I still don’t know any major game studio using Blender. (Ok some individual use it some time but the pipeline exporter etc are still Max or Maya). While Blender is really good it doesn’t mean that it will allow you to work inside a company. Lots of companies still have their entire pipeline deeply integrated inside one…
Just checked , couldn't find free one non-commercial or not. There was PLE Maya years ago, not anymore. As of the pipeline tool you really just need to know how to export your work into Max for example for collaboration purpose when necessary or rather straight to game editor. I did use 3d Max for a few decades and then…
If you take a look at job postings on the gaming companies websites they always say "Strong knowledge of Maya/3ds max required" so knowing Maya won't hurt. Speaking for the software itself Maya has an organized interface and modeling is vey fast. It's heavily based on context menus and hotkeys for the main tools. Basically…
As a beginner a good thing about Maya is that it's also got the best rigging and animation tools, so If you get curios and want to try that out it's already there. If you doing characters I think dabbling into rig and animation will help you understand the technical considerations of the job.more fully as well.
I am not sure how it's in major studios. We have Max pipeline. Still animation guy works in Maya. VFX one in Houdini. . Some people use very old versions of Max , many years before subscription, because they are working from home. It's just not so big of an issue anymore. You just have to know Max to certain extent . As of…
Maya is real easy to learn. It's very intuitive and has got great controls. It's the rest, meaning modeling and animation, that's the hard part. After a while, you'll probably be proficient in several packages anyway because once you know your job, you only have to learn how to do it with a different interface getting in…
It's not clear whether you've career aspirations or purely a fun/hobby interest? Anyway if the latter both would fit the bill quite nicely but more so the FOSS alternative, simply due to 0$$ up front outlay and generally functionality as already mentioned differs between the two. Although that said Blender (2.8x) in my…