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Who cares ^_^
Recently I heard from Blender Bob (YT channel) that Blender now even better than Maya (much better performance and overall), now we see a lackluster release ever from Maxon Cinema 4d S24 (I know it’s only for basic 3d like mograph, so who cares). Modo didn’t see love for ages..
So, my point is, why bother? Why people still use expensive programs, Blender is free and way more good and have unique tools like Grease Pencil, Geometry Nodes, everything you need. I’m not PR manager whatsoever, just want to help people make a right choice.
I’ll tell you why people might want to use something else : I’m not a full time 3d artist, I’ve been trying to get into Blender on and off for years and couldn’t, mainly because it has the worst, most illogical UI of all the 3d apps I’ve tried. Anything i would learn about it would be gone if i didn’t use it for a couple of weeks.
I’ve reluctantly given my money to Maxon instead. Anything i learn in C4D still sticks even i come back to it after a couple of weeks, because the UI and the workflow is all layed out logically and you can feel that a lot of thought went into designing it.
What’s the point of an app being free and having a bazillion features if its UI and workflow is constantly getting in the way of doing things and slowing you down ?
What you’re describing in your post is just things you « heard » about other apps. Try using them for a while instead, and you’ll understand why people might still want to use expensive programs instead of Blender, despite all the qualities of the latter.
I switched after 15years from c4d to Blender 2.8x because of new UI (which is btw. much better now than c4d’s) and because of slow development in Maxon (they have recoded architecture for 10years now? last time maxon show something interesting was r18 but after that.. nothing). first its pretty hard to learn new thing but its only because of muscle memory – but when you learn and learn your muscle memory will learn it too. Like Adobe products – it was pretty uncomfortable to learn davinci resolve first but after 2months hard learning it was even better than adobe’s premiere, after and audition much much better.. And just 300euros and free ugprades.. one payment. I also love these days Houdini and it was easier to learn Houdini after blender and animations nodes. Houdini + Blender + Resolve + Affinity products i see no obstacles. C4D was lovely software wonderful but now.. its antique – old fashion UI.
But if somebody is happy with something like C4D i won’t blame.. some times its hard to get out from comfortable zone and i know it.. but i need to say this: i am very happy when i get out my comfortable zone – its much easier to learn new things and how much i save money each year it was worth it – no way i am going back to c4d or maya or 3ds or modo.. that would be like going back to dark ages. but this is just my opinion
You heard from a Blender YouTube channel that Blender is better than another program?
I don’t use Blender but I clicked on the link above to see what’s up. My impression is that the images they showed of humans take 3d back about 10 years. When Unity has Metahuman models, Blender is showing some really ancient stuff. I’m not saying that is the best they can do, I’m only saying they could show more impressive images with their “new release”.
I also read the comments on the Blender link. Seems like Blender users have as many complaints about the software as Max users have about Max. Who would think people would have so many issues with something someone is giving them for free.
Go figure.
Hopefully Vulkan brings raytracing to Eevee relatively soon
With improvements done in cyclesX. I think having raytracing in eevee will be quite irrelevant.
It’s faster but it’s still nowhere near realtime. Hybrid between ray tracing and rasterization still has its place and will for the next 5-10 years.
It’s important to keep in mind that the average resolution is now no longer FullHD, but around 2560×1440, and will probably rise to 4k soon. It will be still expected for fluid viewport experience to run at least at 60FPS, even in maximized viewport, which will be 3840×2160 at that point.
No matter what new GPUs nVidia comes up with in coming years, I just can’t see fully path traced renderer spitting out 30+, let alone 60+ frames per second at 4k resolution. Eventually yes, the realtime and offline rendered will converge to same point, but that’s at least 10 years away from fully happening. Until then, I can see rasterizer/raytracer hybrid solutions like UE4/Unity’s renderers or potential Eevee with ray tracing as being dominant. The cost of rasterization does not grow quadratically with the increase of resolution and the ray traced components can be subsampled, denoised, and upscaled, then combined with the rastezied components rendered at full resolution, providing overall good detail level. Pure path tracing is a bit different story.
So yes, CyclesX is great, but no, it’s not Eevee replacement, at least not in the next decade.
I agree although I’m honestly quite curious to see whether MCM designs from both AMD and Nvidia will help getting us there sooner than the current performance trajectories might hint at. After all chiplets did wonders for AMD on the CPU front.
Fun times either way! 🙂
Exactly what Ludvik says. I am talking about having realtime rendering with raytracing at usable framerates. CyclesX is awesome and really promising (maybe it will be closer to/better than redshift performance?), but it’s still for offline rendering.
In 10 years we’ll be closer to thinking of offline renderers as dinosaurs that will soon extinguish, but not yet. Maybe CyclesXX by then? 😉
Can’t wait for Cycles XXX in 2040 ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
The roadmap looks great,Cycles X looks great, geo nodes is amazing, let’s be honest Blender is a juggernaut now, steamrolling the industry..Nothing can stop it.
Performance on subdiv needs to be improved but will come in time..
If I worked for these other companies I would start to learn how to write code for blender, cause in 5 years time your job is going to be at risk.
If Max was free and open source, would you still use Blender?
Be honest.
I spent many years using max, and I love it.. modeling in max is great, the modifier stack is just so good the thousand of modifiers out there is such a plus for max.
If max was free and open-source I 100% would use it, but check it.. I have both blender and max and no lie the last 6 months I have opened max once ( when I updated and wanted to test the retopo, its amazing!) but i think that answers the question quite well I hope..
In my eyes, there is nothing wrong with max ( apart from greed at AD ) but blender does it all for me now. So much so that even my Zbrush usage has been drastically cut, granted the sculpting in blender can’t handle the perf that ZBrush can but its only a matter of time.
I can understand the free argument, but why open source? That’s useful for like 0.1% of people who are both competent artists and competent C/C++ developers 🙂 Unicorns basically.
I get the point, but I’d be careful about conflating free with open source, both usually occur together but are two different things with different purpose 🙂
I think it has to do with open source as a prevision to avoid being price gouged out of profitability once the software has enough users, still I see your pont if a software behaves fairly there’s nothing wrong with everybody turning a profit 🙂
as an aside – the open source licensing is crucial. at some point you can bet you bottom dollar either autodesk or adobe would try and take over directly or indirectly. these companies aim for control of the market and there is no such thing as “fair”.
things could be fine one day, the next a some venture capitalist take over at which point its game over.
i realise i may sound like a fanboy and i really don´t care, but blender did change my creative life for the better in every way.
i have max and c4d still installed, max exclusively for format conversion.
i would not use max again if someone paid me to do it, honest to god.
there are some stupid quirks still, but no contest.
Neither Autodesk nor Adobe are companies that would give you something powerful for free. But free and powerful software doesn’t have to be open source (the way Blender is). What Epic is doing with UE4 and ecosystem around it is a great example of that. They are still trying to make profit out of it all, but in a smarter way which lowers the entry barrier and at the same time makes them shareholders of success of the people who truly succeed.
All I am trying to say that when people usually say “free and open source”, what they in 99% cases mean is really just free, because most of them don’t know how to truly take an advantage of the open source part 🙂
its true, in five years blender will handle pretty much all tv effects and 99% 3d animated shows, makes no sense to investing is rented software when studios have bills too pay and the new generation of 3d artists are taking up with blender, because its free and able
Blender looks nice but I am reluctant to learn. Simply because of the fact that fbx import is sooooo slow compared to c4d and Max. I work on a daily basis with very large and complex cad data and Blender simply chokes on it. So please update the import speeds!
one of the things in blender i dont like is handling of fbx. could be better.
i used to have some stuff linked and parented. unparenting actually deletes the child.
its weird af.
But there’s a reason for that and Ton addressed. Starts at 47:40 minutes.
https://youtu.be/qJEWOTZnFeg
And… you belive it??? I found it just excuses. The Fbx importer in blender its subpar compared with any other 3d app. All other apps updates and addapts to fbx changes. ALL exchange formats that are alive, are updated regularly to get more functionality and compatible with newer technology.
Of course it is, because it doesn’t use the official Autodesk’s FBX API/SDK, which is incompatible with Blender’s GPL licence. Autodesk knows it and has no interest in changing that situation. That is the reason Blender’s FBX exporter is so behind. Because it’s a python based, reverse engineered mess.
All the other 3D apps that have FBX I/O can simply afford to use Autodesk’s official FBX API, so they can have proper, performant FBX I/O.
But speaking of new and alive exchange formats, GLTF support on the Autodesk side is as abysmal as FBX support on Blender side 🙂
So yeah, why would you not believe this? What is so hard to believe? Autodesk owns FBX format, and FBX SDK license states it can not be open sourced, which makes it incompatible with Blender’s GPL. This is not something you can choose whether you believe or not. This is a fact which can be very easily verified and proven.