from the You-Can-(Not)-Buy-Expensive-Software dept.
Khara and Anime/CG production company "Project Studio Q, Inc." are preparing to switch their primary 3D CG tools to Blender. Blender will be used for some parts of "EVANGELION:3.0+1.0" they are currently working on.
Khara has been using Autodesk "3ds Max" as their primary tool so far. "EVANGELION:3.0+1.0" production is mainly done with 3ds Max. They are now starting to switch from 3ds Max to Blender. Usually the reason being "due to differences such as quality and functionalities", but Khara's reason is different.
Hiroyasu Kobayashi, General Manager of Digital Dpt. and Director of the Board of Khara and President of Studio Q, and Daisuke Onitsuka, CGI Director of Digital Dpt. of Khara and General Manager of Production Dpt. of Studio Q, told about their situation.
[Onitsuka] "We need cooperative work with friend companies for our production. However, many of those companies are small or middle-sized, so if we stick to 3ds Max it will cause higher management costs. ... While we still have the challenge whether a new partner company can use Blender or not, but at least, cost-wise is much simpler, so we are proposing them to use Blender as we use it."
[...] [Takumi] Shigyo: "We are getting more artists that started by using Blender in Studio Q. We are also seeing more high quality works by Blender users from high school students in Award:Q. I expect these new generations to be the majority working at studios in the future."
https://www.blender.org/user-stories/japanese-anime-studio-khara-moving-to-blender/
(Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Saturday August 17 2019, @09:46PM (4 children)
See Autodesk? Gotta get them addicted while young.
And maybe being less greedy after will help too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Insightful) by edIII on Sunday August 18 2019, @01:50AM
I doubt they'll learn. Autodesk used to have a thriving 3rd party developer community until they deliberately annexed all the IP, and left the developers out in the cold. Not many people have forgotten that, so why would any community form around them again?
Whereas Blender is open source, and the community around it is thriving apparently. So much so, that a major studio is dumping a huge vendor just to be able to attract young talent and smaller organizations that can't afford Autodesk, but know how to use Blender.
Autodesk, and companies like it (Adobe), better see the writing on the wall. The older workforce is retiring, the younger workforce doesn't use them, and companies are starting to drop them.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Zoot on Sunday August 18 2019, @02:24AM (2 children)
Autodesk just introduced Indie licensing for Max and Maya. You can get the complete full version of either for $250/year.
This is an experimental thing for them and there's the risk they won't continue with this offer in the future, but I think that statement is more because this is a super scary move by their marketing department and they want an out if they don't like how it goes. With Houdini Indie at $200/yr (for two years at a time), Blender 2.80 for free, the new Cinema 4D full pro sub for $720/year etc. I think it's quite likely they will continue to offer this or something similar.
So far this seems to be getting fairly well-received, and I 've seen quite a few people say they're going to consider going back to the Autodesk tools rather than moving completely to Blender.
Blender 2.80, however, is a great package now and there's nothing like frolicking naked through the house installing a new Blender version on every computer knowing it's impossible to violate the licesnse and there's not DRM at all (Blender even has a pledge that it will never "phone home" for any reason).
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Sunday August 18 2019, @09:19AM
Can that studio's subcontractors be really considered indie? If so then pretty much all companies can just outsource their major works to subcontractors just to use indie rates. Anyway, that's economy for you. It requires no effort for autodesk to let you copy the software so real market price of allowing the act of copying is 0$ and thus market forces are going to push sticker price to this value.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Sunday August 18 2019, @09:40PM
The problem with special offers is that they can easily go away at any time and then all of your existing work becomes a hostage.
Cue: Darth Vader "I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 17 2019, @09:54PM (1 child)
Do they have taco bell there?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 19 2019, @03:20AM
They definitely have Chihuahuas there. Yo quiero Taco Bell?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Saturday August 17 2019, @10:15PM (4 children)
This is shortly after Blender changed their user interface to be more standard [soylentnews.org] (in particular, left clicking for select, as in about any other software with GUI and selectable content). Coincidence?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PinkyGigglebrain on Saturday August 17 2019, @11:35PM (2 children)
Another factor might be that Since Blender will also run on Linux and BSD.
Now they can start switching their Windows 7 systems over to Linux/BSD when MS EOLs Win 7 next year without having to pay an arm and a leg to upgrade to Win 10, and they would even be able to leverage the old Win 7 hardware for greater savings.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Sunday August 18 2019, @08:10AM
I hope somebody in their studio understands that possibility.
(Score: 3, Informative) by loonycyborg on Sunday August 18 2019, @11:26AM
Blender isn't the only 3D modeling software that works on linux though. Other example would be autodesk maya.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 18 2019, @02:08AM
They could had passed in the flat, poor contrast and full of white (grey?) space, but not, they went full on it. They even got critized for their icon choice (right... flaaaaaaaat).
As for left click and "click everything instead of using the keyboard in parallel"... that means they can get some cash from RSI healthcare plans.
Maybe vim & emacs and others should become "more standard". :P
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 18 2019, @08:35AM (4 children)
I see in proprietary software that as file formats become more and more complex, vendor lock-in backfires as the software has problems with reading own files. I saw it in a proprietary electronics simulation software which couldn't open file made on another computer, while concurrent open source software has a well designed way to deal with missing data when the file is moved between installations. Now 3DS Max. I like to know how data is written, so I analyze formats a lot. The biggest problem is that when in specification something can be written in 3 ways, the program will use 4th way to do it, except "rough" situations when it will use a mix between any possible methods plus "simulation" using other constructs. This sounds like a Murphy's law, but is the general rule in file formats reverse engineering.
At work, I use a very expensive software for computer simulation, developed since 1980s by a few universities and scientific centers. Their geometry format is of course proprietary, and, according to distributor (fortunately they are very cooperative) "not readable by user". I had to automate the software, so I wrote a data converter. They made their converter too last year when they finally saw the problem with lack of export facilities, but they have nasty bugs in it, seriously, people who designed the format left in 1990s leaving an old Fortran code with 10-line templates and they had to reverse engineer their own stuff.
A funny thing: I encountered a peculiar number format: 4-number record, in which one is always zero, all of them have to be joined using another single-number field as the base. I finally came to the transformation, but I was wondering why is it so complex. Recently in informal talk they told me.
The first version of their software ran on a 4-CPU SPARC machine. 3 CPUs were doing calculations, fourth one was for visualization and keeping Unix operating. The format was designed to support 3+1-cores only and they hack it since 1980s to introduce any parallelism. Because they changed endianness somewhere in mid-90s, the files, maintaining field compatibility with 1980s software, are not backwards compatible with it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 18 2019, @12:46PM (1 child)
lol yeah, i remember some old version of word or something such that would format text differently when opened on some other computer...
this was pre 2000, somewhere between 95-99...
when writing report i had to try to get the same damn computer, otherwise i had to spend 15 minutes or so to tidy up the breaks in the sententence and puzzle together split words...
-zug
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 18 2019, @01:55PM
The old MS Office formats were desibned for efficiency on 80's hardware and were full of fast, but fragile, optimizations like directly dumping raw C data structures between RAM andand disk instead of using a much slower serialization/parsing process.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 18 2019, @02:54PM (1 child)
In my previous job I used a CAD/CAM design package which had a notoriously fickle native file format (ver X.Yr2 not reading ver X.Yr1 files, let alone ver W.xxx files, fun things like that...), mind you, that was an improvement on the previous package which, when we got a major version update, happily opened the drawing files generated by the previous version, but generated garbage g-code from them.
Anyhoo, we had a visit from the engineer to service the main CNC one day, fired up the system, went to the design workstation to send through a test job, I casually mentioned Autodesk might be purchasing the company who make this software...first time I've ever seen someone's face pale at the mention of their name, he'd been on the road servicing equipment for a while and had been out of the normal rumour loop, as well as servicing the machines his company also provided lucrative training for this package, which he also delivered (mostly on-site).
Long story short, Autodesk indeed bought them out, then discontinued the software, and the last I checked, the company the engineer worked for is promoting a.n.other design package..and not an Autodesk one.
So, the lot I worked for, as long as they keep the same version of the software I used active, if they lose the g-code files, they'll stand a reasonable chance of regenerating them from my old drawings, and modifying them if needs be, if they lose the hardware keys for the software, then they're fscked (as i know if that day happens, i'll get a call, I've tried reading the drawings using pyrate cracked copies of the software, not one opened them..I'd be telling them to fuck off anyway, as I'm still annoyed about the way I was 'let go', but I do so like to be in the position of telling them how royally fucked they really are..)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 18 2019, @07:19PM
Just don't tell me about CAD formats as it looks like their inventors were interested less in applying optimization to their descriptions, and more in applying prohibited chemicals to themselves :).
One of leading parametric modeller format, used also s output in 3D scanners. The format, called internally totally different than outside, has an interesting "Deflate-it" approach. There are no record separators nor clearly visible data structures. The contents after header are Deflated. Then it deflates to set of Deflated records. The reading procedure is: Deflate all the way, until it stops giving comprehensible data. When it gives garbage, try to deflate the garbage too, as e.g. Deflated mesh is a name plus a set of Deflated polygons which is a name plus a set of Deflated lines, being names with a set of Deflated points consisting of three Deflated coordinates. The "11" unused identifier means that further deflation will give garbage... except for "text" and "comment" records, where deflating remaining garbage one more time will give formatting info of course. And if someone licenses the format, gets a library to use blindly.