I have a bigger job coming up and would love to use blender for it. Going trough the requirements, I realized there are a few crucial features that are missing for me.
I use blender daily since about two years and did smaller projects fully in blender, but for the big ones it is not ready yet (for me at least)
The project type is an architectural / Engineering animation.
Slice modifier (3dsmax): ability to dynamically cut away geometry based on a referenced plane.
Workarounds: Booleans (not stable enough), OSL magic, heavy python script running on frame_change_pre doing the cutting manually.
Fill Modifier (Cap Holes in Max): dynamically close / cap / fill non-manifold edges, works in conjunction with slice. Workarounds would be same as above. (awesome would be a fast mode, and a slower one that tries to detect holes / islands + a fully cycles based one that works on the ray-level).
Light groups: I think this is in the works. For me it would be crucial that they can be defined by either inclusion or exclusion. E.g. ‘this light does all, except objectX’ and ‘this light does none, except objectX’
Ability to reference custom properties in shader nodes.
E.g. i have a bunch of objects with different shaders I want to fade in and out together: custom animated property on a parent object, script with handler propagates the property down to children on frame change and shader group on each shader reads the property to drive transparency.
Better / more control in freestyle rendering. Workaround: none, but I would wish for some pixel shader support in the compositor. Would be fun to combine passes to make a nice line style shader.
I find myself in this unfortunate position (like many others I think) that I can program, know the math and theory well enough to implement most of that say in unity, but am not a professional programmer, therefore I can’t and don’t have time to dig into blender C code… Python is nice, but too top-level for many of the things I would want to do / like to have.
And don’t get me wrong, I see people do insane addons with python, its just that what I often need is a simple loop that runs over all triangles and does something simple, but I would like to have it fast and even more important - easily accessible in my workflow, not frame_change_pre hacks that break the depsgraph half the time (at least back in 2.81).
Anyway - this is not a rant; I really like blender and think its going to get better in time. The question, any maybe reason to write this is: what is stopping you from using blender on bigger projects?
As a sidenote: You can do this via the AnimationNodes-addon. This is the exact node in question, to be precise. It’s a bit cumbersome to set up, though (kinda like drivers).
From what it seems the features you suggest are easily reproduced. But even so about mixing the results you want from two software, and focus on the strong features you want.
These are not reasons for professionnal works. These are your necesseries.
And light groups only works on archaic render engines. Blender have this feature before, but Blender removed old archaic render engine since 2.80 version.
Light groups in some renderer have more usage than simple exclude - include. Anyway I miss exclude include feature in Cycles. In C4D you can "tell light to exclude - include objects, to affect only diffuse, reflection/specular, shadow of particular objects… Also there is light falloff. In blender exist light falloff node, but this is very unintuitive compared to C4D where you have direct visual feedback, so with little practice you can predict how light will behave. Also I think that falloff work different in Cycles.
I try couple workaround without success… Maybe someone have some advice.
Good stuff is that Cycles lights can have negative value… you can make interesting stuff with this feature in some special cases.
I see how Vray can make slice trough objects assign, interesting feature, I guess that this is very useful for Arch viz and technical renders.
So Cycles is good renderer, but in some cases it’s better to use other render engine. Some my friends work on big arch viz projects… Sometime customers Demand that work be done in certain render. One guy non stop nagging that one his big customer demand Maxwel
Sometime you need features which are not available or are not enough good. In some project they use two or more renderers… for example Vray for high quality still and Lumion for animation, all depend of job.
PS. one “brave” soul from my local art forum once use Mantra for arch viz job… because of … reason
But even so about mixing the results you want from two software, and focus on the strong features you want.
