Hi everyone, I haven’t been on here in a looooong time, but that doesn’t mean I’ve left (like last time). No more junk posts from me now, since I’m not so crazy about 3ds Max anymore. I have also matured a little regarding those expensive programs. While I have moved onto the commercial programs now (I bought the student version of Max 8 a month ago), seeing Blender’s development recently has made me realize how great a program it is, other than that it’s free.
Here is my tribute:
The programmers work for donations and the satisfaction of their audience, not for profit alone, and they really listen to their user community.
The dedicated userbase, which is full of so many great people! I’ve started on my demoreel project for a film festival at my school, and I have included both the Elysiun community as well as Ton Rosendaal in the Thank You’s.
You don’t have to wait a year for the next version to come out.
It has the best of several worlds in it–Blender purists, don’t be offended, but I can see pieces of Maya’s, Cinema 4D’s, and 3ds Max’s concepts in it, all packaged into one along with Ton’s own visions.
You sure don’t get Max bones in Maya or Maya-style sliders in Max.
That’s also why I think it’s called Blender.
LSCM unwrap. Yes, I have tried Max 8’s Pelt Mapping feature, but nothing still beats the speed of Blender’s unwrap.
.X exporters, straight out of the package. What confuses me somewhat over Max is, that although it’s the most popular gaming package in the industry, Autodesk STILL hasn’t implemented a frickin’ X-file exporter! And that makes me mad!!!
Less memory is used. Max: 37MB- 217MB so far. Blender: 13MB- 100MB.
Compact size! Again: Max: 227MB. Blender: 4MB.
Game engine. Gotta love that; I can make games when I’m bored one day. Like, I put Suzanne in with a checked plane one day, and had Suzanne push around some colored balls.
Last, but not least: B-bones. That’s all. B-bones combined with Max’s Envelopes as well as Maya’s weight painting system(Max’s sucks!) is the most ingenious combo ever. You can make S-curves now, make more complex rigs, all without the overcomplexity of Maya. With the new Blender coming out soon, you will watch me come, not crying, but screaming back with joy since all my past complaints of the program are gone.
That’s it, my tribute to the best-ever freeware 3d program, Blender 2.40.
Meets the growing needs of the CG artist, The most rapid development of any 3D application in the world. The coolest community on the net. The developers not only listen to their fans but interact with them. It puts hair on your chest…Well, on your models chest.
I have a whole lot more respect for you after that. It’s important that you saw for yourself how good Blender is. There are bits that still need a lot of work but for the main part, IMO Blender is actually better than the bigger apps. I was using Maya just recently to look at some models and it is so bloated and slow. Activating tools is slow too.
Now that I’ve seen Blender’s hair features in action, fluid sims and LSCM, I am sticking with it for good.
Commercial apps aren’t all bad. I’ve found that LightWave has online communities very similar to Blender’s. Very supportive and helpful people as well as direct interaction with the company.
Although I appreciate the over all sentiment of your post, I must nit-pick. The idea of “moving onto” commercial packages just doesn’t really make sense to me. I use Maya, XSI, and have started doing some things with 3ds Max. But I still use Blender. Using commercial packages does not preclude the use of Blender. Just keep using everything.
I’ve also messed around with Wings 3D, and my goodness, if that program just had subdivision surfaces I would never model in anything else. Its interface–once you get used to it–is a dream. (As it is I rarely model in it, simply because subdivision surfaces are really important.)
Use each program for what it’s best at. That’s what import/export is for.
(I do have a strong loyalty to Blender, though. It’s what I grew up on, so to speak, so it will always have a warm place in my heart. :-))
My apologies for being blunt, but generalizing like that is really rediculous. None of the major packages (Blender inclusive) are flat out better than the others. They all have their pros and cons.
Blender definitely has more shortcomings than the other packages. But the gap is constantly narrowing. I’m pretty sure Blender is already fully capable of pretty much everything they used to make the first Jurassic Park, and surpasses it in many regards.
(One thing to keep in mind is that the industry is extremely dependent on dedicated compositing apps, and most of the effects done these days could never be accomplished in any of the 3D apps alone. Or it would just take a lot longer to do them, anyway. That’s why Jashaka is so interesting to me. If it can get even half the functionality of Shake or Combustion, it will add an invaluable tool to the toolbox of serious Blender users. Especially if Blender gets a good render pass system at some point.)
Unless they made a major update within the last month, or I missed something obvious: no, it doesn’t.
Perhaps you’re referring to the smooth operator (hotkey S). Despite what the manual says, that is not subdivision surfaces.
To make my previous post perfectly clear, here is my previous statement using the terminology from the Wings 3D manual:
“I’ve also messed around with Wings 3D, and my goodness, if that program just had metaform subdivision I would never model in anything else.”
Sweet. In that case, either there was an update within the last month or I missed something obvious.
I would be obliged if you would tell me where the feature is, since it doesn’t seem to be in the documentation (in fact, the documentation on the website explicitly says that it doesn’t have it), and I can’t seem to find it on my own.
