Advantages of Maya / Max / C4D / Zbrush over blender?

i never used an autodesk product. but i did use blender for 2 years and even done some freelance work with it.

the comparisons people make online are not sufficient to give us a clear picture on which software is superior.

i think the main advantage of blender is the versatility. you can make a 3d model,animate it,create backgrounds and textures with it, do photo touching and composition and even edit it or add effects. so its sort of a complete package in that sense.

the biggest advantage autodesk have other blender is compatibility and plugins. vray is superior to cycles and we haven't seen a tutorial that teaches people how to explore cycles abilities. with cycles its mostly self learning and trial n' error. you have tons of guides and tutorials on vray. and even complete guides in how to make production level renders with it, cycles doesn't have that yet. cycles also got its first uber shader just a month ago and we don't have a material library yet so its very young, but also very promising since its still being developed.

another advantage autodesk have other cycles is various plugins,FumeFX, Ornatrix,Multimesher etc.

that being said. blender have its fair share of plugins like hardops,archimesh,retopoflow etc

overall its very tight.
with autodesk you get better hardware support,better plugins,better functionality
with blender you get versatility,better customization and more tools out of the box

>cycles abilities
Maybe you should cycle back to the Blender Foundation
>versatility
Yes. Blender attempts to do everything and it does it extremely poorly
>plugins
Blender has a habit of changing APIs every single minor release, which breaks plugins and shows no respect for the developers of those plugins
>overall its very tight
No, it's not. People use Blender because it's free, not because it's good.

>>572893
you made some serious accusations here buddy. any evidence to what you claim?

>>572897
shame on me for thinking i'd get productive discussion on 4chan

>>572881
>Blender is still the only piece of software capable of GPU rendering
What a load of Bullshit!
Octane, Redshift, VrayRT, Thea, Indigo ... there are a lot of GPU renders available.


The character animation/rigging tools available in Maya are top of the line and Blender can't compare.
75% of all characters and creatures rendered in a Hollywood or TV movie is done by Maya. Maya can do it, and is doing it since 2000.
The list of features it has and Blender hasn't is probably 3 pages long.
Same with Max in regards to modelling, same for ZBrush in regards to sculpting....C4d is just really good for Mograph, Jingles, advertising stuff, title sequences, stuff like that.
For VFX its Houdini which puts all others in the backseat even though Maya and Max can do some serious simulation shit.

Blender is not bad, its a great generalist program which lets you do a lot of stuff really fast and easy, its just not really great for high end stuff, but it gets better. For 85% of jobs and artists it might be good enough to get the job done, its the 15% which has the people arguing. If you work in that 15% area Blender might not be suitable alone.

Modern Workflow is mostly using highly specialized tools for each discipline: Zbrush (sculpting),Maya(retopo, rigging, animation) Substance or Mari (textures/shaders) Houdini (simulations/VFX) Clarisse or Katana (lighting and rendering), Nuke (compositing/ post-VFX/ editing).

Blender can't compete with these highly specialized programs. Zbrush can push hundred Millions of Poly's. Mari does 32K resolution UDIM textures, Houdini can do EVERYTHING imaginable, Clarisse and Katana can render Trillions of Polys, Nuke can do deep composition with IMAX resolution. Etc.....

>>572897
The evidence is Blender itself

>>572900
the results are comparable

>>572899
>Blender can't compete with these highly specialized programs.
neither does autokek.

>>572902
Not in terms of time and effort. That may not matter to an hobbyist, but those are key things in business.
Also, I suspect Blender people have an habit of doing things in Maya and then importing them into Blender as late as possible in process, and then claiming everything was done in Blender.

>>572904
modeling in blender is quite fast, the animation part of it is a little tricky but after seeing maya motion strip editor it might not be the case anymore.
>I suspect Blender people have an habit of doing things in Maya and then importing them into Blender as late as possible in process

people do that with zbrush, but not with maya. the most ill believe to is people using vray over cycles. but your theory is comparable to flat earth theory. blender can do IK's and control pads since the 90's i believe. i don't think there is really a need to involve maya in the process

>>572899
You're confusing REYES renderers with true ray-tracers. Renderman and derivatives do things the same way opengl does, which means they are fast but global illumination has to be faked. That's not a problem if you own a room or two full of underpaid indian guys who do nothing but carefully place hundreds of little point light sources for you in your scenes.

>>572904
At least some areas where I know for sure some of those top blender guys cheat : Materials and textures done in substance designe/painter and later claimed to be done in Blender, sculpting done in zbrush, rendering done in various programs and claimed as Cycles. The thing is Blender has a pretty large community that is also very impressionable(because it's comprised mostly of amateurs) so people tend to see it as a niche that can make them money. A mediocre artist like Reynante Martinez, for example, can gain a lot more popularity and more exposure to sell his products among blender fanboys. I really doubt he would have the same success in a autodesk community that is chock full of professionals.

>>572909
that is next level paranoia right there.
you want to hate blender so much that your mind is telling stories to itself.
blender artists showcase page have over 1000 pages of random works from all over the globe. what makes you think people use your outdated shiteater program called maya for everything

>>572899

I suspected this might be the case, 'Jack of all trades master of none' type situation. Thanks for the insight!

I have noticed that Blender's animation tools are -suffucient- but they do leave quite a few things to be desired, and I've not given Maya anything beyond looking up basics on youtube.

>>572911
>what makes you think people use ... maya for everything
The fact that Autodesk are very expensive and they're still in business after 30 something years?
Blender on the other hand is free because IT FAILED AS COMMERCIAL PRODUCT, then it got released for free.

>>572919
because maya was the only option.
basically the only reason blender exists is because maya license at the time was 12000$ and it was literally cheaper to develop another 3D software then to get maya.
at some point blender got released to the public and people started working on it. it survived on donation money for a long time now.
look where we at now. we are evolving fast. we have a few movies under our belt and even some VFX (mad max,hardcore henry,man in the white castle,history channel)

>all this bs in a single thread
I will give out one trade secret,its called git gud.

>>572900
How the fuck is this an argument? It's the same as going
>water is poisonous
>what's you evidence anon
>water is the evidence

Oh just fuck off already with blindly shitting for no good reason. Shits turning into a fucking meme

>hur dur blender is bad because is free hur

>>572903
true, but they are still right in the middle of the pipeline.
>>572904
why?
>>572906
You are the confused one. Neither did i mention Reyes (which is outdated and not part of actual Renderman version) nor are these GPU renderers unable to do brute force path tracing.

>>572909
I don't know about people who pretend/cheat, but like i mentioned earlier, it is absolutely normal in the industry to mix and match various programs.
Whatever fits best. That itself is not cheating, its simply being efficient. Pretending it was all done in Blender when it was not is a different thing.

>>572924
Here's the reason. The reason is dishonesty. The Blender Foundation shills go everywhere and tell people: "Hey, look it's not Blender's fault, it's just that you didn't watch enough tutorials!" when it's obviosly Blender's fault. Then they show short movies as evidence that Blender is good, but they conveniently forget to credit the extensive amount of commercial software and external expertise they've used on top of Blender to achieve those not-even-that-good results. This leads people into endless circles, turning their time into nothing. And I could go on, and I will go on.

>>572930
>you didn't watch enough tutorials!
that's about right. 99% of the questions in this board can be solved by just watching some tutorials.
you even have step by step tutorials to entire scenes and characters. the question is, do you want to invest time in the program and make art. or you want to be a big baby and champion autodesk because you had bad experience with blender.
90% of the people that complain about blender do it because they are just lazy. the other 10% have justified complaints that might require a third-party software or an additional plugin

>>572909
You do realize that the people who do use ZBrush and Substance in conjunction with Blender actually do point out when they used those programs, right?

>>572932
Thank you so much for proving me right and so quickly.

>>572937
you are actually wrong. blender was never a commercial software.
i just didn't point that out because you might pretending to be stupid

>>572940
>blender was never a commercial software
Ask them.

>>572945
stop baiting kid. go watch youtube or something

>>572881
>>>/3/
>>>/3/
>>>/3/

you'd get better answers there

>>572881
>What are some straight-up functional advantages of the more 'mature' 3d software when compared to Blender?
nothing.

the tools are the same.

>>572906
lmao reyes hasn't been used for years

its ris dude, and even reyes was still a path tracer

>>572881
these threads should be banned

as an end-user client blender is undoubtedly lacking some things in the ways of optimization and sensibility. however, due to its open-source nature, and the fact that you can control most aspects of the program with an interpreted language(vs maya where, to my knowledge, python is much more limited), blender may be stronger in many ways than any other 3d package by a longshot.

however, i think blender likely falls short in terms of rendering capability regardless of your programming expertise. unlike modellling features and scripting, rendering techniques require a huge amount of effort to implement, optimize, etc, and unlike most of its other features blender's renderer is not something you can easily pull apart and fix(at least, not me).

so, i would say so long as you can do introductory college-level calculus and can write in python, there is virtually no advantage or perhaps blender is considerably stronger than many other packages(again, in certain aspects such as modelling, rigging, or animation only) simply because of the freedom you have in scripting. it's when it comes to more technically demanding aspects of 3d like zbrush's ability to hold massive amounts of polygons and especially rendering in general that blender is likely to break down. still, even then, if you're a good enough programmer it may be better just because of the fact that you can open it up and fix it yourself when something goes wrong.

as far as rendering goes, though, blender may only be rivaled by 3dsmax's pencil when it comes to NPR rendering, so if that's your thing and you can program blender may be your best choice. but i think most of the time when working professionally you're going to have to plan for everything to end up in a better renderer.

>>572881
I am surprised no one has brought up Cinema4D which is woefully underatted in my opinion. I have a few things I like about C4D over Blender easily.

>Photoshop like UI

Basically it has a heirarchy system like photoshop where everything you have is on the right and when you click an object you can choose how much you want to edit and move etc by a few clicks and it is really simple. You can even duplicate and create complex imagery by a few clicks by cloners etc. It's based on simplicity.

Blenders huge blunder to me is how cumbersome the right side is to find and to search. It's not really easy to understand and feels not that simple. It has all the options but it's not easy to see and manipulate at all you do not know which is which and it's just overloaded and crammed on the right. It's not easy to look and understand. You may see it as not a problem but it is to a entry user who needs that simplicity to lock themselves in.

>Tons of shaders and better renders

Cinema4D has a lot of shaders you can make for objects, and does allow you to also create normal maps. Blender barely has SSS and shaders that can make lifelike objects like bubbles, rusted metal, and although I do like Blenders version of cell Shading which is it's holy Grail that makes it attractive it still woefully lacks options and more ways to utilize this like sketch and toon does for Cinema4D which you can make cell Shading in different ways and tweak etc.

On top of this, Cinema4D has much more control over the render at the end and although it is a bit slower than Blender you can not deny the high quality it produces by the end of it.

>Objects, buildings are easy to make

This to me is the important X factor that Cinema4D has as everything is just hold click + shortcut drag in and drag out etc which is basically a 3 step process and is much more efficient. Other 3D programs have similar but it's not so slick and easy to create objects.

>>573038
>you can control most aspects of the program with an interpreted language
You have to know Python quite well to be able to make anything useful with the horrible and ever changing API Blender provides. But you're right. You could potentially do many thing in Blender, you just can't in practice.
>>573214
Anything compared to Blender shines.

>>573214
everything you wrote about shaders is wrong

>>572932
>90% of people that criticize blender is because they are lazy

Lol why blame the user, if people are having a problem with creating anything on Blender than Blender needs to address it and start making it easier to use. It's not about tutorials make it easy, it's just that the program is not easy to use. I have legitimate problems with it not being easy to use and it needing plugins or set things to begin starting out. I do not see Autodesk and Cinema4D having these problems.

>>573217
i don't understand this oogabooga argument. what are you trying to say?
iv been using blender for 2 years and i never used a plugin.
in the blender questions thread. most of the solutions i write are mostly stuff that i google, its not like i know everything in blender

>>573218
There are plugins that are free which Blender has been lazy to implement. One of which Blender Guru discussed as Blender's lighting and reflection that was worse than Autodesk, Cinema4D and others someone made a better version that blows everything away with realistic lighting and absolutely does a great job, Blender did say they would implement this in their program but I have yet to hear them announce it.

There also is a issue with colors and color blends which a plugin was made called Kaleidoscope which creates richer colors and has a huge color gamut. Again Blender has not implemented it.

Also I will say installing plugins is painful on Blender than it is on Cinema4D. On Cinema4D you just put it in the plugin folder and it scans it and it's done. I tried putting Kaleidoscope in along with the lighting it has conflict errors and it took awhile to fix. Not a fun experience.

I do use Google but if you have to use it for anything like finding plugins all day it would be much better to use a better program.

File: download.jpg (368KB, 1920x1080px) Image search: [Google]

368KB, 1920x1080px

>>573220
im not sure what you are talking about but ill try to explain my angle

first of all Kaleidoscope is simply a tool that saves you color palette and suggest which colors are needed for highlights and shadows. it has nothing to do with the range of colors that you can use.
"the more accurate to the real world" is just a joke, you fell for the marketing scheme of this shady indian guy. blender have the same palette as photoshop and any other program.

>Blender's lighting and reflection that was worse than Autodesk
you mean Vray, not autodesk. yes i will agree that vray have better algorithm for caustics, but that's barely used. and as for the lightning. im not sure on how true that statement is. lightning is an art on its own and its takes alot of time to get right. you can't just slap a GI and lamp and call it a day. most likely your scene will look terrible.
the lightning aspect of cycles is debatable but pic related this was made with cycles and CMV (just 1 plugin). proves that cycles works well in the right hands

>>573223
>Lighting is a art on it's own and takes a lot of time.

You are right about this. Lighting is an art but making sure the lighting you put in is as accurate as possible is important as well.

https://youtu.be/m9AT7H4GGrA

This is a video for you and the one I would recommend watching for Blenders problems on lighting.

>>573225
i already know about filmic and DR
the original filmic in cycles have a lightning range that stops at some value and filmic lets you get much higher values of light.
but all in all. its just a composition trick since you can change it after you render your scene. it has nothing to do with the internals of the render engine

>>573226
>Composition trick
>Blender intends to add it

The problem is Blender is bad that it needs to add this.

>>573229
people did just fine before it was implemented.
look, if you are good with C4d just use that. but don't spout out nonesense like with that color addon shit and how everything else is superior. i just posted an image that is expertly lit and none of the c4d users in this board could replicate

>>573230
>people did just fine before it was implemented.
People might not have complained, but that's only because there were people out there who knew what they were doing.

Most users like myself had issues with images looking darker than what other programs used. Regardless of lighting situation.

>>573220
>Also I will say installing plugins is painful on Blender than it is on Cinema4D.
It might be because I used this program for a long time, but I don't have much of an issue when it comes to installing plugins and addons in Blender.