Blender lets you do displacement maps and even movie clips as textures so it can do some cool stuff. Maya has a more flexible material engine too but you rarely need the complexity it offers. This is quite flexible but I think you can attach IPOs to most things in Blender (even textures) though I haven’t done much of that yet so I can’t say for sure. Having said that, it’s easy to animate any attribute on any object in Maya. In Blender, you make a poly mesh and click subd - done. They might have updated this in Maya 6, though because I read they sped up subds by about 8 times, so that shows how crap it must have been. On the plus, Maya has more advanced NURBs tools than Blender but I hated NURBs because they were too difficult to work with anyway - subds are far better and Blender does these better than Maya because in Maya you have to manually make a subd proxy or convert to subds and this is slow even on low res models. At least if Blender has a bug, the developers will fix it or if you can program, you can do it yourself all for free. How do you fix it? Upgrade at your expense if they’ve even bothered to fix it. At least in version 5, if you type in the co-ordinates of a vertex in the channel box, the program quits - you have to do it the long way. The interface is cludgy (is that a word?) and it’s difficult to find stuff. Also, try getting terragen files into Maya or Renderman files out - very difficult. Because of this, all import/export and general plug-ins are system-dependant, rarely work and are impossible to fix. It uses MEL, a custom scripting language that is far less functional than Blender’s Python implementation. Handy sometimes but this means you have to learn when and when not to remove object history before animating. Not only that but it can maintain object history. For example, it supports n-sided polys and that causes a whole load of trouble. Also, Maya teaches you to be lazy and not follow good modelling practises. Blender is actually faster than Maya at doing most things (launching especially - Maya’s really designed for high-end machines) and it’s far easier to customize Blender. To sum up, the responses came up along the lines that Maya is good but if you’re a good enough artist/technical 3D person, you could get Blender to do the same. Then people got defensive saying I was assuming Blender was just a Maya wannabe, which wasn’t the case. I posted because I too wanted to know how good Blender was feature-wise when compared to Maya just because I’ve used a few other free 3D software apps and they tend to be fairly limited (like Sketchup and Cheetah3D - in fact I think they’re even shareware). From a personal view, I used Maya for a year before I took up Blender. Gees, it took ages for that SOB to die off :). Yeah, but pleeease don’t start it up again. blender post from osxrules… should be enough reading for a week!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |