"Shonner, what you say is true, but soon the studios will realize it will cost them a lot less to fund something like Blender than Maya."

I think it's done the other way around much of the time. I think some studios get various 'perks' and are somewhat funded by the software companies. When a company like Alias, for instance, can say in their advertising, "Maya was used in LOTR" (for example), they get more sales. Some of these companies bend over backwards to get a studio to utilize their product, because it means bragging rights.

The success (or failure) of any software will depend almost entirely on one thing... money. They need money to develop, and they need money to advertise.

Right now, I think the company with the deepest pockets is still Autodesk/Discreet (3dsmax, etc.). Their products are used in so many of the major studios in one way or another (if you take into consideration ALL of their family of products, like 3dsmax/VIZ, Inferno, Combustion, Flint, etc.), and their flagship 3D app, 3dsmax, is still used by at least 80% of the game-creation market. As we all know, game development is a multi-BILLION dollar industry these days, looking to far surpass the profit margine of even the largest Hollywood film productions.

Then you have Alias/Maya, who have brilliantly positioned their software as THE software of choice for the majority of movie FX/animation studios. It really has less to do with what Maya is capable of and more to do with marketing of their product (real or imaginary). To this day, there are some people who still think Gollum in LOTR was created in Maya, when in fact, Bay Raitt modelled Gollum's head and 800+ morph targets in a modelling app called Mirai.

So will these "free" applications ever make it to the big time and completely replace the big guns in the major studios? Perhaps some day they might find their way into more than a few major studios, but you will likely not hear much about it. Not while you have software companies with deep advertising pockets getting in bed with these same studios.

Free apps depend largely on word-of-mouth advertising, and if/when it gets to the point where they might become a threat to the big name apps... I think they will licensed or acquired by those big names first. Message edited on: 07/24/2005 12:47

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.