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I can’t speak for UE4, but this isn’t accurate with Maya. There are four three viewport backends, sans Legacy. You can run DirectX on Windows, OpenGL Core Profile (Compatibility) for OpenGL 2.1- and 3.2+ on Windows and Linux, or OpenGL Core Profile (Strict) for OpenGL 3.2+ only on Windows, Linux, and macOS. Nowhere is OpenGL 4 a requirement. Running Maya on Linux in the first place is a different story with how licensing works right now. And Blender dropping of OpenGL 2 was done specifically because it was holding back improving the application with the major overhaul of the viewports they were doing.
My perspective on the matter from the Anim/VFX industry side:
As someone who works in the animation industry (at animation studios), everything that’s been happening with Blender has been a marked improvement for usability and adoption, but it’s still got a ways to go. And when it comes to professionalism... all of the core DCC's commonly used, e.g. Maya, Max, Houdini, Cinema 4D, etc, even Blender host a ton of functionality in order to support a broad range of workloads and workflows. Every tool that has these kinds of use cases will grow in size, code, complexity no matter what. You can't pick a feature set and just refine unless you want to just be a specialist tool. Other than requiring actual GPU's because Intel UHD graphics... well... suck for this kind of work, these apps will usually work on most hardware that aren't potatoes. Those requirements are put there from a support perspective where you will find the most optimal results and how much time the vendors are willing to spend with you on solving a problem as it actively costs them money.
When it comes to those other DCC's, they also have different target audiences. Maya and Houdini (originally Prism) are geared primarily towards VFX/Anim studios, C4D to smaller groups and motion designers, and Max to VFX studios (to a lesser degree) and archviz groups. And (at least in the case of Maya/Houdini), the versions of the apps used in the larger studios that can sway Autodesk/SideFX's priorities are not the off-the-shelf one's that others buy. They are heavily modified and customized (not talking about plugins), e.g. Disney has Autodesk engineers onsite, and 90% of the time no one other than that studio will ever see what's there unless they gift it to a vendor. Blender from the start was targeting solo end users for the most part and for a long time Ton made a lot of anti-studio/general industry decisions that went against what would have helped earlier adoption in the industry from the studio field. Outside of Blender Institute, Tangent Animation, and Barnstorm VFX, there really aren't studios using Blender, and if they did, they would be doing their own work on it and then considering making it available upstream once the devs got through legal. And it would be up to the Blender team to decide whether to accept that addition/request and weigh it to see if it's a benefit for the most users possible, not a small select group to then support the feature for. Studios are more than capable of doing that on their own. That being said, the Blender devs have been doing some things that make adoption by studios much easier and cleaner, but Ton and Co. are not losing sight of who their main audience is.
Having the support of all these vendors from a hardware standpoint, software features that help significant amounts of users, and enabling tighter, more professional 1st-class support with 3rd-party tools is a huge bonus to Blender, that for all intents and purposes, shouldn't affect what you do with the app. Just due to the nature of Blender, I don't see it following the same path as other DCC tools.
Summation: I really wouldn't worry
Cheers,
Mike
Originally posted by kpedersen
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My perspective on the matter from the Anim/VFX industry side:
As someone who works in the animation industry (at animation studios), everything that’s been happening with Blender has been a marked improvement for usability and adoption, but it’s still got a ways to go. And when it comes to professionalism... all of the core DCC's commonly used, e.g. Maya, Max, Houdini, Cinema 4D, etc, even Blender host a ton of functionality in order to support a broad range of workloads and workflows. Every tool that has these kinds of use cases will grow in size, code, complexity no matter what. You can't pick a feature set and just refine unless you want to just be a specialist tool. Other than requiring actual GPU's because Intel UHD graphics... well... suck for this kind of work, these apps will usually work on most hardware that aren't potatoes. Those requirements are put there from a support perspective where you will find the most optimal results and how much time the vendors are willing to spend with you on solving a problem as it actively costs them money.
When it comes to those other DCC's, they also have different target audiences. Maya and Houdini (originally Prism) are geared primarily towards VFX/Anim studios, C4D to smaller groups and motion designers, and Max to VFX studios (to a lesser degree) and archviz groups. And (at least in the case of Maya/Houdini), the versions of the apps used in the larger studios that can sway Autodesk/SideFX's priorities are not the off-the-shelf one's that others buy. They are heavily modified and customized (not talking about plugins), e.g. Disney has Autodesk engineers onsite, and 90% of the time no one other than that studio will ever see what's there unless they gift it to a vendor. Blender from the start was targeting solo end users for the most part and for a long time Ton made a lot of anti-studio/general industry decisions that went against what would have helped earlier adoption in the industry from the studio field. Outside of Blender Institute, Tangent Animation, and Barnstorm VFX, there really aren't studios using Blender, and if they did, they would be doing their own work on it and then considering making it available upstream once the devs got through legal. And it would be up to the Blender team to decide whether to accept that addition/request and weigh it to see if it's a benefit for the most users possible, not a small select group to then support the feature for. Studios are more than capable of doing that on their own. That being said, the Blender devs have been doing some things that make adoption by studios much easier and cleaner, but Ton and Co. are not losing sight of who their main audience is.
Having the support of all these vendors from a hardware standpoint, software features that help significant amounts of users, and enabling tighter, more professional 1st-class support with 3rd-party tools is a huge bonus to Blender, that for all intents and purposes, shouldn't affect what you do with the app. Just due to the nature of Blender, I don't see it following the same path as other DCC tools.
Summation: I really wouldn't worry
Cheers,
Mike
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