I’ve been using this software for 4 years. Here’s what i have to say. This piece is utterly ridiculous. Not only people lie that this software is good, but they lie that its beginner friendly. IT IS NOT. That disgusting piece might be beginner friendly if you want to learn modeling, but when it goes to other things, IT NOT. The problem is not that this software is difficult. THE PROBLEM IS YOU NEED TO KNOW WHAT YOU CAN CLICK AND WHAT YOU CANNOT, BECAUSE THIS SOFTWARE IS SO BROKEN IT CRASHES IN AN UNEXPECTED WAY. I’VE BEEN USING IT FOR 4 YEARS. YET I STILL PRESS SOMETHING THAT MAKES IT CRASH.
I CANT EVEN MAKE A PROPER RIG THAT WON’T BREAK BECAUSE I HAVE NO 10 YEARS EXPERIENCE OF RIGGING. I don’t know what constraint is broken and what constraint work fine. Okay, even if I do nice rig setup, there’s still 1 big problem. THE SKINNING. It is awful in blender. THE AUTONORMALIZE TOOL SHOULDN’T EXIST. WHEN I PAINT WEIGHT FROM JAW BONE, WHY IN THE HELL IT GETS ALSO INFLUENCED BY LEG BONE THAT IS FAR FAR AWAY. WHAT IS WRONG?? THEN I PRESS CTRL Z AND IT CRASHES. WHY DOES BLENDER CRASH WHEN I PRESS CTRL Z IN OTHER MODES. LIKE WHAT IN THE HELL??
blender 4.0. I clicked ctrl z in armature edit mode. AND IT REMOVED ALL MY RIG LAYERS. I HAVE AROUND 600 BONES ON MY RIG. AND THEY ALL ARE NOW ON 1 LAYER. SORTING IT TOOK ME 6 HOURS.IT COULD BE MUCH FASTER IF BLENDER DIDN’T HAVE THAT STUPID LATENCY CLICKS WHEN YOU TRY TO CLICK ON BONES.
I don’t want crappy 52 shapekeys weak face setup that look ugly ass sonic adventure team fortress faces but with bigger polycount. I want to make rigs like in spring open movie. Yea, there sure are rigging streams from blender studio, but there’s another problem. THEY USED CLOUD RIG EXCEPT NOT ONLY IT DIDN’T INSTALL ON ALL BLENDER VERSIONS IVE USED, BUT IT ALSO CAUSED RIGIFY TO FULLY BREAK SO I HAD TO REINSTALL THE SOFTWARE.
AND YOU TELLING ME BLENDER IS FRIENDLY???
Back to the skinning part. There is a modifier called smooth corrective. It’s like deltamush in maya except 50 times crappier. If maya’s deltamush makes deformations better for real. Blender’s corrective smooth doesn’t. It just relaxes topology driven by bad deformation that is bad because no matter how hard you try to make weights look good, with blender tools it will still look bad. It also lags as hell if you set repeats to more than 15. If you accidentally forgot to disable it while sculpting, you’re dead. Your model might be turned into something that is made of spikes.
The worst thing in blender is the lag. You make your project, do some stuff, than you notice project lagging overtime. You hide stuff from viewport or delete it. IT WILL STILL LAG. You cannot tell what causes blender to lag.
So this is what it is. Blender is definitely not a friendly software. Its for toxic people that have 10 years of experience, their favorite phrase is ‘’ Its just your pc bad’’ and you aint telling me I need to have at least 4090 to do rigging smoothly, its ridiculous.
You might be happier there then, but be prepared because Maya has its fair share of bugs/issues/legacy bloat. Sometimes the grass isn’t always greener, but at least you’re giving it a try which is never a bad thing.
I don’t really want to throw my experience in a trash can, co even if I’m learning maya right now, ill still use blender for other purposes like modeling.
Yep, you don’t have to. Many people, myself included, have tried all the main 3D programs and still use multiple programs. As I said, the skills are transferable so nothing is lost.
Bruh… I think the problem is how you use or how you learn to use it and not the software fault (or also yes if there is a bug or known issue) and comparing it to Maya or other DCCs is unnecessary because all of them also have their differences, as much as their strengths and weaknesses, no digital software is perfect… Instead of complaining why not support blender fund to be possible for more developers to be involved in the improvement of blender if the problems you mention are even true?
The Blender developers have been increasing their focus on performance in the last few years. 2.8 was in fact a disaster in terms of the regressions in that area, but everything is now faster compared to 2.79 and is only going up.
I also wonder if you read the development goals for 2024, which is about finishing the projects that were started in previous years and about reducing technical debt (ie. not a lot of entirely new things). Blender did take a hit in stability during the 3.x series, but primarily because it entered a phase of transition as a new core was being worked on and major architectural changes were being done (which kicked up a bit of dust in the process, but it should result in a much faster and much better Blender once the devs. have had time to build on it).
But seriously, who says blender is beginner friendly? They have been working for 30 years to become more beginner friendly, and they are making slow progress, but Blender still has a solid reputation as having a very steep learning curve. With great power comes great responsibility.
Been using Blender for 5-6 years yet I was able to learn it. Granted, not everyone will be able to learn the way I do, but you should have picked up some useful skills along the way in that time.
Personally after using both Maya and Blender for rigging and weight painting I find the Blender system more user friendly. Some stuff are a bit easier in Maya, but in many other cases it’s the opposite. Been rigging a cat all week and using two armatures for the skeleton and controls respectively helps a lot with simplifying the rigging process. A lot of the knowledge I’ve gathered from Maya rigging can be directly applied to Blender. As long as one understands the differences between Blender bones and Maya joints it starts to make more sense.
Adjusting the base meshes and weight paint are a lot easier since you can go back and forth by adjusting your skeleton/rig while painting and modelling at the same time. This takes a lot longer in Maya because of object history and needing to re-apply weight paint on a new clean mesh if you do the slightest edit.
That is no different from doing that same stuff in Maya. I had no idea how to rig in Maya until I was taught it, since it is not intuitive unless having done it once or twice the correct way. Rigging especially is a very technical skill that a lot of 3D artists dread to do, which is why a lot of them refuse to do it. Whether you do it in Blender, Maya, etc. it doesn’t matter, creating a solid rig is hard and good weight painting is almost always labour intensive work.
That rigging knowledge will however carry over to other software, so if you decide to switch to something else you won’t be starting from scratch. Maya is a good software when it comes to rigging and animating, but it has its fair share of limitations and annoying bugs as well.
I once had to sit down and troubleshoot a single IK controller for days in Maya because of extreme lag and tons of crashes when selected with the Graph Editor open and loop cycle curves in specific scenes. I somehow managed to reduce the issue somewhat, but I have no clue to this day what caused it (only the left controller broke while the right one was fine despite being made the same way). Made me extremely frustrated that I wasn’t able to do that work in Blender at the time.
If you’re finding the flippancy in these replies frustrating, please consider that people will take you more seriously if you write out your rant, step away for an hour, and come back and edit it to be calmer and involve less all capitalized sentences
I can only tell - YES, for 99% of your claims, except - crashes.
Im only once dealing with skinning in blender, and it nothing crashes for me. But it was bloody simple model of just 1 human hand. So, well, probably rigging, especially with big amount of bones/constraints/etc., can be a problem? Im not sure tho.
Im literally remember only one case when blender start to crash really oftenly. I still have no idea what was causing crashes, but iirc problem was solved by restarting the windows. It was one specific and relatively simple model.
Besides that i can remember few crashes which was happened in a specific case with one specific addon, but those problem are really easy to solve, and basically its about how to properly use an addon (basically because of blender nonideality). Really not a problem at all.
