He was calling Blender idiotic, not you... And I would have to agree with him. If Blender seriously exports detached faces to other software... well... that would be idiotic ;)
EarthQuake covered the biggest point, but another issue Blender has is the inability to manually edit vertex normals. A face is either smooth or flat, no in between. However, this is being worked on (by the community, not the Blender Foundation), and I feel that once Blender gets the ability to save custom vertex normals…
It's not the fact that Blender has or doesn't have smoothing groups really. It's that Blender physically breaks the geometry where hard edges are assigned that is causing headaches. Blenders hard edge system (called sharp edges in Blender) is very flexible and similar to Maya in that you select an edge and mark it as…
I'd like to start doing some freelance character modeling work in the future but I can't afford commercial licenses to 3dsmax or Maya so I was thinking of using blender. For those of you who freelance do you think it would be a big obstacle for clients seeing as how they probably would not be able to work with your project…
Awesome news! Smoothing groups export from Blender into 3dsMax just fine, based on a very quick test I just did. Any progress with importing a mesh into Blender? Vertex normals still seem jacked using the latest version from buildbot.
So is that it? The lack of editable vertex normals and exportable smoothing groups is what is holding Blender back from being an acceptable tool for freelance game artists? If you can use Blender through the whole pipeline and submit an engine-ready asset, it seems there's no problem. Is this accurate?
Yeah, I was championing Blender at work, but the vertex normal issue was a show stopper. There so much progress and innovation happening with Blender, it's weird to see it missing "basic" features. Though your explanation puts it into perspective. Those damn VIS guys out number us game artists on every software.
@passerby Unfortunately everything wrote is true. There's no way to export smoothing groups with ANY exporter in Blender. I've talked about [smoothing groups/hard edges] import/export numerous times on BA.org forum with no satisfying response. Like here, the answer was usually 'the Blender way is better', very little…