Blender revolution
2019 was a watershed year for Blender. Jim Thacker investigates why the open source 3D software is now used by the world’s leading art studios.
Jim Thacker charts the rise of Blender, how it took on the big commercial guns and came out on top.
The year 2019 is the Chinese Year of the Pig. It is also the year 3185 in the Discordian calendar and the interval 1,546,300,800 to 1,577,836,799 in Unix time, not to mention the United Nations International Year of Moderation, Indigenous Languages and the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements. But to many digital artists, it is the year of Blender.
The open source 3D modelling and animation software hit a new high in 2019. Its milestone 2.80 update drew in record numbers of new donations, pushing development funding to over $1 million per year: a total helped along by major grants from AMD, Epic Games and Nvidia.
Blender is now in use at companies ranging from Adidas to Ubisoft, for the creation of commercials, game cinematics, Emmy Awardwinning TV series and even a $30 million animated feature film. Once derided as a tool for hobbyists, its rising profile in the visual effects and animation industries has attracted a new generation of artists to Blender, and has prompted even die-hard users of commercial tools to embrace open-source development. So in this article, we ask: what has gone so right for Blender?
To many, Blender seems like an overnight success story. If so, it’s a story with a 24-year prologue. The software began life in 1995 as the in-house 3D software of Neogeo, the Dutch animation studio co-founded by a man who would be inextricably linked with Blender in the public imagination: programmer and producer Ton Roosendaal.
Initially, Roosendaal planned to release Blender as a more conventional product, with a free version for creating online content and paid versions for everything else. But even in the late 1990s, the professional 3D software market was saturated with better-established competitors. When his investors decided to pull the plug on Not a Number, the new firm he had founded to market and develop Blender, Roosendaal went open source. A crowdfunding campaign raised the €100,000 needed to buy back the code base, and on 13 October 2002 Blender was released under a GPL licence.
Now chairman of the fledgling Blender Foundation, he established two precedents that would be crucial to the software’s future success. First, the development of
Blender would be accelerated through ‘open movies’: animated shorts released under a Creative Commons licence. As well as being a public showcase for Blender, these enabled developers to stress-test the software on projects run like real commercial productions.
Second, the work would be crowdfunded. The crowdfunding drives for individual open movies would eventually coalesce into Blender Cloud, the subscription-based online platform through which the Blender Institute and the Blender Animation Studio, the organisations now responsible for the work, release content. For a monthly subscription fee of €9.90, backers can download the 3D assets used in the
production of the open movies, on top of accessing the movies themselves.
At the time of writing, the Blender Cloud has over 5,000 backers, while the Blender Animation Studio is in early development on its first animated feature: a fulllength version of Webby Award-winning 2017 open short
Agent 327: Operation Barbershop. Just as importantly, the subscription funding model also now applies to
Blender itself, via the separate Blender Development Fund, which provided the financial muscle needed for this year’s milestone 2.80 update.
A game-changing release
When Roosendaal first proposed Blender 2.80 in 2015, it was as a “workflow release” – a chance to stop focusing on new features for a while in favour of bigger structural goals. At the time, he thought the work might take “9-12 months”. It turned out it would take three years longer.
But those extra years would buy the Blender Foundation time to address some of the real drawbacks in the software: issues that prevented artists used to commercial 3D applications from switching over to
Blender. The biggest was the user interface. Before 2.80, diehard Blender users – including many
Blender developers – would defend the software’s defiantly idiosyncratic UI on the grounds that ‘different doesn’t always mean worse’. Blender could do everything that other 3D packages could, they argued, and given a little time, it was possible to adapt your old working methods to a new combination of icons, keyboard shortcuts and menu commands.
But for artists working in visual effects or game development – notoriously high-pressure industries, particularly when deadlines are looming – time is at a premium. Many people who might otherwise have loved
Blender got no further than its splash screen. Some of the changes made in Blender 2.80 were cosmetic: the interface has a more industry-standard dark grey colour scheme, designed to prevent it from drawing the user’s eye away from the 3D scene on display in the viewport. Others struck at the heart of
Blender veterans’ sense of identity and even their muscle memory. In almost every other 3D application, you leftclick to select things. In Blender, prior to 2.80, you rightclicked by default. Supporters argued that it made for a faster, more precise workflow – but it was also alien to artists coming to Blender from other software.
Other changes were intended specifically to help artists make that transition. A toggleable ‘keymap’ switched Blender’s keyboard shortcuts from their traditional settings to ones more familiar to users of other 3D applications: tools like Pixologic’s Zbrush, used for sculpting organic characters, Autodesk’s Maya, used for general-purpose modelling and animation, and
Sidefx’s Houdini, used for creating physically based effects like fire, water and smoke.
One of Blender’s strengths – but also one of the things that was confusing for new users – was that it could do all of those things, and more. As well as modelling, sculpting, 3D animation and effects, there’s toolsets for 2D animation, video editing and compositing: integrating rendered 3D images into liveaction footage. The 2.80 release grouped toolsets into a series of themed ‘workspaces’. If you were a specialist animator and didn’t want to be distracted by the editing tools, you could simply switch to the animation workspace and never have to see them.
And for artists working at bigger studios, the 2.80 release overhauled Blender’s core architecture. Changes to the software’s dependency graph now makes it possible to manipulate scenes of the complexity common in VFX and feature animation, particularly those with 3D characters, without the viewport display laggin. To reduce the size of these massive scenes, studios often adopt a workflow in which the main scene file becomes a container for smaller, reusable assets stored in external files. The 2.80 release would also lay the groundwork for a new system of file referencing. But despite being an update focused on workflow,
Blender 2.80 also added new features: hundreds of them, in fact. And one of the most significant has been Eevee, Blender’s new real-time render engine.
Not just for Pokémon
Traditionally, in 3D software there was no such thing as a WYSIWYG interface: displaying a 3D scene on a monitor with the same kind of visual quality as it would eventually appear on the big screen would grind workstations to a halt. Artists had to make do with a version that could actually be displayed in real time – usually a lower-quality, grey-shaded preview of the scene. Rendering – the process of generating final-quality images from the data – took hours, if not days, for a single frame of animation.
Eevee does away with the guesswork involved in such a workflow. While it doesn’t display a scene with the full visual subtlety that Blender is capable of, it does a pretty good job, providing a real-time display with the quality you might expect in a videogame. Blender isn’t the only 3D application to have near-photorealistic previews, but Eevee is currently one of the best examples.
“As a 3D artist, you get used to seeing boring, greyshaded models,” says Daniel Bystedt, head of modelling at Swedish VFX and animation company Goodbye Kansas Studios. “The more I worked with Eevee, seeing everything in such a finished state, the more it dawned on me that this is what we’d been missing. We didn’t have to guess how a 3D model would look in the final render.”
Bystedt discovered Blender four years ago. Finding the render software his previous employer was using off-puttingly complex, he tried out Blender and discovered that he liked its modelling toolset better than that of Maya. When he got a job at Goodbye Kansas, he brought the software with him.
Goodbye Kansas now uses Blender on every project, including its Emmy Award-nominated visual effects for
The Walking Dead, as well as its game trailer for The Witcher series creator CD PROJEKT RED’S much-hyped
Cyberpunk 2077. Around a fifth of the studio’s artists use the software, primarily for concept design and 3D modelling, with others using Zbrush, Maya and Houdini.
For context, that means Blender enjoys equal status in production with commercial tools that cost thousands of dollars per licence.
While Bystedt says that Blender’s limited current support for the USD file format, used to exchange scene data between high-end 3D applications, makes it difficult for Goodbye Kansas to use it for other tasks, individual 3D models are much easier to transfer from one software package to another. “That’s one of the benefits of modelling,” he says. “It comes first [in a production workflow], so no one else is depending on you. You can just use Maya as the most expensive publishing tool ever.”
Blender’s biggest hit
But no such restrictions apply if your studio uses
Blender as its primary creative software package. That’s the case at Tangent Animation, the Canadian firm responsible for what is believed to be the biggest
Blender production: Next Gen. Based on Chinese online comic 7723, the feature-length animation, distributed via Netflix, was produced for a reported $30 million.
The sci-fi comedy drama, described by CNET as “like Big Hero 6 mixed with The Iron Giant”, would go on to be nominated for three Annie Awards, the animation industry’s answer to the Oscars, including two for Tangent’s character design and effects work.
“I don’t like to blow our own horn – too much – but I think Next Gen was a big eye-opener for a lot of people [in the movie industry],” says Tangent Animation co-founder and producer Jeff Bell, “number one, for the size of the budget, and number two, for the quality of the show.”
Bell, whose 25-year career includes time spent as an application engineer at original Maya developer Alias|wavefront, first tried Blender in the late 1990s, but says that back then it “felt a bit like a toy”. Although he kept track of Blender over the years, it was a bad experience with commercial software on a project he describes as “the beginnings of Tangent” that prompted him to re-evaluate it seriously.
“We were spending approximately 10 per cent of our budget on software, so to have the door slammed shut in our faces [trying to get extra short-term licence] in the last month of production left a bad taste in our mouths,” he says. “I took another look at Blender and thought, ‘This has a lot of potential.’”
The fledgling studio used Blender for an internal three-minute test short before committing to it fully for its first major project, Spanish-canadian animated feature Ozzy. “At the time, the biggest concern was simply the unknown,” says Bell. “There were areas where we had zero concerns, like modelling. It had good animation tools. [But with more established software], you know where you’re going to run into problems, so you’ve either figured out workarounds for them already, or [know people] who can.”
Tangent Animation is now working on Maya and the
Three, the epic upcoming Netflix animated series described by its director, Emmy Award-winner Jorge Gutiérrez, as a “Mexican Lord of the Rings.” Although it still uses commercial software in production, including Houdini for effects and Adobe’s Photoshop and
Substance tools for creating surface textures for models, “90 per cent plus” of the studio’s work is done in Blender, including all of the animation, scene assembly and rendering.
The company, which expects to peak at around 250 staff during production, estimates that it has trained, “300 to 400 professional-level animators, modellers and [other artists]” to use Blender. It has three software developers working “fairly full-time” on the software, and as a corporate sponsor of the Blender Development Fund, contributes €30,000 per year to central funds.
“We don’t see open source as free. We see it as free-ing,” says Bell. “You could certainly save money if you wanted to, but I see it as an opportunity to take a portion of the budget and redirect it to our core software. We truly hope that others will take the development work we’ve put in and push it further.”
Friends in Epic places
Another key supporter of Blender is Epic Games, the developer directly responsible for some of the videogame industry’s biggest hits, including the Gears
of War franchise and Fortnite, and indirectly responsible for scores more via Unreal Engine, its popular commercial game engine.
The company, which uses Blender internally as a modelling tool, recently made the Blender Foundation the recipient of one of its first ‘Epic Megagrants’, pledging $1.2 million in development funding, to be delivered incrementally between 2019 and 2021.
“I think Blender improved a lot in the last 12 months, particularly with 2.80,” says Marc Petit, Epic Games general manager for Unreal Engine. “It always had good capabilities, but [they were] hard to get to. By adopting standards for UI, it became a much more accessible tool.”
Petit says that, as an open source application, he expects Blender to be “extremely disruptive” in an industry whose key commercial developers, such as Autodesk and Adobe, now operate a rental-only software as a service model.
“Right now, the problem is learning,” he says. “In the entertainment industry, there are a lot of companies [operating on] low margins, and it’s expensive to re-tool. I think we can expect to see the Blender Foundation spending more time addressing that learning curve, making sure that people can transition from legacy packages to Blender easily.”
Blender’s growing pains
Transition is certainly an issue that preoccupies Blender Foundation chairman Ton Roosendaal. The organisation is having a hard time keeping up with Blender’s recent popularity: as well as Epic Games, corporate sponsors of the development fund now include AMD, Nvidia, Intel, Google and Canonical.
“Everything is exploding,” he says. “We’re growing at a rate of one or two people a month. Last time I counted, there were 32 people under contract, [including] 20 developers working on Blender.”
“We’re experiencing what every start-up [goes through],” Roosendaal continues. “You have a success? Okay, good luck: try to scale up your business. You may double [in size], but that doesn’t mean that things go twice as well. [Blender’s] breakthrough in the market is fantastic. But it’s also exhausting.”
Roosendaal – himself now the recipient of an Annie Award for technical achievement – stepped back from active coding just before work began on Blender 2.80. “I knew that my role was changing from developer to organiser and fundraiser, and the public [face] for the project,” he says. ““Managing the 2.8 project more from a product-design and business perspective was a way for me to find out how I could contribute.”
One contribution has been to “professionalise”
Blender’s developer systems, to make it easier for big studios to adopt the software, and in turn to contribute its development. “We can’t do [conventional product] support,” he says. “But we can do documentation. The whole community is basically a support ecosystem.”
Roosendaal believes that this sense of shared investment in the software is what attracts users like multinational game developer Ubisoft – currently moving over to Blender for its spin-off animated TV series. “If you’re making a game, you can talk to people who also care about their product,” he says. “I care. The developers care. The people in the community care. This kind of interaction with their software vendor is something [studios] never had before.
“Companies who produce commercial 3D tools still have good engineers; still write good software,” he continues. “But you don’t think their CEOS would say, ‘We care?’ People would laugh.”
Roosendaal’s goal is now to transition the Blender Foundation into an organisation more like the Linux Foundation, and in doing so to step back personally. “Now that so many studios depend on Blender, they want it to be stable and well-organised,” he says. “They want it to be conservative, to some extent. I am not conservative. But I shouldn’t [confuse] the Blender project with my personal interests.”
Roosendaal plans to shift his talents for shaking up the status quo to the Blender Cloud and Blender Animation Studio. “Blender may be a big success, but how do you solve the problem of access to the market?” he says. “Why aren’t there 100,000 people in the world who say, ‘Rather than giving my money to Disney, I can give it to an animation studio that shares everything with me?’ That’s my mission.”
Meanwhile, development continues apace on the software itself. Blender 2.81 shipped just as this issue of Linux Format went to press, with future releases due to deliver further studio-friendly features, such as improved file referencing, USD support and the ‘Everything Nodes’ project, intended to give Blender users the kind of fully procedural workflow that is currently the preserve of very high-end tools.
“That’s of great importance to us, because it would enable us to start weaning ourselves off Houdini,” says Tangent Animation’s Jeff Bell. “I don’t want third-party packages in-house. I want everything to be Blender.”
So what would Bell say to the stubborn few who still see Blender as just ‘a tool for hobbyists’? “I’ll see you after I’ve released our next movie,” he snorts. “Get on the right side of history. Blender is the future.”