On Sun, May 10, 2015 at 2:51 PM, C R wrote:
The fact that most people don't currently use blender to make money is a bit troubling... mainly because hobbies often fall by the wayside for more important things in life. It means Blender may lose a substantial portion of our users over time if we don't push to make Blender 3D ubiquitous with 3D graphics in the industry. It's come a long way towards doing that, and I think these figures show it.
It's more complicated than that. You can't push Blender to studios that have tons of custom scripts and plugins for Maya, After Effects etc. No support for proprietary file formats can fix that. It's a workflow thing. It's a bit similar with InDesign and Photoshop users too.
Sure, but it doesn't make them any less FOSS to support interchange formats in my opinion. It makes it more likely that Blender will become a viable option for an increasing number of VFX professionals.
I'm unsure how you arrived from FOSS morals (in your own words) to interchange formats, but OK :)
Inkscape opens both .AI and .CDR. What other industry-leading apps do you know?
Yea, and it's a horrible mess. lol It also does not write AI files back out, which packaging companies are notorious for requiring.
Maybe I've hanged around on #ardour too long, but when Paul Davis says "that's bullshit. there's always one more thing. every crowd has their own "one thing"", I tend to completely agree.
I've been a huge proponent for legacy data support in free software for a long time and personally contributed to some of the relevant efforts, but with time I revised by attitude towards that. The thing is, you don't change the industry by running after major players and doing "one more thing" all the time. You focus on making a bloody amazing product instead (see another reply with reference to Sketch).
Look at the thing with Visio. It took years to get this sorted out for just reading, and crowds who were unhappy that free software doesn't support VSD at all are now unhappy about quirks in the VSD support. It's important that it is done anyway, but it can't and shouldn't be the primary focus. You are not building a VSD reader, you are building a vector graphics illustration package :) Same with AI: you are not building an AI writer (which should be a low-hanging fruit anyway).
There's often a baseline. For vector graphics, that is PDF, PS, and EPS. Support it well and fix the rest by social means: actually talk to printing companies about their need to absolutely take everything in either .AI or .CDR. Not neccessarily _educate_, but _talk_.
If a client sends you a psd, scolding them for not using an open format is not going to convince anyone.
Do you know about GIMP# much? When Maurits started working on support for Photoshop actions, he had to implement every Photoshop filter that works differently from its GIMP counterpart and write a few missing filters. That got him about 50% coverage AFAIK. This is the kind of work you have to do when you aim to support other software's project data. It will never be perfect.
When you have limited human/time resources, what do you make your priority? Adding support for something you can't do much with (remember: those layers effects are commonly used in web design, for which Krita has no features at all) or adding features that help people getting their work done _from scratch_?
I would not say that GIMP is a shining example of something everyone knows about either.
Exactly my point.
Very few know about it compared to Photoshop. People want professional artists doing spots for GIMP, etc, you've got to provide software that is compatible with the industry established software
Are you absolutely sure that artists, that is, people whose primary tools are brushes, absolutely need opening their old PSD files with a layer effect or two thrown in for a good measure?
Alex