blender
polycount lvl 666
so i thought I would give blender a blast. I last tried it yonks ago, maybe '2000' or something when it was truly awful. pleasantly surprised really, but my overall view is that its like cut price maya and it crashes a lot.
renderer leaves a lot to be desired and ui is a bit weird, but I found it better than lightwave LOL
renderer leaves a lot to be desired and ui is a bit weird, but I found it better than lightwave LOL
Replies
"Renderer leaves a lot to be desired". Quality-wise Cycles is equal to V-Ray or Arnold for example. Just you wait for the awesome Principled BSDF node for Cycles which will be in the upcoming Blender 2.79. If you don't want to wait, just pick up the 2.79 Release Candidate already. Keep using it, experiment and learn, you'll get used to it eventually.
It's a game developer -friendly node, similar to what UE4 has:
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/render/cycles/nodes/types/shaders/principled.html
the downside with blender is just when it crashes for me, it plain vanishes and i'm sometimes left dumbfounded as to the whereabouts of the blender UI for a moment.
hmm cycles is not on the same level as vray, mental ray etc IMHO
Also, some advice to ease out your transition (so far it worked very well for someone I recently helped along) :
• Set your viewport controls this way :
(do NOT use the Max/Maya presets presented on startup - they change too many apsects of the program and will only frustrate you when following the official documentation).
• You might want to give this video a look (the one called "Introduction to Blender for Zbrush users") :
https://gumroad.com/masterxeon1001
• Leave all the shortcuts as default and explore the program for about a month before attempting to heavily tweak things.
You can also have a look at my own transition thread :
https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?351344-Customization-questions-from-a-Blender-curious-2d-3d-artist&highlight=
http://polycount.com/discussion/152769/jeds-tutorial-spot
There's also this list of tutorials:
http://polycount.com/discussion/154788/blender-tutorials
Blender 2.79 comes with some new exciting features, and one of them is the Principled BSDF.
Normally a new shader lets you create one more type of material. But this is different, because this is like every shader rolled into one. Simplifying the complex node setups that were required before, into simple easy to use sliders.
There are 3 reasons why this is big news:
In fact, it's likely that 95% of all your future materials will be made using the Principled BSDF, because it's so powerful!
Source
I will give blender another go though . for a free program I can't complain too much
will look at the UI settings pior, cheers for that
But overall it's fairly feature complete, UI and UX is pretty enjoyable after getting used to it, and it's free (I'm too old to pirate software for my machine at home... ) And its open source .. ah not forget the python scripting which is also pretty nice. Next versions look promising as well, so I'm sold on it
In short : the fact that one doesn't get a specific bug, doesn't mean that the app doesn't have any ...
As much as I hate paying those ripoff prices for Autodesk, the whole modeling interface just can't be beat. I tried Blender last week and I can't get over its "freeware" look.
not sure the autodesk apps are such great examples either. max out of the box is a mess of buttons and functionality hidden away in endless rollouts plus the inconsistent look of an app comprised of 3rd party plugins. then there's maya with it's endless whitespace in the GUI and a menu structure seemingly modeled on the labyrinth of crete. but hey, at least you can assign your entire keyboard to different marking menu's to enable fast access so you don't have to look through a shelf stacked to the brim with icons that look like identical twins...
sure you can get used to them - but interfaces that can't be beat - really?
"freeware look".. I personally think it looks great and love the utilitarian snappy UI. it's exactly what I want for productivity.
Also, the sculpting tools in blender are actually pretty good, and it can push crazy high triangle counts. Again, super customize-able and you can get Orb's brushes for it
Sort of the same feeling I had with Modo when first starting to use that.
Feels very fresh and while the UI feels odd coming from 7 years of Max use, I can already see the power of it once you get the hotkeys down to musclememory
some people are used to click most things which is not that great in blender
but once you get used to the hotkeys it gets really powerful and fast
Surprisingly I've never forgot anything in Blender. I bet it's due to its elegant interface and structured multi button hotkey idea. I did recreated MAx viewport navigation and 1; 2; 3 Max sub-object selection modes in Blender but all the other hotkeys are Blender original. Now I have my MAx hotkeys mostly recreating the Blender ones.
Ruz said:
so i thought I would give blender a blast. I last tried it yonks ago, maybe '2000' or something when it was truly awful. pleasantly surprised really, but my overall view is that its like cut price maya and it crashes a lot.
Lolz..yeah thankfully has morphed into a completely different beast since those days. I'd first picked it up in 2004 (2.4xx) when transitioning over too digital from a 'classically' trained traditional painter/sculptor (base-relief) background and has been my core 3D package. I'd say the initial attraction from the outset is it's OSS GNU collaborative ethos. All important by definition as I'm a self professed advocate against "closed garden" DCC proprietary solutions, to be clear just a personal POV nothing in a sense adversarial by any means.
Anyways If it's a bug and you've got the time report it, dependant upon version there maybe errors affecting stability...so an earlier 2.7x main trunk build and give it another try? Plus 2.8 is scheduled for release in Nov.
renderer leaves a lot to be desired and ui is a bit weird, but I found it better than lightwave LOL
Hmm...well in that case Bforartists - https://www.bforartists.de/
...a fully functional Blender fork, could be worthwhile trialling instead?! come to think of it I've yet to run a test myself, probably blockout a "free" weekend next month.
JordanN said:
I tried Blender last week and I can't get over its "freeware" look.
...possibly the most funniest statement I've read - ever!
Never had a crash trying out Blender, very stable for me. Maya crashed very little for me, but a lot of others complained about it crashing.
Now I'm learning Max for its superior modeling suite and it crashes like a mofo. Fml
re blender I made loads of progress on it, can actually model , unwrap and do the majority of stuff I need now:)
I wish that there was a better viewport display though. the rendered preview is good and the
matcaps are ok
The thing that really annoys me a ( a bit) is the camera clipping , you have to change it manually on each viewport. wish there was a global switch to turn it off.
I wish you could have custom menus with all the commands i use regularly, I am not really a keyboard shortcut type of guy, though I have been using them. (maybe you can do this already I bet. will check it out tonight)
I wish for the viewport there was something like max where you can see the lighting on the model without using the rendered view, which is 'not quite' real time.
re the UI I sometimes get a bit lost but then i can just reload my scene with the default UI which is cool
I have been using the material node editor and as someone non techy I have been pleasantly surprised with it.
the program seems to have a lot in common with both maya and cinema 4d
The viewport has some issues but will be addressed as Torch wrote, think the big changes are in 2.8 though.
Don't know the max viewport but you can see the lighting in the material and texture view, though not a beauty.
Have a look at the pie menue, I think that's what you want.
What kind of renders are you trying to achieve inside Blender? Are you using BI or Cycles?
The Principled BSDF as mentioned before will surely be helpful for pbr stuff.
Let me link some stuff:
Custom UI + Several Addons:
https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?352666-Input-Custom-Blender-Setup-Silo-Maya-esque
YPanel (Tools for Real Time Assets):
https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?421150-Addon-yPanel-Tools-for-realtime-asset-creation
Y.A.V.N.E (face weighted normals / I think this will make it into 2.79.. not sure though):
https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?393179-Addon-Yet-Another-Vertex-Normal-Editor-(Y-A-V-N-E-)
HardOps (great for hardsurface stuff):
https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?387735-Hard-Ops-Thread
Magic UV:
https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?391573-Add-on-Magic-UV-v4-4-(Copy-Paste-UV-Preserve-UVs-UV-Bounding-Box-and-so-on)
Asset Management:
https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?391114-Addon-Asset-Management
DECALmachine:
https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?420355-Addon-DECALmachine
These are just a few of a lot of awesome plugins which only cost a few bucks in most cases... most of them are free.
I'd highly recommend checking out this part of the blenderartists.org forum:
https://blenderartists.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?48-Released-Scripts-and-Themes
You'll probably find a lot of stuff that'll suit your needs.
Regarding the viewport i am really looking forward towards 2.8 release. The new evee viewport looks very nice:
lit and shaded geo in the viewport, overlayed with a custom pie menu (set up like a context sensitive version of maya's hotbox):
I've been through most of the software out there. I think Maya was the only software aside from Blender that really felt like "Yeah I could use this." But that Maya was 4.5... back in 2002 or something.
So yeah... Blender exclusively since that time. I used Maya for like a year or something.
PS: I really dislike XSI and it went belly up under the careful supervision of Autodesk. Amazing. *clap*
You can get it from here: http://blenderaddonlist.blogspot.fi/2014/08/addon-opengl-lights.html
I'm not sure is this something you're looking for, but it's worth getting though.
But in general, you'll get the hang of Blender eventually.
This another addon is a MUST, at least for me. Meshlint, where you can check the "anatomy" of your mesh from bad topology.
https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Modeling/MeshLint
yeah i was already heading back to just having 1 viewport view like I do in other programs. hate too much clutter
some great links too from Wannabe and FourtyNights. look forward to going through all of it
which is pretty nice to check surfaces
there's probably more on blenderartists if you search for it.
just wondering also if there is any way to preview imported images within blender as blender does n't use the standard windows UI when importing. maya has an option to use either
• You can switch the file browser to display thumbnails (it's in the options, up there !). Unlike Maya there is no way to use the native OS windows for file browsing, but also unlike Maya ... the native Blender browser is actually very powerful, especially with the way it handles bookmarks. I too was looking for a way to switch to OS style at first, but now I wouldn't want to switch anymore.
• Regarding customization and shortcuts : there is unfortunately a lot of terrible advice floating around, mostly coming from users who started 3d directly with Blender and recommending to "learn its default shortcuts". Now of course there are some very clever default hotkeys (especially the way they are well unified all over the program) but overall it's obvious that everyone has different needs. Unfortunately even addon creators tend to make the problem worse by forcing their own crazy hotkeys. Really an unfortunate situation.
Now there are a few things you can do. First, everything can be remapped either directly by right clicking on menu items, or by editing the mappings in the options (this takes some getting used to though because there is no error prevention there, meaning that you can end up deleting hotkeys and not being able to recreate them since they are defined directly as python commands).
But there is also a fantastic paid addon called "Pie Menu Editor". Unlike what the name suggests it is not only a tool to create pie menus (which I am personally not a huge fan of) - it also lets you create your own regular pop up menus as well as macros. I just spent some time configuring it for my needs and I can now work completely in full screen from the sculpting phase all the way to retopo. I have my regular custom hotkeys for my primary tools, and all my secondary tools in one single pop up menu.
Unfortunately the addon doesn't come with documentation and the videos that the author provides are awful (slow, with no narration, and cringe worthy folk music in the background). Which means that the addon takes an hour or two to understand as opposed to the 5 minutes it would take if there was just a simple help page provided. If you're interested I can write or record a quick breakdown.
shame about the os , but as you say its not at all 'that' bad.I am sure I will get used to it apart for some reason the text in blender is very hard to read. might be my monitor, not sure
prime8 - not quite there yet, but a big improvement this week. I am loathe to post anything yet:)
You can also load your own font but I think the one by default is quite good.
I found this tutorial very helpful:
Ah, the pie menus, they look cool... but I remember when they introduced them for the first time I wasn't interested, and I'm still not interested, because I've used Blender long before any pie menus, and got used to the standard usability.
I already find installing a couple of addons for every new version of Blender laborius enough.
For instance since I do not consider clearing transforms as a primary function that I need instant access to at all times, I don't need it in my keymap. Therefore I might as well use the button for something else. But again everyone is different, that's the whole point.
I will install it tonight.
Also If I did not read it wrong vray is also available for blender now at a very reasonable cost
Personally I haven't used offline renderers almost at all, apart from rare quick'n dirty tests from Cycles. I usually go straight to real-time, like how we all end up rendering our stuff anyways.
The daily build also has a denoiser for Cycles if I recall correctly, which is extremely helpful.
The combination of the principled BRDF, the denoiser, and adaptive subdivision for displacement mapping makes Cycles pretty nice to work with, up to a certain amount of scene complexity. I will admit that I do most of my renders in Toolbag these days though.
probably vray is more commonly used and I have use it a fair bit also, maybe getting more predictable results
I am not saying cycles is crap, far from it. maybe I will end up using it more than vray, could n't say at this point, just keeping my options open