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Comment by rythie | Hacker News Reader

Anyone used blender for this sort of thing? http://www.blender.org/

I started 3d animation as an autodidact when I was 11 years old (now 24). I've spent over a year each in about a dozen different packages, with the majority of my time and effort poured into 3D Studio Max, Maya, and a little-known Mac-only package called Pixels:3D Studio (anyone else here use it, back in the day?).

Just this past week, I've started on Blender. I've been following it loosely since the late 90s, but this was my first real go at becoming proficient. I first tried 2.49, but found it extremely aggravating. Moving to 2.5 was a tremendous improvement, making Blender's unusual workflow slightly more obvious, but there's the rub.

Blender, in its origins, was designed with a very different set of basic interactions than the leading 3d animation packages. In time, as they've added more features, they've slowly moved the experience to be more in-line with Max and Maya, but these alignments apply pretty much exclusively to the newer, high-level features. The core interactions for moving/rotating/scaling, viewport movement, selection, and other "basics" are completely different.

If anyone else is just picking up the program, I'd encourage you to share any good resources or tips you've found for overcoming the initial grind. Here's what has helped me most:

Take notes of all the keyboard shortcuts you encounter. Sure, there are existing lists and cheat-sheets, but writing them out has really helped me memorize them. As I'm following the BlenderCookie videos, I watch for the interactions I don't yet know and immediately jot down the details. Don't forget, many of the commands are highly context-sensitive.

I use it quite a bit, though not professionally so far. Their 2.5 redesign is incredible from a usability perspective, however its not quite stable yet in my experience. Documentation is also inconsistent: there are great resource like http://blendercookie.com for video tutorials, yet sometimes simple questions like how to split a view into two can mean searching forums etc due to lack of real documentation for version 2.5.

I've been using blender for models in the android game I'm making. Don't see a reason to spend $ 40 when there is a fantastic open source alternative. Kind of like buying windows server instead off just using linux.

Where did you learn to do your modeling?

I've been watching the blendtuts videos. My game only uses basic models since I want to support older generation handsets, so I'm not making use of any of the advanced blender features. But, it has been well worth the effort learning Blender. Its really a great tool.

Blender has it's own working experience and once mastered hard to leave. Most of the time new comers are really frustrated with the ui and controls. It's a steep learning curve. But it's really a powerful 3d animation, modelling and video editing suit. It's capable of doing professional level works.

I agree that it is fully capable of producing professional quality work, given that it's professional adoption has been relatively small as to date. 3D packages take years of investment in training to master and once one masters a suit they are hesitant to switch. The dogma in 3D packages can be worse than language dogma. For good reason as well, with languages some amount of foundation transfers but with 3D packages how one accomplishes a task differs from UI to UI, it is closer to starting completely over. When I left 3D as a career I had one of 2 choices buy a full license for a commercial package(and an SGI at the time, Wavefront had just become Maya and the windows version was in the works) or learn Blender. I chose the latter it really was starting over but I eventually became as good with Blender as I was with Wavefront (now Maya).

I've been using blender since 2000. It is really powerful, and the UI has incredibly improved with version 2.5.

I use it for everything: App Icons, textures, explanatory animations, diagrams, and of course 3D. Try it, it's incredible (though the documentation needs some love)

Blender is good, but it's community-driven approach shows in the UI. It's pretty crusty and ugly, but in the end, it works pretty well.

Have you seen the latest iteration of their UI? It's much closer to the likes of Maya and 3DS Max now, and is quite usable.

As a seasoned Max vet, and an avid Maya user (tempting to make an "avid Softimage" joke, but I digress), I find the UI to be similar to look at, but the similarity breaks down as soon as you start touching it.

Working with blender is fundamentally different at the most base, intuition-sensitive level. Not better or worse, but different.

It will be worse if you're coming to it already familiar with Max and Maya. You'll rub against the grain of the program. Of course, the same is true of moving between any programs that are cosmetically similar but based on different interaction models.

I agree. I've worked with MAX and Maya, and my experience is that Maya is at least as different from MAX as Blender is from MAX/Maya. The different programs have a different workflow.

I found MAX very easy to use. Maya was harder, and Blender (before 2.5) was extremely difficult to learn. With the 2.5 release, though, they really improved usability of their program. I'm really surprised, and am now trying to use Blender for everything as I enjoy it most.

Played with it a bit a few years ago. For what it is (free 3D software), I think it does fine. But at the same time, I think there's a reason it's not really being used professionally in the film industry (disclaimer: it wasn't the last time I looked, anyway).

Blender was used to storyboard in Spiderman 2, so it's...getting closer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)#Use_in_the_m...

blender is used a lot more in the industry than you probably know. As one already mentioned it was used to do the animatics for spiderman 2 and it's used in a number of small admination shops for the smaller illustration and animation markets (adverts, short films, stills)

Studios usually don't advertise the tool used in a production to the general public. The trend is shifting in favour of tools like blender though. Blender is also doing a lot of heavy marketing to those segments through their open movie and game projects. I can see a day in the future where studios contribute significant developer time to a project like blender in lieu of expensive licenses for something like Maya or 3DS.

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