Blender is extremely capable in a wide range of areas. It’s much more than simply fuel in your analogy, it’s much more like the car builder’s toolbox or even his workshop.
Blender can do complex 3D modelling, physics based rendering (now including real-time EEVEE). 3D animation including rigging and physics interactions, Video editing, 3D motion tracking, plane tracking, image compositing and spatial audio.
Its grease pencil tool is execptional and allows for powerful 2D animation. The freestyle NPR renderer can export animation outlines to SVG.
It has a wide range of plugins for architecture, 3D printing and CAD.
Everything can be scripted via python and almost everything in the UI can be keyframed.
It is an exceptional project and a credit to the open source community.
Blender is an amazing product being used by a ton of professionals, but a lot of people in the CGI industry don't admit to using it because it is free.
Because of this weird echo chamber of "Blender Shame" you have people who actively promote how cool Blender is, which is not always a conscientious reaction, but still stems I think from this reputation fight that Blender is in.
I think the whole PC MASTER RACE joke was a similar response to Apple snobbery.
Actually, "PC MASTER RACE" came from a comedy review of the Witcher. In context, the original quote:
> What quickly becomes obvious is that Witcher is very much a PC exclusive game, which are typically designed to be as complex and unintuitive as possible so that those dirty console-playing peasants don't ruin it for the Glorious PC Master Race.
It was not originally intended to be a positive term.
The PC Master Race thing grew out of a Zero Punctuation video. It’s more about comparing PC games to consoles.
Those I’ve spoken to in the industry have all praised Blender but say they use various commercial tools because it part of their pipeline and they pay for support.
It is nice to see that it is finally getting some traction and recognition in the professional space. For example, the VFX artists on the Amazon TV series "Man in the High Castle" use it for many shots.
The Python integration is truly fantastic. I bought a Perception Neuron motion capture suit a year or two back for use with Unreal Engine, and in just a couple of days I was able to write a Python addon for Blender to take the output generated by the capture suit software and retarget it to the default UE4 skeleton. And I'm no Python guru.
At the same time I feel like the GPL license is a big limitation for Blender. There are a lot of niche tools in the industry and if blender was open source under MIT/Apache or something like that I'm sure you would see a lot of commercial plugins and spinnoffs. They would still have the incentive to contribute back to core to have their stuff merged with trunk and keep compatibility with latest but could also build commercial tools on too of the code base.
Right now it's basically begging governments and donations for dev money and the level of polish is rarely at the level of commercial software.
Blender is extremely capable in a wide range of areas. It’s much more than simply fuel in your analogy, it’s much more like the car builder’s toolbox or even his workshop.
Blender can do complex 3D modelling, physics based rendering (now including real-time EEVEE). 3D animation including rigging and physics interactions, Video editing, 3D motion tracking, plane tracking, image compositing and spatial audio.
Its grease pencil tool is execptional and allows for powerful 2D animation. The freestyle NPR renderer can export animation outlines to SVG.
It has a wide range of plugins for architecture, 3D printing and CAD.
Everything can be scripted via python and almost everything in the UI can be keyframed.
It is an exceptional project and a credit to the open source community.