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I've heard that Maya and 3ds max are miles ahead when it comes to the actual manipulating of 3d objects and that Blender essentially has a steep learning curve

I've heard that Maya and 3ds max are miles ahead when it comes to the actual manipulating of 3d objects and that Blender essentially has a steep learning curve compared to those two. That someone who has experience with Maya or 3ds has a lot harder time learning Blender than vice versa.

DiThi 10y ago
I know many examples of the opposite (Blender users that have a hard time using Max/Maya). You probably heard years ago. Blender has changed _a lot_ in the last 10 years.
agumonkey 10y ago
I've used most animation packages (xsi, maya, 3ds, lightwave, modo, houdini) in the early 2000s and blender (old and new UI) threw me off constantly. I understand learning curves (I love both vi and emacs to bits) but still. It was so foreign. It's now in GIMP's bag of thousands papercuts.
- jharger 10y ago
  Have you used Blender since around 2011ish? That was when 2.5x was released, which completely changed the interface. It took me a little while to re-learn it, but it's been much better since then.
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    I think I tried 2.52, but I wasn't interested in it enough to RTFM. The UI revamp was significant and you could feel at home much earlier.
  - psyc 10y ago
    I use Blender regularly, and it's fine now that I've submitted fully to its hostile interface. It must have been truly god-awful back then. I can work with it pretty fast now, but I still consider the entire interface perverse and rife with user-hostility, in a big-picture sense.
projektir 10y ago
Or compare it to Silo, probably my favorite simple modeler. The user interface has scared me off Blender immediately.
Keyframe 10y ago
I've used them all. And I mean all - from early 90's onwards. 3D DCC apps settled on a common UI patterns in the early 2000's. Blender isn't among them. Years, heck now it's decades, of different operating systems, computer architectures, applications and Blender still baffles me. It's not like I'm not open to learning new and radical UIs. Take Zbrush for example. It's completely foreign, but you can power through it and be done. There's something about Blender that makes this hard, and I can't explain why.
- DiThi 10y ago
  > Take Zbrush for example. It's completely foreign, but you can power through it and be done. There's something about Blender that makes this hard, and I can't explain why. It's quite the opposite to me. Blender has sensible names (object, mesh, scene) and a few somewhat weird ones (armature for skeleton, shape keys for morph targets). You can search any action with space bar. You can customize keys and set left click as default for selection. With zbrush I couldn't figure out. "Subtool" still baffles me. I use a AHK script to make it manageable. Sometimes I don't know what's going on (why can't I edit?) and I don't have a log of actions (like blender) to help me figure that out. The thing I hate the most about zbrush, though, is not the UI, but the lack of poly group names (changing randomly if you add/remove one) and the fact that is completely impossible to export/import more than one paint layer at a time.
  - wtetzner 10y ago
    "armature" is what they call the skeleton in stop-motion puppets.
    - DiThi 10y ago
      Good to know, thanks.
parenthephobia 10y ago
Blender's biggest weakness compared to 3DS Max, IMO, is the relative lack of non-destructive editing options. Specifically, Max unifies (many) editing operations on the modifier stack. An object is the result of a sequence of operations on meshes/paths/patches/etc, from a root creation facility. In Max you can take a torus, say, apply materials, move it about, distort the mesh, apply physics settings, and then go back to the first modifier and change the torus' inner radius. In Blender, although you can parametrically create a torus with the same options as in Max and customize those settings immediately afterwards, once you edit the created mesh in any way - or even just select another object - you can't edit those settings any more: it becomes "just a mesh". Max has mesh editing as a stage in the modifier stack (it also has Blender-style "real" mesh editing). You can layer multiple mesh edits on top of each other and toggle each off or whatever you like. Blender can do the same thing, but as shape keys. Both applications can make the same edits to a mesh, but in Blender they can't apply at different points in the modifier stack: they're all effectively applied before all the actual modifiers.
- mikebelanger 10y ago
  Non-destructive editing is overrated imho. In fact, one of the reasons I used Blender to model instead of Maya was its destructive editing features. Even though I had a full, legal access to a Maya workstation through college, I preferred Blender. I found that most of the time, Maya's construction history was more of a hindrance, and if your scene file started acting funny for a reason you couldn't figure out, you just had to delete all the construction history. For this reason, working in Maya always felt a little precarious, and Blender's relatively crude modifier stack felt more predictable. Now, I was doing 3d, cartoony animation when I was working in Maya, and one could argue that non-destructive tools aren't that applicable to that context anyways. Fair enough -- if you need to change the inner radius of a torus after you've distorted the whole torus, Blender has a fairly mature add-on called sverchok: https://github.com/nortikin/sverchok https://github.com/nortikin/sverchok
ino 10y ago
I'm very experienced in 3ds max (20 years) and I've tried to adapt to blender some 15 times and it's not for me. Max is just more intuitive, which is a shame because I'd rather work on linux or osx than windows. Similarly I use Sublime Text and I've tried vim some 10 times and it's also not for me.
- khedoros1 10y ago
  I love vim, and I love Blender, and I've been using Blender on and off at a hobbyist level for about 15 years now. I hadn't made the connection before, but I suppose they do have certain modes of thought in common. Both have a pretty bad learning curve, but I really enjoy all that you can do with them after learning. I also used 3DS Max around version 4 for a class. The UI was more intuitive, and I felt like it would be comparatively painless to learn to do some impressive things relatively quickly...but doing 3D work as a hobbyist, and not one with much money when I was the most interested, Blender became my default. Gmax was pretty cool too, but at the time I was more interested in making pretty renders on a Linux machine, and less interested in creating game content on a Windows machine.

DiThi 10y ago

I know many examples of the opposite (Blender users that have a hard time using Max/Maya). You probably heard years ago. Blender has changed _a lot_ in the last 10 years.

agumonkey 10y ago

I've used most animation packages (xsi, maya, 3ds, lightwave, modo, houdini) in the early 2000s and blender (old and new UI) threw me off constantly. I understand learning curves (I love both vi and emacs to bits) but still. It was so foreign. It's now in GIMP's bag of thousands papercuts.

jharger 10y ago
Have you used Blender since around 2011ish? That was when 2.5x was released, which completely changed the interface. It took me a little while to re-learn it, but it's been much better since then.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  I think I tried 2.52, but I wasn't interested in it enough to RTFM. The UI revamp was significant and you could feel at home much earlier.
- psyc 10y ago
  I use Blender regularly, and it's fine now that I've submitted fully to its hostile interface. It must have been truly god-awful back then. I can work with it pretty fast now, but I still consider the entire interface perverse and rife with user-hostility, in a big-picture sense.

projektir 10y ago

Or compare it to Silo, probably my favorite simple modeler. The user interface has scared me off Blender immediately.

Keyframe 10y ago

I've used them all. And I mean all - from early 90's onwards. 3D DCC apps settled on a common UI patterns in the early 2000's. Blender isn't among them. Years, heck now it's decades, of different operating systems, computer architectures, applications and Blender still baffles me. It's not like I'm not open to learning new and radical UIs. Take Zbrush for example. It's completely foreign, but you can power through it and be done. There's something about Blender that makes this hard, and I can't explain why.

DiThi 10y ago
> Take Zbrush for example. It's completely foreign, but you can power through it and be done. There's something about Blender that makes this hard, and I can't explain why. It's quite the opposite to me. Blender has sensible names (object, mesh, scene) and a few somewhat weird ones (armature for skeleton, shape keys for morph targets). You can search any action with space bar. You can customize keys and set left click as default for selection. With zbrush I couldn't figure out. "Subtool" still baffles me. I use a AHK script to make it manageable. Sometimes I don't know what's going on (why can't I edit?) and I don't have a log of actions (like blender) to help me figure that out. The thing I hate the most about zbrush, though, is not the UI, but the lack of poly group names (changing randomly if you add/remove one) and the fact that is completely impossible to export/import more than one paint layer at a time.
- wtetzner 10y ago
  "armature" is what they call the skeleton in stop-motion puppets.
  - DiThi 10y ago
    Good to know, thanks.

parenthephobia 10y ago

Blender's biggest weakness compared to 3DS Max, IMO, is the relative lack of non-destructive editing options. Specifically, Max unifies (many) editing operations on the modifier stack. An object is the result of a sequence of operations on meshes/paths/patches/etc, from a root creation facility. In Max you can take a torus, say, apply materials, move it about, distort the mesh, apply physics settings, and then go back to the first modifier and change the torus' inner radius. In Blender, although you can parametrically create a torus with the same options as in Max and customize those settings immediately afterwards, once you edit the created mesh in any way - or even just select another object - you can't edit those settings any more: it becomes "just a mesh". Max has mesh editing as a stage in the modifier stack (it also has Blender-style "real" mesh editing). You can layer multiple mesh edits on top of each other and toggle each off or whatever you like. Blender can do the same thing, but as shape keys. Both applications can make the same edits to a mesh, but in Blender they can't apply at different points in the modifier stack: they're all effectively applied before all the actual modifiers.

mikebelanger 10y ago
Non-destructive editing is overrated imho. In fact, one of the reasons I used Blender to model instead of Maya was its destructive editing features. Even though I had a full, legal access to a Maya workstation through college, I preferred Blender. I found that most of the time, Maya's construction history was more of a hindrance, and if your scene file started acting funny for a reason you couldn't figure out, you just had to delete all the construction history. For this reason, working in Maya always felt a little precarious, and Blender's relatively crude modifier stack felt more predictable. Now, I was doing 3d, cartoony animation when I was working in Maya, and one could argue that non-destructive tools aren't that applicable to that context anyways. Fair enough -- if you need to change the inner radius of a torus after you've distorted the whole torus, Blender has a fairly mature add-on called sverchok: https://github.com/nortikin/sverchok https://github.com/nortikin/sverchok

ino 10y ago

I'm very experienced in 3ds max (20 years) and I've tried to adapt to blender some 15 times and it's not for me. Max is just more intuitive, which is a shame because I'd rather work on linux or osx than windows. Similarly I use Sublime Text and I've tried vim some 10 times and it's also not for me.

khedoros1 10y ago
I love vim, and I love Blender, and I've been using Blender on and off at a hobbyist level for about 15 years now. I hadn't made the connection before, but I suppose they do have certain modes of thought in common. Both have a pretty bad learning curve, but I really enjoy all that you can do with them after learning. I also used 3DS Max around version 4 for a class. The UI was more intuitive, and I felt like it would be comparatively painless to learn to do some impressive things relatively quickly...but doing 3D work as a hobbyist, and not one with much money when I was the most interested, Blender became my default. Gmax was pretty cool too, but at the time I was more interested in making pretty renders on a Linux machine, and less interested in creating game content on a Windows machine.