At first Blender‘s interface might look a little scary (like most 3D software^^) with all its buttons everywhere, and the behavior quite weird (a little bit like if you met Rainman for the first time), but if you give it a chance then you might never leave it…
It is really ergonomic once accustomed to it and you can customize almost everything you want making yourself at home. Getting efficient is a really fast process, and the learning curve is exponential, moreover there are lots of really nice tutorials out there helping you doing that!!
Blender can deal with many common 3D files and images formats. It packages powerful and intuitive modeling modes and tools (checkout the sculpt mode it works amazingly well with multires models):
It has a flexible and powerful rigging / skinning system and animation management:
an image / UV editor with once again great tools to manipulate UVs:
3D painting tools improved in this new version check this video, the particle system can be deeply tweaked, several type of actor can be added to the simulation and you can even edit the result at any frame for maximum control:
game engine to simulate all kind of physics effects and much more, fur/hair tools, nice raytracer (you can make use of external renderers as well).
It also includes a Video Sequence Editor and the Compositor to tweak your scene rendering pipeline efficiently. You can also use / make Python scripts to do almost anything, but it require though some 3D understanding and programming skills to do one yourself, however there are plenty of them ready to be used on the Internet.
There are several other features that I didn’t talked about here and I encourage you to checkout the official site for more details. The last crazy thing about it: it is totally free!!!
The only downside in my opinion is that Blender in its 64 bits version doesn’t support my SpaceNavigator :/
Hail to Blender’s developers and community!
PS: Coming soon, a few basic tutorials on Blender.
Blender is great for a free product…. but for a professional, I wouldn’t go near it. It’s buggy, crap pan/orbit interface, lack of features (in comparison to Maya, 3DS Max, SoftImage…etc)….
mean that I’ll be wasting most of my day wrestling with it instead of creating.
@Michael
Go through the video tutorials. Try the venom lab tutorials. Once you get the hang of it, you will be pleasantly surprised how quickly you can do things with it. Blender is a lot more stable now and there is a lot more help around compared to earlier days. There was a time when even I had dismissed this product, but a friend of mine got me back on to it and I haven’t looked back since. In the end, it’s a personal choice. If you still don’t like it, well then Max/Maya/SI is clearly your thing.
I use blender a lot. Personally I am eagerly waiting for 2.5. I checked it out a few days ago and boy it looks good.
Im a Maya user and whenever I tried Blender I got lost with its interface. Also the way the viewpoint is handled confuses me. I guess Im too much used to Mayas interface. It always take time to get used to something new. 🙂
But then Im looking forward to its new interface, which will come with V 2.5 . Then I ll give it another try 🙂
I think the hardest part in adopting blender is the change of habits, I had to give it a few shot before being convinced (having to learn all from scratch wasn’t a really exiting perspective). I was mainly a 3Ds max user in the past and I don’t think that it has something to be ashamed of now, it is very stable and intuitive in my opinion, if you haven’t used Blender in a while, you should definitly give it another try I think it is worth it!
😉
SpaceNavigator RULES !
I only really use my own modelling software so I may be biased.
I’ve got blender, can understand it and model with it but just can’t use the UI smoothly. It’s improved greatly since earlier releases (I don’t think it used to have menus years ago) but it still just doesn’t gel for me.
However, people get really picky with tools and I’m more fussy than most, making them for a living and a hobby.
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