Blender vs Maya

Hello,

A friend of mine want to buy Maya telling me that the best (more precise) sculpted prims on SL are made with this tool and that often she doesn't have in SL what she see in Blender. Is there some test between those two tools ? Any one of you can explain me why he uses one or the other of these two tools ?

Thank you

Vid don't load for me Arg, in fact the site doesn't.
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Mainly I don't run Windows so Maya is not an option for me anyway so Blender is about the only option.
The precision is the person I believe, not the tool.
As for the way it looks in Blender and SL. It will not look the same if you do a standard Blender render with F12. You have to turn off specular highlighting on all the textures first.
Here's one I prepared earlier...This one I did a long time ago when sculpts were new. Not exactly, but close. Had to make the maps manually and then rebuilt it in SL. Can do much better now although I'm still hopeless compared to others.

Haha, awesome video, Argent!

Mathis, the answer is great sculpties can be made with both Blender and Maya. The approach is a little different in each, since not only are the programs themselves somewhat dissimilar, but the sculpty exporters for them were written by entirely different people.

Don't base your decision for which one to get on any one person's inability to make either one work quite the way they want to. If your friend is having trouble with Blender, I'd say she just hasn't yet learned how to make Blender do what she wants it to do.

The fact is sculpties are oddballs. They're not made the same way as most other 3D models. It takes practice to learn their particular quirks, no matter what program you're using.


To tell you a little about Maya and Blender, each:

Maya is arguably the most full featured 3D platform on the market. It's been a staple of the 3D graphics industry for many years now. You've seen its fruits in everything from Hollywood movies like Lord of the Rings, to popular video games like Halo 2, to sculpties all over SL. It's an incredibly powerful platform, and an absolute pleasure to use, once you've learn the basics of how it works. It's beautifully constructed, with a central underlying logic controlling the whole thing. Once you've learned the first little corner of it, and the logic has gotten in you, the rest of it practically teaches itself to you. (That's not to say it's easy, so don't get me wrong. All 3D platforms have steep learning curves. Maya's curve just happens to be unusually singular, whereas a lot of other programs tend to have multiple curves going every which direction, if that makes sense.)

Besides its shear power, one of the best things about Maya is that it comes with THE best documentation of any program I've EVER seen. Unlike with most programs, its help file is actually helpful. I tell everyone to learn Maya the same way. Go through the Getting Started tutorials in the help (in order, and without skipping anything), and then you'll know what you need to know to begin. You'll still have more to learn, of course, but you'll have a very solid foundation from which to proceed, for whatever it is you might want to use it for.

All the many praises that can be sung of Maya are true in large part because you get what you pay for with it. It's $2000-$7000, depending on the version. If you're comfortable spending that much just to make sculpties, go for it. But most people, quite understandably, are not.

I use Maya for sculpties every day, myself. But I also use it for lots of other things as well, so I get my money's worth out of it. If sculpties were my only interest, I'd probably be using something else.


Blender is the most powerful 3D freebie in existence. It's a shining example of how open source software can be every bit as powerful as commercial counterparts. It's not quite on par with Maya, but it's still got way more power under the hood than the average user would ever need. It's a great program, more than capable of doing whatever you might want to do with sculpties.

That said, Blender does have a significant drawback. An awful lot of people have great difficulty learning its interface. I myself had trouble making heads or tails of it for years. Very generally speaking, people with an engineering temperament tend to take to it right away, while those who are more artistically minded tend to have issues with it.

I've softened my opinion of Blender's interface in recent months, thanks to some amazing tutorial videos put out by Gaia Clary and the Machinamatrix team. I no longer feel that Blender has a bad interface (although I'm still not sure I'd call it a particularly good one). What I now understand is that it's not the interface itself that's the problem, but the way it's traditionally been explained. Unlike Maya's help, which right away gets yous tarted making things, so you can learn by doing, Blender's help reads like a technical schematic. Gaia's videos, on the other hand, take a far more creativity-based approach to teaching the program, an incredible improvement. So, if you do decide to give Blender a whirl (and you should, since it's free), make sure to watch those videos to learn how to use it. You'll save yourself a lot of headaches that way. You can find them at http://blog.machinimatrix.org/video-tutorials/



To answer your question exactly as asked, why do I use Maya instead of Blender, my first answer is pretty simple. Maya is what I was trained on, what I'd already been using for years before sculpties were invented. And since Qarl Linden, the inventor of sculpties, is a Maya guy himself, the very first sculpty exporter in existence was made for Maya. So I started making sculpties in Maya on day one, and there was never any point in even thinking of switching to anything else.

Another reason I continue to use Maya is because of the Turtle renderer. Turtle is the ONLY renderer on the market specifically designed from the ground up for texture baking, and it only works with Maya. I love Turtle. Other renderers can bake, of course, but Turtle does it so fantastically well, and with such relative simplicity, I'd feel almost crippled going to anything else. It's had me very spoiled for several years now.

Another reason I enjoy using Maya for sculpties is I really like NURBS modeling, and the sculpty exporter for Maya is optimized for NURBS. People who are only used to polygon modeling tend to find NURBS to be a but clunky at first. But there are a lot if things you can do with NURBS very quickly that would take many times longer with polys. Of course, there are also things you can do with polys that are harder to implement with NURBS, so a lot of it evens out.

One major advantage of Maya is that Qarl's exporter makes it relatively easy to export an entire scene full of sculpties with just one or two clicks, and then automatically reassemble that scene in its entirety inside SL. It's really slick. I'm not sure if the exporter for Blender has that capability yet.



So there you have my reasons. I'm sure there plenty of Blender users who could list at least as many equally compelling reasons to use that program as well. At the end of the day, it really doesn't matter what program you choose. Whichever one it is, learn it well, and be prepared to practice, practice, practice. It takes time and dedication to get good at this. Have fun.

Kornscope, I'm pleased to report that you've been misinformed.

One of Maya's primary selling points is the fact that it's cross-platform. It works not only on Windows, but also on Mac and Linux.

[/url]Please note that the original creator of the blender exporter is Domino Marama. And he has meanwhile setup a rich information site with discusison forums, howtos, manuals, downloads and whatsoever. So if you are interested in learning blender, then please also take some time to explore

http://www.dominodesigns.info/

cheers,
Gaia

Oh, thanks for that info, I did not know that. I am, rather, uninformed, I've never heard/read anyone mention that,

The main difference between Maya and Blender for sculpties is the workflow. One clear advantage that Blender does have is Primstar. This provides a set of scripts to improve the sculptie workflow. Thanks to code submitted by Gaia Clary, it recently got a massive improvement for creating sculpties from scratch.

http://dominodesigns.info/node/168 Primstar 0.9.24 - development snapshot - allows things like this:

Add a Mesh - Empty Mesh. Go to front view in edit mode. Hold down ctrl and left click a few times at one side of the center to draw a profile of the sculptie, say a vase. Use the spin tool on the line of vertices set to 360 degrees and 16 points from the top view. Remove doubles on the mesh and add a subsurf modifier set to catmull. Set edge crease on bottom of vase to 1.0 if you want a flat base. Now comes the magic.

Go to object mode and do Object - Scripts - Sculptify Objects. Some objects won't automatically work out the sculpt map size, so check the sculptie UV map has an image and that it's the size you want. Once the map is correct you can bake as normal.

This new feature converts nurbs surfaces as well as polygonal meshes (closer to a grid you keep the mesh the better for the automatic unwrap) to ready to bake sculpties. It's not a magic turn any mesh into a sculptie option, but it's a massive time saver when you model with it in mind.

Another new feature of the 0.9.x series (which will soon become the milestone 1.0.0 release) is library sculpties. The scripts come with some, so as well as the 6 mathematical starter shapes, there are currently 6 additional library shapes. These are special sculpties baked to a 512 x 512 png file. So if you can bake a sculptie in Blender, you can create new base shapes to use in Primstar. These library shapes can be used in the Add Sculpt Mesh Gui, and any of the supported square or oblong ratio sculpties created with just a few clicks.

The sculpt map baker in the 0.9.x series is also much improved over the 0.5.0 stable release. Every part, even down to drawing an individual pixel is aware of the sculpt map format and adjusts automatically. I believe the baker is 100% accurate now.

The only feature still lacking is documentation. I'm hoping to have that complete by Christmas. In the meantime, there's a lot of useful tips and techniques in the website forums and a friendly crowd to help with any questions.

Sculpt Blend - Second Life Blender Resource: http://robynhuffaker.com/sculptblend/tutorials/index.html

Chosen, what do you think of 3DS Max for sculpt work in SL?

Thank you for all your answers . I'll transmit them. In fact, I speak on the behalf of my friend, since she is non-english talking . Would it help to see which is the best for her if I precise that she is a graphist designer, that she already do lot of stuff in SL (AlaFolie fashion design is her), painter in RL ( http://www.babeth.fr ), but on the other hand that she is not comfortable with technics, for example she's not happy when there need to be lot of calculations. At a time I would even have suggested her ZBrush since it seems to work with a very intuitive way. Sorry if my questions seem naive, but I know very little on this subject, I just try to help her because I know english

You can bake specular shading using this technique: http://blog.loonsbury.com/?p=157

I'm not a Max user, so I can't speak from experience. Max is great platform, though, and I do know, that some very good sculpty scripts have been written it.

What I can say with confidence is this much, at least. If you've got Max, and you want to use it to make sculpties, by all means do it. But if you're looking to buy Max, then I'd hope you've got more in mind for it than just sculpties, because just as I said with Maya, the $2000 price tag is a bit steep, if you're only planning on doing one thing. The program itself is worth every penny, though.




Gaia, I just wanted to say sorry for screwing up your name. One of my clients has an avatar with Gaia in the name, and somehow I ended up typing that one instead of yours. I've corrected the post.

If I've done that at any other time in the past, let me apologize again. Mental block, I guess.

Zbrush's interface can be a little daunting. The sculpting process itself may seem more intuitive in concept than more traditional modeling techniques, but the execution isn't entirely straight forward. I wouldn't say Zbrush is any easier to learn than any other 3D program. In some ways it's arguably harder.

There really is no easy or quick solution here. Whatever program(s) your friend ultimately chooses, getting good at using it will take considerable time, and a ton of practice. There's no way around that (nor should there be).

If your friend is looking for the most user-friendly 3D platform she can get, I'd have to say that's Maya. Maya is by far the most consistent program I've ever seen, across the whole UI, which is the biggest reason I fell in love with it so quickly myself. Once you've learned the basics, which for most people takes just a few weeks, you can then branch out into whatever areas of it you wish to explore, with relative ease, because it all works the same way.

Really, the hardest thing about Maya is just that it can do so much. People tend to get intimidated when first presented with such a giant. It's important to understand that no one, absolutely no one, knows the whole program. People tend to specialize in just a few areas of it, and let other people, who specialize in other areas, do the rest. For example, I'm a modeler and texture artist. I'm not particularly good at rigging or animating or dynamics or any of the other countless thousands of things the program can do.

As someone on this forum once put it (sorry, I don't remember who), "Making sculpties in Maya is like cracking a nut with a planet." If sculpties are all you use it for, you'll be using just a tiny fraction of 1% of the program. Make sure your friend understands that. Those introductory Help tutorials cover the basics, which is where everyone starts. Where to go after that is up to the individual.


Really, though, tell your friend not to base her decision on any of our recommendations. All of these programs come with free 30-day trials. Well, all except Blender, since Blender is just plain free, forever. If she's interested in Maya, tell her to go ahead and download the trial, and run it through the mill for a month. If she really wants to make a project of it, she can get through those beginning tutorials in under a week, and then she'll have three weeks or more in which to play. If she has any questions, this forum is as good a place as any to ask them, provided you don't mind continuing to translate.

As an avid Zbrusher, I'll have to agree with this. Zbrush's interface was fairly intuitive for me, but learning the setup is not. But there is good documentation for it, and if you follow the steps precisely, you'll be sculpting away within the hour. For SL implementation, I'd highly recommend Vlad Bjornsson's tutorials: http://www.shiny-life.com/2008/02/12/video-creating-sculpted-prims-with-zbrush-3/

The trial is free and lasts 30 days. The files aren't watermarked (as Maya's trial version are), so you'll be able to import sculpts to SL.

At the end of the day, Zbrush is wonderful for organics, but (in SL), not so good at sharp edges and mechanical shapes. It also does a terrific job of texturing in 3D, comparable to Photoshop CS4 (and you can integrate your 2D editor via the Zapplink plug in).

All in all, I'd highly recommend trying Zbrush out.

I can sum up the best reason for using Max over another application in two words - "Prim Composer." http://liferain.com/downloads/primcomposer/

Yeah, sure. It makes Sculpties - four different ways at last count. But if all you want to do is make sculpties I would suggest going with another app besides 3ds Max. As noted, the price is a bit steep if you are just looking to be making sculpts. You can get a better deal elsewhere.

If you want to build with both sculpties and prims in a unified offline environment and then upload that project (with automatic baking if you want), textures, sculpt maps and all, to SL, or Open Sim, tweak it, download it again, and then upload, etc., in an iterative fashion then 3ds Max with Prim Composer is something you should look into. Once you have 3ds Max Prim Composer is free.