surround SCM (2002)
- Synergy (1990)
- Vault (2003)
- Visual SourceSafe (1994)
A lot of companies was also building their own internal version control software. Either from scratch or as a bunch of loose scripts on top of other existing solutions. Often turning version control, package management and build scripts into one single complex messy solution. I worked for a company early in my career that had at least 4 different version control systems in use across different projects and even more build systems (all a mix of commercial software and home grown solutions on top).
These days almost everyone uses Git. Some companies uses Mercurial or SVN.
One commercial actor that is still around is Perforce, which is still popular in the game industry. Since managing large game assets isn't optimal for Git (but is possible with Git LFS or Git annex, or similar solutions).
Git is an interesting case in its obscure ergonomics. Maybe Linus was right in that for his initial user target group that turned into advocates, algorithmic elegance was a more important quality, so git won regardless of ergonomics for wider audience.
So various projects have come up ever since to try to patch the UX.
Git ergonomics were far far better than the rest because of one reason that all the supposedly more ergonomic projects like Bazaar, Mercurial, SVN, ClearCase and lots of others failed miserably at:
Performance.
Since the CVS days, Version Control Systems got slower and slower. Centralized servers worsened the problem by doing everything in a synchronous manner, making people wait for locks, wait for checkouts, wait for diffs, wait for everything. But even the distributed ones like bzr or hg were slow as hell. What git enabled was the far superior ergonomics of not having to get a coffee while running a "git diff" on a project the size of the Linux kernel, X.org or LibreOffice. All the whining about inconsistent command line options and weird subcommand naming is totally secondary to this.
Nowadays, many of the aforementioned competitors either died out or worked on their performance problems. Nonetheless, git is still unmatched in this regard.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves, Blender has done far better than most open source software but Maya is still very much the industry standard. I don't think we can realistically say that Maya is beaten until Blender is battle-proven to the same degree, on the most demanding real-world production workloads (think Pixar/Weta), which for now it hasn't been.
What Blender achieved is that lots of university programmes have started teaching Blender or becoming 'tool agnostic'. Studios have also started diversifying their pipelines (this coincidences with studios adopting Unreal and increasing usage of Houdini).
So while Maya is currently the standard, I don't believe that it's growing.
It'll probably be around still in 20 years, with lots of studios having built their pipelines and tooling around it, with lots of people being trained in it, and because it's at the moment still better than Blender in some aspects like rigging and animation (afaik).
> on the most demanding real-world production workloads (think Pixar/Weta), which for now it hasn't been.
Super small nit (or info tidbit), but it doesn't take away from your overall message regarding production and scene scale.
Pixar does not and has not used Maya as the primary studio application, it's really only used for asset modeling and some minor shading tasks like UV generation and some Ptex painting. The actual studio app is Presto, which is an in-house tool Pixar has developed over the years since its earliest productions. All other DCCs are team/task specific.
Dreamworks is similar with their tool, Presto, IIRC. Walt Disney Animation Studio (WDAS) does use Maya as the core app last I saw, but I don't know if they've made any headway with evaluating Presto since 2019...
Agreed. You haven’t really won until it stops becoming noteworthy and “oh look X is using Blender!!”
Nobody talks about how Linux dominates the server space anymore. Nobody talks about how “git is winning” or getting “battle tested”. These are mundane and banal facts.
I don’t believe the same has happened to Blender yet.
That is not a very big studio or very big production, Blender falls over in the pipeline department. It’s a constantly changing API that doesn’t allow for the extensibility needed to get a major project out the door, just the fact that only a Python API is provided is enough for most people who have worked on massive scenes with massive amounts of data to consider it a non starter.
Saying Evangelion isn't big is like saying Minions are some irrelevant little flick. Evangelion is quite possibly the biggest series in Japan for 3 decades running. You won't find a person who has not seen it to some extent. Evangelion goods are sold everywhere at all times. You really cannot escape it. For the biggest series in Japan to use Blender is a huge sign to the rest of the industry in one of the most risk-averse countries that yes, it's good enough.
A relevant opportunity may not occur again so here is a great video by Red Bard on whether it's possible to live entirely off of Evangelion merchandise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0Qr9rztRw4
The same way Star Wars was still running in between the original series and the prequels. It had an active fan base and lots of side content that was constantly being produced.
I'm sure "major project" is a subjective label, but Flow made headlines earlier this year with an Academy Award (Best Animated Feature) and Golden Globe (Best Animated Feature Film)
Flow is good filmmaking expressed through low-tech production, which is totally valid, but it doing a lot with a little isn't going to stop Disney from one-upping themselves with the next Zootopia movie so Blender needs to handle that angle too if it's going to become a catch-all solution for all kinds of production.
For sure, it was made by a small team and rendered on a single computer using the Eevee renderer (the fast partially-rasterization one). It's a major project, just not an enormously huge bleeding edge major project. Here's hoping Blender can keep on rolling toward those types of capabilities.
Not disagreeing that usage in large productions is something that Blender isn't really designed for, but I don't think that it's for a lack of Python API features (if a studio wants something specific it could just maintain an internal fork) or the ever changing Python API surface (the versions aren't upgraded during a production anyways)
VFX studios have been using Python APIs for twenty+ years, backed by C. They were one of the first industries to use it. That's where I learned it, around the turn of the century.
3.0+1.0 was the highest grossing box office release that year in Japan and has a worldwide fanbase. The original series + End of Evangelion are considered by many critics and fans to sit among the best anime series of all time, and the Rebuild movies were absolutely huge.
Personally, I think they pale in comparison to the original series and lose a lot of what makes Eva special and interesting to begin with, so I'd kinda love to dump on them a bit, but... it's about as big of a production as it gets in the anime industry. They're of course nowhere near Pixar level or similar, but it is clearly an example of Blender being battle tested by a serious studio on a serious project.
> constantly changing API that doesn’t allow for the extensibility
You pick a (stable) version, and use that API. It doesn't change if you don't. If it truly is a _major_ project, then constantly "upgrading" to the latest release is a big no-no (or should be)!
And these "most people" who are scared of a Python API? Weak! It should have been a low level C API! ;-)
> And these "most people" who are scared of a Python API? Weak! It should have been a low level C API! ;-)
I wouldn't frame it as "scared". The issue is that at a certain scene scale Python becomes the performance bottleneck if that's all you can use.
> You pick a (stable) version, and use that API. It doesn't change if you don't. If it truly is a _major_ project, then constantly "upgrading" to the latest release is a big no-no (or should be)!
This is fine if you only ever have one show in production. Most non-boutique studios have multiple shows being worked on in tandem, be it internal productions or contract bids that require interfacing with other studios. These separate productions can have any given permutation of DCC and plugin versions, all of which the internal pipeline and production engineering teams have to support simultaneously. Apps that provide a stable C/C++ SDK and Python interface across versions are significantly more amenable to these kinds of environments as the core studio hub app, rather than being ancillary, task specific tools.
If you had multiple shows in production, I would expect that standards be set to use the same platforms and versions across the board.
If the company is more than a boutique shop, I would expect them to have a somewhat competent CTO to manage this kind of problem - one that isn't specific to Blender, even!
Also, if the company is more than a boutique shop, I would hope it would be at a level and budget that the Python performance bottlenecks would be well addressed with competent internal pipeline and production engineering teams.
But then again, if the company is more than a boutique shop, they would just pay for the Maya licensing. :-)
Small timers, boutique shops, and humble folks like me just try to get by with the tools we can afford.
On a related note, though: I built a Blender plugin with version 2.93 and recently learned it still works fine on Blender 4. The "constantly changing API" isn't the beast some claim it is.
> If you had multiple shows in production, I would expect that standards be set to use the same platforms and versions across the board.
Considering productions span years, not months, artists would never get to use newer tools if studios operated that way. And it really only works if shows share similar end dates, which is not the reality we live in. Productions can start and end at any point in another show's schedule, and newer tools can offer features that upcoming productions can take advantage of. Each show will freeze their stacks, of course, but a studio could be juggling multiple stacks simultaneously each with their own dependency variants (see the VFX Reference Platform).
> Also, if the company is more than a boutique shop, I would hope it would be at a level and budget that the Python performance bottlenecks would be well addressed with competent internal pipeline and production engineering teams.
That would be the ideal, something that can be difficult to achieve in practice. You'll find small teams of quality engineers overwhelmed with the sheer volume of work, and other larger teams with less experience who don't have enough senior folks to guide them. The industry is far from perfect, but it does generally work.
> But then again, if the company is more than a boutique shop, they would just pay for the Maya licensing. :-)
And back to reality XD
That being said a number of studios have been reducing their Autodesk spend over the past few years because it's honestly a sick joke the way the M&E division is run. It's a free several hundred million a year revenue earner, but they foist the CAD business operations onto it and the products suffer. Houdini's getting really close, but if another AIO can cover effectively everything in a way that each team sees is better, you will start to see the ramp up of migrations occur. Realistically this comes down to the rigging and animation departments more than any other. But Maya will never go away completely as it'll still need to be used for referring to and opening older projects from productions that used it, beyond just converting assets to a different format. USD is pretty much that intermediary anyways, it's the training and migration effort that becomes the final roadblock.
Blender is the go-to for struggling artists/developers, and industry outsiders, like me. I'm stuck at Blender 2.93.18 because I don't have the budget for better hardware, let alone a Maya license! However, even that version of Blender still gets it done for me.
And also, how can you say Blender is not battle-proven? I mean, the big studios use Maya like fortune 500 companies use Microsoft Windows - doesn't mean Linux isn't battle proven.
I haven't used blender much. It's too focused on animation. I mainly make more engineering style things for 3D printing. Even though it can technically do that, the interface just rubs me the wrong way somehow. And i can use Fusion 360 for free.
> I mean, the big studios use Maya like fortune 500 companies use Microsoft Windows - doesn't mean Linux isn't battle proven.
Those are different niches. Not even Apple has managed to budge Window out of corporate environments, though it is a lot more present than 20 years ago.
I imagine it's similar with Blender and Maya: do they fill the exact same space? Or is Blender adopted by different types of companies (probably smaller)?
No sarcasm. Thanks for asking (no sarcasm, again).
You asked the right questions, IMO, and I think they are self evident.
> do they fill the exact same space?
No.
> is Blender adopted by different types of companies?
Yes.
A company or institution that has money to burn will opt for more "professional" suites (Maya, Microsoft, ...). Smaller entities will use the cheaper alternatives (Blender, Linux, ...).
Depends on the industry. Within game development, I don't know a single person not using Blender. People who were big into Maya and 3DS a few years ago have pretty much all moved on.
Maya's API is so much better than Blender's. You pay the fee for the OS that Maya is, but the API is so much better than anything open source. Like Postgres is an OS for databases. Blender is not yet there. IIRC you need to compile entire Blender just to change a node.
Blender gives you two paths for extension: a) fork it and layer your changes directly onto the app, or b) you create a plugin via the Blender Python API.
For vendors, the former is obviously a no-go. The latter has the issue of be throttled by Python, so you have to effectively create a shim that communicates with an external library or application that actually performs compute intensive tasks.
Most (if not all) industry DCCs provide a dedicated C++ SDK with Python bindings available if desired.
I'm curious as someone who's thinking of making a blender plug-in that will need to use some native-ish (not C++ though) libraries/modules for performance. What are the issues with using a Python interface instead of a dedicated C++ SDK?
The Python API is limited by Python itself. You're restricted to a GIL environment, so your ability to maximize throughput and reduce latency will be limited. For small/average scenes this may not matter for your addon, however larger scenes will suffer. There are a few popular options to developing Blender functionality:
1. Extend Blender itself. This will net you the maximum performance, but you essentially need to maintain your own custom fork of Blender. Generally not recommended outside of large pipeline environments with dedicated support engineers.
2. Native Python addon. This is what 99% of addons are, just accessing scene data via Blender's Python interface. Drawbacks mentioned above, though there are some helper utilities to batch process information to regain some performance.
3. Hybrid Python Addon. You use the Python API as a glue layer to pass information between Blender and a natively compiled library via Python's C Extension API. With the exception of extracting scene data info, this will give you back the compute performance and host resource scalability you'd get from building on Blender directly. Being able to escape the GIL opens a lot of doors for parallel computation.
> open source software but Maya is still very much the industry standard
IMHO that's only still true because large studios can't afford to move their entire highly customized production pipeline which they had built around Maya for nearly three decades to any other tool (Blender or not), even if they desparately want a divorce from Autodesk. Autodesk basically has them locked in and can milk them until all eternity or the studios go bankrupt.
I bet that the next generation of CGI and game studios will be built around Blender (and not based on the quality of those tools, but because of Autodesk business practices).
(edit: somehow my brain switched Adobe and Autodesk - forgiveable though because both use the same 'milking existing customers' strategy heh)
Maybe obsolete in the sense of feature to price ratio (infinite in Blender's case), but Maya is still very much used for the sole reason that entire studio pipelines are likely built around it. Years of tools programmers and artist knowledge build-up don't go away just like that. Licensing costs are a drop in the bucket compared to all the other overhead. Of course that's mainly concerning big productions, there's obviously no reason hobbyists or indies should be using anything except Blender. I will say w.r.t to sculpting specifically ZBrush is still king mostly due to how its technology is fundamentally unique in its ability to easily handle huge poly counts. Blender is still not quite there in the high-fidelity regime.
I suspect in general "big companies" and the ecosystems they operate in are the main reason adoption (and subsequent investment and development) hasn't happened. The Microsoft Office suite is a good example, since many companies likely run the full Office + Teams + Outlook stack. It all "seamlessly" (not really lol) works together, and it's attractive to sell corporate solutions like that.
Video editing? Adobe has set themselves up for failure there, everyone wants an alternative
Davinci Resolve is probably competitive with Premiere, but while free it's not actually open source. But either a viable competitor catching up or Davinci publishing the code could change that fast
I'm not a pro or anything, and I don't edit video super often, but I would like to point out that Lightworks is quite good, and offers a perpetual license [1] for $420 that is very often on sale.
I don't have the ability to compare these things in intimate detail, but Lightworks has at least been used for "real" productions [2] so I think it's production-ready.
Resolve Studio is more feature rich by a significant margin and 2/3rd’s of the price. Lightworks is a respectable program but I can’t really see picking it over resolve studio tbh. Definitely not for professional work.
I still root for them though. More NLE’s is good for the editing world as a whole and who knows, BMD could heel turn on us and ruin resolve. I’ve gone through 3 different NLE’s since 2011 (FCPX->briefly Premiere->Resolve) so I definitely don’t plan for more than 3-5 years ahead lol
Premiere is in a bad position anyway here, because in contrast to Photoshop, it is not really the industry standard, at least in the higher end stuff. That would probably be Media Composer.
> Meanwhile, in other niches, Microsoft Office still beats open source office suites like LibreOffice; Photoshop isn't about to give up its crown to GIMP; Lightroom isn't losing to Darktable; and FreeCAD isn't even in the rear view mirror of Solidworks.
Tbf, everything starts somewhere and all the proprietary apps you listed were not instant market leaders.
I can and do use all those FOSS tools just fine both as a hobbyist and professionally, my needs are meet. Others may not find the same, but I suspect there's just a lot of stickyness preventing even trying new workflows.
> I can and do use all those FOSS tools just fine both as a hobbyist and professionally, my needs are meet.
Mine aren't: GIMP is okay, FreeCAD is a complete joke. It is painfully obvious that their development is done primarily by F/LOSS enthusiasts rather than by industry professionals and UX designers. They are closer to being a random collection of features than a professional workhorse. You might eventually get the job done, but compared to the proprietary competition it is woefully incomplete, overly complicated, and significantly buggier.
The poor quality of FreeCAD is the main reason my 3D printer is collecting dust. As a Linux-only user the proprietary alternatives mostly aren't available to me, and FreeCAD is bad enough that I'd rather not do CAD at all. The Ondsel fork was looking promising for a while, but sadly that died off.
Just wanted to point out that I started without any cad experience with Freecad this august. I watched/worked through the first third of the mango jelly tutorials on youtube. Since then I designed and 3d printed a lot of projects [1].
It is definitely not a joke. It enabled me to have a very fulfilling hobby.
[1] Examples: a Steam Deck Skadis Dock, all kind of adapters for easy connection of wood parts, magnetic modular mini shelves for everything in the bathroom, a replacement for a broken door handle, a delicate plissé mounting point that is no longer produced, accessories for the microscopes for school …
> The poor quality of FreeCAD is the main reason my 3D printer is collecting dust. As a Linux-only user the proprietary alternatives mostly aren't available to me, and FreeCAD is bad enough that I'd rather not do CAD at all. The Ondsel fork was looking promising for a while, but sadly that died off.
I've only ever used openSCAD, Freecad, and on shape.
And for me, Freecad had increased my use of my 3d printer, originally built in 2016.
Cad has a specific workflow, which is true regardless of the tool. Sticking to the right order of operations goes a long way to having a positive XP as does some basic intro tutorials.
It's not a tool you can bumble around and figure out easily, even with XP in similar tools.
Had to learn FreeCAD last week, and yes, what an embarrassment. For my current work (cnc) you can't really get anywhere without the third-party lib OCL, which they just... fully interface with, but you still have to integrate/install manually? I generally agree with the observation that the developers care too little for quality or usability, considering e.g. the logs constantly throw python errors in your face.
Edit: oh, it was even worse before? I hope they keep going in this direction then
I would think that in this audience OpenSCAD would be an option.
I only do occasional design for some things to print, and I'm always happy to come back to my OpenSCAD text files that I can actually read and understand within minutes, rather than having to try to remember the correct click path through some giant graphical CAD software.
Fully agree that text-based CAD is the obvious path forward. But OpenSCAD won't cut it, it just lacks too many features, starting from basic fillets to more fundamental things like relative object positioning. Check out CadQuery, it's much more ergonomic and future-proof.
I've found that most of my additional feature needs are covered by the BOSL2 library, tbh.
It's also a pretty compact core, so being rather limited to me is a good thing. I think I looked at CadQuery a year ago or so, but quickly went back to OpenSCAD.
won't solidworks run on wine? i used it for just one semester in a class, but it sparks joy to this day. and even though it's not a cad program, i wish blender had parametric tools
The free tier is non-commercial only, and makes anything you design available publicly, so it might not be suitable for some users. It's also pricey, the first paid tier is $1500/year (compared with Fusion which is $680/year).
Seconded, OnShape is my favorite CAD package. I passed it over for a long time because I had poor expectations of a browser-based CAD. Just wish I could justify the commercial license.
LibreOffice, GIMP, FreeCAD and Inkscape all have their quirks (and bugs), but they're probably seen as features by their core users so they won't change.
Me too. I guess a majority of people don't have the patience to work around counterintuitive things nor do they want to take measures to avoid bugs. On the other hand, Blender and Krita seem to give UX a higher priority, so they're more likely to catch on.
There is just something about it that does not click with me. Just selecting a foreground object even when the background was almost white never worked for me. Just so fiddly.
Try PhotoGimp plugin, it solves some annoyances for me by introducing the shortcuts I used to, and a slightly more familiar interface. The rest, I just got used to, and actually now I like Gimp more than Photoshop (which I don’t like too much, even though I know it for two decades now).
> LibreOffice, GIMP, FreeCAD and Inkscape all have their quirks (and bugs), but they're probably seen as features by their core users so they won't change.
I wouldn't say that, there's bugs in Freecad that drive me bonkers but I would be dishonest if I said it hadn't gotten more stable and better supports my Nvidia card today compared to previous releases
I don’t know if you can really say that Photoshop wasn’t a market leader from day one. It basically created the market on the Mac when it was introduced in 1990 and has been the market leader since.
If you want to limit standard Office productivity to ones that were written with the GUI in mind, MS Office was the leader on the Mac before it came to PCs and crushed WordPerfect and Lotus early on.
> Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche
I use OBS regularly but vMix is definitely the superior option in the professional livestreaming world. OBS is missing many key features for professional operations and vdo ninja only covers some of those gaps.
I tried it for the first time the other day after having heard how much better it's gotten recently, and it made me really wonder how bad was the UX _before_ all these recent improvements. I don't want to bash on it too hard, because it's clear that a ton of hard work has gone into it, but it was really a struggle for me to get some pretty basic things done. The only feedback for a lot of things I tried to do was some not-very helpful error messages in the console, or just the whole program crashing. After trying hard for quite a few hours, reading lots of docs and watching tutorials, I ended up giving up and going back to Fusion 360.
I have been using freecad extensively. Almost daily. It's an absolute utter mess. It barely works. But it's essentially the only open source CAD. So I keep trucking.
The most important improvement is the toponaming heuristic solver spearheaded by Realthunder.
Since that was merged into mainline, it seems that the devs keep breaking the UX and shortcuts without rythme nor reason, while the fundamentals are broken beyond repair.
I would never recommend freecad to anybody, even though this this the only CAD I use, and I actually write python for it for some automation.
I cannot live without freecad. But damn it's a mess.
I was somewhat excited about it, but one feature I wanted for the thing I was doing at the time was importing an svg, which it didn't support at the time (and from a cursory github search still doesn't support?).
It's a shame, because it looks really nice. Maybe I'll check it out for the next thing I do where that's not a requirement. Might be a shame since I've finally learnt how to (basically) use freecad now!
looks like they've got some support for bezier's internally (and they allow exporting SVG's) so I assume the building blocks should be there? I definitely have no idea, and haven't looked into it though.
As an opposing viewpoint, I also use FC extensively for designing moderately complex parts (fully parametrically constrained assemblies, dozens of parts per assembly, mechanical components involving motion).
I've also extended the functionality with python, and have heavily customized the theme and shortcuts to fit my personal taste.
I not only tolerate the software, but enjoy using it, and am quite proficient at it.
I would recommend FreeCAD to others, but with some caveats. The most important being that they need to be willing to tolerate a few hours of introductory material, and second that they are serious about using the software long-term.
Otherwise, I'd probably just recommend Onshape. But, for many others, FC is fully viable.
As a game developer, I'm really rooting for open source game engines.
Unity and Unreal are dinosaurs that target the shrinking console market. Godot is being built in their image. My hope is that something more versatile like Bevy becomes common so that we have something that could potentially compete with the next generation of Roblox.
I really hope not, but I wouldn’t bet against it. The nature of products that take high capex to build and then have nearly zero marginal cost to reproduce is monopolies.
MuseScore is good enough that I haven't bothered to check back with commercial vendors. I'm pretty novice with it, however, so perhaps Sibelius power users will disagree.
But, in my experience enterprises are moving to office365.
Ten years ago I would have bet on the Google suite but it looks like Microsoft is winning this game in the corporate world.
Google gets all the private users, Microsoft the companies.
So, no, sadly, MS Office is not dying. I wish it would.
What I've occasionally seen pointed out for a whole range of separate microsoft software is it's not the merits of on individual bit of software that gets enterprises to use it, it's the M365 package deal of all of them, and once you're in that ecosystem then you might as well use it. Teams is the common example where this comes up, where it's shortcomings are well known but the costs of licensing and setting up an alternative can't get over the threshold.
> Most grads we get only know Google docs and avoid Office
Not true of business grads - who btw are the ones who have the purchase power for enterprise wide M$ Office when they join orgs. STEM grads need to kneel and obey their purchasing decisions.
How does GIMP compare to Photopea. On occasion I open a file in GIMP by accident and end up waiting 20m for it to load and am almost always disappointed. Meanwhile Photopea always just works super fast and supports a lot more. What the hell is it doing?
The load time of GIMP is one of my biggest complaints. It's fine once it finally opens, but that start up time is punishing. The last version of photoshop I used wasn't all that much better though. photopea is a browser app so it's not really a valid comparison. I much prefer open source local applications that leave my web browser out of it.
Blender has the advantage of having been a commercial product that went open source, thus many people on the initial core team cared about stuff that other projects don't, plus they already had an installed base.
You don't see the same success with Gimp, Krita,...
Have you actually tried that "commercial Blender product"? Before open-sourcing it, Blender 2.2x was incredibly user hostile and barebones in terms of features. For example, in mesh edit mode you could only work on points - no edge or face selection. It was very primitive, both in its UI (which was inscrutable) and its rendering capabilities (e.g. except for spotlights, lights did not cast shadows - and spotlights could only do shadowmaps). Very basic usability features were added pretty much as soon as the project was opensourced.
Remember that Blender was opensourced was because it failed commercially. Its commercial background is completely irrelevant to its success - which took years to achieve and most 3D artists for more than a decade saw it as a toy (undeservedly IMO because even by 2.44-or-so it became very capable, but the UI despite its massive improvements was still very undiscoverable and alien for most users).
You can download "Blender Publisher 2.25" from blender's own site which was the last commercial release to check it..
To me, the really impressive thing about Blender is that it now has a pretty good UI. I'm pretty snobby about the GUI apps I install, and Blender is probably the only professional-level (as in professional users) open source tool that feels pretty good to use on a Mac. In the early days it was pretty rough, but it's rare to see open source software UI consistently improve like this.
On aesthetics, it definitely beats out Lightroom Classic, which is a closed-source paid tool (sidenote: I really miss Aperture).
>>Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche. It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete.
GCC and now Clang has beaten Intel compiler (and others).
Nginx has beaten/replaced commercial web servers.
Stockfish has beaten commercial chess engines and Lichess is much better than commercial chess sites.
Just 3 examples that came to my mind reading your comment.
Office as a whole wipes the floor with LibreOffice. Cleaner interface, generally more stable, especially on Windows, Excel is and remains a powerhouse, etc. Word and PowerPoint are also very solid. Outlook is meh.
If anything, OnlyOffice is incredibly polished. I don't know how they did it but it seems to work better and have a much cleaner UI than LibreOffice even though it's much newer.
OnlyOffice is proprietary software, or freeware if you prefer (they modify the AGPL licence with clauses which are not compliant with the OSD), and by natively supporting the proprietary Microsoft Office document format locks in their users to Microsoft (the company controlling the closed and proprietary format). True free software advocates should avoid it.
Maya is the industry standard. Blender may offer most of what Maya offers from a features standpoint, but Maya had the first mover advantage / network effects advantage of an ecosystem of third party plugins sprouting up over the last 20 years which VFX / Mograph houses now depend upon, thus forcing vendor lock-in despite Blender now being on par.
I’m rooting for gimp but they are truly a decade behind photoshop. I don’t know how they can compete. Luckily it does not seem like they are in the market for professionals so the need to match Photoshop isn’t quite as high
"It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete"
Wow, that is great news. I guess its support for Pixar USD is equal to Maya and Houdini then, so all the big studios can finally switch
That would be both feature completeness of the implementation and also some kind of a native USD authoring mode (editing the structure and layering multiple USD files properly), like Houdini Solaris or Nvidia Omniverse. For now Blender can’t even read/write MaterialX properly. (I’m not an insider though)
In the 3D printing realm most slicers are open source. And I think a lot of professionals are also using them. Though maybe not in the very expensive end of industrial printers.
If you ignore the massively easier learning curve, better usability and presentation, purely in terms of raw outcome and capabilities (to an extent), Dark table actually comes ahead of Lightroom. Not saying it will replace it at all though, it's software for power users, while Lightroom is for both novices and pro's who prefer UX over features.
really? I haven't done 3D rendering in a long time, admittedly, but back then Maya and Lightwave were miles ahead of Blender. Rhino3D too. Even 3DSMax was better. Lightwave seems to have sadly fallen off (unfortunately, IMO it was the best at one point, had excellent ray tracing). I didn't really Blender had come such a long way -- that's great.
Since you mention niches: Adobe InDesign has no OSS competition at all, and Illustrator is still much better than Inkscape.
Meanwhile, in other niches, Microsoft Office still beats open source office suites like LibreOffice; Photoshop isn't about to give up its crown to GIMP; Lightroom isn't losing to Darktable; and FreeCAD isn't even in the rear view mirror of Solidworks.
I wonder what will be the next category of open source to pull ahead? Godot is rapidly gaining users/mindshare while Unity seems to be collapsing, but Unreal is still the king of game engines for now. Krita is a viable alternative for digital painting.