Blender - is there any easier to use alternative for simple content?

[cyaoeu]

@fruxo;515256

OK, I think you earlier post mentioned Maya/max at 200/month, which is why I got confused. At least with Houdini, I can download and use the free version as long as I want before deciding if I should buy. It’s pushing what I’m willing to pay though, but I put the hard limit at $200, so it’s still an option.

As for Blender, I suppose something more newbie friendly is what I’m after. I understand these programs are complex by definition, but still. And I’m probably a long way off from knowing what settings to change and how to “mould” it to my liking, which could of course make it more pleasant to work with (eventually).

I have high hopes on Modo to be honest. Hopefully your experience was not the norm, or at least that it’s better now. Which restrictions in the indie version were you unhappy with, ie is there any actual deal breakers there?

It depends. Here are the restrictions (the restrictions for the new version are unknown):

MODO indie 901 Restrictions:
-OBJ and FBX export limited to 100k polys
-Bake and render resolution limited to 4k
-Command eval options unavailable
-Command, scripts, and command history panel results unavailable except “undo” and “history”
-Python editor, third-party scripts, and third-party plugins unavailable
-Can import all formats, but can only save in .lxf format
-Export formats limited to OBJ and FBX
-Image save formats limited to .png, .jpg, .tiff and .exr

So whether or not these restrictions matter depend on your workflow. For example I use Substance Painter for texturing so I want to export high poly meshes to create the meshes directly in SP but with Modo Indie you can’t because of the poly limit. When I brought this up in the blenderartists forum people asked me why I wanted to sculpt in Modo in the first place which was a bit confusing, I thought Modo would have good sculpting tools by now (Blender’s dyntopo has been around a long time now). To get around this you could bake your maps in Modo, but this breaks your workflow for no good reason.

The poly limit can also screw you over if you want to export whole scenes (think levels) at the same time and import them in UE4 with the new Import scene feature. 100k polys is not a lot when you’ve got a bunch of static meshes in your scene and it would be weird if the new Modo 10 is all about “PBR viewport! easy export to UE4! yeah!” and then screw all Modo Indie users over by not letting them export entire maps made in Modo.

Another thing is the ability to use user scripts/python, I find this really useful in Blender and often create simple one-off type scripts for repetitive tasks, for example during rigging/animation. It would be really useful to use other peoples’ tools made in Modo but again in Modo Indie you can’t. Being able to create user made tools is nice and can be especially useful in game asset authoring workflows where you can create scripts and tools that all of your artists can use. So the question again is: why can’t you do this in Modo Indie? To me it just seems like arbitrary restrictions that are there to make you unhappy and want to buy the full version of the software.

The rest of the restrictions shouldn’t matter much if you’re just making game assets. If you only use Modo it might not impact you at all, but from my viewpoint coming from a software that’s free with no restrictions at all, the thought of paying every month for a software with restrictions doesn’t really feel like an upgrade. To each his own though.