I am sorry I am a little stressed and a little sensitive my fault for misunderstanding you.
no worries
I use Maya LT - I really enjoy it. At the end of the day, you can purchase it for £800 - as opposed to Maya at £3000.
If you are a student you can use a free version of it for three years - if you’re not a student, there is a 30-day trial available. I highly recommend it.
I’m aware Blender is free, but I have no experience with it.
… and you are not allowed to use it for commercial purposes. Keep that in mind.
Asking people which 3D program to use is kind of like asking people their favorite ice cream flavor. 
Just because someone else prefers one product over another doesn’t mean you will also. The artists on my team all use Maya, but I’m a Blender user myself. My original reason for choosing Blender (back in the 2.4x days) was simply that I couldn’t afford a commercial 3D package, or at least I couldn’t justify the expenditure. Now, I stick with Blender not because it’s free, but because it’s gotten to be very good and I’m accustomed the its quirks and way of doing thing.
But, there are some pain points with Blender and UE4. Every release, they get to be a little less painful, but they are there. One of the biggies revolves around the FBX license. It’s not compatible with Blender’s GPL license, so Blender is unable to use the official FBX SDK. That means the FBX import and export from Blender are imperfect and usually at least a few versions behind in terms of supported features. The Blender exporter is quite decent now. I’ve only had one significant problem with the 2.70/2.71 builds and UE4, which is that Blender seems to insert an additional root node into armatures. This doesn’t affect anything if I’m exporting both the animations and the model/armature, but it does make it a pain to try and match an existing armature like the ones used in the UE4 templates and sample code. That extra root bone keeps the skeletons from matching. Blender’s FBX importer is not quite as robust as its exporter. It, too, has gotten much better in recent releases, but it still doesn’t support importing armatures or animations, so you can’t round-trip from UE4->Blender->UE4 unless you use another intermediate program in between.
Personally, I’ve yet to encounter something I need to do that I haven’t been able to do in Blender, but there have been things that I’ve had to spend time figuring out. Let me also qualify with a couple things. First, I’m a programmer who occasionally pretends to be an artist, not a full-time professional game artist. Second, our team only switched to UE4 (from Unity) a little over a month ago, so we’re far from established experts on this.
On the other hand, Maya, being heavily used in the AAA games industry, is essentially (if not officially) the reference 3D program for UE4. Because of that, you’re not going to experience as much in the way of headaches trying to get content over to UE4. With the A.R.T., it’s relatively quick and easy to rig a character for use in UE4. Most of the official and unofficial UE and UDK tutorial you’ll find are likely to use Maya, and there’s no doubt it’s a heavyweight of a program that can do amazing things (when it’s not busy crashing, at least).
Whether Maya’s benefits are enough to justify its cost is a purely subjective call. I’m at a point where I can afford and can even justify the expense of Maya if I want to, but I find I can work so fast in Blender with their “one hand on the keyboard, one hand on the mouse” philosophy and their extensive, context-sensitive key bindings, that I’ve always gone back to Blender after a few weeks whenever I’ve tried to switch to Maya or another package. On the other hand, I know a great number of people who feel they are far more efficient and productive in Maya (or 3DS Max or Modo or [insert favorite 3D package here]) than Blender or [insert disliked 3D packages here]). A huge factor is simply going to be your personal tastes and preferred mode of working.
If money is a pressing concern, there’s no reason *not *to use Blender. There will be some minor headaches along the way, but nothing you can’t work around. If money’s not an issue, then I suggest you download the Maya trial and give both a try. Work through a few tutorials, and see which one feels more natural to you.
In both cases, there will be a learning curve and frustrations, but you’ll get over the hump after using it for a bit and really start enjoying it regardless of which one you end up choosing.
I probably should have clarified - I meant try the student / demo version to see if the OP enjoyed the software and help with the decision.
Yes but my point is that if you ever get to where you might actually want to release something you could just purchase a license right? Or is there some reason I’m missing why that wouldn’t work?
I’ve made music for years, and I always released my beats so that they were free to use for non commercial purposes, but you needed a license to make money for it. It sounds like this is the same thing. If you actually have a finished product where you could make some money on it, then the cost of a license would probably be very reasonable.
For example, you wouldn’t go through all the trouble of really trying to sell something if you only expected to make a couple of hundred dollars off it.
The main problem I have with Maya LT is that it doesn’t support the UE4 A.R.T plugin for the normal version of Maya.
Otherwise I would probably buy it, but the way it is I’m sticking to my 3DS Max 2013 which is my favourite DCC app.
Kenomica: Gotcha. I just wanted to make sure people don’t get the wrong idea, that’s all.
I have talked with Autodesk representatives at student / company meet-and-greets before and they have said that it is explicitly against the license agreement to start on a project in the student version and then buy a commercial license and sell that content. I asked something similar to this and the representative almost took it as an insult. You are NOT allowed to start making a project with a student or trial version and then upgrade to a commercial license when you are about to release, if we are to accept what they said.
But then, I doubt they will actively track you down if you were to do something like that. They have nothing to gain by attacking indies, or rather defending their licenses, even if they have full legal right to do so.
I would recommend contacting Autodesk and get a written elaboration if you absolutely want to try this path. I doubt it will happen though as Maya LT was designed specifically to lower the entry price point for indies.
Something I think some should at least know about, are that while blender is a clear safe haven for those of us without tons of money to throw around ( most of us), that it doesn’t come without some glaring ‘flaws’, if you will.
I have a decent system, no i7 here, but a amd x3 Athlon 3.2 ghz, 8 gb ram with HD 7750 2gb, so I do fine.
Latest drivers for everything.
I know blender uses OGL, and Ive heard complaints that in windows, that OGL had/has? iffy OGL handling, but I’ve experienced no issues of anykind anywhere else.
I have a very laggy experience trying to change a material color, and a very laggy preferences window , just moving it around the screen where I want it, and I see black around some edges, and no other 3d app does this.
I have constant headaches on say just a 33k mesh when trying to UVmap, or just move it in edit mode.
I’ts a wonderful thing to hear about Maya LT so when that option comes and I need it, I’ll jump right on it, as given the issues I have with blender, if I had the money right this moment, I’d be jumping real fast.
lag is annoying…very annoying if its a 3d app or a browser , or whatever so given I’ve never seen this lag in any other 3d modeler, I guess blender just doesn’t like my system ? ( wish I knew why)
cheers
nl
I agree lag is very annoying but I don’t have any lag in blender and I’m using a laptop, even having blender open with a 62k model I still have no lag, maybe blender really doesn’t like your system:)
Ya, and I doubt very much, Im alone in this, hence why I decided to warn others, that while free software has a kewl factor and keeps our bank accounts from exploding, that there sometimes are nasty caveats 
cheers
nl
yeah your probably not alone:)
like the fbx exporter, amongst other things;)
so glad I found ways round all that stuff, especially the fbx:p
Is there a issue with fbx exporter ? I wasn’t aware of any ( n ot that I"ve used it for hours), but if there is something people need warned about, please let us know here.
You didn’t mention specifics, so I can’t tell if you are serious, or just making a off the wall jab against me for ‘knocking’ blender ? ;)lol
ty
nl
both the old and new fbx exporters for blender do have a few issues (you should be able to find them with google), mostly affecting skeletal meshes, that’s why my exporter looks like this now.
I was being serious:), I think were derailing this thread a bit so its probably best if we leave it here:D
Nothing was derailed, you were serious, nuff said, so thx for verifying that. Sometimes when we aren’t ‘face to face’ with someone, like on forums or IRC, you can’t hear flucations in our voice or facial expressions, leading to such uncertainties.
The thread is fine.
later
nl
I sometimes work in Zbrush and the models can easily top the 4 million polygon mark. So I sometimes bring things over into other packages to do the decimation process rather than use the decimation routine in Zbrush. It’s just a workflow thing.
ZRemesher does as good of a job as any other package’s decimation. In fact, unlike most decimation algorithms, ZRemesher is going to give you nicely deformable animation. Sometimes you need to give it some hints with vertex colors and ZRemesher Guides, but it’s still pretty fast. I’d highly suggest dropping your poly count right in ZBrush, as general purpose 3D apps like Maya and Blender really don’t handle poly counts that high anywhere near as well.
ZRemesher is fantastic for dropping poly count while creating some good edge flow (though watch out for “spiral” edge flow).
I was trained in Maya before I went to Blender and in my opinion, I think Maya is clunky and overpriced for what it can do (though I haven’t used Maya in a couple of years so maybe it has changed a bit?). Blender’s modeling tools are fantastic for game assets. The only reason why people say Blender isn’t good for production is because it is free and people tend to dismiss it because of that. However, the only area I would say Blender falls a bit short is in the UV unwrapping department. Sometimes it doesn’t do as good of a job as you would want.
Ya, Zremesher is a fantastic tool, no doubt about it. It’s just that sometime I forget to use it before moving to another package. Not very smart on my part but sometimes it happens.