Why Do Video Game Studios Avoid Blender?

Started learning Blender at the end of 2022. When you get past the learning curve you realize it's a miracle that it's free.

I did report a bug to Autodesk and 3 years later they responded and said oh yes that is a bug. After 6 years that bug still is there. but any time i report a bug for Blender, in less than 24h someone respond and fix that bug for next release.

I had to learn Maya in university for games development and we all still spent most of our times self-teaching through Youtube

"It's a lot easier to throw money at the problem than to solve it yourself." A VP I once worked for loved to say, "If you can solve the problem by spending money, then it isn't a problem; it's an expense." Corporations love expenses because they're easy to predict, easy to control, and easy to explain to investors. It's hard to explain at your earnings call why a 6-month project is in its 18th month when there's a similar product available for a few thousand dollars.

As a modder for Cyberpunk 2077, Blender is our bread and butter. We’ve configured it such that it’s very easy to get meshes from the game into Blender with materials and vice versa.

Remember, Blenders not free. In 2002 the community bought a one time perpetual floating no seat limit license for €100,000 with free lifetime upgrades. More seriously it does need donations. Its the only software i really dont mind paying for, because its not forced.

Every time I hear something about "infinite growth" I think about how Warner Bros cancelled the already-made Batgirl movie in order to make their numbers look nice.

My two cents as someone who has worked in the games industry for 12 years: I have been working with blender exclusively for my entire career. The games industry is big and while market penetration for "new" tools and workflows can be slower for big companies like ubisoft, it also contains an enormous amount of small to medium dev studios that have been way more comfortable moving away from maya and max over the past years. Especially since blender had the 2.8 UI overhaul, it became much easier to onboard max and maya users. And blender has everything they need to do the job without the price-tag, which is actually a huge consideration for smaller studios.

not a 3D artist, but i'm an illustrator and comic artist, and for as long as i've worked digitally, i've always used Clip Studio. When i went to the academy to learn digital illustration, though, they wanted me to use photoshop and i HATED IT. I just couldn't get used to it, no matter how much i tried, so eventually i was able to convince them to let me keep using CSP (i could save in .psd anyway) so i totally understand artists not wanting to switch to a different program.

Blender and Godot actually have great intergration now, you can save your blend files straight into your godot project folder, godot updates your files there with all your textures and lighting, and you can just drag and drop it in. Still not unreal, but for Indie's and hobbiest it works fantastic.

I know a lot of studios that use Blender. Blenders biggest issue is its native bone orientation and armature system is different from Unreal Engine which was built around Maya; going way back to Unreal 3 (Mass Effect, Gears of War era). Its always been Maya for UE. Unreal wants skeletal meshes to perform and be imported in a certain way. You need to have a good understanding of how Unreal wants things to be to get correct exports of characters and animations from Blender. But that is true for a lot of game engines in-house or off the shelf. They all have quirks. Legacy code and technical debt are huge in game engines. We have just been adding features on top of features for along time now. The cost of Maya is why studios want to use Blender though. You often will partner with an art house for primary asset production and then your in-house artists will maintain and adjust those assets during development. Building things as needed, retexturing as needed etc. But over the course of 2-3 years of a dev cycle, maintaining Maya licenses for your entire studio during that time is actually pretty costly. Its tens of thousands of dollars a year. Blender is more then capable when it comes to creating/editing static meshes and the fact its free means you can scale your art team without needing to scale your software budget. Blender is almost a default installation on almost every dev PC because of this. Its an extremely powerful tool given its cost; it is pretty much the defacto 3d generalist tool out there. We hire the artist not the software though. If you feel comfortable with any piece of software to do your work we will purchase it for you.

so what you're saying is that the execs of the gaming industry are asset flippers

I'm in triple A for 15+ years as an artist. Blender is awesome, better than the older 3D programs out there, but two big reasons it's not used in the industry much: 95% of the workforce are trained on Max or Maya. A lot of people have years and years of experience using / building workflows with these programs already. Retraining everyone would be a huge pain in the ass, unpredictable, and expensive. Some people would likely take months and months to get back to their previous level of skill and productivity. Some nifty plugin they've used for years might not have an equivalent etc. The other thing is that toolchains/engines are integrated with those old softwares too. Most studios have a bunch of custom in-house tools to get data in or out of the engine, clean things up on export, check for certain things, etc. All of these tools would need to be rewritten. Like all software the new ones would probably be shitty and buggy for a while. This is not something you want to have to go through unless it's really worth it, vs just keep using stuff you know has worked fine for years. So yeah you could save a few thousand dollars a year per artist by moving to Blender - but are you gonna delay production for weeks or months to let everyone train on new software, build new tools to replace the current ones that work fine and have shipped several games already? This is the sortof thing you can do with a new company, studio, or project starting from scratch that doesn't need to use tools / an engine from a previous game perhaps. Basically, the hassle of switching to Blender to save a few k per artist is not really worth it, vs doing something that could make your game much more successful, like spending another month on polish at the end of production.

Government offices for example often cant even use free open source solutions, as they require a service contract with someone. Someone that offers payed support and is liable. Noone is liable for an open source solution.

So I actually learned autodesk maya in high school. the issue is that it was useless because i didn't learn base Maya. My teacher configured each of our workstations to his preferences so the actual "normal" autodesk maya looks alien to me. And I can't reconfigure it myself to get to a format I am familiar with.

Blender: Jack of all trades, master at teaching them. Blender IS industry standard learning software.

Its said so often, that people don't like change. This is in my experience not entirely accurate. We can sometimes even be pretty damn quick to go all in with a change. I think its more that people don't like changes, which don't appear to offer a quantifiable improvement. Because if you have to go to the trouble of learning a new system or technique and it, as far as you can tell at least, doesn't significantly improves the process, you feel like you're just wasting time.

There's an indie license option for Maya that cost around 300 a year. It's full version, not stripped down version like the completely useless LT version was. It can be used commercially with revenue cap. Autodesk doesn't seem to advertise this much, since most doesn't seem to know about it. Still not free tho.

college is not essential for learning maya, dont give tens of thousands of dollars to those crooks because you dont believe in yourself

Plus: triple A developers have spent years with those software, learning (almost) everything again costs time and money. Tangent Animation (400 employees) made Blender Next Gen and Maya and the Three for Netflix using Blender. They used about six months to learn it and make a new pipeline around it...and got shut down in 2021. Good job Netflix.