Indonesia-based Expose-3D studio has written an interesting article discussing their experience of moving to Blender for architectural visualization, discussing both the pros and cons, and the few things still missing in the software, such as a quality scattering add-on and better support for IES lights in Cycles. More on BlenderNation.
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I often see people talk about how it would be cool to use something else but 3dsmax for Archviz, and sometimes there are decent reasoning behind it. Obviously I am biased because of 10 years of max use now, but here is my short takes on why I don’t see people move from max any time soon.
Too many companies use max, and will keep using max. Getting work, just like in any other field, games, vfx etc you have to cater to the companies you want to work at… being good at doing architecture in say, blender instead of max, heavily limits your job options.
Assets! the archviz world more so than any other (maybe games too) is heavily relying on premade assets to be a cost efficient industry, custom making everything simply isn’t viable due to budgets. Problem is by far most assets made are still mainly made for max.. yes you can get fbx or obj version of most of them, but then you have to redesign the shader yourself.. which again, takes too long. Same reason why Vray is so big and will stay big… there is just a ton of stuff out there making it easy to keep using Vray. Only reason Corona render has grown big and is now a standard many places, is because of a little script, that instantly converts Vray materials to Corona.. AKA all your assets still work, no fuss.
Personally I would love to work in something else than max, I wouldn’t mind a change just for the sake of it, but I find it hard to see why I would even consider doing it within ArchViz when I already know and have max etc.
Also most place where people can study 3d, if you want vfx or games, you will learn maya, if you want archviz you will learn max, or maybe c4d in a few cases. Again, going to Blender seems odd.
Seeing a company making the shift from max/vray/corona to Blender seems super odd to me.
Now I am not saying blender is worse, or can’t do it.. I am purely looking at this article from a commercial standpoint, and wonder if it really is “better” for them to do this down the track. Each to their own I guess.
anyway just my brain fart while waiting for beer o clock in the office! have a great weekend everyone.
You have some valid points. The same could be said about leaving Photoshop for something else.
Why would you do it? But than again, if we all flock behind these monopolies, nothing will change. Now that Max is only rental, I can’t see how you can blindly trust Autodesk to not do anything that might hurt you financially.
They say it’s more sustainable for them. Maybe they should keep the ownership of the license but scale down as a company. But that never happens. 🙂
it looks like the average salary is about 7000 to 9000$ per year in indonesia.(salaryexplorer)
in this case a 2000$ subscription makes about 1/4 of your salary and that’s 3 months of work time.
it’s depending where you are as example a american or europe artist have to earn much more to life. so the license cost doesn’t count that much.
Just yesterday I had to import a Revit file, very popular with Architects. MAX did a fine job.
For those that start now because it is free, albeit i advise people to contribute for Blender, even better if they have ideas and hire a coder to make something that can improve some subset of the program.
The main reason to get out of 3ds Max is because is rental only.
So you are stuck and you stop paying you cannot get access to your work anymore.
There is not an universal scene compatible with various softwares yet.