That was my favorite sentence hereš¤£.
Tbh the only places where I can find cumbersomeness in blender is the only places where (in my case Max isnāt too cucumbersome) and is mostly fixed by addons, such as align tools, bool tools, or loop tools, which come with blender or this ones which you have to download.
Btw, Max doesnāt even have hotkeys for meding appart from just inset and bevel (Called chamfer there) and itās for the non-numeric option of those tools. In the 2020 version I believe they added a few more and made keyboard customization a bit better, but from time to time it break and made me have to use a backup hotkey file to not setup all the keys again.
I didnāt mean to imply that they were, just that I wasnāt seeing anywhere near as many in either Maya or Max.
And to be fair, the Max manual is likely a lot better than Blenderās. I find the whole explain-what-each-tool-does-but-not-how-they-fit-into-the-workflow approach do be right next to useless. I canāt speak for Maxās manual on this score, but Blenderās takes this tack. Not exactly useful unless youāre already highly experienced. And letās face it, if someoneās that experienced, what the hell are they doing looking at the manual anyway?
And being no expert, even after ten years, I found the Blender 2.8 Encyclopedia course I mentioned earlier fills in a lot of those gaps, bringing tool-use into the workflow quite nicely.
I havenāt run across all those yet. Thanks for the list.
Right. Got it. My apologies to @Musashidan for missing his point.
When Iām faced with this slow down, I check Simplify in the Render properties and crank the Max Subdivisions down until it runs at full speed. Yeah, it could be optimized to run faster, but at that point, Iām mostly concerned with how things are moving rather than how the shadows/AO/etc. are looking. (My wife calls this: picking your battles ) If I need more precision than is allowed with no subdiv, I set up a camera really close up (ie. nothing in frame than what I need to see with high precision) and do a playblast.
Max has some pretty useful modifiers. The edit poly modifier alone is increadibly useful. Large scenes are very fast in 3ds Max. Editing very high poly meshes in Max is very fast.
There are plenty of other things that are better in Max as well. It is just that there are even other things that are worse. The frequent crashes, the startup time, the 15 or so gig you have to download, the license registering, the paying, the paying even more for a decent renderer, and even more for render nodes. The crappy UI, the material editor and on and on.
All in all 3d apps are more or less on par with advanteges/disadvantes in certain areas.
Oh for sure. Maybe I exaggerated a bit but for my own uses which is Game Dev, I really donāt need anything more. I can do everything I could do in Max and more. Well, except conform but thatās another story.
Isnāt that more or less like Blenderās Shrinkwrap? In theory anyway. Iāve found Shrinkwrap to be a bit of a pain to work with, but that may be my lack of experience with it. I was using it last week while retopologizing a character mesh. I may also have been expecting too much from it. What I had hoped was that I could add the modifier to the stack, make sure the ācageā of the retopo mesh enclosed the original character mesh, then select all vertices andā¦ I donāt know. Magically it wraps itself onto the original mesh?
Have you ever used the marking menuās?
Thatās what an Maya user does to increase speed - itās fully gesture driven and context sensitive and can be very fast since it depends on pure muscle memory.
Also spacebar for having all the menues on screen - easy reachable and configurable.
Saying that Maya is slow because it doesnāt provide the kind of shortcuts you are used to is intellectual dishonest if you donāt check out the appropriate ways of doing things fast.
Maya has a ton of shortcuts but they are spread over a broader spectrum of tools and functionalities.
Blender is fast in the beginning of a project and Maya is not - but if the project increases in complexity, Blender gets consistently slower and less effective, while Maya keeps its speed or provides big jumps, that demand a lot of work on the Blender side. And there comes a certain point when Blender no longer can keep up in speed and in performance and functionality and it becomes a pain in the ass to proceed until it becomes impossible.
Maya too is a pain in the ass when dealing with ever increasing complexity, BUT it works despite the pain and the ceiling is much much higher.
For an Artist that has to choose the question becomes: how much pain and what kind of pain can you tolerate to reach your artistic goal and are you willing to compromise.
I am not willing to do that, so I choose Maya for everything animation related, while I use Blender for the things it does better/faster.
And that is what I would always recommend. A single artist who can use more than one tool in a way that balances the weaknesses and strengths of the tools is always more productive than an artist that sticks to one tool only.
Same applies to teams.
Remember: Every time you have to choose between 2 opposing extremes, the choice is a lie as it denies the possible 3rd option that unites the opposites.
) If I need more precision than is allowed with no subdiv, I set up a camera really close up (ie. nothing in frame than what I need to see with high precision) and do a playblast.