• Glass Half: a blender foundation short film
    12 replies, posted
[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqiN98z6Dak[/media]
I love it. Also amazing showcase of Blenders Non-Photorealistic and Expressive Rendering.
I played around with Blender a bit about 3 or 4 years ago and now I'm using Maya for Uni projects. How does Blender compare now compared to other 3D Software? It felt a bit weird to use last time I used it. That being said I remember UVs being easier to do in Blender then Maya.
[QUOTE=Whomobile;49045266]I played around with Blender a bit about 3 or 4 years ago and now I'm using Maya for Uni projects. How does Blender compare now compared to other 3D Software? It felt a bit weird to use last time I used it. That being said I remember UVs being easier to do in Blender then Maya.[/QUOTE] For the most part it is on par with Maya and 3DS Max, like all 3d software it excels at some things and is poorer at others relative to its competitors. Unlike its competitors it is free and also open source which has it's benefits if you're into that stuff, and it can produce just as quality work as any of the other major packages. That being said, I personally can't stand and as far as I can tell it will almost never be able to compete with Maya and the like simply because of adoption rates, existing pipelines, and potentially justified or unjustified notions of people in the industry.
[QUOTE=Whomobile;49045266]I played around with Blender a bit about 3 or 4 years ago and now I'm using Maya for Uni projects. How does Blender compare now compared to other 3D Software? It felt a bit weird to use last time I used it. That being said I remember UVs being easier to do in Blender then Maya.[/QUOTE] Blender can do amazing things if you figure out how to make it do amazing things.
[QUOTE=Whomobile;49045266]I played around with Blender a bit about 3 or 4 years ago and now I'm using Maya for Uni projects. How does Blender compare now compared to other 3D Software? It felt a bit weird to use last time I used it. That being said I remember UVs being easier to do in Blender then Maya.[/QUOTE] Having used 3DS max for 2 years, mudbox for 6 months, and blender for 6 months, I've gotta say that blender has an amazing workflow, as well as one huge feature that max/mudbox just sucks in comparison to: You can hit spacebar and start typing what you think a command might be, and it shows a drop-down menu that brings up any command or modifier with your text in it, the first thing highlighted. On the other hand, blender is the only tool with a devastating limit: you can only undo [del]64[/del] 256 times. There are still a few hitches with blender(as there are in max, but different kinds of hitches), but it's far better than it was 3 years ago. And for game engines, both Unity and Unreal support blender files and work well with blender. Unsure about cryengine. Personally, I love blender because it works on linux and I can afford it. As far as I can tell, it does everything Max does, but sometimes you have to google to figure it out(which is better than the max alternative where you have to e-mail autodesk to get answers). No big deal. If you end up making assets for a company that uses max/maya, your experience in blender is equally valuable as your max/maya experience.
[QUOTE=willtheoct;49045379]Having used 3DS max for 2 years, mudbox for 6 months, and blender for 6 months, I've gotta say that blender has an amazing workflow, as well as one huge feature that max/mudbox just sucks in comparison to: You can hit spacebar and start typing what you think a command might be, and it shows a drop-down menu that brings up any command or modifier with your text in it, the first thing highlighted. On the other hand, blender is the only tool with a devastating limit: you can only undo 64 times. There are still a few hitches with blender(as there are in max, but different kinds of hitches), but it's far better than it was 3 years ago. And for game engines, both Unity and Unreal support blender files and work well with blender. Unsure about cryengine. Personally, I love blender because it works on linux and I can afford it. As far as I can tell, it does everything Max does, but sometimes you have to google to figure it out(which is better than the max alternative where you have to e-mail autodesk to get answers). No big deal. If you end up making assets for a company that uses max/maya, your experience in blender is equally valuable as your max/maya experience.[/QUOTE] Last time I checked you can change the undo limit, but it eats up a bit more memory. Kind of a payoff I'm happy to make, tbh. One of the frustrating things about it (maybe this is totally subjective though) is how unintuitive or non-obvious a lot of features are, how much you end up relying on hotkeys that aren't shown anywhere, and how much you'll find yourself googling terms as you try to maneuver the program for the first few months of using it. Maybe the latter goes for all programs with a learning curve, idk, but I never found Blender's in-house documentation all that useful, I always ended up relying on forum posts and stackexchange and Youtube tutorials. That said, for being something that can feasibly compete with 3ds max or Maya, holy fuck am I glad it's free. [editline]4th November 2015[/editline] Also, what you said about it being better than 3 years ago is incredibly true. I tried picking Blender up in... I don't remember exactly, but some time within the past six years, and it was atrocious. When I sought it out to re-install earlier this year, it was with a lot of hesitation and a "I guess I can try to see if I can get it to work this time; it's better than nothing" attitude. [I]Massive[/I] improvement on the older versions.
wait I have the lasted stable version of blender and I see I can increase my undo limit to 256? Also I first tried blender when it was in it's early stages and I couldn't figure it out at all, but three years ago I picked it up and it was way easier. But the official documentation is poor and it's best to find the youtube videos, (the official site that links them off to something like cg cookie is a good starter for a novice). I used to do CAD models in blender do to speed and ease for 3d printing (the size was always off so I had to readjust), I just wish there was a package for FEM simulation for blender that's out of the box.
[QUOTE=willtheoct;49045379]On the other hand, blender is the only tool with a devastating limit: you can only undo 64 times.[/QUOTE] [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/AHjKiXD.png[/IMG] 256 is actually the limit. Also Crytek is still a dick about not really supporting Blender. All in all I agree with your post. For Hobby and more advanced levels Blender is probably the best tool out there. I also hear a lot of modelers swear on Blenders unique modeling tools and modeling workflow.
[QUOTE=ElectricSquid;49045425]Last time I checked you can change the undo limit, but it eats up a bit more memory. Kind of a payoff I'm happy to make, tbh. [/QUOTE] [del]64[/del] 256 is the hard limit. Since it is open source, there may be a way to modify it, but learning how the internals work is probably not worth the effort. The only thing you can change via blender itself is how many undo steps you want to have between 0 and 256. [QUOTE] One of the frustrating things about it (maybe this is totally subjective though) is how unintuitive or non-obvious a lot of features are, how much you end up relying on hotkeys that aren't shown anywhere, and how much you'll find yourself googling terms as you try to maneuver the program for the first few months of using it. Maybe the latter goes for all programs with a learning curve, idk, but I never found Blender's in-house documentation all that useful, I always ended up relying on forum posts and stackexchange and Youtube tutorials. [/QUOTE] Hit spacebar. It's blender's magic. For instance I wanted to do something like max's lathe in blender, so I hit spacebar and typed lathe, didnt work. Tried "spin" and it works! just type whatever you think it might be. If I wanted to know what tools I have to detect or solve ngons, I could type "ngon" into the spacebar menu and get a full list of all related tools. And I still have no idea what the hotkey is to mark seams for UV unwrapping, or actually unwrap after marking seams. Instead, I hit spacebar and type "mark s" and hit enter
[QUOTE=ElectricSquid;49045425]Last time I checked you can change the undo limit, but it eats up a bit more memory. Kind of a payoff I'm happy to make, tbh. One of the frustrating things about it (maybe this is totally subjective though) is how unintuitive or non-obvious a lot of features are, how much you end up relying on hotkeys that aren't shown anywhere, and how much you'll find yourself googling terms as you try to maneuver the program for the first few months of using it. Maybe the latter goes for all programs with a learning curve, idk, but I never found Blender's in-house documentation all that useful, I always ended up relying on forum posts and stackexchange and Youtube tutorials. That said, for being something that can feasibly compete with 3ds max or Maya, holy fuck am I glad it's free. [editline]4th November 2015[/editline] Also, what you said about it being better than 3 years ago is incredibly true. I tried picking Blender up in... I don't remember exactly, but some time within the past six years, and it was atrocious. When I sought it out to re-install earlier this year, it was with a lot of hesitation and a "I guess I can try to see if I can get it to work this time; it's better than nothing" attitude. [I]Massive[/I] improvement on the older versions.[/QUOTE] It still uses hotkeys a lot? that might be ok for me actually because I hate how a lot of things in Maya is behind menus of menus.
[QUOTE=willtheoct;49045482][del]64[/del] 256 is the hard limit. Since it is open source, there may be a way to modify it, but learning how the internals work is probably not worth the effort. The only thing you can change via blender itself is how many undo steps you want to have between 0 and 256. [/QUOTE] That change from 64 to 256 max was made in Feb this year. [url]https://developer.blender.org/rBfa9e42b57d9b4c846528ee2ab0dd5e6912392ad1[/url] It also shows you the file and line where it was changed, so technically you can download the latest source, change the line and recompile it. Compiling from source is actually really easy and doesn't require special programming knowledge. (There are also a lot of tutorials about that.) [QUOTE=Whomobile;49045486]It still uses hotkeys a lot? that might be ok for me actually because I hate how a lot of things in Maya is behind menus of menus.[/QUOTE] It does. Although there are a few [URL="http://conceptart.io/quickpie/"]new addons[/URL] that make some quick selection with mouse a lot faster. Most tutorials for Blender teach with hotkeys tho, which makes it a bit harder for beginners but the speed in workflow once you know them is worth it.
I will say the blender tutorials where the keys are shown on screen when pressed are fantastic, there has been times where the person walking you through doesn't say the key command for a step and you can pause the video to see what key they pressed.
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