Blender or Modo for Houdini-Substance-Unreal Pipeline?
polycounter lvl 6
Hi,
So a bit of background on this. I've been doing freelance game modeling for a while now and I'm at the point where I'm close to setting up a pipeline and have some funds just dedicated to that and i'm not sure what modeler to choose.
I used maya in the past but started transitioning to Houdini for most things and now it's the core part of my pipeline.
I currently use Houdini for modeling, Substance for texturing and bringing everything in Unreal.
Now since i'm ditching Maya, I need to make a decision on which soft to use for modeling since modeling in Houdini is not the fastest ( already use Zbrush for more organic stuff).
The choice comes down between Blender and Modo and I'm not sure which one to choose.
I will only use them to model and UV stuff. I use Substance for texturing and Houdini for animations and VFX.
Which one of them would you personally use for this pipeline?
I know Blender is fast at modeling and can do a lot of other cool stuff ( Eevee, sculpting, animations and compositing) but I'm not interested in that. Just pure modeling speed with clean results.
I have experience in Blender, but not in Modo. I did download it and played around with it and it seems powerful and It has substance and unreal bridges which blender hasn't ( big plus imho) but I need to make sure before I bite the bullet and get some paid training and invest 2-3 weeks in getting up to speed with it.
TLDR : Which one would you use in a Houdini Substance Unreal pipline and which one is the more efficient modeler in your opinion?
Any answers are appreciated.
Replies
I personally only use ZBrush/Houdini right now for modeling. I do the sculpting and majority of modeling in ZBrush, and use Houdini for retopology and UV mapping, as well as any modeling that requires a lot of precision or proceduralism.
The modeling is generally better in Modo than Blender, and the UV mapping is way better in Modo. The UV packing is better in Houdini than in either of them though.
As for the pipeline support in Modo for Substance and Unreal, I've... honestly never known what purpose those serve, and have never used them anyway. They just let you preview the end result of the textured model inside the modeling software. But since you don't do the texturing inside the modeling software, you're better off just loading it into the actual engine to preview it, if you need to see how the engine renders it. And Substance already lets you see what the model looks like with the substance on it as you're making it.
I think some people use it when constructing scenes, but I don't understand why you would build the scene in the modeler instead of the engine.
I can only assume it's some kind of compartmentalization of work done by certain studios.
The overall conclusion drawn in that thread as well was basically that modeling primarily in Houdini is bad. Modeling exclusively with ZModeler is also bad, so I let them fill out each other's weaknesses. The fact that you can use GoZ to bridge them would, in theory, make the pairing that much better. If I could actually get it to work.
He uses Modo for game assets and has a pretty healthy community that is very active. lots of tips and tricks shared there.
Here is a link for those interested: https://discord.gg/QuFSFq
He also has a Youtube Channel you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5dRrOarPI6ufGWsabG28FQ
Earlier on when I was using Modo, it felt like 90% of my time was spent trying to figure out what I broke and how.
I pratically never touch Zbrush unless i need to sculpt some details so i'm not really a pro with it.
In the past i tried it out for hard surface modeling but it seemed to me quite "clunky" in comparison with Maya but maybe it's because i don't use it very often.
Otherwise, Blender is inching out to be a better option WITH affordable 3rd party plugins, such as decalMachine, meshMachine, HardOps, boxcutter...ect ( https://blendermarket.com/creators/machin3 & https://blendermarket.com/creators/teamc )
For the short term, Modo is probably a better option, however if you are looking for a long term solution I would seriously suggest migrating over to Blender 2.8 w/ plugins.
The geo transfer from Max(my main DCC) was absolutely terrible. I tried practically every every way of importing .FBX and it was a mess. Broken normals and scale.
It crashed regularly and a LOT.
The viewport performance is abysmal. It was chugging on 400K meshes(Max's can handle 100s of millions)
What is considered illegal geo in other DCCs is completely fine in Modo, apparently, and if you're not careful you'll end up with all sorts of geo errors.
In the end I decided to never return to Modo. I've since learned Blender 2.80 and can see it surpassing Modo this year once 2.80 is officially released along with the many useful(and necessary) addons. My money is on 2019 being Blender's biggest ever year. I can certainly understand that in its current state 2.80 isn't suitable for your pipeline, but futureproof-wise, Blender would definitely be the better option. Modo jusn't hasn't gotten the same amount of love/creative concepts/innovations since the Foundry bought out Luxology. All the original devs are gone now.
By comparison Blender can bake rounded edges much better than Modo. The only problem is that for whatever reason Cycles doesn't sample AA(although the Textools addon does have the option)
.FBX transfer between Blender/Max works perfectly - normals/uvs/mesh scale/materials/everything
Blender can handle 10s of millions of tris in the viewport.
Bender has some amazing addons that propel it ahead of Modo for modeling.
Even though it's still beta, 2.80 rarely crashes.
Blender's material/texturing/node system is set for a big update in the next few months and it looks like it will be very powerful.
Thanks for the posts everyone it’s just what I needed to read, lots of interesting information in this thread.
Personally I need to choose what to put my efforts into moving forward. I am starting to transition from Maya to Houdini but I can’t help feel I need to focus more on Blender. The only trouble is Houdini does seem to house everything I need under one roof with lots of promises in the pipeline. While Blender has loads of great tools I am working at an educational institution which means I really need site licences and someone I can communicate with so again Houdini is ticking a lot of boxes.
Maybe for now Blender will have to be my hobby horse. These are some of the tools I love the look of in Blender FYI. And DECAL Machine just looks amazing.The price for commercial licenses is very high compared to maya/max. the vast majority of studio artists won't be doing anything that can take advantage of the features you're paying for and the comparatively weak traditional modelling tool set means it's less effective in general use cases.
As such, it doesn't make any sense for studios to use it as a core dcc and thus opportunities for someone with houdini but no maya/max are going to be fairly limited.
It's difficult to build a business case for bringing it into a pipeline when you have a team of technical artists and tools developers there long term who can develop solutions in house.