Productivity - Blender vs Cinema 4D

Greetings,
So far I was using Maya for modeling and Blender for basically everything else (don’t judge me…) but wish to switch to one app.
Mainly my goal is to get stuff done fast in terms of modeling and baking textures.
Maya is terrible in the “fast” part but I kept because “I might learn Arnold rendering using Maya” which I never did xd so I plan to switch to something else altogether.
I looked at non-Autodesk products and C4D looked like the best choice.
In terms of achieving the same result for models, how does C4D fare to Blender? I’m well aware I can do the same in both, the question is about how fast I can do the same? Main subject is modeling, texturing and scene “set dressing” - like blender’s hair particle vs whatever C4D has to offer, using brushes to “paint in” objects to the same and the like.

It may depend on your time frame for purchase…seeing that 2.8 is under heavy development…who’s to say? I have always felt good about C4D(aside from the different packages…they should just include all plugins by default)…so I guess it is whatever you are comfortable with…blender is free…so there is no time crunch…or worry about saving up a few dollars to get it…and that may be the best answer…blender is free…why not just try doing everything in blender for a month and after the month re-visit this decision.

Yup.
I forgot to mention, I use these tools as a solo developer for games, and for fun, rendering still images.
The only drawback for Blender to me is the lack of rendering solutions, it would be fun to try something not Cycles for a change. I’d like to see something streamlined, like Arnold available (but asking them, they said it isn’t even planned yet). I know there’s a third party plugin for Arnold export, but I rather save meself the trouble in case something is wrong with the plugin :smiley: I know it’s an impressive project though.

Another thing - C4D procedural and displacement modeling? Blender’s micropoligon displacement is very handy, jumping back and forth from textures to sculpting. Is C4D capable of anything like so?

I don’t think c4d is for you, It has been a while since I used it, between version 12 and 16 I believe, but I remember hating the modeling tools.

I used c4d because of volumetric lights and mograph, modeling I did in blender.

Blender is pretty awesome with modeling and texturing compared to c4d in my experience.

C4D is almost exclusively GUI driven, which can slow down workflow, whilst blender relies heavily on keyboard shortcuts which, whilst taking time to learn, does speed up the process considerably.

From my experience, Blender!
Much faster for modeling, texturing & set dressing. Interactive preview is another success story. Node based shading again another. Integrated color management, compositor, VSE, smoke… adons like: animation nodes, sverchok… + mass of 3rd party render engines, great community, open source, no license stress, happy clients (they too can use the software to manipulate scenes, render as much as they want, iterate… for free - i simply give’em instructions and do consulting further on - teach how to fish).

But you can try C4D for yourself - use it in full for 42 days. (Registration to try is another turn down for me)

I advice you to do a complex scene to really see the rigidity of ‘Preset’ approach to solving specific custom cases… much like Sketchup :smiley:

So if you’re specialized in specific task, then it could be well suited for you.
It’s kinda like ‘Jack of All Trades’ VS ‘Master of One’

As far as alternate render engines, try the Radeon Pro Render addon: https://pro.radeon.com/en/software/prorender/

It’s free and open source and works well with Blender. It even comes with a material library.

1 Like

There’s plenty of very powerful opensource render engine out for Blender. Not sure what you mean by lacking in rendering. If you mean commercial rendering, you can get vray, octane, renderman, indigo, plus many others.

I would try some of the open source solutions like yafaray, lux render, RPR, and Appleseed.

Thanks for the replies, seems like I was just uneducated :smiley:
I found RenderMan too for Blender (for free non commercial) but the problem is I didn’t find any realtime preview. Is there btw?

C4D’s modeling looks indeed very UI based which takes up a lot of time. the shortcuts were limited and most of the time I had to select something from a popup. I looked up Gleb Alexandrov’s quick tips and boi am I in awe.

My videocard is old and thus not supported by Radeon ProRender :smiley: but I check out others too. If I want Arnold very much, I consider the student version of 3ds max - or not give an F becuase blender will soon release 2.8 with Eevee and I’m better off with that for my rig than a raytracer.

Renderman, I believe has a seperate floating window for preview.

That’s great, I’ll look into it then :smiley: I made it crash because the importer and RM version was not the same.

Yup, it’s called IT :slight_smile:

& a playlist on YT: RenderMan For Blender 21 from Brian Savery.

Cycles is basically same as Arnold, just not so well optimised and no AOVs like Arnold. But it has GPU. And for type of work u do and level I think Cycles is more than enough.

Please take your head out of that echo chamber / fantasy world where Blender is the only tool which uses keyboard shortcuts. There is no 3D DCC which is almost exclusively GUI driven. Certainly NOT C4d which provides an extensive shortcuts list with the vanilla version.

Please stop with that stupid meme, it makes you look uninformed at best and untruthful at worst.

1 Like

I guess my use of C4D since V4 on Amiga right through to V16 counts for nothing, then?