WHat do you still find easier to do in other applications?

i think making objects glow should be doable from the material settings rather than the compositor

I saw a lot glowing cubes and Suzannes when people where going gaga over the render branch and the gi stuff that was added, I assume that was without compositing

i havnt used many programs, so for modelling i use blender and artwork/ background images and curves.
is there any reason for me to familiarise myself with wings, sculptris etc?

(so far im familiar with Blender, Maya, Gimp, Photoshop, Python. i have no formal training)

what other programs should i be using?

for me the most intuitive programm for organic box modeling is by far silo.
imo nothing can beat the speed of modelling with its context sensitive tools and the sticky keys.
not to mention the tweak mode, split polygon and connect tools!
for me its the most intuitive tool out there.
on the other hand blender has a few very nice modelling tools as well which i havent found in any other porgramm and with bmesh i hopefully won’t switch to silo any more.

other things i prefer over blenders solutions:
-mayas hypershade(its so powerful!!!)
-mayas driven key editor(very fast and intuitive)
-maxs old material editor(havent used max for about 4 years now but im afraid nothing is realy worse than blenders material system :frowning: )
-maya: drag and drop objects into other objects in the outliner to parent them to each other
-mayas channel box.
-mayas scripting abilities: do what you want(model, rig, whatever), copy the generated code from the console to the script editor. mark everthing and drag and drop it to your tool shelf and there you have your script with a button ready to be accessed from the tool shelf every time you need it. very intuitive solution.

this post may sound like an ad for maya and silo BUT if i had to write about all the pros of blenders tools and what i prefer in blender the list would probably be minimum 3 times as long :stuck_out_tongue:

I think that blender’s material system is very very good really, especially combined with nodes… it’s just that the ui isn’t so friendly…

I can’t remember who said it, but I’d agree that more “modal” and “blocking” nested UI’s are quite good(clearer, less confusing) than blenders “flat” approach…
personally I mostly use my own scripts for material handling and only venture into the node editor for anything complex…

maybe the refactor to an even more nodal system will be clearer and more accessible?

As for silo, it’s only more intuitive because of two things:
Cut tool (which can act like blender’s knife, a point to point tool and sketch inside polygons as well)
right click context menu (which many silo users actually don’t use, preferring shortcuts instead)
(blender has a good context menu in the"addons" section these days) which is pretty easy to customise yourself with basic python knowledge…

of course, in the feature department : ngon support (ok, I guess you could and bevel and inset, but they’re well served by blender scripts…

Blender is good as an organic modeller, but also hard surface and especially environmental modelling too…(something that silo, wings etc just really suck at…)

If you just compare blender’s edit mode (assuming the specials menu shortcuts are known by the user) then it’s very direct! (don’t get me wrong, i loved silo, lightwave modeller, wings etc, having used them all for years and years…but blender really is a good modeller too! (and now my modeller of choice for the last few years…)

as i said blender has a few realy powerful tools beside the basic toolset most programms have. and i enjoy modelling with it.
but you didnt even list the (for me) most important tools of silo. (seems as if that heavily depends on workflow) :

-the connect tool
-the tweak tool
-the stickey keys
-multi selection mode
-selection hilighting

these are the tools i use most of the time in silo and realy miss in blender.
i know blender has multiselection, too but thats not as useful as in silo due to fast shortcuts and selection hilighting.
also the selection hilighting is great as you can use all the tools without the need to select anything. just hover over it press and hold down the shortcut for your tool, move the mouse to tweak the tools action, release the tool and your back in whatever tool you used before.
for me that works realy fast.

and about the material editor: what i realy miss is the ability to control every property with a texture. this extra texture tab is not very intuitive imho.
i hope we’ll see updates on brechts shading refactoring soon after durian, bmesh and gsoc as part of that seems to address exactly what i mean:

Yeah, everyone’s different!

I mentioned connect just under a different name…(cut tool)
blender is in constant “tweak” the way I use it on my tablet
Sticky keys aren’t something I miss,
selection highlighting is only interesting to me as part of the “connect tool” when blender gets one I hope it highlights the same way!

Multi selection mode can be done in blender for as long as I remember (shift click the icons)
so from my point of view I really didn’t miss anything out…

just proves we like different things!

Unless I am missing something, in Wings3D you have to right-click select from a menu every time you want to push verts? No thanks, that’s way too cumbersome.
I think when the Durian smoke has cleared we will see a materials system rewrite, the issue is well known.

Better (in this case) and more Blender way: add it to a “camera properties” drop-down list. You know, like… a Material… :wink:

Incidentally, I remember reading a detailed thread awhile back about a this type of functionality. I forget if anyone said they would work on it, but take hope, it’s definitely on a number of people’s wish list.

+1 for the centralized material stuff. I think is no good that if I want to change a material I have to select an object that material has been assigned to.

Yes! That’s how how it’s different (and more difficult in some ways) - Other’s material creation is at the top level instead of purely object-attached. I could never quite put my finger on the organizational difference that made it harder, just got used to it. Thanks.

Font support in Blender needs work. I like the way C4D gives you front and back fillet caps by default. It also supports a material ID for those front and back caps as well.

The hierarchical window in C4D is better than Blender too. You can drag and drop and re-arrange things on-the-fly in that window. The simple things like being able rename in the outliner window.

Particles, of course, are better in every other major package.

The text editor built into Blender should be thrown out and some other open source solution should be put in it’s place. Not that Maya’s MEL editor is any prize either.

yup you are missing something, look under the tool menu the last option is tweak which sends you into tweak mode. kinda of what you get when you have blender setup with release on confirm.

Some of what I say may sound odd as I will actually compare some odd software…

layer management-easier and better in trueSpace 6(yes truespace) and anyone that actually tries it will generally agree.
shading-easier and better basics* in Lightwave, but as far as nodes go I feel it is spot on.

Modeling-this one is tough and there is a lot of back and forth over N-gons and such…regardless…silo is much cleaner and easier to model with, not necessarily better, but much easier…this is my opinion. Also…truspace was, belive it or not, a much easier modeler(minus the crashes…).

rendering-I personally take the path of the more options the better. I disagree with simple render setups, If I could I would like access to every function() called by the renderer…lol
that being said I really liked the Vray for max renderer, it WAS easy to setup a simple good looking render, but advanced users could get into the nuts and bolts of it.

UI-here is where the laughs come in… truespace 7 had a great ui, highly customizable…easily as customizable as blender 2.5x, and you could assign hotkeys dirctly on the clickable buttons, you did not have to *dig around looking for some abstract function name(from an artist perspective). and once the hot key was set, you could hide the icon…easy enough…I had more fun customizing my interface as I did modeling…

I don’t sculpt too much so…

…anyway just my 2 cents…

There is also a User Pref option to start Wings in Tweak mode by default. Since all of Wings commands are now available in Tweak, there’s really no reason NOT to.

Also, there is a major re-write of Tweak mode in the works that looks to be very nice…

Don’t get me started on Silo… I’m one of those unlucky souls who have stability issues w/ silo2. The last time it discarded all my UV mapping I shelved it and went back to Wings… besides, I think Blender’s UV mapping tools are WAY better… and WAY more stable.

T-Monkey and Ran, thanks for the tips.

The biggest thing i find easier in other apps is finding things. In blender it’s more of a keyboard shortcut workflow and down to remembering these where in other apps you simply have a main menu or image buttons which makes things simple and fast.

This is one reason why i think the spacebar menu addon is one of the most useful as for me it makes things much faster now. I would like to see some sort of button based addons at some point like for sculpting so you can have more of a sculptris style workflow in sculpt mode.

For modeling this would be good also, silo for me is one of the best apps to use as it has a good main menu setup so quick to find what i need and it has optional addons for button based GUIs which can be customized for different layouts etc, this makes it the fastest app to model with i have tried so far.

The texture assignment workflow in Sculptris vs Blender. Assigning diffuse and bump textures and painting on them in Blender is such a painful, long, and error prone process. Hopefully we will get it fixed before 2.5x is out.

Hmm

lets see I could actually be quite long winded if I so chose.

Outliner - parenting/hierarchy assignment in most other 3d apps. Renaming in most other 3D apps.

Modeling - Silo and Modo are much smarter about their tool implementation

Sculpting - UI, Masking, Hiding, Layers, Resymmetrization from ZBrush and/or Mudbox. Improved brushes in general. Better ‘unlimited clay’. Useful base meshes for sculpting.

Retopology - slice and connect retopo tool of 3D Coat; Better baking and mesh transferal from high poly to the retopo mesh of ZBrush and Topogun. Low level mesh edits propogating properly to higher multires levels of ZBrush and Silo.

UV unwrapping - autoseams in ZBrush; the workflow for mirrored geometry in Headus UV; smart sizing of uv islands; welding and unwelding of seams in about any other package

Paint Texturing - image assignment workflow of Sculptris; Layers, masking, and brush system of Mudbox; rendering preview while you paint of Bodypaint 3D; decal placement of sketchup; drag and drop brush assignment; Additional brushes of mypaint; texture size and quantity of Mari; multiobject at once of Bodypaint; Live bump painting of Sculptris; multichannel at once of Bodypaint

Node Texturing - Primarily missing material presets of VRay, Maya, etc.

Rigging - Autorigging of CAT Animation. Asset transfer of XSI.

Skinning/Weighting - weighting based on selecting geometry and choosing how to interpolate weights between selections - Maya/XSI/Max

Animating - Muscle system in general; Mocap workflow in general

Particles - node based particle workflow of Houdini. Particle presets of particle illusion.

Rendering - Good light rig presets as per Modo. Probably lots of things but this is my knowledge weak spot. Preview rendering that was dropped from 2.49b.

Compositing - again a bit of a weak area for me.

Python - macro recording, stroke history etc. of ZBrush

Hmm… make that preview rendering (fast progressive refinement renderer) of Fprime for lightwave! that was the hardest thing and most missed when I started using blender in earnest…

teh 2.49 preview renderer was very un-responsive for me… I could usually do a render quicker!

that was a good list though!.. currently I’m really missing sculpting layers for what I’m doing right now!

Well i like so much the Modeling tool of Blender i think is the best i know .

But LetterRip think in that .

We should focused more in the sculpt , paint System to have something similar or even better what you said before .

That can be more important for us WHY?.
Because in the Next global competition Dominance , all the artist , studios , people in general see what Blender can offers with those option .
They will think more attractive Blender for games and movies proyects like Zbrush and Mudbox does .

I think it’s gonna be possible if you can do it all this year i hope so :rolleyes:

You should know that you actually can rename objects in the outliner (Ctrl + leftclick).