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pretty impressive, especially for a free software!
very impressive, something you’d hope maya, modo and 3ds max might attain someday if they have a development path that wasn’t just ‘buy stuff’ and bug fix it afterward.
except that they don’t really fix the bugs
Well, there’s a ton of bugs in Max/Modo/Maya. I think Houdini is the only one where the company is on top of squashing bugs.
EEVEE is coming along quite nice. But every software including Blender has bugs and they’re always fixed afterwards :). And Blender costs money too, just a lot of Blender users are cheap and don’t contribute to the development.
uh…surprisingly more impressive than I thought at first.
Blender can’t be ignored any more.
Very exiting.
that’s just insane. i agree you can’t ignore blender anymore.
This looks very impressive. I’m really hoping the new UI improvements will let me move into this software easier than its been in the past.
Impressive!
It’s only me or you guys can see Juang3D behind his monitor with a evil laugh: “I told you so!”. 🙂
I´ve laughed a lot with your comment 🙂
Just for fun! 🙂
But I’m sure you are proud. The work in Blender is very impressive. Even I supported the Code Quest. Makes you want to support such a nice development.
Going back to 3DS MAX viewoprt after watching this is gonna be hard…
Autodesk, if you have any honor, commit seppuku now…DO IT NOW!
wow! that bit with the magnifying glass was mental. must download blender cant resist.
Looking at this, I guess the question is not anymore ‘How many years until Blender is a valid replacement’ but ‘How many years until that multi-billion company realise they seriously need to invest in developers, research, innovation and stuff users really want to see and ask for since 10 years.
Also, it’s pretty clear that a company developing one application will do things better and really polish the stuff they release, unlike a company which tries to sell 20 different products with quite a lot overlapping functionality.
It’s not about whether 3dsmax/maya will die anymore, it’s getting obvious that it’s more about whether Autodesk will survive in DCC if they keep their slow and uninspired ways.
Honestly, this blew me away. Also, is there a new UI in Blender?
This viewport is very impressive, and I will be playing with it as soon as this is out.
Now, being realistic, for my type of job and I guess for a lot other users, anything that is not final rendering is not so relevant, and you simply want to have the fastest playback possible. We have arealights, area shadows, AO in viewport in 3dsmax, and I have everything disabled all the time, because with 2000 assets on screen with pointcaches, with particles, etc… I dont care about having a shadow there, I only want to move it in a fluid way, and I will see the final result as a render.
Obviously I see the potential of this for a lot other users, or even me to test new stuff at home. Simply surprise me how some shines excite more people than improvements on alembic I/O, more robust core, or any improvements on day to day tools (that also blender is doing).
Eyecandy is effective because that’s what we are doing on a daily basis – pretty pictures.
Blender’s way is impressive in that it’s free and they keep adding the good stuff constantly. Then again, I’m not using Blender and I’m pretty sure I’d have a lot to complain about if it was my main tool, I’ll give you that.
3dsmax/Maya – as much as I appreciate the teams behind the product, there seems to be the usual problem of bigger companies, they’re simply too big, walk on too many legs, have a crazy management/sales overhead and become ineffective and slow. I guess we would be shocked to see the research-developer vs. management-sales-accounting ratio if these numbers were available. You can watch features being developed and added in super-slow-motion… or not at all.
I’ve learned in recent years is that as a user I get more out of my time if I put it into beta testing of 3rd party plugins instead of the core package. Realizing that was a bit depressing but then again it’s just part of reality – this huge dinosaur of a company is simply unable to walk faster.
And that’s why users of 3dsmax/Maya keep looking at Houdini and Blender and get jealous – it’s simply an entirely different experience compared to how smaller and more specialized companies work.
That is true. But for that specifically you can have Houdini. For £300 you would have a killer FX software for ultra complex stuff and a free software that allows you to do real-time rendering (depending on the projects), fast modelling and good animation tools.
It’s a hard combo to beat and I’m a Max fanboy.
300? I dont understand how you do the numbers.
I’m talking about Houdini Indie, of course. If you do more than 100k as a company, then the cost of 3ds Max + plugins or the full Houdini FX shouldn’t be a problem.
But for a Freelancer, you can have Houdini for $269/year + Blender + maybe Redshift or some other render engine. And you have a full FX pipeline with 4K rendering. In most cases, is more than enough.
But, let’s say you decide to go full Houdini FX. It’s $4.500 the first year and then $2.500 each year for the upgrade.
3ds Max is around $1.500/year + $600/year of TP + $395 of FumeFX (I’ll go rental so it makes more sense). That’s $2.500 each year to keep it current.
So Houdini would cost double the first year, then the same as Max and some basic plugins for the next years. But you own Houdini, you don’t own Max (that might or might not be good). And I’m not adding Krakatoa, which is a must for particle work in Max.
Not saying that this Max combo is a bad idea, but the pricing matches. The only difference is that Houdini has a VERY generous Indie version, something I don’t see Autodesk doing ever.
You are kind of moving the numbers as you want. The license of Houdini FX “comparable” kind of to 3dsmax is 6995 + 3995 per year to have a none locked license. Quite far away from the cost of 3dsmax. Plus all the tools of krakatoa you will need for FX are free with the demo version, you only need to pay for the point renerer.
But well..I dont know why we move the conversation, here we was talking about blender, And the demo its awesome!
Hi Eloi,
My bad. I was looking at workstation for artists. For a studio, you are right, the cost is impressively more expensive. So it all depends really. Houdini for a freelancer or single artist is cheaper if Indie, or the same price if Houdini FX. But if you need a floating license, then it’s a lot more expensive.
And again, my bad also. We should be talking about Blender. You are right. 🙂
Have you seen this add-on? I’m finding it very impressive for “simpler” FLIP Fluids.
https://twitter.com/FlipFluids
on the other hand, you can load digital assets from houdini fx to houdini core and engine. so only fx guys needs the fx licence. Houdini core anual upgrade is 1500. Just for other guys that are reading : ). Don t know the cost of slave nodes for farm for max thou.
Another great Blender point for efficiency, it starts in 1 second.
It’s crazy how this makes your life easier, a crash almost doesn’t matter.
They really seem to do it the right way, they’re already thinking of improving the animation too.
They have focus and a vision.
And the performance with high dense meshes in Blender is really more impressive then it was. I remember it was similar to Modo. Now it just blows Modo out of the water.
Quite hard to dismiss Blender as ‘faff’ these days.
this year i added Blender to my workflow..i import and edit CAD models (.step) into 3dsmax, clean up and export to blender to render in cycles on GPU for product shots and short animations for clients.
Autodesk sealed their fate with me as a long term customer (started with max 2.5 in 1999) by adding 20% year on year for subs to pressure you to go rental…so i dropped max subs and moved my rendering to Blender. Autodesk really have crap management…i guess they factored in many will walk away for bully boy tactics but they just don’t care.
Once i find a good .step importer for a non auto-rental app i can move away completely.
Blender is on the rise
https://www.foundry.com/products/modo/addons/power-translators
Maybe that interest you. Bit expensive thou. Nevertheless, then you can use gltf to export/import. Blender don’t like fbx that much.
i use fbx all the time with blender..not an issue
I had bad experiences with rigs on the past. If it’s only mesh, uvs, vertex colors and material assigments usually its fine.
Have you tested https://www.freecadweb.org/?
It is not an importer, but if you go indirectly from max to blender anyway, this could be an option for you.
Best regards
RoH
YES. If Blender had a better outliner for selecting / viewing listed items within nested groups I would start diving into it. The automotive CAD files (delivered to us in Maya often) we use are very difficult to work with in Blender due to this shortcoming. Viewport performance, however even with the large CAD files is solid.
You mean like the new “Collections” of Blender 2.8? 😉
It’s great having a free software pushing boundaries, and hopefully keeping the big developers on their toes. Nothing is better for us consumers than proper competition between software houses – especially having a free option getting attention. Wishing Blender the best of luck here!
That being said this is no doubt a simple scene and setup. Made to look amazing, so I’m not being carried away just yet. It has its limited use. For students and indie artists working on shorts etc. this could be a great tool though!
You know this is just the viewport, right? Is the only thing being shown here, Cycles on the other hand is the proper render engine 🙂
Oh indeed, I know. I’m more pointing out that this scene is a simple setup with an image backdrop. I’m assuming if you go for a more typical production scene things will drastically slow down – and you’ll end up turning all the viewport features off.
Still, it does look good! My experience is just that unless you’re actually working in a game/real-time pipeline (low-poly, baking textures and so on) real-time visual features tend to bog you down more than it helps.
I’d be happy to be proven wrong though 😉
I think so, at least with some features, but this is really helpful for Look & Dev because materials and lights are treated in a pretty similar way than how the render engine treats them, so you can configure your materials and your lighting in Eevee and after that render it and get the expected results, usually you are not able to do that in any other package because viewport “candy” is not represented in the same way by the render engine, so all the bells and whistles are there not besucase it´s beautiful, but because it´s useful 🙂
Now… for animation or modeling work you have an specific mode called workbench with a lot of features designed to speed up workflow and viewport performance.
So far, up until today, Blender 2.8 with Eevee enabled with everything is as fast as Blender 2.79 plain viewport (wich was already pretty neat, except when you edit a mesh with millions of polygons, note that I say Edit, not sculpt 🙂 ) and so far it has not been optimized, so it seems that once it is optimized it would be several times faster than 2.79 viewport with everything enabled… so you can imagine there will also be another improvement with everything disabled 🙂
Cheers!