I start started in a new video production lab for a large company. I need to brush up on my 3d skills. We have Blender, 3ds max 7 and Maya 6.
Mostly I plan on doing shapes and items but I will also be doing about 30% character work. Is one application better then the others as far as modeling and sculpting goes?
I have been using Blender for a few days now I am still very lost. Mostly because the tutorials range of different versions and I cannot find certain buttons SubSurf and SubDiv is a great example.
Blender will have a fully featured sculpting tool and a re-topology tool starting in 2.43. Blender is also fairly good with character modeling as of now but will be even better with 2.43.
As far as I know 3DS Max 7 does not have retopo or sculpting and Maya 6 has paint effects but not retopo.
For the last part Subsurf is in the modifier panels.
thanks for the very fast reply. I just realized that 3ds is only for PC. While I have access to PCs I already have a render farm set up with 5 dual core G5s both with 2gig of ram. So I kinda want to do all my development on the Macs.
That leaves Maya and Blender and maybe cinema4D. I love the idea of using Blender as the community seems very solid and development seems to be moving nicely.
question:
I see all of the amazing objects and faces done in Blender yet the sculpting tools just became available. I also watched a 12min video on someone drawing a face at 2x speed.
I’ve used Maya for several years now and it’s pretty good for animation. It is a very powerful program, but that can be agravating as well - when something isn’t working there are a LOT of different things to check to find out what went wrong.
I’ve been uising Blender for about a month now and I really like it. Once you get used to the interface, it is the fastest program I’ve used for modeling.
I haven’t used the character tools as much, but from what I can tell they seem really solid.
I would recomend Blender, but that could be just me.
