3dsMax vs Blender. (Modeling)

Hi. I have worked with Max and blender for some time now and have some constructive criticisms on blender and some questions that I’m hoping some people know the answers to. This really is a take of the modding tools in both programs and I have found that Max is modeling tools are superior to quiet a few programs including blender. As such it’s something I always wonted to replicate inside blender with the same work flow but found it quite difficult because there are quite a few tools that I know of in Max that Blender could benefit from greatly. Also I never found the workarounds for allot of these things and was wondering if anyone here knows what I’m talking about and has found the workaround in blender and is willing to share. So I’ll talk about the tools I find that are great in Max that should be given some consideration in Blender or if there is a known work around that I have not discovered that someone would be willing to show me. I’ll start with the tools I think blender would greatly improve by and do not change much about blender in general.

First there is Edge Constants. This handy tool allows the user to move vertexes or edges without changing the shape of the geometry. What it dose is makes the Edges/vertexes constrained to the edges that are connected to it allowing the Edges/Vertexes to slide along the faces that are connected to them. This is great when you made a mistake and would like to rearrange the Vertex or Edges but would like to keep the general topology the same.

Duplicating/Extruding. In Max when you duplicate an object or extrude a face Max ask you how many time you would like to duplicate or extrude and if you put in a value more then one it will do the same action that many times over. This includes placing the object or extruded face the same distance away from the second object/Face as the second is from the first. This is a great tool indeed and greatly decreases the time it takes to do some actions. For example if your making a cannon on a ship and you have each port hole equilateral distance you only need to duplicate the cannon once and change the value to match the number of port holes. This could be included as a values next to the Extrude function in the mesh tools panel instead of a pop up like in max.

Smoothing groups are something that I have always been surprised that they where not included in blender. There seems to be only 2 smoothing groups. Smooth and not smooth with no ability to adjust weather one set of smooth faces is smooth with another set of smooth faces, I think most of us know how useful something like this could be. It allows one to crease edges without needing to apply the subsurf modifier.

Manipulation of object centers seems to be somewhat lacking, Only in that one cannot grab the objects center and place it where they wish.

Also I think there is a way to do this already but I have not discovered it yet. What I would like to know is how to put one object on another. That is to say a tool in witch you select one face of one object and attach it to another face on another object. This I have found is a vary useful tool.

That ends the section on the stuff I believe most people would find welcome tools to blender that don’t change blender much if at all. Now it’s time for more controversial stuff.

Most of the next set of tools are things that have to do with using Ngons and as such it really gets down to the matter of if blender wants to use Ngons or not. I think it should with maybe the ability to turn it off for users who dislike Ngons or would like to see the real geometry of there mesh.

The knife tool is one of the worst knife tools I have worked with in any 3d application. There seems to be a major lake of usability when dealing with this tool. In Max you can cut a mesh up whatever way you would like. It allows you to cut each face from edge to edge or vertex to vertex. Because there is no support for Ngons in blender this is not allowed and as such the knife tool suffers greatly from this.

Cutting holes in geometry is something that we all need to do from time to time and it would be much easier if blender allowed us to do that and then rearrange the geometry after it has been done to be more efficient. Rather then making us spend hours bleeding over some geometry that would take 5 seconds to fix in max.

A layer manager would be nice.

It would be nice if we could deal with some faces as one. Example would be the tops of cylinders, I would much rather deal with the tops of cylinders as one face rather then several. This is also a good example of having an ability to turn Ngons on and off.

It would also be cool to have snapping on all the time. This would help mappers who use blender.

If you have any thoughts, workarounds, or would like to add to the list please do so.

Some valid points, but I must warn you of the oncoming torrents of hate you’re subjecting yourself to. You won’t see it from me, but trust me. You’ll see.

That said, I love Blender’s knife tool because it DOESN’T let you just cut wherever you want. This lets me focus on creating a clean mesh in the first place.

Ill go ahead and give the answers I know.

Press Ctrl+E and select “edge slide”

Extrude your faces to the length of the last extrusion that you desire. Press Ctrl+R, hold your cursor over the newly extruded area and type in the number of extrusions that you wanted.

Select the area that you want to have a smoothing group. Press E and then right click to clear the selection.

Place the 3d cursor where you want the center to be and press “center cursor” on the mesh dialog.

Edit to add: The reason that posts like this (ones talking about features rather that the UI) usually dont go well is that they are normally asking for things that Blender can already do. In a way this is Blender’s fault I guess, in that it should be easier to find these commands. In another way I would say its Max’s fault for giving some of their commands crazy names. For example “smoothing groups” is just an extrusion without moving the vertexes but Max makes it sound like its doing some sort of magical thing that changes the way shading algorithms work.

smothing groups:

sorry jrs100000 but i think what he is looking for is more likely to be the edgesplit modifier,
since your solution creates unnecesary/unwanted faces/edges, where the edgesplit doesn´t do this.
use ctrl+e --> mark sharp on edges to define the boundarys (with y or ie or what?)

Dunno, I could be wrong since I dont work with Max at all. However, when Ive worked with Max artists in the past they kept adding smoothing groups and passing back the models with double the expected number of polygons. It could be that they were simply confused and had been doing something other than smoothing groups, but I believe that smoothing groups do in fact get split into extra polygons on export.

good point

NGONs are in blendersfuture, but not until Bmesh (the new data structure for meshes) is done…

A lot of the things you like about max modelling are the things I don’t like about it

there’s much more imediacy to the “feel” of blender’s extrude for example and if you want an exact distance it’s available by just hitting the numbers for offset… 2.5 is looking at a “repeat last command” thing, so that’ll add what you want though

Smoothing groups are a rubbish bit of overengineering that I’m amazed max stuck with , try the “edge split” modifier (it allows edges to be set hard or soft) It’s a shame it’s a modifier, but easy enough!

@jrs10000000 Any OBJ exporter of smoothing will split edges and add vertices, but it’s no problem. It’s what happens at render time anyway.

The knife isn’tbad, just different… A point to point one is available with the "knife pro" script, but it’s hampered by the lack of ngon support (as is the built in knife) so you get lots of unwanted edges…

the object center thing is much better with the cursor as you can just click to position it or you can snap it to another object or selection or you can do it numerically…

Cutting holes? are you talking about non destructive booleans? there’s a modifier for that. Booleans are evil though!

the cylinder thing, you can select a bunch of faces and turn them into an FGON (fake ngon)… BTW, an ngon can’t be “switched on and off” unless it’s fake. It can be subdivided or split, and then re-joined A quad for example can have the inner diagonal edge go either way because it doesn’t exist…

“snapping on all the time” is another style issue…

as a final note, over the years I’ve spent a lot of time modelling in a variety of packages and each requires a certain “paradigm shift” and/or change in thinking… some you like more, some less and some you favour for certain tasks over others, that’s why given free will we all have our favourites, but ultimately it’s rare that something “can’t be done”, whether you like how it is done is another matter!

It’s much better to either embrace the package you’re using and work out how to work fast in it than to worry that you might be faster if only it worked differently!

There’s nothing new in your requests, hope you found the answers helpful!

BTW JRS1000000 smoothing groups aren’t an extrusion they’re a “mesh split” that happens as the geometry is sent to the renderer…

(just being nit-pickey!)

Vary helpful indeed. I was under the impression that Fake Ngons are real Ngons. Computers can’t understand anything but triangles when it gets down to it. So working with a fake Ngon is the same as working with a real Ngon I would imagine. My guess is there just need to be better implamentation of the fake ngon system to make the knife tool better. The knife tool is not bad but the thing is that it’s not good. I like somethings about it but I feels like it needs more fetures and when Ngons are implamented I would imagen that these issuses will be addresed.

Thanks. I had a feeling that there must have been a way to do these things. If I run into any more problems I post them here.

Edit: I just tested some of the things you guys mentioned. It’s odd that the Edge Split is a modifier. It seems to do the same thing as smoothing groups but docent give you as much control although It’s better then nothing.

2.5 will most likely improve allot of things and it’s cool they will have an auto redo feature.

I still think the knife tool could use some help not so much changing anything but improvements. But the improvements have to do with Ngons.

Dose anyone know how to make objects stay snapped to the grid? I’m trying to make game levels in blender and that’s the key difference between a modeling program and a map editor. The way things snap. If I could make it so everything is snaped all the time it would make building level geomatry alot eayser.

As to Blender’s center editing tools, I wished there was a way to drag the center of an object in blender with the manipulators like a vertice. It would make changing center a lot easier and quicker.

@Michael W: When will BMesh be available in Blender? 2.5 ?

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Graphics cards use tris because they are fast rendering approximations so they reduce ngons to tris…

computers can “understand” ngons fine…

fgons have a “hidden” edge that never changes, ngons get approximated by tris and the edges could go between the vertices differently every time… The edge can even differ between openGL display and a render…

now, the tools could probably be re-written with lots of stuff to make fake gons behave more like real ngons, but that’d get pretty messy pretty quickly, sure;ly it’s much better to have a data structure built to cope with this stuff!

I’m left thinking why did i deel it necesary to write this?

Ah well!

How would I know?
Last time this came up on these forums Briggs said that it wouldn’t take too long to do (like a month or something) but that because of personal commitments he’s not doing it himself anytime soon! I think he was looking at documenting and tidying the work he’s done so far so that it could be passed on to another dev once one becomes available

post 2.5 then!

Personally I found modelling in Max to be an absolutely horrendous expriance compared to blender. The knife tool kept on adding garbage geometry instead of just dividing the current edge. As I originally learnt to model using blender(with no Ngons), I just find it annoying how Max consistently added ngons into the mesh, when I was trying to devide some edges to get rid of a triangle. Ngons in blender, Yes if there’s an option to disable the easely.

Also I was unable to find a merge at first/last/canter tool, which was very annoying.

Don’t get me started on Maxs interface;)

Hessiess, I guess I’ll never share that view!

Whilst I never liked modelling in max, the blender knife tool adds loads of garbage too because it doesn’t support ngons…

Whilst it’s true that you have to be careful with an ngon modeller that you are actually kniving to the vertice, not just close to it, at least that sort of stuff is trivial to clean up!

At least no one’s tried to argue that the lack of ngons makes you a better modeller because you can only make a clean mesh! LOL

give time… I’m sure someone will…

At least no one’s tried to argue that the lack of ngons makes you a better modeller because you can only make a clean mesh! LOL

That would be partly true if the modeller didn’t support triangles ether :p.

Have a look at this tutorial…

http://www.screencast.com/users/Neal/folders/Flash/media/9e724758-1227-4bac-893b-5c72957083c5

I think this will show you some features you haven’t discovered. Although I might have completely misunderstood what you were suggesting.

In edit mode you can select just the faces you want to be set smooth and then hit ‘Set Smooth’, you can then use this in conjunction with ‘Auto Smooth’ I think, and set the degree. Or as someone has mentioned before you can use the edgesplit modifier.

I’ve never used Max, so I can’t really comment on much else. But I do feel you would have been better off asking some of these questions in the support forums first. You would be much less likely to start any aggravated discussions. Maybe you already did that already, I don’t know.

Anyway… checkout

http://gryllus.net/Blender/3D.html

as there seem to be lots of good tutorials about features I didn’t know about there.

Happy Blendering or 3DSmaxing or whatever you like to do.

Edit:

In the preferences window under the ‘view & controls’ section you can set ‘snap to grid:’ to ‘Grab/Move’

Max’s interface sucks. Its the horrible thing that was made to make your life suck in every way imaginable. However it’s modeling tools are great, they might just be the best out there if you ask me. I took a class over at 3d Buzz on understanding Max and the modeling tools are allot different then blender but I found them allot better then most every other program I worked with.

OMG thank you so much. I guess this really is more of a support thread.

Edit:Oh I got another question about a features in Max that I can’t find in blender. How do you do spline modeling in blender?

Well well, i forced myself switching to blender since i noticed a much stronger and reliable development within this application than 3dsmax it has, about a year ago.
After this one year i can say that i really don’t miss much features from 3dsmax in blender. But i need to admit the feeling that blender could be the last major app out there without support for bmesh/ngons. :no: You can do almost the same with blenders modeling tools, but they just need some more effort from time to time for the same procedure. Just corssing fingers for a render api and bmesh/ngons support one day. Anyway, i really learned to love blender.