Autodesk monthly subscription is too expensive.
Foundry or Houdini packages are also expensive, though there are indie options and its price is alright.
C4d is also not cheap.
Each one of software prices are maybe affordable, like modeller only or painting only, but packages with plugins are nearly impossible to afford for me.
anyway thinking about all the prices I should pay for basic modeller/painting program/texture program/etc,.
I started to appreciate how cheap blender is----free.
I bought some texture softwares and planning to buy substance series too, but I guess modelling/basic render/texturing is alright with blender.
I regret getting angry with Blender when the learning curve was steep for me.
When i started using Blender (3rd Try got me in), i thought it will be “an additional” Tool. To my surprise most of my Paid Work is now done with Blender.
i hook up to appreciate Blender and its cost (supporting Dev Fund)
While there are many software packages out there that will outperform Blender by leaps and bounds, you won’t find a better workworse that works for free, imo. It might not be the best at everything but it can do a lot of things and do them well and it won’t cost you an arm and a leg. The best thing about Blender is how it continues to grow and expand. The open source/free nature of it means that it will never stagnate like a lot of other programs do.
If you can get past the clunky UI and a few small issues, it’s really a great tool for hobby artists and professional artists alike.
Well all 3d package require time to get used to them.
Its like riding bicycle after a while you manage it.
Personally i find it amazing how far as Blender has today.
And that it is still gaining more popularity every day, at schools / universities / architects /Artist / Coders etc.
It’s not that good. And it’s supposed to be free, it’s an open source project. The recurring problem in open source development is uneven progress. Some areas of the program can be really advanced, but others can be even completely missing.
What you would also appreciate then is the fact that it’s pretty much impossible for Blender to ever see the closing of the source and then have a price-tag attached to it (so it’s always going to be free).
However, if you feel like you need to give back, you can subscribe to the development fund or the Blender cloud (which is still very inexpensive compared to what you would pay for the commercial solutions).
So true. I remember when I first started using Maya after having used Max for a while and as I was mostly doing modelling I was disgusted with how poor the modelling tools were (Maya 6.0 vs Max 7), but eventually they were improved after Autodesk bought the NEX modelling addon and integrated it (about 5 years later…). Meanwhile, all the animators at my previous company were asking if they could use Maya instead of Max because it was better for animation.
I’d rather support Blender than Autodesk, since I won’t lose access to it if I stop donating, and the devs are very good about listening to feedback and looking into bug reports compared to my experience with Autodesk.
For Autodesk softwares, well depend if you are doing a commercial use of them or not… Student licences are free and unlimited in features. ( no watermark or whatever and you can install them, remove them, update them etc as you want, and well you dont need to be a student, just create an account )
I use Autocad since 1991 at work ( architect, building engineering), i can tell you that at this time, licence was cost way higher than what it cost now.
This said im completely right with you. When you addition every softwares ( let alone the addon, plugins, render engine ) you will need, this cost easely an arm and 2 legs.
I’m actually getting to the point where I’m becoming frustrated with other interfaces and find them slow and clunky I can work so quickly in blender now I’ve used it for a while, perhaps I’m just a bit strange, I’ve certainty set substance up so it works more like blender for navigation etc. rather than the other way around + If Ir really don’t like something I can just tweak the code.
Blender still wins for the best short cut key combination for shift, ctl, alt F for selecting faces on the same plane, I think this is a shore fire way to spot if someone is a regular blender user, just check if their left hand is a bit claw like
Right now, I might buy zbrush to go along with blender.
But looking at autodesk it comes down to about what 1200 to 2k rent (tax) a year to use their products? I know some professionals like to point out that they use said autodesk products (although I have noticed quite a few of them are ignorant of its costs…not saying anything on that topic but pass the rum please.)
@joseph same here z brush really looks great, I did use it during my piracy days, I loved it, but I wasn’t very good with it. Maybe I’ll download a trial(I don’t know if it has a trial version, I’ll see, hopefully it does ) to see if the zremesher is as good as they say it is.
It’s not really that cheap when you consider all the ‘mental’ effort one has to invest. Also it’s not easy to team up with other studios in the industry, so consequently there’s not much profit. In such way it hardly matters if it’s free or cheap. It is open source and that, for community, makes a huge, a giant difference!
ie. Houdini Indie, for what it does, is cheap… skill is in demand and you can team up with big studios on big projects, making a nice profit.
Invariably when the cost of software comes up, someone will mention “It’s only free if your time is worth nothing”… or something to this effect. Of course, cost is always relative to the time & energy you have to invest and the reward you get as result.
However this is true for practically any complex software/technology, (open source or not).
If all the time you spend to learning Blender is not rewarding, probably Blender was not the right tool for the job in the first place.
(or needs extensions/improvements to be useful for you… totally depends on the use-case).
Sure… if it’s important to use what other studios use - then thats going to heavily influence your decision.
However its worth noting that the are practical advantages to being open-source, not directly related to cost. - You can for example, run as many instances of Blender as you want… without having to ask anyone (deal with connecting to licensing servers … account information … or whatever else).
You’re free to use whatever version you want, on a wide range of hardware/platforms.
+ If Ir really don’t like something I can just tweak the code.