I’m Jocelyn “Strob” Simard from Canada, and I’m a freelance generalist CG artist and naturally a new Blender user. Having used many softwares over my 21 years career in the CG industry, I think I just have no choice but to master Blender now that it has reached such a level. I used and still use 3ds Max/V-Ray mainly but looking into switching to Houdini and Blender. I also used professionally Maya and softimage XSI. So I can say I’m kind of a 3D software geek!
One thing that seems very simple and unimportant at first but that can still change many thing in a workflow is about the start up time. I don’t understand how Blender can start up so fast! Is this only because there is no licensing system slowing down the process?
Blender Starts so fast that having assets spread into several different scene is a lot less frightening than in some other apps. Just look at my benchmark and you will understand what I mean.
Here is a little start up time benchmark I did between the 4 3D apps I currently use:
3ds Max 2016
3ds Max 2017
Houdini 15.5.565
Blender 2.78 rc2
Its so annoying! Blender I mean… When starting one of the lovely autodesk products I can go grab a coffee, hail a cab, go to the airport, fly to southern Portugal, pick up some sun and a nice fish for lunch, fly back, take a nap and then return to my screen and wait for plus minus a minute or so before i start to work… Blender starts so fast I don’t even know where or what to begin with before it is up and yelling COME ON!! at me.
If your home/business/etc. is heated with natural gas, chances are it was processed in AutoCAD-designed facilities. Same with many of the small-to-midsized oil processing refineries. I wouldn’t use it for animation or visualization, but then again I wouldn’t drive nails with a pickaxe either.
The slower launch time of a lot of programs is due to preloading assets. If you launch Photoshop it precaches fonts, custom brushes, shapes, gradients, and all that stuff so it is ready to go. Blender doesn’t do much of that. So you get zippy startup times but you can lose time setting up fonts, gradients, and alpha textures manually.
It’s the same for 3ds Max when editing high poly models, it can be easily brought down to its knees. That’s why I do almost all my modeling in Zbrush which is not afraid of editing models with 100 times more poly without any slowdown.
Oh yeah, still running strong for 33 years. It’s such a bloated piece of trash, it’s so painful working with it, but It’s what we are using at my work, so there’s not much I can do about it. I use blender any time I need to make a pretty picture, but if I need construction blueprints, it’s gotta be CAD.
