Does making tools in blender carry any weight?

Tools
#1

Hey all, as the title asks - I see lots of Maya, Max and Houdini but no love for blender?

Maybe there might be a shift as more modellers seem to be turning towards it with the new update.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

#2

First, welcome to the community!

It’s definitely an area that is gaining interest. The #blender channel on the TA Slack has more discussions now than it has in…well, forever.

At Volition I’m working on a way to standardize our minimum viable pipeline (mvp) across Max, Maya, and Blender. MVP would be:

  • Ability to load assets using our standard asset browser (Done)
  • Ability to parse and display our custom game format materials (Done)
  • A single standard UI for a per-object property management tool (UI displays in all 3 tools, no backing code model in Maya at this time)
  • A single standard UI for exporting data to FBX w/ our custom attributes to be fed into our asset crunchers (UI displays in all three DCC apps, working on porting the backing code model now)

The biggest hurdle to standardizing a UI across all three DCC apps is that Blender does not use Qt for Python as its windowing toolkit, while Max and Maya do. It’s a hard (very hard) argument to make to support one off versions of pipeline tools just to cater to Blender’s custom UI paradigm. Luckily the TA community has worked on BQT, which re-parents the Blender main window to a QApplication and allows for Qt based dialogs to be created and parented to the Blender main window. It’s not perfect, but it is does work.

You might say, well, why support all three? Why not just X, Y, or Z? Trading Max for Maya or Maya for Blender, etc… just replaces the devil you know with the one you don’t. A better goal is DCC application agnosticism, where the artists (either individually or by discipline) can use the tool that is best suited for the task and your pipeline works to support that decision.

You can find BQT here:

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#3

This won’t be the case for every studio, but the License Agreement for Blender can be a blocker. At least at my work legal declined use of the software.

Don’t know the exact details, but if I had to guess it probably has to do with ownership of tools built for Blender.