Blender has been around for decades, and enjoyed a fair bit of popularity in the 90s when it was a great point-of-entry for budding 3D artists.
Since then, it's fluctuated in its rate of evolution relative to the industry standard. It always had cutting edge features, but they were trapped behind a troublesome UI, while the big competitors made their tools ever easier to use.
In recent years, the gap has been drastically closed due to a ground-up rewrite, completely new approach to the UI, and a tremendous effort to modernize.
Unfortunately, Blender still has a bad reputation, a legacy from the previous design. What's more, many studios and schools have firmly entrenched workflows, or depend on custom extensions written for a specific tool.
On the other hand, Blender seems to be enjoying popularity in the booming indie games community, where it integrates well with other free tools like Unity 3D.
With the new design, I wouldn't be surprised if Blender's best and most-popular days were ahead of it. I see share growth coming from individuals looking to make great graphics on a shoestring budget, as opposed to big studios or schools adopting it instead of Maya or Max.
I would argue that it is now roughly equivalent to those other tools in terms of features and usability. So, no real reason to switch (which requires expensive adjustments to existing workflows), but great incentive to adopt it in the first place (because it's free).
The scriptability of Blender has been a big draw for me. It's pretty deeply integrated with Python. One can even use it as an interactive 3D front-end for a substantial Python script. That is, let the script create and manipulate the objects, and just use Blender to view what is happening. In Blender 2.4 it was possible to keep a script continuously animating the scene, something I found tough to make happen after the 2.5 overhaul.
Blender 2.4 also let scripts create UI components, such as entire control panels to influence the running script. The last time I checked in 2.5, this was either not possible or not well documented. But I'm not up to date on this.
I'm also not familiar for comparison with the scriptability of Maya or other tools.
Maya has multiple scripting facilities. It has its native language, MEL, but for a long time it has also supported Python scripts, more recently with a new API. In fact, much of its GUI is built using scripts that come with it.
There is some lack of consistency between the different approaches, not just in the languages but in the presentation of the underlying data model, which isn't always helpful. Still, as a guy with a programming background, I actually found it easier to figure out how Maya works by playing with scripts and the underlying object model than by experimenting with the user interface. :-)
Since then, it's fluctuated in its rate of evolution relative to the industry standard. It always had cutting edge features, but they were trapped behind a troublesome UI, while the big competitors made their tools ever easier to use.
In recent years, the gap has been drastically closed due to a ground-up rewrite, completely new approach to the UI, and a tremendous effort to modernize.
Unfortunately, Blender still has a bad reputation, a legacy from the previous design. What's more, many studios and schools have firmly entrenched workflows, or depend on custom extensions written for a specific tool.
On the other hand, Blender seems to be enjoying popularity in the booming indie games community, where it integrates well with other free tools like Unity 3D.
With the new design, I wouldn't be surprised if Blender's best and most-popular days were ahead of it. I see share growth coming from individuals looking to make great graphics on a shoestring budget, as opposed to big studios or schools adopting it instead of Maya or Max.
I would argue that it is now roughly equivalent to those other tools in terms of features and usability. So, no real reason to switch (which requires expensive adjustments to existing workflows), but great incentive to adopt it in the first place (because it's free).