Most gaming studios use 3DS Max while most animation is done in Maya. But most of the basic modeling functions you expect to have in any 3D program can be found in Blender. As someone who was taught to use Maya, Blender is honestly a very nice free program. There are a few things I noticed between Maya and Blender, though:
Maya has better soft selection tools, like the ability to make a custom falloff profile
Maya has mental ray for crisp rendering. Blender is stuck with an unbiased renderer which has a very nice quality but requires an insanely long time to resolve, even with CUDA
Maya has a lot of modeling functions like append to polygon which requires extra effort in Blender (extrude, merge, etc)
Maya has a “redo last command” option to make certain tasks much easier, like appending
Maya is much more mechanical in its modeling. Bevels, for instance, can be handled DURING the editing of polygons, not as a modifier applied to a finished object, allowing for more precise control
Maya has more polygon primatives than Blender: spirals, and extruding on a path are not possible in Blender
It is really easy to non-uniform scale and slide anything in Maya, whereas Blender requires manually inserting scaling. Even with the Maya controls, you lose some functions that Blender handles easier
Moving on a normal doesn’t work in Blender. So expanding a mesh to make a cage or when confronted with certain cases, you will be helpless in Blender
UVs in Maya are great for mechanical purposes, while Blender is very iffy
This is a big one, Apex cloth is integrated with Maya and 3DS Max, NOT Blender. I am trying to do some research to see if there is a good method for getting cloth on characters from Blender to UE4, but the entire process is quite confounding.
The only thing Blender has that Maya doesn’t is the realtime CUDA preview, but again, the CUDA Cycles rendering engine requires a LONG time to render anything well because it needs to shoot thousands of ray samples for each pixel in order to yield a better result. It can take hours to resolve something in HD to a level that would be acceptable for a finished deliverable. But if you just want to make basic block meshes, simple meshes, simple sculpts, of course, Blender will be fantastic.
Game development is not so demanding that performance in Blender should be a problem. That should not be an issue.
Maya will save you time - I could not do much with Blender back when I first started learning with UDK as nothing would import or export properly. One of the first things you learn in human-computer interaction is consistency - and Blender is not consistent with other programs. Based on some arguments around the UI - basically that 3D is difficult and they care about features and not making it easier to use ( price almost got butchered for even suggesting changes to the precious software - someone with the best courses around the software for years now). For these reasons I moved on. Developers are not free (try and learn some C++, and consider whether you would want to work for free if having to code complicated things like 3D apps all day), and so free software does not make sense to me anymore. These indie versions were not around when I first got started - people these days are lucky. I would suggest you pick up Modo to get stared (or Maya).
If you like technical stuff, working with nodes and so on - I would recommend Houdini. I use Houdini primarily now since the H15 updates focused on modeling tools and updates. Use Zbrush for detail work, substance apps with Photoshop for texturing. I would not recommenced Blender to anybody - and there is no reason to use it. The Houdini apprentice version is free - you can upgrade when you want to actually sell something, so don’t get stuck on the price thing, and don’t be cheap as developers need to eat too. If you want the best tools in the world, spend a few bucks and you’ll save a lot of time and headaches.
I am a blender fan. there is only one thing in another program that cant be done in blender. to solve that i use 3dcoat in conjunction with blender. (along with some substance painter) and I have been able to do it all. I use the 3dcoat for retopology and of course substance painter for the texturing. These three programs in my opinion are all that is required.
One question what if you used Houdini FREE to create a game and release the game and after you have made money off the game then you buy the license? I know that isn’t exactly what the terms state but I am just wondering, I mean is there anything that pops up in apprentice houdini program that tells the user playing the game or buying assets from the asset store that the software was made using a free houdini program or something?
That is true. If you like blender and are comfortable with it then why not? You can also do some great painting in both Blender and specially 3DCoat. But yea, the retopo tools in blender is very lacking - which is one of the reasons I switched to Modo, and if you want autoretopology, you’ll need 3DCoat, Zbrush or Mudbox. I hope that they will update Mudbox with some cool new features, as it seems abandoned at this point. It is cheap as well, and has great texture painting tools (though I still prefer substance apps).
When it comes to VFX tools though, Blender does have a nice renderer. Few tools in the industry can come close to the Houdini tool-set in this regard though - you can do things that I won’t even know where to begin in other apps, and it is all procedural with that.
The Houdini plugin is also great for building procedural level building tools, and few (if anything) can match it. This is only handy if you care about populating rather large levels, or reusing/ building ‘smart’ assets. It will save thousands of hours on even small projects. This and many things, you can in fact NOT do with Blender, nor does blender have a procedural workflow. Modo has a cool new procedural workflow, but that has ways to go to match what you can do in Houdini. So if you don’t care about this feature set, than any other tool will be fine - but they are also updating their modeling tool-set in Houdini, so I would keep an eye on that.
It all boils down to your personal preference I guess. Some people will model in Maya and Modo, and then use the procedural tools in Houdini, for example, to build tools for artists. I myself use as few apps as possible as it gets expensive. So instead of using 2 apps - I just use Houdini. Obviously you need other tools like sculpting tools and such, but still, at least this cuts out one tool in the chain.
They do have all kinds of restrictions on the apprentice version, and I think you can only import FBX (but can export .obj) assets as you can see here:
That being said, once you are comfortable enough in working with the software (it is very different from other typical 3D apps), you can upgrade to the indie version (save up for a few months?). The Indie version is a restricted commercial license, similar to what they have with Unity. The indie version is not that expensive, as it is based on the full Houdini FX version - we should be glad we have it. I am working on a Houdini course actually, along with Unreal - but I’ll post about that in the forums soon.
I’m not a salesman for Houdini, but I do not believe they’ll allow you to do what you are suggesting - so save up for the indie license whilst learning with the apprentice version - that’s what I did.
Blender 2.8 will be a huge update. It will improve it a lot. They plan to make the node editor for shaders similar to the one in UE4. In the new viewport, you would see your mesh the same way as you would see it in UE4. (you would create your materials dirrectly in Blender, with the same knowledge as when using the UE4 material editor -then export them to the engine)
Blender devs call 2.8 the pipeline upgrade. The controll scheme will also be completely revamped, to maintain consistency with other softwares. I guess UI will also improve, because there are a lot of proposals for it related to 2.8.
Anyway, we'll find out more in september, after SIGGRAPH. They might also start a crowdfunding campaign for 2.8.
It seems that Maya users would make an easier transition to 2.8 than to the current version.
If you want to work in the industry I would use one of the commercial apps rather than Blender, even if you’re able to do a lot with Blender it can be a problem to find a job where many will expect you to be able to use Maya or 3ds Max. It’s not just being able to export the correct mesh to a game engine, they have to be able to access the original files and they won’t want to use Blender files if their pipeline is in Maya.
What about the UI graphics stuff like the Icon etc? like how the UI is pretty in MODO and C4D with fancy icons and colors. You think they would improve on that?
There is a Blender branch with Alembic import and export. I have heard that Alembic is becomming a new format standard in animation, and probably will also become a standard in gamedev, since you can export and import, besides meshes and skeletal animations, particles and other physics stuff. If a studio uses Alembic files in their pipeline, they won’t really care which program you used to make it, since the original file is also Alembic. I have seen that Alembic support is on UE4 roadmap, but probably it will be merged in Blender’s trunk before it will be officially added to UE4.
Like I said, it’s not about the export formats, if they want to access your original files they would have to install Blender to be able to open them. There’s a lot of reasons they would want the original files rather than the files you export to the game.
FBX is pretty a pretty standard export format for games and the issue is just that Blender doesn’t have a good FBX exporter, if they wanted to they could improve that.
It looks much better but they really need to improve the visuals thats one of the things that make MODO so attractive it just looks so pretty they put a lot of artistic effort into it. Sadly free software like blender are unable to support this kind of cosmetics.
Really sad in all honesty. You won’t believe how pretty modo looks.
Yes, you can also subscribe to Modo on a monthly basis instead of buying the license, breaking down the cost even further - I’ve been asking for similar options with Houdini - we’ll see what happens. At least they listen to the Indie community - which I could say the same with Modo Indie. Feels abandoned and you get updates sometimes months and months after the people who have the full release - if you get it. It was a letdown to many people and still is - if you just take a look at how serious Autodesk is taking the Maya lt version. I’m sure they will give the indie version more love in the future, I guess it just does not have that many users yet.
When it comes to Houdini, I feel like it may be slightly more expensive, but it is not striped down like Maya lt (thought we mostly have the full version of Modo with the indie version thankfully) - in fact it is based off of the Houdini fx version, so you can mess around with the VFX tools as well. I also feel like you do not have as many restrictions as compared to Maya lt or Modo indie for game design, but have not done and in depth comparison yet.
I’ve been following that, but information on it is scarce. Tom’s presentation on it was very interesting - but it was just a proposal. I got my hopes up when Price stirred the usability pot, but nothing much came of that. I eventually moved on to Modo (I’m glad I did). They said it will take around 2 years - and by the looks of it, it will be a huge update. The problem is that, other programs like Houdini, Maya, and Modo are not taking a break for the next two years either. We’ll see how it all comes along though.
I think those people may not have actually ever used Houdini. Another thing is that it is very different from other, more traditional apps.
The thing is that, it is not Modo. The modeling tools need work, but they have improved it allot with the H15 release. One more problem I see is that people get very complicated when they explain it - there are few beginner courses on it that are easy. I think 3DBuzz has some older courses on it that may be useful.