Is it worth learning C4D if I already know 3ds Max

yusefkerr

Hello, 

I'm mostly working on real-time projects with Unity and Unreal and I currently use Zbrush, 3dsMax, Substance and Photoshop to create art assets.  I'm thinking about learning a new 3D tool and wondered about the following for the given reasons:

Maya - for better animation tools
C4D - seems to be well integrated with Octane which would be good for moving into pre-rendered animation
Blender - always good to have an open source tool at the ready    

I wondered whether anyone has a good overview of all these tools (and others) and might be able to suggest a recommended, slightly future-proofed path to go down.  My main concern is to have an efficient toolset for doing realtime and pre-rendered work, to some degree I see the workflow for both areas converging in the next few years.  

I'm very interested to see whether anyone has strong views on this. 

wannabe

I use cinema on a daily basis but primarily for a motion graphics design heavy workflow. I for one ended up using blender for any kind of low poly/realtime work as the uv/polymodeling tools of cinema are way inferior. Another drawback might be that cinema doesn't seem to be able to bake normals from highpoly to lowpoly. I might be wrong though and somewhere there's an option.

What could be useful is the relatively new decimation modifier which preserves uv's as far as i remember. So it might come in pretty handy for lod creation.

All in all I tend to use cinema mostly for offline rendering at work. For everything else and private projects i tend to use blender. If you decide to use blender, there's loads of free/relatively cheap plugins which enhance it by a whole lot.

I can post a list of my go-tos if you're interested. Hopefully this was helpful!

yusefkerr

Hello, yes I'd be interested to know what main blender plugins you use.  Have you ever tried to learn max/maya, or just skipped these?

wannabe

I actually "learnt" Maya at Uni and goofed around in a very old version of Max when I was just starting out. But i wouldn't consider myself well versed in both programs. I mostly use cinema 4d (work related) and blender.

Here's a few Blender ones:

Open VDB Remesh: https://gumroad.com/l/jqLNZ    (Gives you dynamesh like functionality directly in blender)

Hard Ops: https://gumroad.com/l/hardops (streamlined hardsurface suite)

BoxCutter: https://gumroad.com/l/BoxCutter (same author as hardops. works great in addition)

UV Packmaster: https://gumroad.com/l/uvpackmaster (UV packing solution. Works great and just recently added GPU accelerated packing)

Bevel after Boolean: https://blenderartists.org/t/wip-bevel-after-boolean/693072  (essentially does what the name says)

TexTools: http://renderhjs.net/textools/blender/  (Texture baking suite for blender. 2.8 port is coming later i suppose)

Machin3 Tools / DecalMachine / MeshMashine: https://gumroad.com/machin3  (amazing tools really. Well worth the money.)

Those are just a few. There's plenty of free stuff too. Check them out.

sacboi

If you're comfortable with Max, then Blender shouldn't be much of a grind too get up to speed, smartish. 

musashidan

I'm using Max over 10 years and having recently added Blender to my arsenal purely for rendering real time assets because it supports mikkt.

Otherwise, for offline rendering of non-mikkt baked projects I'll stick with Max, because......Arnold. Arnold is a world class industry-leading renderer used extensively in high end vfx. Cycles simply doesn't compare. 

Although for simpler scenes/renders Cycles is great and the Blender node editor is a pleasent environment to work in.

As for c4d? Aside from motion graphics I really have no idea why you would want to use c4d over Max/Maya/Blender?

yusefkerr

Thanks, the main reason for thinking of C4D was because I've seen a lot of great-looking "product photography" and arch-viz shots created with Octane/C4D that I really liked the look of, and along with Vray, Octane seem the most interested in bridging the gap between pre-rendered and real-time rendering.  

I don't understand though, just out of curiosity, is there no way to get your mikkt normals rendering in 3ds max?  or converting them?