Started using Blender 2.8 in April (Of Corse due to Corona lockdown) and been fascinated by it since then. I am a 3ds Max user from past 10 years and it’s been a hell a of ride learning Blender because of it’s UI and how it manages everything.
But I can assure you guys that – Blender is Awesome. It’s 100% free and found it to be more stable than 3ds Max. There are some short comings specially in modelling department (Really missed the 3ds Max’s Spline Tools) which can be somewhat neglected through change in modelling style but overall Blender’s modelling is solid.
UVW Unwrapping is on point and can easily be updated after few trials but if we compare it to 3ds Max Unwrap UVW Modifier’s ease of use it will seem somewhat lackluster. UVW Map Modifier is also heavily missed here.
If there is one expect of Blender that blew my mind, it will be – Cycles Rendering Engine. It’s ridiculously easy and produces photo realistic results out of the box. At first, I thought will take me many settings and tweaks to get Corona or Vray quality renders from Blender, but to my surprise it was super easy to get same quality renders from Cycles by only changing one or two settings.
Learning Blender is easy if you have patience and flexible pipeline. If we want Blender to behave like 3ds Max/ Maya, it’s possible by changing default keyboard shortcuts but I highly recommend not to do so because it will ruin the beauty of Blender’s UI which has already matured to do things really fast in its own way.
Below are my first interior render shots from Blender. This was a 3ds Max scene from “CGTrader BeInspiration 97 – Link for the which can be found at the end of the page” which I exported as FBX scene and imported the same in Blender for re texturing and creating all materials from scratch. As being primarily a lighting and texturing artist, I did not spend much time with modeling tools and rather tried my hands directly on ‘Principled BSDF’ and Cycles with already modeled scene.
Links – https://www.cgtrader.com/3d-models/interior/other/beinspiration-97
I will be posting my lighting and material workflow shortly.
Yes Blender is crazy, its free ad i can do actually everything with it. I hope it stays like that.