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Blender Tests and Impressions


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1 hour ago, johanal said:

HOw far behind is Blender lagging compared to XP or Houdini for vfx and motion work?

At this point all DCC apps are far far behind Houdini. Time will tell how fast everyone can catch up or if even anyone is trying to compete with Houdini in that realm. And its not only about the nodes and its workflows, there are many aspects that needs to be put together for everything to work as you would expect. On top of that, Houdini never disappoints with their releases. It will be nice to see what does next Houdini release brings us. Release should be expected soon, probably next month. 

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1 hour ago, johanal said:

I've seen various youtube tutorials for Blender "vfx" and they are absolute crap.  Ironically all the blender people commenting think it's at the level of ILM or something.  Sad.

 

I don't know about the commenters (I rarely read YT comments) but would you expect a lone YouTuber doing a free Blender tutorial truly being competitive to an expert team at ILM doing Houdini with probably tons of assets and scripts on top of it? Even if the softwares were the same, this is hardly a fair analogy. Also, as @Igor said, Houdini is a class by itself with quite a bit of a lead over... anything else.

 

Blender is in the middle of the Nodes transformation which involves (or will lead to) an evolution of the solvers. XParticles still needs to support GPU calculation either, so... let's just wait how things turn out.

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On 8/3/2021 at 5:45 AM, Igor said:

At this point all DCC apps are far far behind Houdini. 

 

I don't believe this is a reasonable statement because it depends on the user and the type of project.

 

Houdini is best (by far) for visual effects and has superiority perhaps for creating re-usable rigs. But I would guess Maya is better for character design and c4d leads for most types of motion graphics. Blender is great for general game dev, has great modeling options and is the best value.

 

Does Houdini offer motion tracking? After Effects integration? 

 

 

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24 minutes ago, Icecaveman said:

 

I don't believe this is a reasonable statement because it depends on the user and the type of project.

 

Houdini is best (by far) for visual effects and has superiority perhaps for creating re-usable rigs. But I would guess Maya is better for character design and c4d leads for most types of motion graphics. Blender is great for general game dev, has great modeling options and is the best value.

 

Does Houdini offer motion tracking? After Effects integration? 

 

 

I guess we I can agree. It definitely depends on the user needs. 

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1 hour ago, Icecaveman said:

 

I don't believe this is a reasonable statement because it depends on the user and the type of project.

 

Houdini is best (by far) for visual effects and has superiority perhaps for creating re-usable rigs. But I would guess Maya is better for character design and c4d leads for most types of motion graphics. Blender is great for general game dev, has great modeling options and is the best value.

 

Does Houdini offer motion tracking? After Effects integration? 

 

 

 

I understood that the original question was

"HOw far behind is Blender lagging compared to XP or Houdini for vfx and motion work?"

so character animation et al. didn't come into play? Okay, for motion graphics you may consider C4D for their ease of use, but the lack of speed in object parsing is still an obstacle.

 

Anyway. The market is moving; everybody seems to do nodes these days, C4D gets "Scene Nodes", Blender gets "Everything Nodes", dunno about Maya. Such a change in the core paradigm will certainly shake up the tiresome old prejudices about "what program is best for what".

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10 hours ago, Cairyn said:

 

I understood that the original question was

"HOw far behind is Blender lagging compared to XP or Houdini for vfx and motion work?"

so character animation et al. didn't come into play? Okay, for motion graphics you may consider C4D for their ease of use, but the lack of speed in object parsing is still an obstacle.

 

Anyway. The market is moving; everybody seems to do nodes these days, C4D gets "Scene Nodes", Blender gets "Everything Nodes", dunno about Maya. Such a change in the core paradigm will certainly shake up the tiresome old prejudices about "what program is best for what".

A lot is changing for sure. Who would have thought people would be using UnReal for motion graphics, or that big game companies would be switching to Blender.

 

But from where I sit the general historic niche strengths of DCC programs still generally stands. For now. Tektonic Plates beneath us are sliding...earthquakes upcoming?

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Curious to be someone who didn't take Cinema R16 and went to Blender 2.76, but didn't take Blender 2.9 and went back to Cinema S24.
I see Cinema4D is coming. No, guys, not Blender 3. There's a lot of buzz around it, but no-no, success is coming to Cinema 4D.

Just wish Maxon would increase the speed of the system.

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On 6/17/2021 at 8:23 AM, Icecaveman said:

 

With your extensive use of Blender to find free models and all...how can your critique of the UI have any credibility?

 

It doesn't.  Your assessment is of no more value than my superficial assessment of the Maya UI.

 

A UI can only be fairly judged after at least a few hundred hours of general use...approached with an open mind.

 I only use it for this purpose at the moment to find free content.

I understand that you have more technical background and therefore your focus on things might be different.

My critique for UI is for the tabs. I only do not like the idea that user have to change modes to work with the project.

It is just very inefficient workflow or there is no workflow at all. UI should have the same window system with less

modes then it is efficient. Just like in Cinema 4D. You have a default mode, modeling mode, texturing and sculpting modes.

Not more. More is just a scam to lose a deadline. Keep it tighter to work efficient. The more tools you have the less time

you have. Blender is for dabblers and good for game developers.

Not very good software for serious archviz company or motion graphics. 

I have archviz company and make some animations for 80€/ hour

and have no time to dabble with interface.

 

As a 3d-generalist artist and use tools that are best for certain purposes.

Blender unfortunately does not suit for me as full professional 3d-production pipeline because it is too slow for me to use.

 

I use Blender 3d-models to create graphics for computer magazine in Cinema 4D + Photoshop.

Sometimes you have publishing deadlines when you do not have time to model from the scratch.

Then for example Blendswap is a good place to find Blender models.

Such as this: https://ahven.cgsociety.org/jnc2/robot-priestess

 

I have found only one youtube tutorial Blender for Cinema 4D artists by Helge Maus that explains how UI works.

He is a special guy who is not limited by any constraints of any software but that is very rare.

 

This is a Cinema 4D users forum so I should not be concentrating too much on Blender.

Just my 2 cents.

 

 

 

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15 hours ago, Dez said:

Curious to be someone who didn't take Cinema R16 and went to Blender 2.76, but didn't take Blender 2.9 and went back to Cinema S24.
I see Cinema4D is coming. No, guys, not Blender 3. There's a lot of buzz around it, but no-no, success is coming to Cinema 4D.

Just wish Maxon would increase the speed of the system.

I totally agree. Leading artists are using Cinema 4D because it is an industry standard. Blender is really not an industry standard but a good software for game devs and indies though.

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26 minutes ago, ahven said:

My critique for UI is for the tabs. I only do not like the idea that user have to change modes to work with the project.

It is just very inefficient workflow or there is no workflow at all. UI should have the same window system with less

modes then it is efficient. Just like in Cinema 4D. You have a default mode, modeling mode, texturing and sculpting modes.

 

While I am not a big fan of Blender's window handling, I must ask what exactly you mean by "mode" and "tabs", this is a bit ambiguous. The buttons (not really tabs) to the right of the menu are the equivalent of C4D's layouts. You can add layouts to your heart's desire, with separate main windows for dual/triple screens as well.

 

The tabs of the right-hand window with the properties are a mix from C4D tags, Attribute Manager modes, and AM tabs. Admittedly, Blender is not as flexible as C4D's AM which can be opened multiple times and be locked to objects and modes.

 

The buttons on the left hand of the main window are the tools; this is quite similar to the way C4D presents itself in standard layout (not in mine as I customized my C4D layout a lot, this is something I will definitely miss in Blender). The (fly-out) tabs to the right of the main window (View, Tool, Item) are again functionality that C4D has in the AM (in Tool mode and current object mode). Some other Tool settings are hidden in the temporary popout dialog on the bottom left of the main window. This spreads a lot of stuff all over the place which C4D concentrates; however, that is just from a C4D perspective... if you start out with Blender, it may not even be an issue.

 

Quite a bit of functionality in Blender now is made accessible by a mass of tiny icons that surround the main window. Personally, I am an icon fan 😉 and in previous incarnations of Blender, years back, I used to hate the way things were hidden under keyboard shortcuts. But I see that other people may perceive the abundance of icons and fly-out dialogs as cluttering.

 

As far as modes go, I see only Object, Edit, Sculpt, Vertex Paint, Weight Paint, Texture Paint. That is similar to what Cinema does. Actually, Cinema has quite a few more modes (Camera, Animation, Lighting, ...). So I'm not sure what you mean there.

 

My biggest complaint about Blender would be the Outliner (~C4D object manager, but not as efficient). The fact that stuff can be in different collections at the same time is irritating. Parenting hierarchies cannot be created by drag and drop. I still do not understand the sorting in the Outliner (I keep it to alphabetically otherwise I'm lost). If you open an object to see the children after they are parented, the properties also show up vertically (no separate mode for "vertical tags" as in C4D, although I don't like the way it's been solved in C4D either).

 

The main menu in Blender is quite rudimentary. All the functionality that is presented in the C4D main menu is spread in Blender to context menus or window-local menus. Also, I find Blender's handling of shortcuts shown in menus terrible - it shows multiple entries with the same shortcut, which actually means "this shortcut opens a context menu that contains this command". Maybe it's helpful if you are aware of that logic, but frankly it makes my hair stand on end!

 

What I'm currently missing is a material manager. Not sure atm whether there is one, somewhere, hiding. Showing available materials in a single dropdown list will probably turn out a major obstacle when you work with tons of materials, and this "fake user" workaround to prevent unused materials from being deleted is rather unintuitive. (Like some things in Blender are - you need to have it explained; there is no way you can figure it out by yourself from just clicking around.)

 

I am sure I will find more objectionable things over time, I haven't even started animation, and I really hope that execution priorities are not the same mess as they are in C4D...

 

However, my current impression is that it will be a very interesting race between Blender and C4D when it comes to Nodes. Both applications are currently expanding in that direction, and for Blender this change opens the world of motion graphics as well.

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Oh, Blender. I'm tired of the abundance of plugins and addons needed to work.
Each addon requires very little, and the rest is like unnecessary luggage - all the time in the way.
The abundance of addons causes problems in the stability of all ecosystems.

Yes, you can build an entire ecosystem into Blender. Do everything within it. I used to be such a person. But got tired of switching between tabs of addons to pull out single functions.
Blender is a great program! I'm not criticizing it at all! I admire it!
But I started noticing that in my attempts to prove that everything can be done within Blender, I started earning less. I began to notice that the battle for a completely free Linux+GIMP+Blender software I cornered myself.
I'm tired of it. I want freedom. I want more icons and fewer hotkeys. I want quality rendering.
Yes, C4D is an extremely expensive program. It lacks a lot of really important modeling tools. But. Those that are there are worthy of respect.  That's not even the point.
The very ideology of C4D as I see it, and what is the key, the most important thing that brought me back to C4D after so many years of working with Blender is the wonderful focus on the ARTISTRY.
The designer is better in C4D. Among icons instead of hotkeys. With buttons, not the most complex interconnections of node editors.

Even if you compare the realization of Animation Nodes (GeoNodes) in Blender and similar functionality in C4D I, as a person far from programming, see the availability of implementation in C4D. 
This is the most striking example. But this applies to every point. Orientation to people with non-technical mindset.

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