ace dragon,
yes I see that it catches up - but turn on ray tracing and you die.
HDRI rendering with Blender render branch does not have the same output as with
other systems.
But well it is currently also in dev and not done so one should not judge the render system
for current issues. We also need to see where it goes to when it reaches beta and finale stage.
Look at it this way… If you are planning on working at a professional company learn Maya. If you want to make 3d art and basic animations as a hobby use blender. Also blender runs natively on unix which is a plus.
Maya runs natively on linux and mac as well, cheers. :eyebrowlift:
Blender is a better choice for upstart studios.
I’m currently planning on setting up a studio (small size, under 10 people) and Blender is the obvious choice.
I don’t need to spend money on Maya, or Max, or any other ‘legacy’ application because I don’t have x number of years worth of scripts and add-ons.
For small studios and upstarts it is the perfect 3D application.
/Posted before flame war…
The major differences between Maya and Blender are the depth in the implementation of a particular feature.
If Maya have a feature,it’s fully implemented,you can do a lot of with that,and the users have the possibiity to use that particular feature as they want,not as the coder wants that you use it.
Blender is much more rigid.
Usually,in Blender you can’t do what the coder espressly hasn’t thought.
It’s a different philosophy,Maya is more for technical people,Blender is more for artists,it’s more close to Cinema 4d IMO than Maya.
Maya talks nicely to various other pro apps such as motion builder, shake, nuke and others. Hell, we only recently got an FBX importer/exporter that worked!
I know one professional who dropped Blender from their pipeline due to this.
How do you integrate Blender into a pipeline if it won’t connect to anything else?
Tea_Monster - obj for geometry and mdd for animation data is a fairly common pipeline,
that said yes our i/o needs improvement for both standard object/material/texture/animation formats and image data,
We’ve mostly focused on Collada for roundtripping. Also AFAIK we don’t have FBX import except for fairly simplistic stuff, but our export has been fairly good. The reason for the lack of good FBX support is their is no format specification.
LetterRip
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Its the only thing i crave for the most in blender… good import/export options.
Its tough to live in a region which is too autodesk-savvy and difficult to use blender with other apps, although obj works really well for exporting models with textures.
And i recently tried fbx export for using some files in maya, its good but one needs to tweak all lights etc anyway…
While this was true after AutoDesk acquired Motionbuilder via the buyout of Alias, a little over a year ago they released an FBX SDK for developing FBX i/o. I’m not a programmer, but I’ve been told that is even better than a mere “format specification”. The SDK is compatible with all the environments on which Blender runs (Win, Mac, Linux, 32& 64-bit).
Yes: exactly BECAUSE not buying Maya, i could afford buying a good machine. :yes::eyebrowlift:
As you might know: Maya is not that good on a old dual 1Gig G4…
And im not even talking about the yearly upgrade taxes i’m free of…
(removed duplicate)
The sdk is not gpl compatible unfortunately.
LetterRip
a sdk isn’t better than specifications. especially if it is closed source. it’s incompatible with blender’s license.
Damn it - I hate these subjects. To answer them honestly brands you a troll, but to leave it alone perpetuates the “Blender is better than everything else” meme that stunts development.
I was going to avoid this (and have come back after initially typing than discarding a post); but assuming there was an honest desire to know why Maya is preferred over Blender - I’ll answer briefly and honestly.
1. Stable & Flexible User Interface
Maya has had alot more artists use their application over alot longer a time than Blender has been actively used in a professional sense (outside the original NaN context). The amount of time spent getting it right, and the profit motive to please as many users as possible with a design they could all live with, resulted in a user interface that stabilised (in terms of radical changes) some time ago. Combined with the capability of scripting/recording common actions that could be simply added as “shelf buttons” and the almost-a-pie-menu “Hotbox” - a majority of users could easily find their way through the interface a majority of the time.
Blender has not had the time to stabilise and is, relative to Maya, only recently undergone the intensive introspection in “professional use” required to hammer through the initial developer preferences toward an artist-centric tool. As the user-base grows, the common denominator interface is emerging from each new iteration of Blender, likely to be accelerated now that the interface is scripted.
2. Content Pipeline & Infrastructure
Blender does what it does quite well but, when it comes to working with other applications, it tends to fail somewhat dismally. Maya, though pure dint of being around longer and used by more people, has a large suite of import/export scripts & plugins that make it relatively simple to work in Maya on what it does well then move to other applications (Nuke for example) to do what THEY do well.
Blender is catching up in this regard, the addition of Collada is a good example, but there are big holes that make it impossible for a studio to adopt Blender and keep in budget.
This is ignoring the added cost of putting together a new pipeline, and testing it, for adding Blender to the mix. There are a number of established “tried and true” methods for mixing Maya with other software packages; something Blender has yet to have had the time & exposure to bring about.
3. Training & Existing Investment
Maya is one of the main applications taught at those “exclusive graphic colleges” (i.e. technical schools that make you pay through the nose to learn software); Blender does not have similar training exposure yet.
As such, it is easier for a studio to find another Maya-trained artist than it is to find a Blender-trained one. Finding trained staff and being able to replace them should things not work out is a LARGE consideration to studios both large & small. Never underestimate the cost in time (& hence money) it takes to train someone up, nor the risk one takes on when relying on a (relatively) obscure software package & related skill set. People with Maya skills are almost a dime a dozen (like all skill sets though, good ones are harder to find). Blender training is much rarer and therefore the likelihood of finding another Blender-trained artist with reasonable talent being slim to none.
Update: Yes, I am fully aware that my “summarise briefly” became “outline in this ten page essay”. Sad, but the quick “Blender doesn’t have the training, a stable user interface, or features assisting in a decent pipeline” would have just painted a target on my back for the flame-throwers.
So drop the GPL only ‘schtick’ and write your i/o script under the isc license which is compatible with both.
BTolputt,
what you say is mostly correct. For 3 it is largely the most important consideration given the short time that Blender has been viable as a robust tool - note this consideration varys dramatically by the market and nation - 3D software tends to be used much more in the surrounding area of where it originated. 2 it depends on where in the pipeline. For modeling and UV unwrapping Blender has been doable for most pipelines for many years (It has been used to model characters for some of the top animated films and games). For animation tools it has only been usable this past year or two and the pipeline tools have yet to mature for it. Although for the past year or so the obj+mdd pipeline has been quite feasible. The blender to fbx for game engines has also been reasonable.
For 1 - it has been a consideration for how widespread adoption is and hence mostly influences 3.
Blender has not had the time to stabilise and is, relative to Maya, only recently undergone the intensive introspection in “professional use” required to hammer through the initial developer preferences toward an artist-centric tool. As the user-base grows, the common denominator interface is emerging from each new iteration of Blender, likely to be accelerated now that the interface is scripted.
Blenders iterface was a ‘user centric interface’ designed specifically for the use of the in house artists at NaN. Unfortunately the initial users were on SGIs and before any widespread UI paradigms had been developed. So Blender inherited what are now ‘odd’ key combinations, and do to being in house software for artists was designed around fast to use instead of any interest in being easy to learn. Then after going open source the lack of design in the growth meant that interface items were added somewhat haphazardly and inconsistently. I don’t think Maya can be held as an example of good UI design, first mover and flexibilty are the main reasons for its success. Good UI design has been Modo and XSI, and to some extent C4D. Artists from other packages aren’t really interested in good design so much as a design that is similar to what they are used to. Of course good design with an air of familiarity is best.
LetterRip
pseudononymous,
So drop the GPL only ‘schtick’ and write your i/o script under the isc license which is compatible with both.
Not quite sure what you mean by isc. Personally I’d rather focus my efforts on Collada than FBX. Also there is a reason that XSI wrote their own importer tools for Maya and 3DS Max instead of using the SDK.
LetterRip
LetterRip - That may be so, but until we DO have a method of getting this stuff out of and into Blender, people who are using these tools (i.e. CG Professionals) will pass Blender by. I’m not trying to troll or stir up controversy, I’m just telling you what I have heard. The guy I was talking to was working for a game studio in Poland (TheFarm51). He was trying to export a Motion Builder animation from Maya into Blender. Sadly, I know SBA about exporting animations, so I couldn’t really help him. I suggested Pepeland’s Anisculpt, but I don’t think that helped him.
Blender has kind of learned from what is wrong with it’s inter-operability. Now that a lot of Blender’s internal operations can be accessed by the Python API, you will see a lot more development of importers and exporters. Sadly, that is going to take a few years for it all to get up to speed. First Blender and the API has to stabilize, then it’s going to take time for the training materials to be made, and for python programmers to learn them and get to grips with using them.
There is one thing that’s bothering me in Blender’s interface.
When you try to save a file, you need to confirm it., but if you try quitting Blender with your changes unsaved, it just cheerfully obliges. Yes, I know about quit.blend, but that’s the opposite how 100% other applications I know work.
Can anyone provide a reasoning behind this behavior?
Sorry for the offtopic.
As for the on-topic, the key to Maya success has always been flexibility. It was designed to accommodate different workflows, while Blender before 2.5 was designed with pretty specific workflow in mind.
And yet another - Maya is primarily an application platform with built in decent animation and modeling capabilities. If you consider rendering in Maya, you need Mental Ray or something like that, if you want cloth simulation - you have to invest in something like Syflex, etc.