Is Blender Taking Over As The 3D Software Of Choice?

You may be new to using Blender, or you may not be, but either way, you will probably have noticed that Blender has become extremely popular as the general public’s first choice for learning 3D modeling, sculpting, animation, etc. But will it fully take over from the likes of Maya and Z brush in the major industries?

Blender is unlikely to become the number one application in most industries including game design and manufacturing, due to the fact that it is not a specialist software like many of its competitors. It is however cementing itself as the perfect alternative when other options are unavailable to the end-user.

The question itself is an extremely broad question, as there are many industries that use different applications for different tasks. But where is Blender considered to be a top choice or at least a top alternative and where is it playing catchup.

What Industries Are Currently Using Blender?

Blender can be used for just about anything that you can imagine related to 3D art, and even some things that are not 3D related at all. The most obvious industry that Blender is used in is the general art industry, as it can be used to create stunning portrait and landscape renders of any kind, from lush environments to character facials.

But it goes far beyond simply being a tool for artistic renders, as Blender 3D is also a major player in both video game design and 3D animation. It even has new tools for 2D animation as well in the form of the grease pencil. In the video game industry, Blender is often used to create concept art for games, as well as assets that can be used for the game itself.

For animation, Blender can be used almost entirely by itself as it has a whole suite of rigging, animation, and render tools to create professional-quality animations of any length and genre.

These are the main industries where you will find Blender being used but they are not the only ones, as below we have a list of industries where you may want to use Blender for various tasks.

• Game Design
• 3D Art
• Animation
• Programming
• Advertisement
• Music
• Film And Video Editing
• VFX
• Manufacturing
• 3D Printing

The current trajectory of the industry is digital, and that means more and more job roles in almost every field will require the use of a tool like Blender.

Where Is Blender 3D Considered As A Top Choice?

Blender is not really the top choice in any single industry but you could argue the case that it is the perfect second choice in almost any industry that its connected to, with the exception of a couple. As it is primarily a 3D modeling software, it works very well in the fields of game asset design and 3D animation.

Autodesk is a much larger company that is littered with applications that perform various 3D-related tasks. But if the price point for an Autodesk application is too great, then Blender is the ideal second choice for most users.

This holds true when you move away from the much larger companies, who have been using Autodesk and Adobe applications for years, and towards the smaller, mid-tier sized companies that are highlighting the need for a larger workforce, and Blender accessibility means that you will now find more Blender artists than you will Maya in 2022.

In 3D printing, there are some great applications for designing 3D models and while Blender is not the best choice here, it is still a decent one. Creating models that will eventually become tangible objects, whether through 3D printing or more traditional manufacturing methods, is a very different workflow to designing objects for virtual products like video games.

Blender offers the key functionality for this kind of workflow and can definitely work as a cheap alternative compared to the other options.

In Which Industries Are Blender Playing Catch Up For?

Blender is versatile and does continue to improve with each updated version, but some features receive more attention than others. Compositing images and videos using the compositor is a powerful tool but the exclusive node-based system is much less intuitive to use for photo editing compared to the standard workflows that you find in Adobe Photoshop or Photopea.

As such the compositor is only really used for images that are rendered in Blender itself and even then some artists still prefer to use other applications for similar tasks such as color grading. On the plus side, you can isolate various channels of your renders such as with the z depth or cryptomatte tools so that you can isolate and edit very specific parts of your render, which is powerful if you know how to use it properly.

Another field where Blender admittedly struggles is traditional video editing. This is a very common skill to learn and there are roles in almost any tech-based industry that require some knowledge of using a video editor.

While the VSE in Blender does offer many of the fundamental tools required for video editing, as someone who has used the likes of Final cut pro, Adobe premiere pro, and DaVinci resolve, I have always found the VSE to be clunky and slow to edit.

What Does The Term Industry Standard Mean And Does It Apply To Blender?

The term industry standard is used to describe a product or a tool that is considered the optimum choice for that industry. For example, in video game design 3D modeling applications are required to design and create the game assets used for the video games before exporting them to the game engine. Maya is considered as the industry standard for this field.

By contrast, video editing is a process required for multiple industries from animation to advertisement to television. Again Blender is a part of this field but Adobe Premiere Pro is considered to be the industry standard in this field.

So why is Blender not considered an industry-standard tool?

Well the term itself has become less important in recent years as more applications become available and new companies choose to create their own pipelines for their projects, but industry-standard tools are referred to as such not because they are the best tools outright, but rather because the companies behind these tools offer additional services like support for loss of work, app breaking bugs, etc.

They have also been around at the top for many years now and were adopted as a core feature in the production pipeline for many of the larger organizations of these industries.

Blender has been around for a while now itself but has only recently been able to offer long-term support to companies for specific versions of the software. Despite this, Blender is being adopted in smaller companies across several industries including game design, animation, and 3D printing to name a few.

Thanks For Checking Out Our Article

Thank you for taking the time to read our article, we hope you found the information that you were looking for. Below we have created a list of additional topics that you may be interested in reading.

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• What File Formats Are Compatible With Blender 3D?
• Streamline Your Material Setups With Reroute Nodes
• Is Blender The Only Free Software For 3D?
• Does Blender Use The GLTF File Format?