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Comment by plufz | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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. ;)

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

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