Arnold to go rental-only

I don´t prefer Blender INSTEAD of Houdini 🙂

I think Houdini is a great tool in conbination with Blender, the problem for me is that I target to surpass the 100k limit so I try to avoid using Houdini if I can, not because it´s not a great package but because I want to rely on packages with no limits if possible, but for many people Houdini is a great package, instead of Houdini I´m looking to acquire Real Flow, it´s not the same at all, but I will have the simulations part covered, the other part may be solved as we always solved it with Max or Maya.

Now as main package I prefer Blender because it´s way of working is similar to Max or Maya, so teaching it is easy and using it is pretty familiar, Houdini is a bit harder.

Regarding the alternatives you mention, all alternatives come with limitations, being the first and most important for some of it that they are from Autodesk and I´m running away from ALL Autodesk because I strongly belive in business ethics, it was one of the main reasons why I funded my own studio, and as of today Autodesk has no ethics at all.

Now regarding the other alternatives, as I said they are somewhat limited, Modo is limited, Zbrush Core is limited, now we use Substance and Zbrush (not core), Quixel has another limitation wich is that it relies on Photoshop, and we are migrating from all Adobe too.

Of course we use Blender in combination with a lot of tools, just like we used to do with Max/Maya, nothing changed, we just interchanged Autodesk software with Blender, that´s it.

About Blender, it´s not about it´s price/cost, I assure you that Blender can do EVERYTHING you do with Max or Maya, in fact you can do much more, but people resist to learn and use it because it´s open source or because it´s free, well people should ignore that fact and try to learn and use it in an actual project, but as with any other 3d packages, it´s not simple, so a learning curve will happen, usually with Blender the learning curve is a bit hard at the beggining and it´s ver easy when you passed the first 15/20 hours working with it, but let me stress that you should use Blender defaults and not try to use it as Max or Maya, embrace the right button selection and the cursor, and you will love it.
And talking about quality, Max can´t compete with Blender when talking about quality, just looking the features, it´s no competitor, even the main render engine is a lot better than it was mental ray, now Arnold may seem strong but here the licensing scheme enters again, and Cycles has nothing to envy to Arnold, there are features here and there of course, but in any case you can use Vray or Corona too if you miss something so… no big deal…

I´m not talking about working with free only tools or open source only tools, I´m talking about migrating from Autodesk, our choice was Blender and we cannot be happier.

I agree wholeheartedly with Juang3D. I’m also ex longtime max/maya user who jumped ship to houdini/blender. Both empower the user. From my point of view Max and Maya were a bit too stagnated and mainly served as modeling/scene assembly interfaces where bulk of functionality was achieved with external apps or many expensive plugins. Subscription nor rental made no sense given that Blender is a lot more efficient at modeling than either. Max users should feel right at home with modifiers of Blender and welcome the fact that program is actually fully featured not polarized/handicapped. Houdini on the other hand can give you all the functionality in the world and ability to forge your own plugin-like functionality, not to mention hollywood level FX. Needless to say, both play well with one another thanks to recently added Alembic(@Blender) and many other formats.
What’s also truly astonishing about Blender is the rapidly evolving OPEN roadmap. Great patches are submitted by users and very often reasonable requests/ideas get implemented with just months in next release. This is done several times per year by a tiny group of people on shoestring budget while it takes a year for ADSK to come up with some excuse how they had to further polarize the software or work bugs that any other company implicitly patches after release.
The FOSS guys deserve your money (simple donations), not the machine who puts most thought into financial models that extract most money from artist while spending least on development to have biggest profit margins. If you have been with adsk long enough, you know the trend and that will never change. What can change is us as artists. Circumstances understandably vary, but I encourage you to explore and be a bit more open minded. You cannot go wrong with FOSS(Blender), nor most powerful software on the block @Houdini.