I’ve been using Blender as a hobby, really just playing around (no serious work) for a few months now, and as such I have become relatively comfortable with the program. This January, I will be participating in an animation contest that requires the usage of Autodesk’s 3ds Max. I don’t see this as being a permanent switch - I won’t have indefinite access to Max, and for my purposes Blender and the open source community are more than adequate. And of course, there is something of an attachment I have for Blender.
Anyways, I was wondering if there was anything in Blender that I should do to prepare me for using Max - a certain type of modeling, texturing, animating? Hopefully I will be able to have a few months to learn Max in advance, but I may have to do it quickly, and was hoping I could use Blender to help me prepare for a [hopefully] brief stint of using Max before returning to Blender.
Well… you can download 30-day trial version of 3ds Max to see for yourself how these programs differ in those aspects. Of course the principles are the same but it can be hard at first to find every corresponding function from a different software.
i think Blender is a functionality subset of Max. So WHAT you accomplish in Blender and Max are the same, but HOW to get there are two different ways. For example, can’t press space in the 3D view to get a pop-up menu, but both packages can add a mesh cube primitive.
Don’t model or unwrap in polygon models in max. You’ll find that Blender is faster for those thing, at least in your hands. That is my advice. Other than that, Blender experience is quite useful for Max, even though they’re quite different. You should be prepared to see faster and better render quality ;)… Not that Blender sucked in those, but it is better in Max, imo. And it has nice animation tools too. I hope you get the most out of it.