Thanks, @dan2, interesting! Your reply reminded me of a few things, so I’ve updated my initial post.
I’m also a long-time ZBrush aficionado, although I’m trying hard to confine all of my work to Blender, aided by some useful add-ons.
For rendering I also switch between Eevee and Cycles. I generally find Eevee to have more dynamic appeal for stylized / cartoony renderings, but until recently I kept struggling with the mediocre shadow quality. That’s changed since the addition of PCF shadow maps. Now I’m eagerly awaiting improvements in the GI and reflection areas, so fiddling with the probes will be something of the past.
Ye, that’s my goal as well. Most times it’s not the question if you can do it in a software package, it’s how fast you can do it. Comes down almost to a point where a click more for an operation makes a difference.
I usually try to use Blender more when working on personal projects, during my day job / when freelancing I only use it when I’m confident it won’t impact efficiency and deadlines.
Heading in the right direction though in many areas.
So far I’ve interacted with it mostly through the Python API trying to get more ergonomic access to the bread and butter modelling features like 3D View navigation, translate, rotate, scale, knife cut, merge, snap, etc. Once I start using a tool for artistic ambitions I end up wanting speed more than anything else, and I believe Blender has room for improvement regarding that.
Building rooms according to measurements or imports. Placing furniture and our equipment in them.
Procedural/hybrid texturing, shading, lighting, and simple ambient light and sun studies. For now, Cycles only. All my Eevee attempts has been crap.
Some very basic and typically special UV setups (aniso or offset UVs, not the typical painting UVs).
Compositing. Usually limited to ID masking, cryptomatting, and adding some glare. Global glare is completely busted right now, can’t trust it.
Rarely:
Cloth sim, usually limited to curtains. We prefer hard blinds if possible.
Softbody, rigid body physics, and cloth sim on a more advanced level; only in my spare time.
Basic poly modelling for recreating garbage import models.
Freestyle. For big imports (office buildings/floors), rendering can take (when only going for the lines) a minute, freestyling it can take two hours - you really hate when you messed up a setting! Why cant’ we just export the ridges and valleys (in same color!) from workbench engine? Culling doesn’t seem to do anything.
Video editor. To assemble my own spare time tests.
Never:
Well, the rest I guess. Sure I may play around with stuff occasionally but nothing productive.
).
I mostly work on characters, so there’s no way around certain other packages for now.