I used to use 3ds max and then started learning Maya. Sorry for the essay, but I thought I may as well make one big detailed post than explain myself in several more.Īll in all it's a bit of personal preference. It really is quick to model with as well. I know a lot of people who've made the switch from Autodesk (Maya in particular) to Blender and say they wouldn't go back. I hope I didn't sound like a fanboy, I'll happily admit Blender has a lot of downfalls, but the industry needs to start finding a better reason not to use it now that it's grown so much. I think I will have to reluctantly give Max another go, and see if I can better customise its navigation. However, I thought its modelling tools were a bit weak, and I hate the Autodesk way of moving vertices etc with the arrow axes widget.
I hated using Max with a passion, particularly its navigation, but found Maya much better in that respect. I'm also a student, and planning to go to University (if you're in the US I think you call that college), so I thought I should learn either Max or Maya, as they seem to be the standard. I guess 3DS Max is the standard for a reason (though I would hold age and familiarity as that reason) so it makes sense to learn it, I suppose. It has a barrier for learning, but once you're past that the UI and way of using tools actually makes a lot of sense and it comes into it's own.īut then. This for me is the best thing about blender. Blender is really, really fast because every action is hot key based you can do basically anything without knowing where the cursor is, you just know you have to move it, but not to a specific place. My biggest nag with max is the navigation and button-based tools. There are a lot of things I could go into, but I'll refrain! Having selection and moving vertices etc (via the widget) on the same mouse button is stupid in my opinion. Sure, it defies industry convention in several ways, but I think that's a very good thing - considering Max has been the standard for over a decade (more?) I think people should consider change. It really is worth sticking with Blender to learn it. If it's stylised or just a low poly with no normal map, I'll generally poly model in Blender alone. I then retopo that again properly as a low poly mesh and bake the details down in xNormal and then texture in Photoshop.
I then import that into Blender and do a quick bit of retopology and make a properly subdivided high poly model. Generally, if it's realistic and organic (but often hard-surface too) I use sculptris to knock out a concept sculpt to build in all the basic forms and shapes. My workflow changes a bit depending on what I'm modelling.