Another Blender Comparison
Did you like the article that compares Blender to other 3d apps? Well, there is another article that makes a comparison between Blender and other 3d applications.
“In the linked article I argue my point as well as do a little comparison of my
own, with the goal of being a bit less biased and clearly marking the parts
that are a matter of opinion and personal preference. I like seeing other
people adopt Blender just as much as the next guy, but bending the comparison
in favor of Blender can be more damaging than helpful.”
If you want to take a look, visit this link.
I want to apologize for my remarks the last time this topic came up. I engaged in flamebaiting and I’m sorry for that.
I think Blender is a good middle tier 3D app.
Maya horrible to use with NURBS?
Interesting …
I learned how to model in NURBS with Maya over a weekend.
Thank you for that interesting article, that confirms me in using MAYA!
The learning curve is very good, the support is great (Autodesk and communities).
There are gigabytes of professional tutorials and plug-ins; you can use professional renderers for free like MentalRay, 3Delight or Gelato.
I agree with the autor that the UI of Max is sometimes terrible, XSI (I use it sometimes too) is gratuitous difficult in handling.
… maybe I use Blender later (if the GUI will be better!).
There are many reasons why it isn’t.
There no such thing as an objective comparison! This article is no exception.
Just take the 3ds Max interface bashing in the article for example. This is what is said in the article:
“Max, the weakest point is the interface. It’s messy, difficult for newbies, and not much is where you would expect to look the first time. Additionally, you must dig through illogically named panels for whatever you are looking for.”
3ds Max was the first 3ds package I learned, I can tell you I’ve never had a problem with learning the interface or working with it, in fact I found it very logical and newbie friendly. Here’s there interesting thing, when learned Blender a couple of years ago, guess what my first impression of Blenders interface were? Messy and that things where illogically placed/named! Is this a coincidence?
Well this what I think: once you have learned your first 3d package you are filled with prejudices about how a 3d application should be. And when you learn your second 3d application it’s very hard to adopt to things that are different and the new ways of thinking.
The conclusion: Never trust comparison between 3d applications, they’re always subjective
…and btw I still think 3ds max has one absolute best UIs of the many 3d application I have used :P
i, too find 3ds’s interface bad, but i also admit that its a personal pref. and i fount maya’s quite simple to learn once you know about 3d, in general, Houdini seems quite nice to me as well, but my favorite is blender, witch i really did learn fast.
@Claas: from what i understood, he said that Maya has the best nurb’s tools, and that saying that blenders implementation of nurbs is horrible is an understatement.
I read the second paragraph “I love open source for many reasons, ….” and decided that I couldn’t take this article seriously.
Whatever else was said, I tried Max for ages, I learnt a lot about 3D applications in general, but I just couldn’t model anything to save my life. Somehow with Blender (despite any UI issues it has) it all just clicked into place, and the UI is now second nature.
The only issues I now see with it are that there are so many features being added to it that it is outgrowing its own UI space. Max suffers the same issue with having to scroll the settings panels.
Not just Max, not just Blender….hooray for 3D
And reading the other rants from this guy’s site…..the archetypal fanboy….move on people, nothing to see here.
That was a good article. I like the way it was written. The writer took into account that People have different ways of looking at things. To each his own, ya know.
Quoted from gustav “3ds Max was the first 3ds package I learned, I can tell you I’ve never had a problem with learning the interface or working with it, in fact I found it very logical and newbie friendly.”
Just my point of view on 3Ds Max… It’s a very adequate interface, nothing more, nothing less. It’s logical in it’s structure and everything is put together as you would expect. The problem with that, is that the most logical and adequate interface is not built for speed. Blender, on the other hand, is efficient and fast, the downside to having those two things is that it is not always logical, until you learn to think in the way it works.
Logical, Fast, Efficient: Choose two, then make up for the 3rd with documentation/practice/customisation.
Mystery
@claas: I guess what I was trying to say there is not so much that Maya does a bad job with NURBS, but that NURBS is a poor way to work unless you want really specific results. Blender has awful NURBS support, worse than most applications out there, but I don’t care generally because I don’t use them.
@gustav: Interface is and always will be purely based on preference. Max isn’t so bad as to be unusable (again, this is only my opinion) but I do find it to be a pain to use.
@goosey: My what a quick conclusion. The blog is nothing but a place to rant. I probably should just delete that old stuff, since the only people that would have had any interest in it have seen it. In fact, I will delete it, since that is of no interest to any of you. The article linked here is really the first that was intended to be read by anyone else other than a few friends. Honestly, if I cared about traffic to my blog, I would probably have my own domain to put it on, and I would have made it look nice. The “I love open source…” comment was to emphasize that I’m not bashing or trying to belittle Blender, just that I’m trying to tell it how it is.
The whole point that I tried to make with this whole thing is that the only way to *really* do a comparison is to open up those applications and try them yourself. Who knows, with a few more years of development, almost any argument against Blender may be invalidated.
I started with Blender, and didn’t have much trouble to learn 3dsmax (school). I think Blender is a very good application to start with, and also continue with. Maya seems pretty nice, after about 2 weeks of use (school).
@Mystery:
What you have said is pretty true – I second your comment!!
~epat. :)
“a few more years of development, almost any argument against Blender may be invalidated”
I second that, given by the fact of how quickly Blender tutorials are becoming outdated with a plethora of features thrown in every year I have no doubt that in a few years Blender will be just as good as its commercial counterparts although I reckon there’s quite a few here who would argue it already is ;)
I’m not sure what all these comparisons really accomplish. I think the best way to promote Blender is to create artwork and learning materials in Blender, and show people what can be done with this tool. When the focus becomes comparison or tearing down other software, then I think attitudes become polarized. Blender is a software application and a tool for artists, not a political party.
Both comparisons have been helpful for me, though this one is many times more so. Instead of comparing specs, with a few cryptic notes about the author’s preferences, Adam goes into detail about what he sees as the important differences between each package, why he feels that way, and what those differences ultimately mean.
But more than anything, I think this confirms that there will always be people who take issue with any less-than-positive comment directed at their own 3D suite of choice. I once had it suggested to me that in every decision a person makes, there’s an investment — be it money, time, or the more obscure investment of self. No matter what choices we make there’s always the need to feel that we’ve made the right choice. And so we’ll defend our choices; right down to the choice of what software we get our 3D on with.
Hmm… still seems very bias, but wait a minute and read on…
I think this kind of comparison should ultimately be *completely* bias… but on a *completely* personal level.
If you are looking for a 3D package that *fits you* please be as bias a possible. This will help you find whats right faster. Most 3D packages are close enough that the personal issues start to really make a difference. I am a firm believer that it is the artist, not the tools.
Thats my 2 cents.
—
Kevin
I’ll post here since the linked article doesn’t allow non google blah comments, and I don’t feel like dealing with all these signups.
The comment about using non-bones in a rig is very “maya way” centric. Blender solves the same problem differently- by allowing bones to have custom shapes. The end result? to the animator: exactly the same. To the rigger? different procedure, same result. In fact, some of the Maya riggers I spoke to, after understanding how blender did this, prefered the Bone shape way as being more elegant a solution.
but yeah, in the end these “comparisons” are usually quite devoid of content. It’s not enough to have played with one package or another, you actually have to use them in production- or in a big enough project- to really know strengths and weaknesses. Very few reviewers can actually say that about more than one software- and the nature of their work often dictates their biases (each production is different, too! )
There was a slashdot article about the other blender comparison we recently discussed just a few days ago: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/01/0251254
One of my favorite comments:
(start quote from slashdot discussion)
“A UI so bad even a 10 year old can figure it out..
Sheesh. All this whining about Blender’s bad UI is making me sick.
My 10 year old picked up Blender a month or two ago and has cried, fussed, whined and sometimes driven me absolutely nuts with ‘I can’t figure this out!’.
Guess what, the stubborn little guy didn’t quit.
First particle animation movie [flyinglow.ca] (it’s 13MB – still need to work on compression).
Oh, and he’s not the only kid struggling with the useless UI. Check out these guys at
Peerless Productions [peerlessproductions.com].
It’s their tutorials that really got my son over a lot his hurdles. (Thanks Colin if you’re reading this).”
(end quote from slashdot discussion)
i have used max, after using blender for around 8/9 months. i have fount the interface to be horoble, and extremely confusing
haha, well, the discussion goes on
More opinions?
max interface is really bad… but blender ui is not for beginners.. :)
and what about maya then :D
It’s fun to realize that (AFAIK) NONE of the comparisons nor the replies pointed out the thing that Blender being open source is the only app that let you actually improve it or fix it.
When it takes to REAL production this is a must.
I actually learned Max and Maya interfaces simultaneously… back in the 3.2 /2.5 days…. And I must admit that I found Maya to be the more enjoyable interface to work with… It was a lot more unixy though and I can see how that would turn people off…
I agree that the best way to promote Blender is to show what it can do. Tutorials with an AMAZING end results is the way to go.
I don’t find blender’s NURBS that bad. I think it’s great. And I had used a NURBS software, Rhino.
Anyways, this is the first article I’ve read that said blender’s interface was simple and good for beginners. I’m assuming he also said it was easy. Other’s I’ve read said it was hard.
Haha I made a comic in blender about Blender and Max :P
In my opinion blender has something over maya and max that neither maya or max will be able to compete with for years… its free! :D and thats why I use blender…. because I’m a cheap B******! Hey it’s not my fault I don’t have “money” or a “job” or an “education”.
As for the UI, I learn’t to model in wings3D so moving to Blender was:
1. Hard because the controls were completely different.
2. Easy because the UI looked similar in many ways.
I tried max but I didn’t like the UI and all the windows based UI.
well SDS vs NURBS head / hand modeling.
I would not say that one way is superior.
With SDS you are always restricted to your low polygon mesh.
With NURBS you need to plan ahead a bit more.
But with NURBS support like in Maya where multiple patches can be blended
together to prevent continuity problems and trim possibilities, it is quite a powerful
system. In Maya it is also fully animately.
How do you want to stitch a highly detailed ear mesh to a head with SDS? you mesh count
has to match. No problem with NURBS here.
SDS are much faster to lay down proportions and make fast and quick explorations.
Each one shows a trade off. A combination of both in one tool would be a dream.
It also depends on what you want to model.
Amen to Bassams comment
students say Blender is confusing with it’s interface
and the reason behind that is only the inconsistency in the menus.
Instead of having one centralized modeling menu you have those menus also in the view ports.
but that is more a minor issue.
when they know Rhino this si something new to learn – but nothing impossible to learn.
However I think when the menus are more consistent and organized
there will hardly be a complain anymore.
claas
thanks, good link
I started with True Space. It came free with a 3d world issue. Then i moved to 3ds Max. A few years later I saw Blender on PC formats download page. The rest is history \^_^/.
For me Blender just keeps getting better and better, After you learn a few important hot Keys and how to tweak the interface. Its really is easy to use IMO. Video tutorials are always a help too.
At that aside its all bout how you use the software not what software you use. Finally the more you know the better i say. :)