Apple was huge in getting open standards funded at Khronos for OpenGL ES, WebGL and more. These investments led to lots of great things and innovations.
The market for 3d tools is one of the most fixed markets out there and the tools are expensive, that has caused interoperability issues and standards being more proprietary. For instance, COLLADA wasn't great but it was one standard they pretty much broke in favor of FBX, which is probably better but also less open/standard.
Hopefully these investments can help change that in the 3d tools market a bit. Even getting your hands on Maya, 3ds Max, ZBrush, Houdini, Cinema4D, etc was difficult until recently. Blender might have made the pricing on those more competitive as well as Unity/Unreal opening up more on pricing.
Blender is opening up 3d tools for all and that is a good thing. The app used to be a usability complexity problem but is getting very competitive in usability and less complex on entry. Tools are like games, they should be easy to approach and more advanced on the backend/detail to master for advanced users, simplicity should always be the goal for tools.
Cinema4D is still ~$100 a month unfortunately. I prefer it’s interface to Blender, even with Blender’s recent UI updates. I don’t think my preference is strong enough to support forking over $100/month, though.
The others have a “lite” version or an indie subscription that is significantly cheaper. When you have those, and a lot of other software is is around $10-50 a month, C4D’s pricing is egregious.
Apple was huge in getting open standards funded at Khronos for OpenGL ES, WebGL and more. These investments led to lots of great things and innovations.
The market for 3d tools is one of the most fixed markets out there and the tools are expensive, that has caused interoperability issues and standards being more proprietary. For instance, COLLADA wasn't great but it was one standard they pretty much broke in favor of FBX, which is probably better but also less open/standard.
Hopefully these investments can help change that in the 3d tools market a bit. Even getting your hands on Maya, 3ds Max, ZBrush, Houdini, Cinema4D, etc was difficult until recently. Blender might have made the pricing on those more competitive as well as Unity/Unreal opening up more on pricing.
Blender is opening up 3d tools for all and that is a good thing. The app used to be a usability complexity problem but is getting very competitive in usability and less complex on entry. Tools are like games, they should be easy to approach and more advanced on the backend/detail to master for advanced users, simplicity should always be the goal for tools.