Comment by DizzyDoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DizzyDoo | Hacker News Reader

Early in the year I made the switch from Modo (by The Foundary) to Blender 3.x, and I've been enjoying it. Since I use 3D software for my video games business it's quite daunting to switch a significant part of your workflow over, because the muscle-memory of all the shortcuts is all there, and you've learnt the Way To Do Things™ in that particular piece of software.

As much as I liked Modo, I was paying a monthly subscription, and now with Blender I don't and it's got this enormous open-source community that provides a lot of long-term confidence, which I wasn't quite getting with Modo. The UI changes going from 2.x to 3.x was pretty important in my decision to switch.

One thing I found helpful when moving 3d modelling softwares was to setup all the keyboard shortcuts to your previous software's bindings, and then you can tackle figuring out the UI, the different object modes and the Blender Way To Do Things™. There's plenty of preference files around on the web that you can plug them in and get going quite quickly

> Early in the year I made the switch from Modo (by The Foundary) to Blender 3.x

Hah, that's me. Except i was out of CG for ~7 years or w/e. I used Modo extensively from 1.0 to .. i want to say 5.0 or something. Tons of modeling. I adored Modo for modeling. This was all before they were bought by Foundary or w/e, though. Back when it was Luxology.

Maybe you have an opinion here.. but how is Blender for modeling? Specifically when 3D Navigating. So far i've found Blender to be .. okay, like it has all or almost all the tools i remember from Modo... but something just feels different. Modo felt so fluid, intuitive. Especially with 3D navigation. Something just doesn't feel as good about 3D Nav compared to Modo. But i can't put my finger on it.

Regardless, Blender has so much power i absolutely adore it. I'm just trying to capture that fluidness that i had in Modo. Yet i can't articulate what it is. Which.. sucks, heh.

I'm really just using Blender for modelling and UV unwrapping (and I've used the paint-to-texture feature once) and I think it's pretty solid, but I really haven't gone near sculpting or anything soft-surface/organic. I probably need to model another dozen things to get up to my Modo ability though.

I also used Modo from version 101 to 501. Maybe it’s because of baby duck syndrome, but I have never found anything that even comes close to Modo, in terms of ease of use and workflow.

You can get the Blender viewport behaviors to match Modo, but you'll need to customize all the Input/Navigation/Keymap settings. The modeling tools themselves are mostly kind of there at a foundational level, but it’s all really clunky in comparison. I wish that Blender had the work plane and tool pipe. I just learned the Blender way to do things, instead of trying to fight it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com