> Today Blender is one of the industry leaders, but it started quite small, three decades ago.
Which of the major shops are using Blender?
Edit: This question isn't a dig against Blender, y'all, I'm genuinely interested in where Blender is seeing industrial use, as the article doesn't touch on this!
Before they went bust, some folks at Rhythm 'N Hues publicly talked about using it. It has pockets of usage at ILM, there are lots of software pockets though in these big design firms. Not all bitmap and vector tools are Adobe.
Unreal Engine has been pushing Blender a lot too, and attracted hires from ILM, they mentioned this a lot in their video podcast.
A lot of the time you only know a company is using something like Houdini because they pay for the promotion or give the customer a big license discount.
The primary modellers at ILM are Zeno, their internal tool, then Maya and then Modo, but especially in some departments, it's a whatever gets the job done mentality. I do not however know what usage Blender gets internally at ILM
It may mean industry leader by number of people using the software, not necessarily that industry leaders in who use this type of software are using theirs.
I've seen a lot of hobbyist/indie game developers use the tool, although not exclusively. It plays nice with Unity and Unreal, you can always count on it being there since it's free and supported on Mac/Windows/Linux.
I believe larger game studios and vocational schools entirely use 3ds Max or Maya. I don't think the traditional game industry has much of a culture in Blender.
Good times! I never came across Tracer or Sculpt 3D, but I did start out with Real 3D [1] which actually was created in 1983 for the CBM64 and later came to the Amiga in 1990.
About the same time Lightwave 3D [2] came out which first was bound to Newtek's famous VideoToaster but of course someone found a way to emulate the hardware so "everybody" could use it :) even for us who needed PAL (disk swapping was a thing back in those days).
I recon that Blender is a very capable 3D software as well (and as a NLE video editor (!)). I never got around to properly use as I was a customer with Newtek but I kind of giving up on Newtek so I might dig into the massive information and tutorials out there for Blender.
Which of the major shops are using Blender?
Edit: This question isn't a dig against Blender, y'all, I'm genuinely interested in where Blender is seeing industrial use, as the article doesn't touch on this!