[Bf-committers] blender job market

[Hart's Antler]

The recent blog post by Farsthary got me thinking, why is one of the best blender developers out there hard up for money?  A quick look at the blender job market reveals it is almost non-existent compared to the Maya or 3dsMax job market.  This leads to the next question: with blender's recent advancements why is there so little adoption by studios?  I think the fundamental issue holding up adoption is blender currently offers no viable migration path for studios, its either switch or don't use - so they don't use it.  A migration path requires integration with proprietary tools and Maya and other commercial software.  Studios typically employ many programmers to create in-house tools and glue code, and this reflected by the large job market for MEL scripters and developers using the Maya C++ API.  My point is that: before studio artists can start using blender, the studio programmers must also be able to use, extend, and integrate blender into the
 pipeline.

Blender is currently not easy to integrate within other tools.  The Python API has its limitations, and the C API does not offically exist.  To make integration simple, what is needed is a stable C API and a blender library (libblender.dll) that can be dynamically loaded by any program and then used to call any function within blender.  Lets imagine a studio might be interested in first using the unlimited clay features from within Maya - in theory a modular blender library makes this possible.  This is the beginning of their migration path, and over time they can integrate more blender features into their pipeline - in the end they can make a complete switch if they choose.  Running blender inside Maya also solves the problem that blender can not load or save a maya binary file; the fact is studios have their data locked up in .mb and .max files; and they are not going to throw away compatibility with their old data.

Blender has come a long way, and one could argue its more powerful than commercial offerings in several ways.  It should now be at the tipping point for studio adoption, if only this final integration road-block is lifted.

-brett