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I have taught Blender to over a dozen artists who have worked under me and have come from other software, Maya, 3D Max etc. One for one they take to it right away and the find it simple and easy to use. And they continue to use it along with other software.
Blender is in the ball park. It is basically familiar a lot of the tools and terms are similar. With the added benefit that modeling in Blender is really superior in a lot of ways.
I also found a university, a very prominent one in SE Asia that teaches Blender to all of its 3D Students along with Maya and 3D Max.
Very interesting.
@rambo
Don’t worry I know, it’s an Internet forum thread nobody is targeting anyone. But about that comment of kids today being able to learn blender in a heartbeat… Not so sure about that.
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How could you be sure if you have not done it? I actually don’t know if you have or haven’t so I am not going to jump to a conclusion.
But I have done it. So I am just reporting statistical fact. To be exact of probably more than 16 artists I have trained, only 1 preferred to stay with Maya. The others under my direction use Maya for certain tools Blender does not have. But for the things Blender does well, Blender is used.
Additionally I found myself in a classroom full of 20 about kids at a university just last year. I was actually taken aback as I was asking 8 or so of them down the line what software they used and all of them said Blender. I had to laugh. Thinking of threads like this. They had no idea why I was laughing. Turns out there was a teacher there teaching Blender. An exclusive class in Blender. And so along with other software they all had at least a basic grasp of Blender.
If you have an opinion that people can not easily accept Blender, then what personal experience teaching and in a studio environment of training and producing are you basing this on?
I am only reporting what I have seen with my own eyes. And it does not match at all with the “general opinion” expressed so often in threads like this.
@Richard (1st post)
Interesting… I didn’t expect that to be honest
Kids of today consider piracy an option far before they even try to look at the free alt.
They’ll probably pirate Cinema 4D and make their mind up if 3d is for them before they even consider using blender
Hey all!
First of all, thanks to xrg for linking to my blog posts on learning Blender. I’ve been definitely enjoying the process of learning to use the tool & get to know all of the extremely creative and passionate people I’ve met within the community.
The intent of the posts is not to flame on Blender - far from it! It’s to demonstrate how I’m going about getting used to using it the way the developers intended.
All software is unique, and each requires a bit of a learning curve. Some tools (like most text editors) are easy to move from tool to tool. There are unique things about each tool that make some better for certain things… but plop someone in front of jEdit, Sublime Text, Notepad++ or whatever and they’ll be able to figure it out.
More complicated software such as Nuke or Natron (two compositing packages) also have their unique challenges… but it’s still relatively easy for folks to learn.
Blender, 3D Studio Max, Maya, Houdini, Modo, etc are even more complicated. Each has their plusses and minuses and as users “figure things out”, the more non-standard they are, the more the user will have to “stretch” to learn the tool.
Regardless of what type of interaction is “better”, users are approaching the software with a history of tool interaction. We have to be aware of that history.
If a user has no previous experience, it’s easy for them to think “oh, this is how you do it” and then move forward. If a user has TONS of experience that is relatively consistent, then coming to a new paradigm can be confusing… frustrating… and ultimately futile if they are not led through the process.
Thus, it’s up to tool developers to be aware of the history each user may be coming from… and make sure to “walk with them towards success”.
I think that regardless of how the Blender developers decide to adjust the tool in 2.8 (LMB, RMB, whatever), a great task would be to make sure they create a beautiful and easy on-boarding process for new and experienced users.
As for what we’re doing with the blog at Nimble Collective, we are demonstrating that even though the tool may be unfamiliar or confusing at first… there are ways to learn it that will ensure your success.
-Jason
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Actually what is kind of spooky about the pirates I have met, who are mostly maya users, is how candid they are about it, and these are mostly lonely kids who are quick to give out traceable contact information.
BTW Pro tip boys and girls if you commit a felony; Don’t admit the damn thing. You never know when some federal agency is going to need to validate its existence and decide to crack down on the activity you are doing.
Unfortunately, whenever you type the name of software X in the Google search bar (and this is in almost all instances), among the suggested searches will be searches for cracks, keygens, and serials. Piracy right now is numerous enough that it may have already caused many smaller software vendors to go out of business (and in some areas, that only helps the big corporate solutions get away with ideas such as removing the option for a permanent license).
Also, many pirates love to rail against the big companies, but in some instances they actually help said companies by taking out their smaller competitors (so the only hope for those wanting an alternative is for a robust solution to emerge from the land of FOSS, something that’s never a guarantee).
i think piracy claims are over stated. take games for example. bethusda loves to claim piracy. i bought oblivion for xbox, accidently sat on the disk breaking it, bought it again my nephew “borrowed it” so i bought it again. then i discovered nexus so i bought it for the pc so i could try mods. then a goty came out so i bought that. then my pc crashed. i had changed video cards and i think sound card by then. after formatting my hdd to get rid of a virus i couldn’t get rid of any other way i reinstalled everything. bethusda flagged me for pirating for useing my own cd key again. i had unpirated/bought the game 5 times. i doubt pirates are more common than people like me in america. in asia/ russia etc…its irrelevant because those people aren’t going to be buying it anyway. music industry loves to talk about piracy also. how did so many get to be millionaires if piracy was that big? i think most piracy claims are used by corperate tax cheats to claim losses that are vastly over stated.
blender may not have many users by % of the world population, but i highly doubt autodesk does either. with the price i wouldn’t be suprised to see more blender users than autodesk users over all. for professionals its probably autodesk because they have much better documentation. thats also the reason most schools teach it instead of blender imo. i have heard blender changes too fast for the documentation to keep up, no opensource can do it (despite blender useing opensource python because python does exactly that, no pyton gets released without ip to date documentation.) you want to learn autodesk…look in the manual. want to learn blender look in the …whoops. look it up online and pray what you are looking up is for the version of blender you are useing or that the kid on youtube actually knows what he’s talking about.
there are other book instead of the manual? have you read blender for dummies? to me dummies books = noob books. blender for dummies is for people much smarter than i am. nothing wrong with being a noob, everybody including the masters were noobs once upon a time. noobs need the most help, and they have the least. if blender wants to be more successful they need to do what the more successful have done, include the instructions. instructions current to the release. rather than paying all those “artists” for films that use special builds so its actually showing what cant be done in blender…give that money to an author to write a good set of documentation. i dont care how good a tool is, if you dont know how to use it its near worthless, just a piece of junk. i dont care what blender can do, if the people cant do it or learn how they are not going to bother with it. they might as well try useing their toaster as blender…atleast they would get to eat their failures and get something out of trying.
I teach Blender since over 10 years. Truth is there are three types of students.
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the clue less - ever software is hard for them sadly
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I don’t want to learn it - Blender sucks because it is not like software XYZ and thus it is hard - those are the cannot change habits people
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I am just open to everything and willing to learn - fun fact a graphic design students killed I repeat KILLED all my industrial design students in modeling rendering and animation - he just enjoyed learning it. And the same is true for a painting students who hands dont defeated a whole class of design students.
truth is blender is different but like with all software you need to sit down and learn the UI. period.
Maya with the manual just makes it easier in the beginning phase.
I feel actually that with the mesh modeling tools and the modifiers Blender beats Modo and Maya. MeshFusion looks cool but results into a mesh mess.
Maya has nicely great NURBS tools included but honestly the only app that maybe beats them all is Max because of the better modifier system they have.
I cannot really say anything I miss in Blender besides faster boolean modifier speed.
All path tracers are noisy, it’s just the nature of the beast. From my understanding almost all visual effects companies that use path tracers (Arnold or the newer RIS Renderman) also use noise reduction on their renders. That’s why the denoise tool that’s being developed for Cycles is so exciting.
Let’s not forget the importance of this statement.
It depends on your workflow too. Since I do a lot of retopo in my pipeline we still have not been able to replace Maya LT. And part of that is because I have not had the time to fully check out Modo to see if the retopo tools are on a par or better. But at first glance the NEX tools in Maya now seem to be based on the Modo tools. But I need to check it out more.
In the mean time (even with Retopo Flow) I have not been able to rely on Blender for robust and fast retopo.
Dynamics and Rigging is another thing entirely. So still there is nothing that replaces MotionBuilder and Maya for that rigging/wrangling mocap data workflow and character dynamics with nCloth and so on. Nothing.
Too bad. I wish at least there was something that could replace MotionBuilder, but nothing comes close.
For retopo blender is the best !
Use bsurface, surface constraint and iceking tool, retopo MT etc. there is a lot of great addon for retopo and they are all free.
I don’t use retopoflow it’s too unstable.
Have you ever used the NEX tools in Maya or Modo? I am curious your opinion on those compared. I have used Bsurface not really that much but of course have use surface constraint quite a bit.
What look for is a one stop all solution for retopo. And another factor that stops us from using Blender is the inability to handle high density meshes. Maya is not great either but it is much better. And it makes all the difference to a workflow. The workflow we have now is fast and straight forward.
But if you have some techniques or tips to share, I’d love to hear it.
Of course I used NEX, even before it was added to maya ^^
Look at my videos on my youtube channel 
NEX is great but you can do much better in blender.
And blender can handle meshes with 129 Millions tris too.
I use it all the time with scans.