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Comment by hashhar | Hacker News Reader

Nice to see more professional commercial projects picking up Blender. It helps to see what are the things missing or suboptimal for "expert" users of the system.

Blender and OBS Studio are very good examples of FOSS software that are the best at what they do and can easily offer competition to even the commercial alternatives.

Most of all their design and UI language is consistent - something very rarely seen in FOSS software.

And they have incredible depth of features 90% of which are overkill for the casual user but the experts sure do appreciate them.

And the best part is the well-thought of extensibility and API story. Both of them have a very good community of plugins and extensions which add very useful features without feeling out of place.

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I first learned 3D graphics on Lightwave 3D on Commodore Amiga ages ago, and since then have tried many other 3D applications, many of which (like Lightwave) cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

True Fact: Blender beats every single one of them hands down in every way that I can think of. :)

Funny, there are UI affordances I remember from Lightwave 8 and 9 that I still miss when I'm using Blender. Capability-wise the set of functionality is streets ahead (although if I could find a reasonable approximation to LWCad I'd be deliriously happy), but the UI just doesn't click as nicely for me.

Don't get me wrong; I did really love Lightwave. It was prolly my favorite by far before I got my brain wrapped around the Blender workflow. You can thank YouTube (and some amazing tutorial creators there) for me bein' able to finally grok Blender enough for it to replace all my other 3D tools properly.

I think one of my favorite things still to this day about Blender is how heavily customizable the UI is. How easily you can recreate your favorite workspace layout from whatever software you're most comfortable with. I still tend to set me up a tab with a Lightwave-like 4 pane 3D view just because it's sometimes still useful to me. :)

Isn't the reason why 3DSMax is so popular(or at least was haven't followed this in decades) because of the abundance of plugins?

I never used any of these enough to understand what the advanced differences were, but 3DSMax definitely seems easier to use than Softimage and Maya. I'd assume one of the reasons why softimage died was precisely for that reason.

The thing I miss from 3ds Max is that you could have a non-destructive workflow for basic primitives because the geometry of simple objects like a cylinder just lived at the bottom of the modifier stack and you could change them later.

Once you need to edit the mesh you have to “apply” that geometry and lock it in, but it’s handy to be able to go back and say “When I merge these objects the topology flows better with 24 faces around the cylinder instead of 16.”

Haven’t used it too recently, but in blender I think that still means deleting the object and making a new one to replace it.

Blender also has modifiers and can do many things non destructively. (Been a while since I've used Max heavily though.)

Yes, but the geometry is not a modifier. The “how many rings/segments” configuration shows up during primitive creation, the geometry is generated, and that’s your geometry unless you want to delete it and make a new one.

You can see what I’m talking about in 3ds here: https://youtu.be/Dp9Ozs3HjzY?t=120

Yes, I know what you mean now. (Perhaps they could add primitives to the modifiers for a similar workflow.)

You can setup parametric primitives other ways though, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaHL7jRo6mM Or putting a screw modifier on a curve... ( torus, sphere, any lathed object...)

Or there's likely a number of different ways using geometry nodes. Granted it's not currently simple and intuitive though.

I need to try out blender's node systems. I've done a bit of texturing with Substance Designer and really liked the approach, just not been doing this kind of 3D work lately. Flipping through some image search results, geometry nodes look pretty cool!

The shiny new geometry nodes feature in Blender is a modifier and can be used to perform some pretty nifty non-destructive trickery on basic primitives too. Not exactly like what that video shows, but still some really neat stuff can be done with it. Well worth playin' around with a bit. :)

2.93 has a Mesh Primitive node! Seems like what I wanted from 3ds should be directly doable with this, if not quite as simply! https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/modeling/geometry_...

^^^ And this right here is one reason I love sites like this one. Seems like I always get to learn somethin' new from folks. ;)

Thank you for finding that! I have played with the geometry nodes some, but somehow I'd missed that particular detail. I suppose I should peek at the docs a little more often. :)

There are ways it's not better over other tools, but many of those are being addressed, because it's a strong open source project with increasing resources.

Maya has a one up on the character animation tools, with addons like Studio Library for a pose library, though now Blender 3.0 in October(ish) will have a very similar feature. And there's others like lattice in the graph editor that Blender does not have yet.

Houdini is awesome for node based procedural animation and simulation, now Blender has Geometry Nodes, as a step in that direction...

Geometry nodes are fun as hell. You played with them yet? I wasn't a fan of all the node based stuff at first, but it's really grown on me…

If Blender comes close to Houdini in the future in terms of procedural workflow, especially with physics, then Blender has a real chance at conquering the space.

The "Node Everything" project is producing such exciting stuff. Animation nodes and now geometry nodes have made some really amazing things possible. Geometry nodes have been iterated on so quickly, too!

Pretty sure Blender is going to be best in class, or very, very, close for basically every portion of 3D cg work within the next 5 years.

But does it really beat every single one? I’m a blender user myself and really like it but I was under the impression that most professionals use Maya. And I guessed for some reason?

It is what they are frequently trained on in school. That is one reason for it to be an industry standard.

I'm also a sort of amateur at 3D modeling (though my background is in VR programming so I have a lot of exposure to it) so take my knowledge with a grain of salt, but afaiu there's a few different steps:

Modeling: Maya is best, Blender is a good substitute

Sculpting/topology: Zbrush is best, Maya is runner up, Blender is a good substitute

UV Unwrapping: All the above are good at this

Texturing: Substance Painter is best, Blender is a good substitute

Animation: Maya and Blender are comparable

So as far as I understand the cool thing is, aside Blender is essentially a nearly as good replacement for Maya, and can do everything to an adequite degree for high quality production.

The only things Blender is decidedly not an equal substitute for is Sculpting compared to Zbrush and Texturing compared to Substance Painter.

Again, I'm not an expert, but I think the above is roughly accurate.

I keep hearing really good things about Substance Painter from a ton of folk. I'ma really have to prolly have a proper look at it sometime soon-ish.

It's now Adobe's, though, so no more lifeteime licenses, only subscriptions. 50 dollars a month (with introductory price of 25 dollars).

I'm not sure if it is still the case but you used to be able to get a perpetual license on steam for ~100

Just checked. Looks like both Substance Designer and Substance Painter are available on Steam.

Sounds like it's the Python [0] of 3d tools: the 2nd best 3d tool for everything.

(It's cool that it's arguably the best in some areas even if that's a controversial argument, I think the same true of Python.)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17571705

Blender's procedural ability isn't to be understated or underestimated, either. It's not Houdini, yet, but I don't think the 3rd place competitors are particularly close to Blender, especially with the recent and rapid development of geometry nodes.

> Animation: Maya and Blender are comparable

I’m a VFX artist who loves Blender but unfortunately they’re not even close when it comes to animation, even less so rigging (the process of making a 3D mesh animatable). Maya allows for much more sophisticated rigs, and to have them perform at much higher framerates than Blender, which is crucial for animation workflows.

So far Blender is a much better Maya substitute for modelling and rendering than for rigging and animation.

IMO, no, it's not better than every other 3d tool for every problem. (I've used it for 20 years.) You can get by with Blender for many of them. But for example, Maya's character animation tools and available addons are more mature. Blender is working on a pose and asset library, that is being used now in their open movie project and should be ready by Blender 3.0 in October... I learned Maya in character animation school, and that's how it happens, that's what's used in studios, so that's what people learn. I think that will change as Blender developers remove more reasons for not switching.

> "I've used it for 20 years."

Wow. So you remember back when the Blender UI was a total nightmare then… Total night and day difference between then and now, that's for sure. :)

Yeah, I used 3ds r4 and max 2 before then. In 2001, I didn't want to pirate, and saw blender in a magazine, so I dug in. I brute forced learning hotkeys, took apart example files... I really liked the UI once I learned it, it was designed for efficiency not discoverability or following existing conventions.

Now, everything is much more discoverable (f3 search access to most commands, things can be set to hotkeys...) and there's tons of great content on Youtube.

> "Now, everything is much more discoverable" …

And yet despite all the massive improvements over the years, Blender managed to successfully keep all the stuff about it that made it great back in the beginning and simply improved everything around and over the top (and under the hood). Things like the utterly customizable interface, and the hotkeys available for everything (which are now also super configurable), just to name a couple of examples. And now we also have this nifty Eevee engine, too. Am really enjoying that one a whole lot.

Beats every one of the tools I've used in the past (though they've all probably matured significantly since I last used them, but then again, so has Blender in the time I've been using it). :)

As to Maya, I've personally shown Maya users around Blender and gotten quite a few "OOooh"s and "Aaah"s out of them, so I dunno… Maybe they might be easily coaxed away from Maya. I certainly intend to sing the praises of Blender to any of 'em that'll listen. ;)

Blender has been getting better and better with time. Many studios started with Maya or other commercial software have written tons of custom scripts to integrate better with their own workflows. Additionally, Maya/max/etc all are taught in schools, I haven't seen a school that teaches blender, at least. That means that there might be less onboarding time.

I am also believe that blender is the best all-around 3d software out there, but that doesn't mean it's best for the studio or cost effective to switch.

Blender has become so awesome in the latest versions. I think switching from other software is quite easy, even if some things work differently. It also has an industry standard preset for hotkeys...

I use it as an amateur, but there are really good tutorials that allow you to render high quality scenes in a day or two.

I use the occasional 3D model on a website, and the pipeline from our industry CAD software to the web with an short detour through Blender works flawlessly.

I have one big problem with Blender, and that's all the upgrades its been through.

As a result when you're trying to figure out how to do something you can't just google a youtube video because inevitably it'll be of a different version. So you'll see a guy telling you, "now click the little x button" etc.

Of course in your updated version the x button has long since been replaced by something else.

I think in most cases it is relatively easy to find the button in the new version, there are exceptions though. Hotkeys didn't change for ages I think.

But I would still recommend to use the version of Blender from the tutorial. If you get familiar with the rendering pipeline, you will find those buttons more easily.

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