DIGIPENDENCE - declare yours!

Earlier this year, CGenie, “the digital artist’s resource”, released the results of its 2009 CG User Survey.

The survey had 2022 responses and the results were quite illuminating, and in some cases, surprising. For example, Blender was well-represented and much-praised by its users. In fact, the open source software stacked up well against products which cost thousands of dollars. After Blender’s strong showing, CGenie interviewed Ton Roosendaal, Chairman of the Blender Foundation to get his views on the results.

CGenie: Blender received overall the highest mark from its user base in the survey, despite it having a smaller share of the market than many of the bigger contenders, it certainly evokes a lot of passion from its customers, as can be seen from the comments posted both on the article and the survey itself.

Firstly, congratulations on the excellent results that you’ve received - if you didn’t know it already, it’s pretty clear you have quite a vote of confidence from your users. Was this expected?

Ton: We are certainly well aware of the passion of our artists and developers for Blender, so that’s not a surprise! What I’m very happy with is that this survey was executed independently of Blender channels or websites, so the results didn’t get polluted by orchestrated internet community floods. It gives us confirmation of successes of our strategy over the past five years -just working hard on getting the program improved and staying loyal to the original concepts behind Blender and to its user base.

And even though there are perception issues - free and open source programs typically are ‘made for the average user’ and ‘horribly designed’ - the results clearly show an increasing awareness that Blender is being made for artists with a serious interest in using 3D on a professional level. Which, like any program you’ve surveyed, just requires time and energy investment to get most of out of it.

Read the full interview.