Blender Compared To the Major 3D Applications

LetterRip writes "Recently TDT 3D published a comparison of the major 3D digital content creation applications such as Maya, 3DS Max, and XSI, and of course Blender. Blender came out surprisingly well, although it definitely still has some weaknesses."

Comments

On the Interface

[Smerity]

First off, the name is a tad misleading, it's more "Major 3D Applications Comparison (including Blender)" as opposed to a focused against Blender - but that can be easily forgiven. What is good is that the author has used a wide range of industry standard tools (Maya, 3ds max and Lightwave etc) in everyday tasks, so it's not a fanboy style review where the outcome was and always would be 'Blender best'.

Blender is maturing well, especially considering if you look at the progress they've made since the code was first open sourced, and I'm confident that they will be able to continue this progress in to the future. I won't comment on the feature to feature comparison, I will just reiterate what the author said early on in the article - it's the artist not the tools - and in this case the an open source and free tool is sufficient to create some stunning art. Check out Elephant's Dream to see an example.

And my one note to those commenting later - the interface. Many people complain about the interface, how it's difficult to learn. Unfortunately, many of these people are trying to 'learn 3D' over the weekend - and I'm sorry, that won't happen, regardless of the package. To become truly proficient in any 3D software package takes a long time.
I also see many people compare the UI disaster to that of GIMP - I don't think that's really an accurate comparison. Read reviews of people who have actually mastered the Blender UI and they will confess that once learned it is very effective. The author in the article also states this, with him saying that it's a "Fast workflow, (but) can be more intuitive".
I'm not saying the Blender user interface is perfect, or that improvement can't be made, merely that even in its current state, once learned and mastered it is a powerful tool.

Overall however, I'm glad that Blender has progressed so well, and look forward to seeing it's progress in the future. Without it I would never have begun my exploration into 3D at all.

Re:It's the UI that kills it

[bky1701]

I thought the same when I started using it. Actually, you can read my complaints on their forum. The thing is, after I made the commitment that I was *going* to learn it, and after I stopped trying to do things the old 3ds ways, it started to come naturally. Now I can do far more impressive work than in 3ds, much faster.

It's painful to LEARN, not use (though there are a few UI annoyances, like the non-standard save/load menu). I'd suggest if you really want to learn it, throw the tutorials (they often offer irrational, hard or just bad ways of doing things) and old knowledge out the window and learn it. Once you know it, you may understand why they kept the interface.

Re:It's the UI that kills it

[Anonymous Coward]

I think there are a lot of people who start with the closed source ones and a closed mind and from there on in the open source UIs are always "wrong". Having learning the GIMP without becoming indoctrinated into photoshop and hearing all the catatonic whinging about the GIMP UI, I somehow think that I will be fine with Blender. Sure, photoshop has more high end features, but as people say, unless you need the print colour range, there isn't actually that much difference other than the price and amount of whinging.

Also, not only are these programs 4 stars to the industry leader 5s (and often beating them in many features), for people starting out with the blender or GIMP in highschool, 15 yrs old say, they have to factor in that blender will undergo 5 or more years of development before they hit the job market after uni. They'd be insane to learn a closed source one, which might go bust in that time, as opposed to coming into the market with 5 years of Blender and GIMP under their belt (and blender and gimp with all those new features).

So basically if you are already in the game, keep using the industry standards photoshop and maya etc. Remember they only got the blender sourcecode in late 2002, so as much as it's improved since the first open source release it will improve again in 5 yrs. And with a larger user base and more devs, it will likely move even faster.

Spend $30 on a good book for blender another $30 on the gimp, maybe another $30 on a python book to script both apps way further than your peers using close source stuff - go to the forums and make some good friends above and at your skill level for other advice. Then with the $1000s you were going to spend on close source edu versions and expensive manuals for them, don't forget you have to upgrade when you graduate, into something else maybe an investment account. You'll end up with better skills, better software, more friends and more money.

Industry people your calculation is simple, to stick with your software till you feel the open source stuff is good enough for you to make a move. Simple as that. But one thing you should do is shut the fuck up discouraging other people from using it like there is a chosen way.

It's the future ppl. kthxbye.

Re:It's all bunk

[big4ared]

Not exactly.

I work in video games, and ultimately the graphics cards render polygons. There are definitely tools that can down res, but have you ever seen what a 40k poly mesh looks like when you use an auto-down-res to 20k? It gives you a good start, but you still have to remesh it and tweak it by hand.

As for CSG, it's ok for CAD, but not practical at all for games. The realtime stuff is useful when comples models need to be edited in realtime (like for designing car engines), but the approaches like OpenCSG are too slow because each primitive needs to be drawn a bunch of times.

As an example, if you have the expression (A+B+C)*(D+E+F), you have to break the expression into sum-of-terms form which is AD+AE+AF+BC+BE+BF+CD+CE+CF, so that's at least 18 draw calls (acutally more). Alternatively, you could just precompute the CSG model into a triangle mesh. There are other techniques (like Blister) but they're still too slow.

CSG is used in moderation in games for tasks that make sense. For most applications, it doesn't. Imagine trying to model Wolverine with CSG. But even if you use CSG, at the end of the day, you still need an artist to tweak the vertices (which artists can do very quickly).

Not to mention, you also need to be able to lay out UVs.

If you really want your model to look good at higher resolutions, you can always subdivide your triangle meshes, which is robust (unlike triangle reduction). Up-resing meshes is easy. Down-resing takes artist work.

Re:It's the UI that makes it

[paganizer]

This is a rebuttal.
Background: My very first job, in the late 70's, was as a Draftsman. I used the very first version of Autocad, back in '83(?). I've been using 3dstudio since before it was a actual product. I used Lightwave on an Amiga in '91 (VideoToaster rocked).
I changed careers, and only play with 3D these days. But I play with everything, Vue d'esprit, Poser, Maya. I've tried pretty much every 3d application I hear about just to see if it's worth parting with my limited hobby money. Never had a problem figuring out the wildly different UI's (except Maya, a little. I was overthinking it).
Do you get what I'm saying here? I figured out Truespace from a german language version. I don't read or speak german.

I tried out blender first when it was shareware.. 2001 I think. The UI was a nightmare. I had a decently new copy of 3ds, so shook my head and forgot about it.
Then the game "The Movies" came out. I got hooked. after poking around, I found out that the only import/output scripts for customization were blender scripts, so i grabbed the latest version of blender.
I tried. I really, really tried. I grabbed the tutorials, FAQ's. I bought "The Official Blender guide". I even had a "Blender Guru" come on to my system in VNC to walk me through the (allegedly) simple process of opening a file, applying textures, and exporting using the plugin. it took 3 flipping hours.
Blender may be a great engine. But the interface is a crime against logic, nature and makes me revise my opinion on whether or not true Evil exists.
If you are thinking of getting into 3D software in some way, as a career or a hobby, keep this in mind: If you waste your time learning the Blender interface, you will not be able to use that "knowledge" with ANY OTHER APPLICATION.

Re:It's the UI that kills it

[ajs318]

Mod parent up.

Too many people confuse "hard to learn" with "hard to use". For example, typing less-than, e, m, more-than followed by text to italicise then less-than, divide, e, m, more-than is much quicker -- once you know how to do it -- than highlighting the text (an operation requiring leaving the keyboard, getting hold of the mouse, manoeuvring it with pixel precision, clicking and dragging), either clicking on an icon (invariably an italicised "i") or selecting something from a context menu (involving a tricky finger-swap or possibly even a keyboard operation), and then returning to the keyboard.

Also, anything that was hard to learn will be even harder to forget.

Bitching about Blender's interface never gets old,

[astralpancakes]

I'd like to know how many of you complaining are actual 3D artists (of some sort, be it pro/student/hobbyist) of even an intermediate skill level, who actually made an honest effort learning Blender. No, opening it up, finding your left and right mouse buttons swapped, then giving up and going back to your pirated copy of Maya doesn't count.

I _HAD_ to learn Blender for an animated short I worked on over the summer. I had about 9 months of 3ds max experience behind me, and grasping the basics in Blender took me less than a week, using Tony Mullen's book Introducing Character Animation with Blender as well as whatever tutorials could be found online. Yes, the documentation is sometimes lacking (nothing new there, considering it's free software), but that mostly applies to more advanced features (NLA editing, linking animation files together, stuff like that) where you end up having to discover many things by trial and error (which is horrible if you're working to a deadline to be sure). In my experience there's no shortage of resources targetting beginners though. Just don't expect to become a master sitting around reading tutorials -- the reason 3D graphics in general and animation in particular is hard is because IT IS HARD. And it's hard even after you've mastered whatever application you're using. Getting past the user interface is the easy part.

At this point the only thing I could say 3ds max is outright "better" at is pure modelling, since Blender lacks n-gons, and even then I'd rather use Blender because the interface is just that much nicer. I haven't really used hair and fur much in 3ds max, but my understanding is that it's a fair bit more advanced than what's currently in Blender as well, although you can expect that to change soon as the Peach project gets underway. Textures, rigging, animation, lighting, rendering, compositing are all things I find much easier to do in Blender.

Yes, the Blender interface is "unintuitive" in the sense that it doesn't look like anything else, but compared to the hodgepodge that is max it's a shedload more consistent and logical. Once you grasp the basics (A selects/deselects all, B border selects, G moves, R rotates, S scales...) all 3D windows, node views, curve editors and what have you work exactly the same way which is just lovely. Add to that a completely customizable workspace layout and completely zoomable/pannable windows. I cannot tell you what a shock it was to go back to 3ds max and discover that to move and zoom the timeline you had to use combinations of ctrl, alt and mousebuttons, when you're used to doing all of that the same way you zoom and pan 3D windows: scrollwheel and middle mouse button. Or that the damn thing loads for a minute and a half even on a top of the line machine, while Blender takes about 2 seconds to start. :)

That's not to say the Blender interface couldn't be improved. The default keyboard shortcuts are WEIRD -- Ctrl-W to save, anyone? -- and more importantly, not customizable. The default view control options are pretty confusing as well if you're used to basically anything else ever, but these can at least be changed. I think changing the defaults (but making it easy for advanced users to change back) would go a long way towards improving Blender's image at large, but I'm not so arrogant as to assume that the Blender developers (who btw are excellent, pay attention to users needs and release new features at a mindboggling rate) aren't aware of these things.

(Struggling with the formatting here -- first post, sorry.)

Re:It's the UI that kills it

[4e617474]

Now, if the Blender team could ever pull theierr head out of their ass and bring in a UI developer and stay out of the way... they might have something. But it's been ears coming and I doubt we'll ever see Blender become usable.

I've actually seen an interview with a Blender developer (a Linux magazine I flipped through, I can't remember which one) from when Elephant's Dream came out that discussed why they made the interface the way they did. Being the in-house application of NeoGeo, it was geared towards how they worked, and the developers gave the animators what they wanted - maximum productivity after learning the application when used the way that particular group of people liked to use it. The developers came to them and offered them an easier to learn interface - they were told "No, you idiot. We're going out of business and have to try to finish our last few projects. We're not going to hire anyone new. Now add this highly unintuitive key sequence to shortcut this arcane task that no novice has ever heard of." After it was released for widespread consumption, ease of learning became a common request, but there were still people learning the interface it had and wanting to be able to use it the way they had learned to. After almost ten years since its shareware release, and five since its release under GPL, this hypothetical easy-to-use, powerful, intuitive 3d modeling software that someone must have their head up their ass not to have delivered on a silver platter by now would probably have to take the form of a completely separate front-end, a fork, or a complete rewrite with some of the nuts and bolts used over.

And there are people out there who think that Blender "has something" just like it is. If a hobbyist or student wants gratis open-source 3d modeling with an easy to use interface, they should try Art of Illusion. It's nowhere near as powerful, but it's easy and intuitive enough for someone to learn on, and it can export into formats used by the big boys. According to TFA, Blender has the same "Learning path to be productive" as the others, even with the less familiar and intuitive interface. If someone is "getting serious", there isn't really a way around having to invest the time to learn something. And of six packages the article reviewed, only one could be learned in the single month they give you to try modo, and I'm sure those figures are for people who aren't squeezing it in on a part-time basis.

Oh, and there's a few gotchas with modo. They support both platforms - Mac and Windows! Should I download the trial and see if I can get it to work under Wine? Let me click on the "Try Modo" link - "Interested in trying modo? As a result of modo 301 now being available, all of our website bandwidth is being focused on supporting our registered modo customers. Sign up to create an account and you will be informed just as soon as the new evaluation version of modo 301 is available. If you already have an account you're already on the list to be notified." What? If I have an account, I'm on a list to be notified that there's a trial version available? Oh, they want $400 for an upgrade (which they're ready to sell you sight-unseen right now). Okay, let me see if I can figure out if I can use modo to turn blueprints into 3d models the way they do here. Hmm... not too big on the import/export capabilities are they? Looking over the so-called tech specs (looks like they hired some marketing people and got out of the way) I can only find "modo is able to harvest animation data from other 3D applications in order to render it. modo reads .MDD files for this purpose." Maybe it