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Is Blender the future of 3D modeling and VFX?

More and more companies are adopting the free and open-source software.

Christian Behler

Published in

UX Collective

6 min readJul 12, 2021

A screenshot of a scene and the user interface in modern Blender versions. It’s a scene of a beach with a lot of rocks and dune grass and an ocean with a sunset. The userface is dark gray and you can see a node editor at the bottom. — A simple scene in the newest Blender version that can easily compete with other 3D programs, image by author.

3D modeling and VFX software is incredibly expensive. Licenses for Maya, Cinema 4D, or 3DS Max cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars per year. This makes it very difficult for beginners to learn and too expensive for most independent artists and developers.

For a long time, there were no good alternatives. Blender wasn’t good enough to compete with the industry-leading programs. However, everything changed with the very impactful Blender 2.8 update in 2019. The free and open-source software took a big step to catch up and is now up to par with the other programs (if not better in some areas). As the Blender development continues, more and more companies are starting to integrate it into their workflows.

The Old Blender

“Hey, I have an idea! Let’s go against every common piece of software and use right-click to select something instead of left-click.”

This is the decision Blender made back in the 90s. They wanted to separate selection from action to create a faster workflow. Maybe that’s true when you are used to it, but it was extremely unintuitive for new users to learn because it went against years of training and muscle memory from…

I used to be very skeptical of Blender ever going mainstream but it certainly has. Every production studio uses it in some capacity these days.

So is it the future of VFX? Yes and no! Let me start with the no...

Historically no workflow used a single…

Slightly off topic, but I feel the same way about Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer being perfectly good replacements for Photoshop and Illustrator, for my limited needs. And only $50, versus Adobe's subscription model that I loathe.

I know blender from version 2.79 and let me tell you they've came a looong way, and with every update I feel like the market is more repective to this software. Not long ago most of the biggest render farms starting considring it as one of the main…