So what are your reasons for getting blender?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

I’ll go first,

I moved to blender because of cycles, amazing renderer, just wish it had adaptive sampling and used the embree raytracer, also because the community seems to be more open and less strict.

I started 3D when I was 10 years old
(Well um, I never actually knew how to do anything at the time)
with 3DS Max student edition,

as mentioned earlier,
I didn’t know how to do anything and I didn’t know that there was such a thing as “rendering”

so I left the program for a year, then came back after I saw a tutorial on mental ray on how to create realistic glass and was amazed on the level of quality.

Then I saw a tutorial on Cinema 4D Student edition, that’s what got me hooked into 3D completely,(This was in 2014)

After the licence expired I decided to move to blender(Just this year, yes I’m 15 years old) because it was free and because of cycles.

2

I initially got Blender back in the 2.3x days, when I read that it had a game engine to go with the modeling part. Though these days most of my time is spent making rendered images.

I still stick with Blender because of how it advanced over the years, it has definitely pushed the boundaries as to the quality that free software can get to.

3

^^ ditto except I got in around 2.49 - 2.5x

4

Free as in free beer :wink:
And free as in freedom, because i just love the Open Source philosophy.

5

@Ace
Interesting story, personally I’m not into the blender game engine

@Gspin

Damn right

6

I was handed a demo CD at e3 2000, I believe. If I recall it was 2.2 something. Took me about 3 years to really get into it.

7

I love modeling almost as much as I like coding,
blender game engine gets most of my free time.

I love the community and the software, no other game engine feels like home.

8

I used to use 3ds Max, but I got really frustrated with the lack of good quality free tutorials and the like. So I started watching Andrew Price and transferring the concepts to Max. After watching Andrew for a while I couldn’t help but switch to Blender!

The awesome Blender community is the main reason I switched. But I also honestly prefer Cycles to any render engine I used with Max (including Mental Ray), I really love it’s shader nodes system.

9

I was hired at a company that liked my work from Maya for product shots but didn’t like the price(pre rental though we tried it later for some animation). I picked up Blender when it was at 2.62 and enjoyed using it the more I learned about it. The pace of development is really nice and cycles is a beast!

10

Definitely that same for me. I can even get free access to Autodesk programs, but open source is always the better option in the long run.

11

Well at work we were getting a 3D printer in about half year. (long order time on that model).
It seamed fun to me, we already had someone on Autocad, so i thought lets see if Blender might be something.

2 years later i haven’t done any 3d print yet, but several beta product demonstrations, and simulations.
In fact currently we’re not printing that much, as most of the time the leapfrog is broken (its a terrible product, stay away from it).

However we came to learn that if you invent new products, that it is really a big help to draw something quickly. Not only for interested customers but also for ourselves, to see problems ahead in time.
Why not use autocad for this, well it turns out i draw a lot faster with blender then the autocad guy with autocad and in this production phase exact measurements are not important yet, visualizing ideas quickly is important, might be typical for invent/design/engineer
Next comes presentations in blender, that’s most important to us
Stills and animations look well…
You know…Simply said : SUPER AWESOME… and that’s important if you deal with investors.
Its as if we have product photos, instead of drawings, they look so amazingly real.
While the product isnt even build yet…still ideas.

Sometimes though i have to convert an autocad drawing delivered by custommer, or our internal, into blender.
So then i work with exact measurements, makes it even more real, but it requires a lot polishing.
Or if it doesn’t need to be exact the same, i simply redraw it in blender which is usually faster to do still
(well if there is not to much details).

The idea of learning blender to do 3 prints, kept me drawing weekly for a half year, and that spurred me to learn as much as i could, any topic was ok for this, i even used blender game emulation once for work to simulate something (because i knew what it could do from that learning period). over time i came to love how blender works, how its actively maintained, and how surprising futures get added over time.
Things like light portals, etc they’re just candy to me (like a kid loves his candy :smiley: ).

edit : oops not correctly i did two 3d prints, those were autocad drawings with problems, which i fixed in blender and they got printed. but i never printed something of my own imagination, i had ideas of a chess board, but the leapfrog just isnt that stable enough and its often broken.

12

I’ve been a professional animator for 20+ years, really starting in Maya (I worked at Alias|Wavefront back when Maya was just starting out… before you could even save files in it!), used Maya at Weta on the LOTR series, then in 2004 moved to Dreamworks where I used their proprietary animation software (EMO) for a number of years. About 5 years ago I helped develop their next generation animation software (PREMO).

Now that I’ve left Dreamworks and have co-founded a new company (Nimble Collective) focused on helping animation professionals around the world spend more time creating content and less time dealing with all the barriers to the process, Blender has come up as a very interesting option. Partly because of the cost (yay free!), partly because of the power (you can do almost everything with it!), and partly because of the vibrant community.

Plus, I love the philosophy… you get great tools in the hands of great artists and amazing things will come of it!

-jason

13

Longtime frustration and uncertainty with adsk products:

  • Extreme polarized apps requiring several products and/or countless third party plugins to get the job done.
  • Tremendous cost, overhead and fragmentation caused by this
  • Extreme stagnation, unpredictability (XSI fate).
  • Closed roadmap with mostly subpar, unpredictable and broken releases
  • Monopolistic stranglehold and forced rental (last straw)

I moved to Houdini awhile ago however nodal modeling can cause an overhead in certain scenarios. I needed a complimentary solution. C4D, MayaLT and Modo were in consideration however each had its own downfalls such as scripting limitations and or destructive/linear workflow (unacceptable after working with modifiers/nodes).

Blender was really the last beacon of hope that I had dismissed for all these years… You can only imagine how stupid I felt discovering how incredibly capable this software is. With every other software I learned, i felt I had to compromise and lost a part of myself. It was completely different with Blender - everything i learned seemed better than the 10 year old unchanged alternatives in the other software (e.g compare max/maya sculpting to blender, 3d painting in blender vs primitive viewport painting in max, scanline/iray/default maya render vs cycles, even modeling functionality is more advanced). Anything missing was mostly possible to reproduce through most amazing Python integration (not a lazy limited wrapper). The UI and hotkeys are also ridiculously customizable making you feel right at home. Coupled with Houdini, sky can be the limit (alembic is a must though)

I’m with Blender because I believe it’s the best tool for the job, one that comes with highest productivity and greatest freedom. I am grateful to community and the talented developers for making it so.

14

I was using 3DS Max at the time when I heard that they were remaking Blender’s UI in the 2.5x transition. I had tried Blender a few times in the 2.4x area but the UI had always kept me from delving deeper into learning it so I thought that I would give it another shot when a “proper” UI was in place. So I gave it a go and liked it way more than I expected. Now it has replaced 3DS Max for me.

15

Yeah, people complain about blenders ui, AutoCAD is or at least was a mess.

I actually like modeling solids better in blender anyway.

16

@Peter

I think I remember a very good 3ds max tutorial site called 3d sphere and CG rats

17

@Blue

sadly I used to be one of those people, I really didn’t know what I was talking about, because I couldn’t learn it all at first glance

18

Wow. I started using Blender back when you still had to buy the c-key to access certain features (look at my join date, ffs ;), like pre 2.0-days. Just played around with it because I liked to draw and was interested in trying the 3D-medium. Back when the complaints against the UI were definitely valid, lol.

I´ve had issues getting anything more than basic doodling out of it though (mostly related to lack of inspiration and time), made a popular modeling tutorial, that I never finished and got mails about for 5 years after, lol… but now I want to use it to make my own animated shorts for an IP I´m developing. A good opportunity to go through and really learn every facet of Blender. It´s really amazing how, especially the last couple of years, development pace has increased. There really are few areas that make me want to look at other software now. Once devs get to refactoring sims (mostly particles/hair, cloth, bullet) I think I´lll be quite content :slight_smile:

19

The cost of commercial programs is just too much for me. It’s not that I don’t have the money, it’s just the principle! From music software I have Studio One Pro (DAW) which was 350€ at the time I bought it. It’s a kind of money that is ok, it’s not too bonkers. 3D software (or any software) should have about the same price.

20

my (initial) reasons for getting Blender after first diving into 3D via Max and a bunch of other 3D applications?

  • the willing to learn about 3D as much as possible as soon as possible
  • the efficient small size.
  • Not willing as a kid to do menial and boring small paid jobs and waste a couple years just to someday be able to do what I already wanted to do.
  • the competition didn´t thought back then about young people wanting to do it as a hobby and majority of the commercial 3d program developers still struggle to understand that market.

reasons to stick to Blender today -or some parts of Blender?

  • Community - pletora of tutorials, a melting pot of help.
  • getting more glimpse into the development
  • Eula, licencing
  • fast and very much alive development with quick bugfixes.
  • freelancers and small studios get taken seriously.