Last month viewers from the “Maya animator tries Blender” video came to my video and left a bunch of negative comments about Blender’s capabilities, so I wanted to make a video reviewing the Maya animator’s experience with Blender and my opinions on the “issues” he ran into.
Please be kind and enjoy this educational video!
Thank you for this video. I’ve seen a lot of these, “Blender vs X” and most often it’s not capabilities that are the ‘problem’, but rather lack of knowledge on how Blender works, which these video authors should point out but usually don’t – they complain that Blender is just lacking in some way. They only way for a person to accurately compare Blender to other DCC’s is if they are familiar with what they are comparing. Blender isn’t free Maya, as you pointed out – they are two different programs, each with their advantages and drawbacks.
His video is just a typical ‘jump on the Blender Youtube bandwagon’ with a sensational title to gain clicks. It’s an issue on YT in general.
When I went from almost 20 years of 3dsMax to Blender I took the time to actually learn it to a decent level before I made a ‘Blender for 3dsMax Artists’ video series. It was more aimed at Max users considering the switch and what to expect. At no point was I complaining ‘but…but…why is Blender not like 3dsMax?’
I also learned Maya years back while I was in Max. I had to do some animation in Maya so I had to learn it, and it was the same there too, I made a ‘Maya animation for 3dsMax Users’ vid explaining the main differences. Surely that’s far more useful to people interested in it? This whole trend of posting videos with the intent of sensationalising and outraging people for clicks has no place in the 3D community.
It would have been for more constructive for him to at least learn the animation tools in Blender to a competent level and then impart that knowledge in a helpful way for people interested in the subject. This has always been what the 3D community of sharing knowledge and experience has always been about.
I enjoyed learning Blender and anything that I wanted to know that were common tools and workflows I had used in Max I went and learned how it’s done in Blender. For instance, the hotkeys for translations(Blender didn’t have gizmos then), I LOVED that system when I took the time to learn it and get used to it. It’s so much better than using a clunky gizmo.
The fact is, this guy didn’t bother to learn even the basics of animating in Blender before making this clickbait video. I mean, if you are learning a new 3D program as an animator, the FIRST thing you would do is go in to the prefs and find options specific to animating, which he didn’t even bother to do that.
I agree. It’s almost like he needs to justify why one should buy and learn Maya, rather than learn Blender and find out that it’s a viable alternative. Blender isn’t perfect, but neither is Maya.
As a former Maya user, I can tell you what the fundamental problem is. As the “Industry Standard”, Maya users just assume any software can just copy the way Maya does things. Because it’s fairly easy to switch from Maya, to Max, the former Softimage XSI and Motion Builder.
There’s a reason for that: Autodesk owns all of them. So if one copies methodologies from the other, Autodesk isn’t suing anyone.
If you’re a Maya user, you can go to a studio that uses Max or Motionbuilder, and learn a level of functionality that lets you do shots in less than a week. I typically had 3 days before I had to turn in shots.
That’s harder in Blender. It doesn’t use the same hotkeys. Most Blender tutorials are done exclusively with hotkeys and sometimes never touch an actual menu from the UI, and they’re thrown at the novice Blender users at a rate of 3 per second. And the same hotkeys do different things in different modes.
Maya users have to start over from scratch to a very large extent when going to Blender. I did. And it took a lot longer than it took me to learn Max and Motionbuilder. Because Blender has its own ways of doing things at every single level of functionality.
It is a bit like going to a foreign country and complaining that everyone speaks a different language, eats different food and have a different culture.
The world is diverse and software is too, for me that is a good thing. There are always things to learn from other perspectives, workflows etc. No software is perfect, but they each have their own good points.