Hahahaha, excellent answer, Omar!
Sorry, I’ve been moving! not to that mythical farm, but across town!
And Omar’s answer actually isn’t spot on for me. It’s definitely why I stayed with Blender, though. The community is just amazing.
However, sadly, I actually did start using it because it was free. I was working at a big studio, and to make vfx elements for myself, I would have to go home, do it in 3dsMax, email to my work email, then the next day I could start using it. If I had to make a change, I had to wait until I went home. But our work computers had Blender installed already (it was v2.48 or something like that), so I started messing around with it because it was there. As soon as 2.5 came out and overhauled the UI, I was really hooked.
And back then, for all the freelance jobs I would do at home, I used After Effects for compositing. But I wanted a node compositing program like I was using at work, and Blender had it. When Adobe went to subscription, I stopped upgrading all my Adobe products. And sadly, there’s still not been much development in free or open source compositing programs. Fusion is great, and Blender is great. Blender’s compositor doesn’t get as much attention as the other areas of Blender, but I’m very glad we have it.
