Lost in Sculptie Hell

So Jaynessa, did you have any luck with AC3D?

Since I am a glutton for punishment (and cheap as hell) I decided to go with Blender. I am working my way through the tutorials now. Any tips out there.,...pray for me.

WHY! Of all the 3d systems that are cheap or free did you choose Blender.
Oh well. Perhaps you are one of those that can handle the GUI insanity it is. As for the tips they are about. Search for them.

One man's insanity is another's enlightenment. One of the reasons I prefer Blender's GUI is because of a bone I broke in a rollerblading accident. It set funny and puts extra pressure on my mouse hand wrist which gives me real pain with some GUIs. So when I say Blender's approach is more painless than others I really mean it. It was designed by artists to use all day everyday and things like RSI are considered. Sure it's different, but it's not insane, quite the opposite IMHO.

Jaynessa, I'd recommend going through the Blender introductory tutorials at http://blenderunderground.com first.

That'll show you all you need to know to follow the sculptie tutorials /8/ab/210627/1.html

http://walkercreations.org/blender.html has a great collection if you get addicted to Blender tutorials and want to go further than sculpties

Thank you Domino, I am doing just that. Thunder sometimes a challange is a good thing...this is almost as exciting (but a bit more frustrating) as learning clothing design. Difference is....I didn't have to pay for this program like I did Photoshop.

Well, that is good. As I said there is a small subsect of people who can manage blender. I work with computers so this type of UI would have got someone the boot. Its that bad to me. But It exists and people use it. I am glad it gives you less pain.
Jaynessa, challenge is good. Having to use killtask to shut down the program isn't. There are certain every good Windows program designer does. That isn't it. Oh well. enjoy.

That "small subsect" is enough to make Blender the most popular animation package.

http://www.blendernation.com/2007/06/04/blender-no1-animation-packaged-based-on-number-of-installed-copies/

Even allowing for people like you who hated it and then uninstalled it, there's a long way down to Maya on the number 10 spot who sold about 10,000 copies in the same period.

Blender was originally written for SGI, not for Windows. Now if you had created an application that worked well and offered artists a fast creative pipeline and decided to port to another system. What's more likely to get you fired? Improving what you already know works for your users, or abandoning that and accepting a slower system to match the different OS?

At that point of course your existing users get priority, and if they are saying "we like the interface" then you stick with that and improve it. Just like is still happening with Blender.

I would be interested to learn more about this survey. I've got Blender on my desktop also only because I haven't bothered to uninstall it yet. It's the most god awful crap, and saying it's ok because it was built originally for SGI or not an excuse. Hell Lightwave started as an Amiga program and it's UI is tolerable. No Between bad UI and horribly unstable, I just can't recommend Blender to anyone. Even with it being free. While I also don't approve of $10,000 programs either, just because something is free doesn't mean I have to use it. Besides, the time I save using something that I might only spend a few dollars on that's even 10% better, allows me to recover more than the cost for the software in time not wasted.

Sorry, for the rant, I just really can't stand blender that much. Good luck with your efforts Jaynessa, I sincerely hope you're able to be productive. Looking forward to seeing your work!

Me too in all honesty, but even assuming a ridiculous innaccuracy on numbers, it's nowhere near being just the small "subsect" that Thunderclap said. Though I do find him thinking that Blender users are a sect kinda amusing. We're not really religious zealots you know, that's just FUD



Yep it's not an excuse. It's a hint at why things are they way they are. Blender users like it the way it is (though most agree there's room for improvement). Non users don't like it. I don't see anything to excuse there.



That's fine. What I don't understand is why people jump in when someone else does recommend it. Obviously some of us see something in Blender that you don't.



How many projects did you complete with Blender to make the comparison? I ask because most people who criticise Blender's UI never got over the initial learning hurdle. Often they are already familiar with another 3D package and much of the criticism comes from Blender not working how they expect. It is a GUI that has to be learned, but that doesn't necessarily make it a bad one.

I recently got a thank you from a user who switched to Blender as they found my sculptie tutorials a lot easier to follow than the others. It's not the first time I've noticed people with no 3D experience find Blender easier to pick up.

I think a lot has to do with whether they were warned they would have to learn the keyboard commands or not. Haters tend to have tried to figure out how to use it just with the mouse. Going in knowing it's a two hand program, one on keyboard, one on mouse generally gives very different first impressions.

That sounds about right to me. Starting out Blender is very intimidating, but once you learn the keyboard commands and how they work in different modes the interface becomes incredibly efficient. Its like working with a twenty button mouse, very confusing as first, but very fast once you figure it out.

Well to be honest, I'm a mouse based user. And I've been using all forms of 3-D aps for years. My first hands on was an internal 3-D modeling platform built for the Computer Sciences group at Ohio State University on Amigas. It was cumbersome, and free and got the job done as long as you didn't mind writing extensions in C for it, or manually doing screen captures of each frame when making animations.

I've tried using quite a few modelers over the years and the UI's frequently make me nuts. I like simple interfaces that have easy to understand icon usage, and logically constructed tools menus/dialogs.

It's for this reason that I still run Picture Publisher 10 Pro as my primary paint software even though I have Photoshop/Illustrator CS2 here as well. I don't have a problem with spending money on something where it improves my productivity. On the other hand I have zero patience for products that require what IMHO amounts to a Frat initiation ceremony and 30 hours of reading just to save a file and gives you the honor of joining a click of others bonded together by their scars. On that note, for me Photoshop is nothing more than a necessary evil just to be able to open clients files successfully.

I'll be honest, I'm the kind of guy who hates to read manuals, and feel that if I have to read the manual then I believe you as a developer have failed to deliver a usable product. I have not completed a project to finish with Blender, I wasted time enough with the program once that I'll never get back and was unhappy with the results. All of this is why I've recently been advocating AC3D in the groups. I just installed the program and was building stuff that day without all the bizarre loops I see everyone else discussing with their favorite flavors of modelers. For me the $75 bucks was worth it to me to spend to save me hours of my life wasted. Granted it's got it's quirks like all of these programs, but quirks are one thing. Bad UI and unstable code are something entirely different.

I didn't get the impression that Thunderclap was trying to say only a small number of people HAVE Blender. He said only small amount "can manage" it. Big difference there.

Just about every 3D artist I know has Blender. Why not? It's free, and it's a quick download. Might as well grab it. How many do I know who actually USE it though? Aside from students who dabble with everything, and SL users on this forum, I could count them on one (fingerless) hand.

Just because a program has a lot of downloads doesn't necessarily mean it's popular. Notepad has a lot more installations than Word, but that doesn't mean people like it better. Now you might say that comparison's not fair since Notepad comes with Windows and Word doesn't, so of course more people have Notepad, but you see, that's just the point. There are all kinds of reasons why one program might have more downloads or more installs than another. Actual user preference is only one possible explanation out of a great many.

Also, I think it's important to note that the survey didn't talk about unique installations at all, just total number of downloads, which means absolutely nothing. I've downloaded Blender probably two to three dozen times in my 3D career, while I've acquired new copies of Maya all of all of 5 times ever. Does the fact that I've got 5 times more Blender downloads than Maya CD's to my credit mean that I like Blender 5 times more? Absolutely not. All it means is that since Blender is a free download, I don't bother keeping the install files lying around. If I need to reinstall it for any reason, I just re-download it. I do the same thing with ALL free software that I have, and I'm sure a lot of people would say the same thing.

So how many of those 1.8 million downloads are actually unique users, and how many are just the same people re-downloading again and again? It's impossible to say, obviously.

In any case, you're right that Blender's user base, whatever the exact number happens to be, is not small. And that's with good reason.

As I often say, I really applaud Blender for delivering so much for free. Anything that puts digital arts, especially 3D art, in the hands of the masses, gets my seal of approval every time. However, as I say just as often, it really can't be denied that Blender's interface is quite terrible, and the way it goes about many things is overly complicated at best, bass-ackwards at a medium, and very poorly implemented at worst.

In other words, there's more than enough good and bad in there to fuel endless discussions like this one here.



I'll agree with you here, to a point. It's not right for someone to say something like "Blender sucks! I hate it so you have to hate it too, and if you don't, you're insane." That kind of stuff does bother me.

However, when people rightly warn new users about drawbacks, that's worthwhile. It is important for people to understand that if they opt for Blender as their tool of choice, they will be getting a very mixed bag of both good and bad features. There's nothing wrong with pointing out the bad ones.



You might be right about that. Personally, I hate being forced to memorize keyboard shortcuts, in ANY program, let alone one as complex as a 3D modeling app. It's not something you can expect most people to enjoy, and interface designers should take that into account, always.

For me, one of the key things that makes an interface great is when I can find everything there is to find with the mouse until I've had sufficient time to memorize the shortcuts. Sometimes that memorization takes me years, depending on the program, if it ever even happens at all. Heck, I write more about Photoshop than anyone, and I still don't know the shortcuts even for the toolbox items.

Shortcuts should be optional, not mandatory. There shouldn't be anything you can do with shortcuts that you can't do with the mouse. Photoshop operates on this principle, and so does Maya. For that matter, so does Windows itself, as well as the Mac OS. Blender's one of the only programs I can think of that maybe doesn't. (I'm taking your word for it that it doesn't, by the way. I can certainly allow for the possibility that maybe Blender does have mousable commands for everything, and that I just haven't figured out how to use/find them. So if I'm wrong, and it can, someone please say so.)

To illustrate the point, think about something more everyday than 3D software. Think about something like MS Office. Back in the early 90's when Office really came into its own, it was definitely the interface that propelled each of its programs to number one status in their respective fields, not the power of the programs themselves. I remember that time quite vividly. People used to make comments all the time about how Excel wasn't as powerful as Lotus 1-2-3, and how Word wasn't yet as feature rich as Word Perfect, but that the brand new, easy-to-use interface present in both more than made up for any lack of power.

Clearly, the vast majority of people find the interface to be the most important part of the program. While I obviously can't speak for Thunderclap, I'd guess that that was his point. It doesn't really matter what Blender can do if most people don't have the specific personality traits that would enable them to use it effectively.



This argument really doesn't hold water. Maya was also first designed for SGI, yet Maya has always come with the befefit of much friendlier and more intuitive interface than Blender has (which is probably the most direct reason why Maya is now an industry standard and Blender is not). Blaming the first OS for the current interface is like blaming the ocean because you didn't like your fish dinner last night (while the same kind of fish at the restaurant down the street tastes great). Put the blame where it belongs, squarely on the chef.


I really don't think it's an either/or question. It's entirely possible to maintain the workflow for existing experienced users while simultaneously making the interface simpler for both old users and new users alike.


There's a tremendously obvious fatal flaw in the placement of Maya, and all the other 3D apps on that list. They lumped 2D and 3D animation programs together, as if somehow one has anything to do with the other. OF COURSE more people use Flash, for example, than use Max, Maya, and all the others. I'd lay down good money that more people probably use Flash actively than the whole rest of the list combined, including Blender. Flash is used primarily for the Web, and more people make web content these days than anything else. To guess, I would attribute the fact that Blender downloads outrank Flash sales to the above stated reasons (people download it more than once, it's free so lots of people try it out, etc.).

They also included many programs which only do modeling, not animation, yet they call this a report on "animation packages". Stuff like that makes everything in this so called "report", or at least in BlenderNation's rehashing of it, very suspect. If they couldn't be bothered to do enough fact checking even to compare apples to apples, how can we possibly believe they'd go to any trouble to make sure their numbers are accurate?

The same reason, I would stop you from putting your hand into a fire, or smarking yourself with a hammer. And I didn't mean a sect religiously, I meant a group. Blender isn't a industry wide thing, but I respect that it was birthed from SGI.
As for the firing thing, non-standard things waste time. Time is money and that other corporate crap.

Well, as Blender causes me less physical pain than other GUIs, your well meaning intentions were misguided, thanks anyway.

Non-standard interfaces only take more time (marginally so IMHO) at the learning stage. The real comparision is between two experienced users, at which point Blender's workflow shines as a fast productive way of working.

Conservative estimates put the Blender user base at somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000.



Hmmm. Not sure how valid excluding SL users is. Seems like you are putting on blinkers so you don't see anything that contradicts your position.



Again with the blinkers. Even just in this thread there are at least two of us saying Blender's interface gives a good fast workflow for experienced users. So saying the whole of Blender's GUI is bad or terrible is obviously an overstatement of personal opinion or just plain wrong.



I agree, but the way it is done has to be honest. Zee's clarification that he prefers mouse and didn't like Blender because of the heavy keyboard use is an honest and fair critique. Stating point blank that Blender's interface is bad because it doesn't fit with preconceptions seems a little misguided.



One aspect of interface design is how new user friendly it is. The Blender designers decided that experienced user workflow was more important than that. That's what I'm trying to point out. Blender is highly efficient once you have learned it. That's when it can be seen to be a good way of working, that's when it can even be considered a good GUI.

Most people calling it bad focus on that initial experience of a new user which just wasn't part of Blenders design. How much screen is taken up by icons that you now exclusively use shortcuts for? How much time do you spend navigating menus? That's part of what Blender skips by going straight to keystrokes.



How much further does your mouse travel because you don't use the keyboard shortcuts?



Hmmm. Are you sure it wasn't Microsoft's anti-competitive behaviour that resulted in the dominance? I was in computer support at the time and heard more cursing of Microsoft for breaking things again than comments like you heard. IMHO the best interface Word ever had was on the dos 5.5 version.



I don't blame the OS for anything, and the chef has my praise. You are reading something into my comment that was never there.



Yep. But just because an interface can (and will) be improved, doesn't make the current implementation bad or terrible.

I won't bother commenting on your long discussion on the merits or lack of in download statisitics. That's even more off topic than the talk about Blender's GUI.

Well I have decided to take up Chosen's challenge to try out the free trial of Maya. I havent had much time to play around with it yet, but first impressions are that I feel nearly as intimidated by the interface as I did when I first started Blender. I have managed to make objects and push a few vertexes around. So far flipping through the menus the only options that look exciting (i.e. the only things that I dont recognize as having an equivalent in Blender) are for texturing, and I still have much to learn before I am ready to play with them.

A few problems that I have noticed so far. Camera controls: there has got to be a way to control the camera without switching between static views with that little box in the corner. Selecting: do I have to use that lasso tool every time I want to select something?

To be honest I already miss the keyboard commands. If I want to select something, rotate it on one local axis, stretch it on a different global axis and then move it anywhere within the plane of my view...in Blender that takes about 4 seconds to complete. From what Im seeing of Maya, even once I know the interface (and actually figure out how to do those things) its going to take upwards of a full minute or more for the same action.

The other big complaint is the single window. Is there some way to split the window so that I can view the object from multiple angles and also view the UV map at the same time?

But going back to the exciting part, the texturing. Just clicking around I was unable to actually paint onto the objects I had made (probably need to figure out how to apply a material), but I was somehow drawing onto the viewing area...Maybe I found some particle effects, not texturing tools?

Im going to stick with it as time permits, if for no other reason than to be able to have a fair comparison between Blender and Maya, but so far I think that perhaps a combination of Blender for modeling and Zbrush? (I hear good things about Zbrush) for textures might fit my needs better...or perhaps I should just wait for someone to get Gimp and Blender functioning together.

Is there a free trial of 3DS Max available anywhere? I would like to give that a try also, if possible.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/mform?siteID=123112&id=10083915

All I'll say is give them the same fair shout I'm asking for Blender. You'll need to get to grips with their workflow rather than trying to adapt your Blender workflow to them.

As it is a timed trial Ill have to wait until my review of Maya is finished before starting

Honestly, this whole thing reminds me of the Photoshop vs Gimp argument. Two different interfaces that do essentially the same thing, but at least in that case anybody who has worked with both programs can point out specific things that one does better than the other.

If I do find anything in Maya or Max to justify the price, my solution may be very similar as well. I will use Blender to do the heavy lifting and Maya/Max to do...whatever it is they do that Blender doesnt.

The big problem that I have noticed with Blender so far is that there seem to be no jobs available working with it. Even if after a full evaluation of all the programs Blender comes out on top, I may still have no choice but to switch.

This is slowly changing. Not sure how things are in America, but in Europe there are a few newer companies who have Blender as their primary / exclusive 3D package. The highest profile one is Manos Digitales who are producing a feature length film exclusively with open source software. http://www.plumiferos.com/

And there's always the freelance route where clients don't care what you use as long as you produce what they want. I've done photo montages for planning permission applications using Blender and The Gimp. Only complaint I got was on one with multiple sites where only one of the choices would be picked. The montage for their least preferred site looked too good and they asked me to make it look worse

I wasn't aware that I'd issued a challenge, hahaha. In any case, I'm glad you're giving Maya a try.



That's not surprising. Maya's interface, while very friendly and intuitive once you get used to it, is more than a bit overwhelming at first. You'll find that that feeling goes away pretty quickly though. Once you've been through the basics, you'll see that everything builds upon everything else. There's a very nice uniform logic governing just about everything. It takes some longer to "click" with it than others, sure, but sooner or later everyone gets it.

And don't feel like you have to learn every last thing. Maya is not just a program; it's a platform. It's designed to be used by teams of specialists who each have high expertise in their own particular corner of it, and many of whom will use their own customized tools within it (because of that uniform governing logic I mentioned, the capabilities are endless for customization). Nobody is an expert on everything in Maya, so don't feel like you have to be.



There's considerable overlap, which is obviously a good thing. I don't pretend to know everything Blender can and can't do, but I'd imagine it can probably do the majority of the most common things people do in Maya. The difference with respect to those things is not so much in the what but the how.


Did you watch the quick training videos that came with the program? Basic navigation is the first thing they cover.

You'll also want to go through the tutorials in the Help file. Unlike with most other programs, Maya's help is actually, well, helpful. It's hands down the best Help I've ever seen, in fact. Go through all the tutorials in order from start to finish, and you'll learn everything you need to know in order to have a good, solid mastery of Maya's basics. You'll be surprised at just how much you'll learn in a relatively short period of time.


Not at all. There are dozens of different ways to make selections, ranging from simple and obvious to complex and high-powered.

What I'd define as "simple and obvious" is just click on the sucker. You can use the Select tool or any of the manipulation tools (translate, rotate, scale) to do all the normal selection techniques you're used to from nearly every other program on the planet. To select something, left click on it once. To add to the selection, shift-click something else. To subtract from the selection, shift-click an already selected object. To select a bunch of stuff at once, click and drag a selection box around all of it. Use the lasso tool only when you need to draw non-rectangular selection boxes, just as you would in Photoshop, or any other program that has a lasso. All of this is perfectly expected behavior, is it not?

As for other, less immediately obvious methods, here are a few. The Hypergraph (Window -> Hypergraph) will display a graphical representation of all the database nodes in your scene. It's extremely powerful, and quite intuitive if you can make the leap to think of your scene not just as 3D space but as categorized information in a database (which you should anyway). There's also the Outliner (Window -> Outliner), which will display the contents of your scene in file-tree form either in its own floating window, or docked on the left of the viewer pane. You can also select anything you want via command line by typing into the MEL field near the bottom of the screen.

If you hold down the spacebar, you'll call up the hotbox (a patented, super-powerful feature of Maya's interface), which will grant you quick access to all kinds of options for selection and many other things.

That's all just the tip of the iceberg. As you work with Maya, you'll start developing your own style of using it. You'll never locked into any particular designer's notion of how it has to work. The possibilities are endless.



Maya has tons of keyboard shortcuts too (and you can make your own as well), but the point is you only have to use them if you want to. If you prefer to be a key-puncher all day long, you certainly can, but if you'd rather do nearly everything graphically (like most new users would), you can do that too. Whatever floats your boat is just fine.

If you really want to take it to the furthest possible extreme, key-wise, you could do everything via command line, either in the MEL field at the bottom of the screen, or in the script editor. You could even write your entire scene as a text file, in Maya ASCII format if you really, really wanted to get ridiculous. Nobody would do that, of course. I'm just illustrating the point as extremely as possible.

I use a combination of the both hotkeys and GUI, which is what most people do. For example, I usually use the hotkeys for select, translate, rotate, and scale, and for the master manipulator, which are in order across the top of the keyboard as QWERT. Undo is Z. Redo is shift-Z. Set keyframe is S. Focus the camera on selection is F. Focus on all is A. Parent is P. Group is ctrl-G. Duplicate is ctrl-D. Snappings are across the bottom of the keyboard as X, C, and V for snap-to-grid, snap-to-curves, and snap-to-points, respectively. Insert displays an objects pivot (its "center point", which you can then move anywhere you want. Tapping spacebar switches between camera views. Holding spacebar calls up the hotbox.

Those are the kotkeys I use the most. Got them all memorized yet? Neither did I at first. It took a lot of usage in order for me to commit those keys to memory, and it all happened through simple osmosis. I never deliberately set out to memorize them.



Absolutely not. For your particular example, here's how I'd do it (in 4 seconds or less). Note, there are other ways; this is just mine:

1. Click on the object to select it.

2. Double click on the Rotate tool, set its mode to Local, and rotate the object any way you want.

3. Switch to the Scale tool (either by clicking on it, or by pressing its hotkey, R). By default, it will be set to global, but if you set it to something else previously, just set it back to default by clicking the Rest Tool button. Scale your object however you want.

4. Switch to the Translate tool (either by clicking on it or by pressing its hotkey, W). Move the object anywhere you want.



To split the view, either click on one of the preset view buttons on the left hand side of the screen below the toolbox, or just press the hotkey, spacebar. By default, the spacebar will switch you from Single Perspective View to Four View (perspective, top, front, and side, all at once). From there, if you want to expand any one of the 4 small view panes to a single large one, just hover your mouse over it, and press spacebar again. To get back to four, you guessed it, spacebar again.

You can also change any pane to show anything you want at any time, by clicking on the Panels menu at the top of the pane. If a view or a layout that you'd like to use does not currently exist, you can even create your own by using the Panel Editor (Panels -> Panel Editor). Again, the possibilities are endless.

As for viewing your UV map, would you like to see (and/or edit) it in 2D, 3D, or both at the same time? And would you like it with or without fries? To show the UV map on a flat canvas, go Window, UV Texture Editor. You also have extensive options to view and control UV's directly on your model in any viewer pane by going to the Polygons section of Maya (click the drop-down menu at the upper left corner of the screen, and select Polygons), and then exploring the commands in the Create UV's and Edit UV's menus.


Sounds like you were using Paint Effects. They're unique to Maya, and they're really cool. Want to make a field of vegetation, or a sky full of clouds, or even a plate full of sausages? Don't bother modeling all that, or doing countless hours of particle math; just paint the stuff into your scene. Think of it kind of like how Wiley Coyote makes stuff with a paintbrush in the Roadrunner cartoons (just without the all that violent backfiring).

Paint Effects are not always good to use because they're not supported outside of Maya, not even by many third party renderers, but in the right circumstances they're great. They've got nothing to do with painting textures though.

To paint a texture inside Maya, you'll need to learn how to create and apply materials, how to assign images to various attributes of the materials (color, bump, specular, etc.), and of course how to do the actual painting itself. All of this is covered in the Help tutorials, and there are tons more on the Web and in books.

Just be aware that Maya's 2D painting tools are quite rudimentary. If painting 2D textures in 3D is what you really want to do, I'd recommend you go with a dedicated program for that. Maya can certainly do it, but not as well as, say, Z-brush, BodyPaint, or Deep Paint 3D.

That said, I'm not a fan of 3D paint programs in general. They're almost always buggy, and I've never seen one that's really all that powerful in terms of the actual painting tools they contain. Photoshop CS3 Extended is, in my opinion, the best solution. You can't paint directly on the model in it, but you can paint on the canvas and then see the results update on the model instantly.

Or if you want to use Photoshop in conjunction with Maya more directly, you can set up a PSD shader network, with each layer in a PSD from Photoshop controlling various aspects of a shader in Maya. This can be really powerful. I'm not all that experienced with PSD shader networks though, so I can't really give you many how-to's on them, I'm afraid.

Where you'll find Maya really shines for texturing is in its implementation of 3D parametric texturing and baking. Just thinking in SL terms here, want to make a great looking rust-covered, grime-infested, dirt-laden metal grate in no time flat? Want to make incredibly realistic stone walls, or deeply texturized tree bark, or make your furry attachments look like they're actually covered in fur, or put complex reflections and all manner of dents and chinks into a suit of armor? Paremetric 3D textures and good baking techniques are the way to go. Add a really good renderer into the mix (Turtle kicks ass!), and the results can be amazing.

Some of the stuff in the machinima we did for tonight's CSI episode is going to make people swear they're not looking at Second Life, but at a CGI film. Why? It's all in the texturing, which for the parts I'm talking about, was all done in Maya with Turtle.


Keep at it with Maya. I can promise you that while Blender is quite powerful, and while I admittedly don't know every last capability it has, it's not in Maya's league by a long shot (not that it needs to be). The fact that you're used to Blender will naturally cause you to look at Maya from a certain perspective. I just hope the fact that it's going to counter many of your established habits won't make you think it's harder to use. It can be really uncomfortable for human beings to break habits (actually takes more chemical reactions in the brain to break a habit than to form one). I hope you'll be able to keep that in mind as you progress.

Again, go through the Help tutorials. Quit trying to just figure it out by brute force, if that's what you've been doing. I never say this about any other program, but with Maya, Help is the best place to start.

As for Zbrush, I still haven't made time to play with it myself, but I know it's a fantastic program. I wouldn't expect it to work any miracles though. From what I know of it, it's pretty quirky.


I believe Domino already posted the link, so I won't bother. What I will say is this. I wouldn't recommend trying to learn so many programs at once. You won't be able to do much more than stick your head in the door and look around with any of them if you do. If learning Maya is important to you, give it a serious effort by itself for at least a few weeks. After that, by all means, play with Zbrush or Max or anything else. But do them one at a time.

I don't think any human has enough time or enough brain power to learn three different 3D apps at once to the point where he or she could judge them intelligently.

So what I take from this... Maya, 3ds Max, and Blender3d all involve tutorials and manual learning.
All of them will look daunting if you have no idea how they operate at their basic level. They all just have a different price tag. Blender should be the best choice then for a novice to 3d since the cost in the time learning it is just about the same. The real issues with the interface come from people who are already established in a different 3d modeler.

Blender3d was the first professional level 3d modeling application that I have taken the time to learn and use. Its true that I'm still learning more and more of what this thing is capable of, but by now, I'm fond of its interface. I demo'd Maya and promptly removed it. It wasn't friendly enough for me. What's so hard of typing, for example, 'rzz45(enter)gy6(enter)sxx.6(enter)' to rotate a selected object 45 degrees around its local z-axis, moving it globally 6 units on the y axis, and then scaling it locally on its x axis to 60%? I had to click on a bunch of stuff to repeat this in Maya and re-rigging keyboard commands weren't much of a help. ( most likely my bias )

... back on topic...

What application would you rather develop your bias on given they all do everything you want?

Yes.


Well, yes and no. If all you ever want to use is one program, and if you know for a fact that you will never have any interest in doing the things that Blender cannot do, then sure, learn Blender first. However, if you want to develop more marketable skills with 3D, if you want to do things that Blender can't, and/or if you simply want to be able to transition from program to program with the greatest possible ease, then it makes sense to learn a program first that is more standardized. Going from Maya to Max is not all that hard. Going from Blender to, well, anything, results in these long discussions about how typing "dsafjdsiqyruep" somehow makes soooo much more sense than doing anything else possibly ever could.

And whether all that typing does or it doesn't make the most sense (I personally think it doesn't) the simple fact that most other programs don't operate that way is reason enough for me to recommend other things.


Right. As I said, it's much harder for humans to break existing habits than to form new ones. In my mind, that's why it's so important to form habits first that will be the most universally applicable. For better or worse, Maya and Max are the ones that are most often mimicked, so it makes logical sense to let your own habit forming come from them first. Then, if you want additionally to pick up something as unusual as Blender, go for it.


I would agree with you that your bias from Blender is probably getting in the way. It would be hard to imagine that it wouldn't.

If you want to hear my "bias", you must realize I could turn your question right around and say if you really love to type so much, what's so hard about typing the equivalent of all those same commands directly into the MEL command line at the bottom of the screen? Or if you want to type a little less, what's so hard about opening up the Channel Box or the Attribute Editor and just typing values into fields (works just like the the number fields in the editor in SL)? Or if you don't want to type at all, what's so hard about simply dragging the manipulator handles around?

What I think trumps any possible bias is the fact that you have so many choices in Maya that you don't in Blender. You can develop a work flow that makes sense to you, without having to conform to anyone else's idea of how it has to be. There's enough flexibility in there to accommodate just about anyone.

Don't get me wrong; Maya's not perfect. There are certainly things about it I don't like. But on the whole, it's definitely the best 3D program I've ever used, and one of the best programs of any type I've ever seen.

As for whether or not it's immediately "friendly", I gotta ask, did you go through the Help tutorials? Or did you just not give the Help a second thought since experience told you that most programs' Help files suck, so you then tried to beat the requisite knowledge out of UI through trial and error? I can promise you, Maya has way too many options for trial & error to get you very far right off the bat. All you'll do is confuse yourself. Take a few hours and go through the tutorials though, and you'll be making decent content by the end of the day. Spend anywhere from a few days to a few weeks practicing (depending on how fast a learner you are), and you'll develop a first class mastery the basics.


I wouldn't say they all do everything I want. They each have their limitations. However, even if all things were equal, I think it makes sense to develop your bias in whatever way will be most universally applicable. Whether people love Blender or hate it, I don't think anyone would deny that Blender does not fit that description.

This is what I am trying to lock down here. What is it that Maya does that Blender does not do? Beyond preference in interface and possibly being more newbie friendly, is there any reason to spend two thousand dollars on this software in order to make sculpted prims?

Chosen Few - I'm one of those few people that actually read documentation when I care about knowing about it.

Jamay Greene - I side with you. Besides bias, what makes app x better than app y for creating,moving,and deleting a set of geometrical data ( verticies, vectors, and polys )?

What makes Maya better than Blender? 13 feature length movies including Shrek and Spiderman 3. Go ahead, make Marko in Blender.

AS for tiny european companies embracing Blender, well there you go. Have they done anything, that would be known than couldnt be done on Maya?
My point is the same I make about Gimp, Free programs were made for one reason only to give people who don't have the means to get a $5000 (or $500) program without pirating it.
Gimp was made by college students, for Phillips sake.
AS I said, you enjoy it, thats great. That was one of the purposes of it being made.
But as for comparing it, or job seeking, Blender will not get you seriously considered. 90% of 3d cad jobs because those companies are looking for people who are proficient on the software they have, and since it is generally middle to upper mgmt that decides this, with some input for the IT section, those managers will look to the industry standard, and that is Autodesk who owned Maya and 3D max.
And that is what Chosen meant, or at least what I thought.
And yes SL people are excluded because 95% of those here aren't doing it for a company like the sheep etc, but for themselves.

There is a broad difference between learning a program and a skill. Blender is a program and defend it all you want, its UI will keep it that way.
Autodesk begin to make programs and for a while there were in the same boat. But then the internet came and allowed easier training, and piracy. But by this point Maya had become more, it became what you learned if you wanted the skill of 3d design.
This wasn't set by me or Chosen, but by those self same corporations, and no amount of small european companies will change that, if multimillion dollar hollywood films, TV shows (babylon 5) and computer games are made in it.
Ask yourself this, Why if Gimp was so good did gimpshop appear?
I believe the same thing will happen to Blender. Someone will write a plugin that will move it towards the standard.
So this is why I shoo people away. Because why learn a specific program when you can learn it broadly and hey even get a job later on.