I tend to agree with you Killer Ferret. Another reason that Blender isn’t taken seriously in my opinion is because most of the people in the game industry made that decision based on what they saw with Blender version 2.49. Well, blender has come a long way since then and I think people should take a look at it again.
Oh god, the color scheme hurts my eyes. One thing that can be said for Maya is that it’s impossible to color it like that 
Blender works quite well for game assets in my experience. It also has a few more options for rigging than Maya LT does, and the dopesheet in Blender is actually useful. I’ve used Maya a bit, and while it gives good results, I can’t see myself reaching the same speed that I do with Blender’s hotkey-heavy interface. (I’ve always been a keyboard guy, though. I’ve been playing the piano since I was seven.) I run into about the same amount of problems and flaws with each, but the nice thing about Blender is that if I run into an absolutely mission-critical bug, I can file a bug report and have a good chance of getting it fixed, or I can fix it myself and not have to wait eons for Autodesk to fix their eternally slightly broken software.
Of course, Blender was my first 3D package, so I’m biased. I think that’s true of most artists that I’ve come across–the first program they learn is their darling, their baby, their joy, just because it takes so much effort to learn how to use the blasted things. Due to the massive nature of the problems these packages solve, each of them is full of quirks and oddities and well-hidden functionality that you’ll need to find solutions for, and that’s a big reason why people are scared of giving Blender a chance. I know it’s why I’m scared of giving Max a chance. 
That’s quite a conspiracy theory you have going there, I know because I use blender sometimes,but on my rig ( as noted above,which is plenty fast) its very slow to do many things,including but hardly limited to handling even remotely high counts,and I doubt ‘everyone’ sluffs it off due to its free nature,thats a rather large hole you’ve dug I think to plop everyone in.
I try to avoid it, because its far too laggy, as noted above in my post. I could report, but I’d rather avoid the headache in dealing with all of that, so I’ll use somegthing else for now, and likely foreseeable future till they get blender working better,in more places.
No,its not about free, though for some people ‘maybe’ it is,but for me its being tired of perf. issues.
I am a artist ,among other things as I need to be, and I have no problem using ‘whatever’ works,and atm,that is NOT blender,and its not because of bias either, given my other post.Don’t ‘paint’ all of us with such a wide brush I’m also a pianist btw, not that it matters, but a small world it is
Cheers
nl
Using Blender full time. I am not a 3D gfx expert but I can do basic stuff for what I need with it.
I would probable buy Maya/Max if they would be more accessible as price. And I say probable, because Max/Maya have features that I will probable never use for game dev (Blender have those too, but is free so do not matter), and I don’t like to pay for things what I do not use.
PS. I am amazed how many gfx artist can use so many polygons for basic stuff, and they cry over Blender that he can’t handle zillions of triangles. Usually for game dev in general you want to have as less as possible triangles to render. The true art comes from combining a minimal amount of triangle with good textures/normal maps/etc.
It’s definitely dangerous to make assumptions about why other people make decisions. This is some very complex software we’re talking about here, and there’s as many different, perfectly legitimate reasons for choosing one product over another as there are people having to make the choice. There are many valid reasons for choosing Maya, many for choosing Blender, and many for choosing other packages like 3DS Max, Modo, Lightwave, etc. I’m hoping we can all relax and not let this become a “the product I like is better than the one you like” thread. The internet has enough of those already.
Oddly enough, my experience has been just the opposite yours. In the early 2.5x days, Blender was frustratingly crashy and slow, but since about 2.55 or so, Blender has been incredibly stable for me, rarely crashing, and with every release, it gets faster and more things get GPU accelerated. It’s quite fast for most things I do. That being said, I rarely work in very high poly counts, as I prefer ZBrush for digital sculpting and remesh before going to Blender. Blender’s sculpting tools are decent, but not in the same league as ZBrush’s.
On the other hand, every time I’ve spent time trying to learn Maya, one of the things that has frustrated me is just how unstable and crashy it is on my machine. Talking to other people, a lot of people experience this, but for a lot of people, Maya is solid and rarely crashes.
Bottom line, your experiences with complex software may not exactly match other people’s.
You’re right, bad choice of wording. It isn’t the only reason. However, that is something I have heard/ read from a lot of areas so I know it can be a common misconception. I don’t know which version you’ve used in the past but TDoro and are right in that Blender has come a long way over the years.
Rest assured I respect and am open to fully learning other software so a trivial flame war is not my objective. Sorry for plopping you in a hole 
Na biggie
It’s all good.
I wish blender didn’t have perf. issues, I’d be using it much more often…I guess it hates my gpu or something ? ( HD 7750 2gb)
later
nl
Blender. I’ve gone from Maya to modo, and now to blender, and I am in love with it. For me, 2.71 was the pivotal release where I felt blender was ready to become my primary 3D DCC. I just briefly tested Maya LT on steam when the price dropped, but I went right back to blender after a couple hours of modeling. Trying Maya LT actually reaffirmed and further cemented my recent decision to switch to blender. I hope that Epic continues to support blender. Their efforts to get blender working solid with UE4 is one of the reasons I’m excited about UE4. Blender and Unreal just feel like the perfect combo to me.
Could be, though it also depends on what you are doing with it. I know that Cycles doesn’t use ATI cards because of their drivers so everything is done with the CPU. I currently run with an AMD 8350 and haven’t encountered any real performance issues. Though once you pass 600K to 700K polys on a single mesh Blender does start to throw a fit haha.
@: Yeah, I’m excited to see what happens with future updates. Another thing I do like about Blender is that updates are usually between 1 to 3 months apart. I wish Autodesk and Pixologic would do that with their software (though I don’t know how often they update Maya LT).
To the OP, if you are interested in sculpting at all and don’t have much to spend, I would recommend you check out Sculptris. Its free and very easy to use on top of just being another awesome program.
There is an environment variable you can set to turn on GPU support for AMD cards. It’s not enabled by default for a few reasons, but if you’ve got a hefty AMD card, it’s definitely worth enabling. I’ve been using it with dual FirePro GPUs for a while, and I’ve only had one Blender file where it couldn’t compile the kernel and use the GPU for both in-window rendering and final rendering. I set the compute device to use both GPUs and all CPU cores, and it screams. Makes a huge difference in day-to-day Blender use for me.
To turn Cycles rendering on for AMD cards:
[FONT=Courier New]setenv CYCLES_OPENCL_TEST all
Be aware, though, if you have an AMD or consumer grade GPU, it may simply not be capable of rendering most Cycles scenes. I have no idea how the HD7750 will handle it, but it can’t hurt to try it out.
I feel the same way too. I am using Blender and I am still getting use to it. I am more familiar with Blender than I am with any other 3d software so I wanted to stick with Blender. I thought about switching to Maya LT since the price change because it seems that is should be easier to import from Maya LT to UE4. I like Blender and I was very happy to find out the Blender and UE4 are working together to make the two programs workflow easier. I have been working with Blender 2.71 release 2 candidate and it seems very promising. I am working on a character(it’s actually a tutorial on Blender Cookie http://cgcookie.com/blender/) this week and I will try getting it to work in UE4. Static meshes are not a problem but I will see how much trouble I have with an animated one. Be blessed and be good.
Daaaaang, where was this a year and a half ago haha. I remember researching cycles and ATI cards and most people said the reason why it never worked (I forgot which version it was after) was because ATI changed something in their drivers making it harder for the Blender devs to include it.
If I ever go back to my 7870 I will try this out. Thanks for the tip!
Blender is the choice for me since it develops so incredibly fast with its fast paced development cycle, the fast bugfixing and there are so many tutorials and helpful people out there.
I already paid a few Blender projects/plugins/scripts, donating to the dev fund from time to time, the DVD purchases, their Blender cloud subscription for new tutorials and so on.
I Like to pay developers directly for improving and adding good stuff to Blender.
Tools like ZBrush, 3Dcoat, Marmoset and a bunch of other paid tools are also under my toolbelt because they are great and are companying Blender in areas where it can make the creation of 3D easier.
I transitioned from Max to Blender and never looked back to Max.
Maya also even with a lot of tries and bought books never was a real option for me, it is slow and had on my PC a lot of bugs and crashes and the student version forbids the user to make any money with it. sorry Autodesk but I want to earn money with 3D right now not in a later time when I have enough to use the “rich kids” tools.
to be fair with Blender
In some cases like bending the Vertex Normals for trees and so on, Blender lacked or still lacks but it allows me to earn money in the area that I like.
on the other side Blender now has even options to change the swizzle for Normals (X-+ Y-+ Z-+) to make it workable in many engines.
as always testing the tools and being open for new things, keeping an open eye on tools like the fast developing Blender is a good route to take. 
Blender; I fell in love.
I also came from Max. At the Art institute we were taught Max and I’m still confused as to why the college didn’t even show us Blender as an option…
I’m going to be honest the first time I used Blender I hated it. Kept blaming the UI and the viewport controls(which I still hate the controls(not the ui)… I use my own viewport control scheme which is a mix of Max/Blender with all Blender hotkeys ). Then realized I could customize it and started understanding the modularity of Blender and haven’t looked back since.
LOL and the first time I used the 3d cursor… lol… I was really confused as to it’s purpose. For at least a year, I just gave it the most complicated hotkey so I would never have to think about it or accidentally use it, for an entire year the cursor was just this “thing” in the center of the viewport which signified only 0,0,0. Until I kept seeing online why people were using it and then slowly started using it and when I finally understood it, I can’t get over how useful it is.
Don’t fear the cursor, embrace it. It is an arbitrary, extra origin or destination point in space. You can use it to assign a new manipulation origin for an object, you can use it as a pivot point, as an object creation point, as a snap point. You can easily place it on the surface of an object, at the center or even at the center of any 2 or more points(objects, vertices, edges, faces)
For me it’s not only about the fact Blender’s free, but it’s genuinely a professional and serious developer tool.
In my opinion, I feel like Blender’s UI is amazing despite what many people say. Basically Blender is itself a direct Interface to your creations not just the menus. It feels much more like playing a game… obviously it’s not completely there yet and has lots of room for improvement, which is another of it’s other powerful sides: improvement.
The animations tools are amazing. I really like the UV editing in Blender(I have no clue how it is in Maya) I actually prefer sculpting in Blender and equally use it for all retopo and normal baking. The grease pencil is very useful for modeling and creating curves.
Contours retopology by CGcookie is great(paid plugin), Decimate and/or Remesh get the job done if you know how to use them. Blender has a multiresolution modifer(which is like zbrush’s subdivision levels). F2(the plugin) is really useful. Many, many useful plugins from the community…
…like Bsurfaces… 
, it might seem awkward to use at first but it’s so powerful… I don’t understand why it’s not praised all over the internet. Although, it lacks documentation and the video for it… is well… I find the background music er… painful
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.64/Bsurfaces_1.5
As for performance I guess it depends on your system… For me Blender runs very smooth even on my crappy 7year old so its easy to work on my beast and then use blender on the go(just not for rendering lol).
It doesn’t look like you will have either fluids nor MEL scripting in Maya Lt, so it’s really a matter of tool preference and FBX convenience only. Asset creation is the real priority with your 3d tool so choose wisely based on what you create better in, not what offers the best FBX options.(which blender is getting better with despite the blender developers having to create workarounds) Autodesk is the real problem with FBX.
I’m still confused as to why Epic depend on it so much even though Maya/Max are the tools they use in-house, but that will change(ex. now added .obj support). It makes absolutely no sense as a multi-purpose, multi-platform and multi-user oriented game engine to depend so uniquely on a single proprietary format.
Anyway, you should try both Maya and Blender and find which one suits you better, which one do you feel more comfortable creating in.
Bsurfaces looks very powerful I am going to get that and you are right I had to fast forward through the video that music annoyed me.
Will it work with 2.71?
Yeah bsurfaces works in 2.71
I’m already using 2.71 RC2
by the way blender’s fbx exporter is getting better by the month! help with bug reports to make it better. is actively working on improving fbx export with blender.
No, it doesn’t ‘depend on your system’, that’s just unfactual.
My system is extremely fine, with a Athlon X3 3.2ghz cpu, 8 gb ram and a HD 7750 2gb gpu. There is no reason on earth, blender should slow down to the point of frustration on a tiny 57k mesh , is there ? It is why I don’t use blender for everyday use. It’s too slow here, period.
I also get HORRIBLE lag, when trying to change color on a material, and blender is the ONLY app , that does this. That should tell somebody something, no ?
Not even anim8tor or art of illusion, do this on my system, so I think this idea that blender is some magical app , is just nonsense.
I’m glad its free and open source as that helps those who can’t afford max or maya , but given autodesk is changing that model too, gives a lot of us great hope given that blender UI alone is mess. You can’t even go into quad view without needing to use a gnarly keypress combo, and don’t tell me about ‘n’ to get there…I shouldn’t have to keep open a crazy extra panel , just to go into quad view.
As I say, I’ts great blender exists for those who can’ afford max or maya and that’s many of us, but the devs have no clue about what makes for a solid UI, just none.
Even trying to open a new texture, has the ‘open’ button far below where it should be. Again, terribly poor d esigned UI.
And its been that way for ages, apparently no one cares to change it , and I"ve tried, but everytime I move it, its back on restarting the app, unless I save session . It should stay there, once I’ve moved it
Also , when I move preferences window, its SLOW, and I see black around the window.
Don’t tell me my system is ‘poor’, because that’s silly, as I can run games on max, and current ones like Diablo 3 and wow , so its def. NOT me As noted, blender is the only 3d app, that gives me any problem, whatsoever. It’s not me.
Max, maya, Houdini,they all work fine, no lag anywhere; its blender.
Even if it were my GPU, and I doubt it, how would I call AMD, and say hey, I have this ONE app , free open source, that causes lag in places it surely should not, so does this have any relation to your gpu ? They’d laugh at me, straight up. Not happening
Sorry if this sounds like blender bashing, but no, its factual, pure and simple, and me reminding people that if blender was that good, the kinks I experience would simply , not exist!
If 3d apps noted above can work without said kinks, why can’t blender
Maybe that’s why most companies default to non blender 3d apps…many of them have very similar experiences to mine.
cheers
nl
That’s a very one-sided view stated as absolutes. Let the people try and discover what is good for them.
You had a bad experience with Blender, you don’t like it. That’s ok.
No one said your system is poor, I don’t even know how you go that…
So if I speak up, to you, that’s me being ‘one sided’. You see, that’s another reason I have ‘issues’, with blender, as people like you have jaded opinions, when someone has the ‘audacity’ to speak up about things blender does badly.
Sorry, you are FAR too sensitive, it appears
When we live in a world, world a person can’t express their view , for fear it might stop ‘someone’ from trying a certain 3d app, is the day we all need to worry, a lot.
I don’t think you thought that one through, when you typed it
I didn’t have ‘a bad’ experience with blender entirely, its just enough for me to avoid it when possible. THe app is just written poorly, or it would not perform the way it does, on my high -end system. No excuses are needed, are they ?
Yes, the ‘poor’ system was inferred, when someone said ‘even their lowly laptop’ runs blender fine. I didn’t want to take the chance, that someone might see me , having a poor system , thereby having blender ‘issues’
I wasn’t imagining things
I really wish blender people would Lower their sensitivity scale, because its very unprofessional, and if you guys keep this up, the thread will likely be locked, and I"d not blame epic one bit for doing it. Its a sad day, when we can’t offer our opinions without someone thinking we are ‘one sided’. It’s my opinion, and just because you don’t like it, doesn’t mean I am jaded. I had valid reasons for offering my ‘input’. If that bothers you, you are in the wrong field.
If Im not trusted to be neutral, I can always post a video on youtube showing, where the slow downs occur. I"d be happy to do that, not that it’s going to change anything here…ya know…the lag, because if its a OGL issue/windows…good luck on that ?
cheers
nl