Strata 3D Suite

General Forums Off-topic Chat
1

Hello guys.
I’m about to begin a school project in making an animation. My teacher recommends Strata 3D Suite, and is getting like a 44% discount if we buy it. (I’m the first to make a 3D animation at this school or something.)

I mostly want to do it in Blender, but I need some second opinion. I will download the demo as soon as I get home (at school now).

So if any of you guys have tested and used Strata 3D, please post some comments on it and how it compares to Blender. I have feeble to medium experience in Blender, but will the fruits of Strata 3D be worth the learning of it?

In advance, thanks.

  • Kjartan

(PS. This is not some advertising or anything, just so we’re clear :slight_smile: )

2

well judging by their gallery and such it looks like pretty decent software.

i’d learn it anyway, you can always learn blender whenever you want.

I did a Maya paper at uni, learnt maya, then went home and did it all in blender (topped the class). so its not always about the software.

however it is worth learning the other anyway, as you may find it does things blender doesn’t. for example i rendered a lot of my project in maya just because it had mental ray which had SSS (infact i taught myself mroe about the hypergraph than the lecturer understood, just by messing around with it). i also used maya later to use its toon settings on other projects. so i did learn something in the end.

Being a fan of blender doesn’t mean its bad to use other software. infact the more you know the better you are since you can grab knowledge from anything and your skills can be mroe portable.

I know 4 or 5 3d softwares. and can work between them.

Blender
Maya
Cobalt
Concepts Unlimited (basicly the same as cobalt)
Solidworks
Deep Paint 3d (more like photoshop)

you don’t lose anything by trying something new.

try learning the same thing in both softwares. you will find you pick up each quicker afterwards.

Alltaken

3

well, I’m just downloading the demo now, so I’ll let you know.

But in all honesty, from what I saw from the presentation, I highly doubt it would be as good as blender. But we’ll see.

4

Just remeber that these are all tools. You don’t make a chair with just a hammer. Well good images/movies are often similar. Just look at the pipelines in places like pixar. Sure they write a lot themselfs, but there are different programs used as different steps for different things.

5

I bought Strata 3D CX a couple of weeks before I discovered Blender. I’ve only used it once since and that was for about 5 minutes. For me Blender wins hands down!

6

Thanks for the quick replies. I’ll take your advice and give it a shot and let you know how it turns out.

M@dcow, how was your experience with it?

7

Ok, after further investigation of Strata 3D CX, I can say safely say that it isn’t within a 1000 miles of blender. Comparitively, it’s kids stuff.

8

I won’t repeat everything I said from an earlier thread similar to this, and just link instead.
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=64773#9

In short:
Strata - easy to get going quickly. Similar to the Adobe apps. Nice renderer.
Weak on animation tools. Weak modeling tools (most users also use Silo or Wings).

I wouldn’t say it has any advantages. I’m guessing your teacher may be recommending it as he feels more comfortable with it (either uses it himself, or likes the ‘look’) and would feel in a better position to teach you.

The most compelling thing (IMO) in Strata (that almost got me to upgrade my old copy) is the render to PSD layers … but that looks like it wont be that big of a deal, with the upcoming render pass support being included in the next version of Blender.