A while ago, I was invited to give a short talk at a small gathering of CG professionals in my hometown Vancouver, Canada. My 20-minutes presentation is suppose to be a show-and-tell that gives people an overview of Blender, a software that almost everyone in the room has heard of, but has no real experiences with. Most people downloaded it and ran it at one point, but admitted that they didn’t invest too much time on learning it.
As some of you might know, Vancouver is a pretty major hub for media and film production. It’s home to Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Rainmaker, a whole slew of movie and TV VFX studios, and more recently, Pixar. The ~30 attendees all had very strong industry background, except me. (To my disappointment, no attendee has worked at Emeryville) But more importantly, it was apparent that they all consider Blender to be immature, with limited features, and see it as a toy more than a production-ready tool.
Blender: Just a toy
To be fair, this view on Blender is not surprising to me. But I was surprised by the overwhelming positive response after the talk, people were impressed with what Blender can do, they did not seem to expect a free software to be able to do so much, so fast. I demoed with a pre-release Blender 2.5, showcasing sculpting, compositing, rendering, the game engine, as well as some of my previous work. People were positively surprised to see what Blender can do, and few perhaps would even start to see Blender as an alternative to Autodesk’s offerings. Of course, no one in their right mind would change the production pipeline overnight from Maya/Max to Blender, but establishing Blender as more than a toy in the industry is good enough for now.
oooooooooo
What I realized from this presentation, and the point of this post, is that if we want to get more people to use try out Blender, we need to show them what it can do. Listing features, talking about code refactoring, or focusing on the open source advantages, is not going to sell the product. We need to inspire. Let’s show people what Blender is capable of through artwork and video demostrations.
Show. Don’t tell.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on that, Mike. I’m pretty relieved that you presented Blender the way it should be, and there’s no doubt, with you presenting it, people will definitely realize how great an app it is, of course with patient learning here and there.
Thanks, Mike. ^_^
I think a lot of people underestimate the persuasive power of a nicely put-together demo. I just hope I didn’t come across to them as a Blender fanatic. :D
So true, is there a video or something from that lecture? Would’ve been great to see.
I fully agree, talking about sharing a code repository and recent svn commits and patches will make even me fall asleep.
What I think blender institute could greatly benefit is to offer blender artists a small compensation in $ or institute videos for using that artists work in a yearly blender production showreel. or even twice a year.
Something to inspire people to contribute.
Also worth mentioning is not only the finished production. Money and Time plays a big role in that. short productions with little money tend to have a certain quality.
I think workflow and ease while working in the suite is equaly important.
Martin,
I believe there is a lot of talent out there for Blender, it’s just that the efforts aren’t really organized when it comes to big projects. The amount of awareness ED, BBB and YF generated is really still minimum. If people could actually get together and produce something ‘cool’, viral, that would help a lot.
The workshop wasn’t recorded. I was mostly just blabbing on about Blender while demoing and showing a few slides.