How viable are low priced subscription software like Modo Indie

>>555917

Honestly, just look up the limitations of each software (ie what the full versions don't offer) and make a decision based upon what you think best suits you. This is seriously just another, "wuts the best software" thread.

In my opinion, don't weigh in the "lite" software versus Blender. Either go all in, or don't go in at all.

By all means demo the software and learn it first though..

you should get both if you care about convenience and ease of use

>>555917

First of all, there's no reason to use the gimped versions; just get the full versions under a Student trial thing, you don't even need an .edu address for Autodesk

Second, if you actually generate any revenue (such as from kickstarter), you can use that money to purchase license(s) and write it off as a business expense.

If you never go anywhere with your game, you can at least add it to your portfolio, and if you ever end up working for another studio, they'll buy you a license (assuming they aren't also stealing, which they likely are).

Reasons to use Blender at all:

It's light weight so it runs well on old hardware or a laptop, it's never going to jew you with DRM, it's an all-in-one package and extremely powerful

However, all the default settings on just about everything are garbage, and it'll take a long time to learn how to use it properly to get good or great results (whereas Maya et al will give you "good" results out of the box), however ALL software takes a long time and a lot of learning before you get truly "great" results, and all software requires you to ultimately tweak the defaults

If you want to see what Blender can do, look up Gleb Alexandrov on ArtStation

>>556064
If you're going to generate revenue you might as well pirate it. No obvious student/edu license tags or comments in your files. But the problem with Autodesk is that they don't have permanent licenses anymore, just subscription plans that jew you up the ass. Might as well pirate modo and use it until you can get the real license.

>>555917
Blender is a fully featured modeling program on par with Modo and Maya for the most part. The hard part is getting used to the unintuitive UI but once you do that it can do almost everything you want, though it may have some quirks here and there. Memorizing a few shortcuts alone can get you into it easily, it's just a few hours of practicing.

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Just roll with Blender senpai. You're ALWAYS going to be looking at shiny software, comparing features. It's fun! But Blender will always be free, and yes, it's 100% fully featured and really fast when you learn them hotkeys.

Looking at the limitations of Modo Indie, compared to the full thing it's great if you're just making games.

The only questionable limitation is the inability to run any scripts. But you might not need it for just games.

And the 100k poly limit but that's basically more than you'll need if you're an indie developer, or for most developers really. Sounds like they just don't want it to be used for film assets.

>>556065
>If you're going to generate revenue you might as well pirate it
What makes you think you can get away with it if you're successful?

>>556064

this is a very good reply. thank you anon.

>>556065
i used to think employers don't give a shit about using something like blender, but i asked around a few times and they seem to care alot. regardless of your skill level

>>556147
Because his entire idea is doing it until he can afford to buy the real deal. And abusing the student license is just as bad and is more susceptible to getting caught.

Anyway, I don't advocate piracy, I'm just saying it's less likely to get you caught than cheating on the terms of the student licenses. I actually use blender you know, rather than giving money to jews who want to pilfer people's wallets while giving garbage support.

>>556064
I've been using Maya for a while and never tried blender. What exactly do people mean when they say it's not good out of the box? What is it that needs tweaking?

>>556275
>render settings are garbage, for example caustics and other crap is turned on that adds noise and is not needed 90% of the time
>cycles shaders are dogshit. you can do sweet stuff in cycles but you need to make a library of good materials or download a package of good ones like i did
>the viewport shading is not that good, its very dark
>baking is a fucking mess. i suggest they should make a wizard menu for baking just like any other program on earth
>camera controls are great once you get the hang of it. but none of the good stuff is enabled by default
>some good plugins are disabled for no reason
>smoothing options is all over the place
>composition is all over the place

>>556279
thanks for the heads up. i'm gonna make sure to set it up properly when i give it a go.

>>556279
>>camera controls are great once you get the hang of it. but none of the good stuff is enabled by default
What good stuff is disabled by default?

>>556275
the default control scheme is fucking right click to select, if that's any indicator of how fucked up default blender is.

>>556279
This is why you ditch Cycles and use Luxrender.

>>556408
lux isn't gonna make pretty images for you, you have to make them yourself.
on the subject, lux have better materials but not that good that i would switch the entire render for

>>555917
To freelancers and small projects and things like that you can go with blender, on the other hand you should know how to work with industry standar programs in order to being able to apply 4 jobs being able to work in big projects and things like that

>>556464
Keep talking out of your ass you fucking moron, I know for a fact that cdpR uses blender in its animation pipeline.

So edgy repeating outdated memes out of your mom's basement huh.

>>556469
come back when Seedy Project Red makes something other than worse Assassins creed clones ok kid

>>556469
>cdpR
?
sounds like a quake player, who is this literal who?

>>556471
some cookie cutter europeen AA studio

>>556469
>1 (one) studio uses blender
>no need to know anything else

It can never hurt to know at least the basics of any program widely used in the industry

>>556065
Actually blender is missing a lot of shit. I only use blender and the particle/smoke/fluid simulations are just there. Mocap is hard as shit too.

>>556631
>Actually blender is missing a lot of shit
Like what?

People always say shit like this without backing it up.

>>556658
They are just memeing.
Get to work,modeling is modeling the program dont matter.
If you have the skill you can pull it off on any platform anything else is excuses.

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>>556664
nobody talked about pure modelling my satanic friend.
Blender sucks as VFX tool. Try to blow some stuff up or flood something and you'll see how Blender is missing a lot of stuff.
Or to put it more bluntly, the tools are there, they are just shit and unusable for more complex stuff.

Also Light linking, AOV passes, shadow catcher, illumination in the viewport, Openvdb, ... i could come up with more if my brain would work better.

I also use Blender every day, so i am not a hater, but i am also not blind to its flaws, faults and missing features.

>>556673
looks really CG. Tell me that was made in blender?

>>556674
No it wasn't. This is already way above what Blender can archive.
Its just an example i picked randomly.

>>556683
Looks awful.

>>556684
Now imagine how it would look like if it was made in Blender.

>>556686
I blame those autistic Blender movies and Ton for this

>>556658
Modifiers on subselections, a lot of modifiers that could be useful, parameters when creating objects, always accessible transformation parameters for moving and scaling stuff at a specific value, etc

Sure, you can get around those or bring them up with autistic hotkeying but fact is it's not comparable to professional stuff as far as the workflow is concerned.

>>556471

How do you not know who CD Projekt RED are? They made the Witcher games.

>>556600
Epic also uses Blender (or lets one of their extremely talented artists use it)

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>>555917
Modeling+Texture artist here.
(Not professional)
I came from a Maya background and wanted something better for modeling and got tired of cracking maya and prolly would never be able to afford, and alot of people say trying to get stuff done in maya is trying to "fight" it to do stuff right.

Modo indie had a steep learning curve, but the modeling is much better. I've never touched the animation tools in Modo, and if I need to animate something, I do it in maya.

I'm accustomed to vanilla modo and it's great for modeling, UVs, and Baking.

retopologizing is easier in modo compared to Maya as well, but neither beat 3d-coat ($99). And 3d-Coat sculpting is also great.

In the pic, the first robot I made is in the BG, and was made in maya.
The FG robot was done afterwards in modo while trying to learn it. Modo robot is much better.

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>>556838
>Epic also uses Blender (or lets one of their extremely talented artists use it)
[Citation Needed]

I've always know their process to be zbrush for sculpting and Max for game res modeling.

I know blizzard uses Modo for modeling, and pretty much everyone (Including Epic) uses Maya for animating, and 3d-coat for the warcraft cartoony style of painting on a model (not sure if substance painter has taken over that role).

>>557304
both look like shit bro

>>557304

Because every single fucking edge needs wear.

>>557304
Is modo indie really worth it without scripting?

>>557325
I'd say so.
Compared to maya.

>But scripts make _______ better!
Tthat's said of every 3d program.

The models I make are game res (like in the pic) so for high poly modeling, Retopologizing, UV mapping, then baking, normals, AOs, and Color ID masks, Modo is GREAT!

>>557330
How would you compare it to Max?

>>557332
I've never used max, but in college, majoring in animation, the consensus as maya was best for Animation, and Max for modeling.
-Probably why I wanted more out of maya's modeling tools.

This was around 2005-2008.

Since then, the consensus is that after Autodesk acquired Maya, Max has been getting left behind. You can find feedback like that all over the internet, even /3/ the past few years.

Anyway, check these out:
>posting to polycount

http://polycount.com/discussion/138301/max-vs-modo

http://polycount.com/discussion/145407/max-to-modo-is-it-a-good-idea

http://polycount.com/discussion/177293/modo-maya-max

As a hobby, go with blender (free) or modo indie (one time payment), as opposed to the monthly subscriptions for max or maya.

But if you're ok with pirating every new release every year, go with something from autodesk.

>>557334
I should add, one more neat thing about modo is you can set your navigation style to match Maya, or Max, and other programs.

Its default navigation is crazy.

As a former maya user, I set it's controls to be like Maya, and I'm good!

>>557334
>As a hobby, go with blender (free) or modo indie (one time payment), as opposed to the monthly subscriptions for max or maya.
>But if you're ok with pirating every new release every year, go with something from autodesk.

I'm using blender and I used Max as a student.

I'm thinking about trying the 1 month subscription for Modo and Mari indie on Steam.

That thing about Foundry's programs spying on you is kinda scary though. I don't pirate any software there are some tutorials on my pc...

>>556066
damn that image looks nice

>>557338
>That thing about Foundry's programs spying on you is kinda scary though.

You mean checking to see if your license is legit?

>>557340
Someone on /3/ said Foundry sued some guy for 195k after spying on him to find out he had pirated some of their software. It's one of the other threads.

>>557306
>[Citation Needed]

I'm too lazy to google it for you right now, but the reddit moderator of the official UE subreddit is that artist and has talked about it and has written tools / worked with the community to improve the blender -> UE pipeline

I guess I'll ask this here since lack of python scripts seems to be one of the major drawbacks of Maya Lt.....

What would I miss out on without python? I've only really used it to do simple shit while animating. Are there any significant uses that would be hard to live without?

>>557346
IIRC, the most popular story is some guy on CG society got a warning from the foundry via email because they discovered he was using pirated software. What actually happeneed, is he was letting two others use his wi-fi, and THEY had the pirated software.

>>557352
I can believe this. Back when the unreal tournament "pre-alpha" forums were really active, someone posted a gun tutorial, and when I tried it, the y-axis was messed up for Maya (I wasn't using Modo yet). I thought he posted a blender tutorial because they assumed the fans cannot afford the mainstream packages.

>>557338
>I'm thinking about trying the 1 month subscription for Modo and Mari indie on Steam.
That's how I got hooked on modo after one month.
:)

>>557306
Epic games donated around 10,000 to blender for them to improve their fbx exporting pipeline from blender to ue4. If they weren't already using their software they sure as hell are now.

>>557306
>I've become a Blender fan over the past few years after being introduced to it at Naughty Dog. I've been using it regularly ever since so along with the Naughty Dog testing, it has officially touched Call of Duty:Ghosts, Battlefield 4, Hardline and I'm pretty much using it daily here at Epic Games. Now I'm probably the only artist using it but it integrates very well into a AAA pipeline and I've never heard a complaint other than the tools guys saying they wouldn't support it (too much work to support one artist). The community is amazing... to the point that I had a guy in Germany write my tools for exporting to Radiant on CoD. That exporter worked better than the in-house version (Maya) because it kept the UVs between 0-1 where Maya would throw those things all over the place.

>So the answer to your question is that it doesn't matter. If you like Blender, you're fine.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/51ocwd/do_professional_3d_modelers_use_blender_does_it/

TomTom_Attack aka @TomTomAttack on twitter aka Tom Wright, Senior Tech Artist at Epic.

>>557671
It was 10,000 euros