Why my school decieded not to use blender

[alltaken]

This sort of attitude that 'people dont use blender because they are stupid' is really really harmfull to blenders image in the long run, It makes me sad.I wish more people saw this...

Cheers,
Zarf.

same issue with Linux.

i ahev had many many people attack me who use linux because i say that Windows XP is good.

they say i am dumb, they say i don't know crap and that linux is soooooo good.

but frankly i don't have the time to spend hand coding crap to get things to work.

time=money and you gotta choose what is better value for you.

i would like to use blender professionally and most likely will in some form, but if it came to it i wouldn't hesitate using somthing else.

i have seen crap done on MAYA (boy have i seen crap on that) but i bet it was faster to make that crap :p

ha ha ha ha anyway by the time i am ready to be doing full time pro work blender will most likely be great.

i wouldn't hesitate to teach high school students in blender, or even first year Uni students, but degrees in animation and diplomas in CG kinda things then NO I WON'T only provide blender.

i would however offer it to any student that wanted to use it.

for example i have both PS and the GIMP, i use both of them equally and often have both open at the same time. they each have their strengths and weekness's

Alltaken

[modron]

I just noticed,...there seems to be something wrong with this thread,...I saw that alltaken had replied to it, went to read it, and the last comment that I saw was still my own. So, I searched for all posts by alltaken, clicked on the one that was in this thread, and though I saw it, was told I was viewing page 3 of 2. ?? I wonder if this is a problem specifis to this thread, or if it affects the whole forum? Quite odd,...

[Zarf]

same issue with Linux.

i ahev had many many people attack me who use linux because i say that Windows XP is good.

they say i am dumb, they say i don't know crap and that linux is soooooo good.

but frankly i don't have the time to spend hand coding crap to get things to work.

time=money and you gotta choose what is better value for you.

i would like to use blender professionally and most likely will in some form, but if it came to it i wouldn't hesitate using somthing else.

i have seen crap done on MAYA (boy have i seen crap on that) but i bet it was faster to make that crap :p

ha ha ha ha anyway by the time i am ready to be doing full time pro work blender will most likely be great.

i wouldn't hesitate to teach high school students in blender, or even first year Uni students, but degrees in animation and diplomas in CG kinda things then NO I WON'T only provide blender.

i would however offer it to any student that wanted to use it.

for example i have both PS and the GIMP, i use both of them equally and often have both open at the same time. they each have their strengths and weekness's

Alltaken

Another thing I would like to add to the whole 'people don't use blender because it's free' argument is a simple case study of an OSS 3d project that has made VERY good inroads into the mainstream CG industry in an incredibly short amount of time: wings3d.

Many professionals are using wings3d to supplement their CG package of choice and it's already been used in some pretty major productions. I don't say any of this to start a 'wings/blender war' but only point out the fallacy at work in many peoples line of reasoning. Most people have no problem with using what works best, period.

re modron's points: If Iv'e stuck with blender for 5+ years there certainly is a reason for it. If however you have something to say to me personally, feel free to email me about it and we can work something out, let's not drag it out on the blender foundation forums though ok?

Cheers,
Zarf.

[teachtech]

I don't know if I want to get too involved in this discussion for fear of the results, but about 15 years ago, while IBM was targeting the business sector, Apple was targeting the educational sector by giving schools great deals by thinking that if you learn on a Mac, you'll go out into the "real world" and continue using a Mac. I think this, and coupled with their approach to not letting anyone develop hardware and limits on code, almost killed the company. Autodesk has the same approach with their software and now they're seeing a small loss in customers that I predict will continue. Autodesk has frustrated many of us high school educators in Pennsylvania because of their pricing packages to the point of finding alternatives. That's why we decided to stick with AutoCAD for 2D drawing only and look for alternatives to our 3D, architectural and animation needs, hence, why I'm now a poster child for Blender. I held a seminar at this year's state conference based mostly on Blender and spoke with about 45 other teachers about these options. The word is speading.

Apple's idea of hitting the education market was solid, but followed up poorly. Very few people know of the Blender option and even fewer have taken the time to sit down and figure it out well enough to see if it can be used in the classroom. We try to teach concepts more than the actual tool (program) to get there since technology is ever changing. Blender does that well and lets the kids actually be able to go home and follow up because they can afford Blender! If the movement continues as strongly as it has over the past year, I can see Blender reaching a much broader audience. Will it put Maya and 3D Studio on the defensive, I doubt it, but one can only hope

On one final note: Even though I'm a teacher, I gave up my Mac about 8 years ago and moved over to the dark side of Windows because with what I teach, there isn't a whole lot out there for the Mac!

[dsobiera]

As far as open source being the future, well guess what, no open source project exists in either situation that would have enabled WETA to work this way. Once again I would wager (actually I know) this is not an isolated incident. So please do tell, *why* people are ignorant and need to 'wake up and smell the OS coffee'. I don't think that you can really with any authority state that the industry really dosnt know what its doing without having deep insider knowledge of it, otherwise the implications you made are just rude and offensive. I will wager (once again) that you don't have any such knowledge.

Cheers,
Zarf

Zarf, I had a conversation similiar to this on Elysiun a while back. For some reason, Open Source is considered the savior for people. They quote projects like Linux as the proof this works. Without getting into a huge flame war here, *companies* did not start going with Linux until they had tangible support. Redhat (and others) were instrumental in getting this to happen. Outside of hobbiests and education, no one was going to go with a product unless support on some level happened. Outside of the fine Blender manuals and the "cowbook" what documentation is there for blender? The user documentation project? Ummm...how many people are actually modifiying that? It's a good starting point but a skeleton at best. The tutorials? Ummmmm..... how many companies are going to say "yeah, go to http://www.geocities.com/coolBabyRibs and look at this tutorial for training on ths feature"? Yeah, I'd bank my company on that professional looking training method

It is a matter of conventions and public relations. I keep hearing how Blender kicks all this butt and other companies are stupid for not using it. Okay, for still images I cut some slack on this. I've seen some images generated from Blender that are up there with other packages. But what project can we point to that set the standard for blender as a professional standard animation and rendering tool? I remember Lightwave came into my view in the early-middle 90's due to Babylon 5 using it. I've seen snippits of animations posted as "finished work" but outside of Ton's "demo reel", what can we tout as "the standard".? The put up or shut up attitude is prevailent in the world. A team driven animation project (let's call it "Tuf Guy" for the sake of this discussion) needs to be created using Blender's latest technologies as advirtisement. This needs to include actual story tellers (all the animations I see have very little plot) as well as the technical artists. Until his happens, Blender will have no quick answer like "it was used in Babylon 5" to DEMONSTRATE it's usefullness. How many job ads do we see now-a-days that say "demonstrated knowledge in..."?

I also think the user community is too sit back and do nothing here. I could say selfish (what can Blender do for ME) but I think the community is too good for that. Yes, the core developers kick much butt. But look how many people are registered on here and elysiun and how many actually contribute stuff? The ratio is horrible. I tried to get an effort going to come up with a more formal training method for Blender learning a while back. *I* offered to do most of the hard work, editing and delivery method if the artists would supply the material and ideas. Do you know how many people responded- 1. And he hasn't written me back since I replied to him privately giving him my work email. Even if one is an artist (not a coder) does not mean that shields one from responsibility to help out. Artists are exactly the type of people to know how to create something. Unfortuanately, they are not always the best to COMMUNICATE these ideas. Hence why I tried to propose central writers (like myself) to take the artist's knowledge and form USEFUL CONSISTANT training. Yet everone sits back and waits for someone else to do it. I've been stuck at an advanced beginning level of blender (using it since 1999) because of the lack of consistant training.

Successful Open Source projects (there are many more failuress than successes) only work when the userbase is proactive. Some can code, some can write. Most have ideas. There is no excuse for people to not contribute SOMETHING (except bitching). Blender's problem right now isn't the tool, isn't the people helping now. It's the rest that sit back, complain and don't lift a finger to help out. Then complain about the problems and don't offer solutions and take ownership. I see a problem with training, I complain about it. I tried to help. I hear crickets in the response to this. Donations are fine and help the coding but there is so much MORE that can be done. That shouldn't be the high bar for contributing to Blender. That should be the MINIMUM!

Okay, I'm feeling slightly better now. I felt you were making excellent points. Excuse my rant.

[Al-Capone]

Here's a succesfull one

http://www.ogre3d.org/modules.php?set_a ... _album.php