Basically, the guys we had in house on staff were just focused on low poly and fixing bad topo.
Max, Maya, Zbrush and substance painter all made auto-magic re-topology tools. Whatever that shit out went through minimal editing before it was baked and considered good. Lots of broken "difficult" areas like bad topo around tits, bad topo around the corner of lips. Weird as hell lighting artifacts thanks to that.
You know how you'd have topo that is like /\ in the middle of a symmetrical line? If the retopo pass made it / / they'd not even bother to turn the triangles. Oh, giant 8 edge n-gon? Fuck it. It's flat. Surely the engine will get it right. Let's not solve that pre-emptively!
The dumbest topo tool is zbrush though. Smear red and blue to indicate where you need more texture density and hit the easy button. Others in the office didn't even know you could premark texture seams to make the tool at least a little more intelligent.
Most people heading up studios had a backround in QA or production. So management has a familiarity and connection to the tools that are legacy. They can easily call bullshit when a hireling starts saying "Oh, my texture bake for a gun is going to occupy my computer for the next 8 hours. I'm going to leave it to cook, see you tomorrow boss!"
That's the big reason. Getting new tools for the staff would mean having to learn themselves.
Another thing is the "good enough, lets just get it done" mindset. That'd have a guy struggling and grunting to drive in some wood screws by hand because he doesn't want to climb through a messy garage to retrieve a powerdrill.
Theory of mind issue; you're thinking if you can do it then they can do it. Consider yourself a unicorn.
Linux has ALWAYS been an option. Every time windows is looking to impose a really shitty change, people threaten to go to linux. Do they though? Or they threaten to change cloud services... but they usually stay on azure.
You could have a manual transmission offer 30% better gas millage. People would still stick to automatic because they just don't have the mental bandwidth to learn manual after a lifetime of automatic.
Not justifying it, just saying, humans preserve brainpower whenever possible.
Legacy is legacy, y'know? More ready made tool and scripts, tutorials and video learning. What makes them better than blender is just the fact that there's more money behind it. Whenever blender comes up with something truly unique, the major players just copycat them.
Opensource tenders to be by the people, for the people, but like most projects that are quasi-communism, there is no real motivation to have high production values in training seminars or said training in the first place.
If you are a self guided learner, this is fine. If you have the free time, this is fine... but where commercial software wins is when the industry makes a major shift. Like in recent memory, the change to PBR materials. When you have to change the entire way you bake materials to accommodate ray tracing or change the way you model something to accommodate nanite, there will be professional training in person you can buy from one of the big 3.
With blender. . . you don't really have that crack team of "We need to train the entire studio on nextgen pipelines THIS MONTH" groups.
Basically, the guys we had in house on staff were just focused on low poly and fixing bad topo.
Max, Maya, Zbrush and substance painter all made auto-magic re-topology tools. Whatever that shit out went through minimal editing before it was baked and considered good. Lots of broken "difficult" areas like bad topo around tits, bad topo around the corner of lips. Weird as hell lighting artifacts thanks to that.
You know how you'd have topo that is like /\ in the middle of a symmetrical line? If the retopo pass made it / / they'd not even bother to turn the triangles. Oh, giant 8 edge n-gon? Fuck it. It's flat. Surely the engine will get it right. Let's not solve that pre-emptively!
The dumbest topo tool is zbrush though. Smear red and blue to indicate where you need more texture density and hit the easy button. Others in the office didn't even know you could premark texture seams to make the tool at least a little more intelligent.
Most people heading up studios had a backround in QA or production. So management has a familiarity and connection to the tools that are legacy. They can easily call bullshit when a hireling starts saying "Oh, my texture bake for a gun is going to occupy my computer for the next 8 hours. I'm going to leave it to cook, see you tomorrow boss!"
That's the big reason. Getting new tools for the staff would mean having to learn themselves.
Another thing is the "good enough, lets just get it done" mindset. That'd have a guy struggling and grunting to drive in some wood screws by hand because he doesn't want to climb through a messy garage to retrieve a powerdrill.
Theory of mind issue; you're thinking if you can do it then they can do it. Consider yourself a unicorn.
Linux has ALWAYS been an option. Every time windows is looking to impose a really shitty change, people threaten to go to linux. Do they though? Or they threaten to change cloud services... but they usually stay on azure.
You could have a manual transmission offer 30% better gas millage. People would still stick to automatic because they just don't have the mental bandwidth to learn manual after a lifetime of automatic.
Not justifying it, just saying, humans preserve brainpower whenever possible.
I do some hobby 3d rendering in blender. How does that tool compare to the professional ones?
Legacy is legacy, y'know? More ready made tool and scripts, tutorials and video learning. What makes them better than blender is just the fact that there's more money behind it. Whenever blender comes up with something truly unique, the major players just copycat them.
Opensource tenders to be by the people, for the people, but like most projects that are quasi-communism, there is no real motivation to have high production values in training seminars or said training in the first place.
If you are a self guided learner, this is fine. If you have the free time, this is fine... but where commercial software wins is when the industry makes a major shift. Like in recent memory, the change to PBR materials. When you have to change the entire way you bake materials to accommodate ray tracing or change the way you model something to accommodate nanite, there will be professional training in person you can buy from one of the big 3.
With blender. . . you don't really have that crack team of "We need to train the entire studio on nextgen pipelines THIS MONTH" groups.