Why isn't blender very used for exteriors?

Hello, Blender artists.
I regret that I learned 3ds max in the past 3 years because I realize that it is too expensive and I will never get the money to get it no matter how hard I try. So these were 3 years of my life WASTED !!.
Now I would like to move to blender which is much cheaper ;)). But I see that a very few artists use it for exteriors and there are a few truly realistic renders over the web made in Blender and I wonder why… Is it much harder to obtain good results in blender ?
Thank you.

I don’t think you will be limited in your exterior models and renders with Blender. In fact, with the polygon modeling experience you have from 3DS Max, you will probably find you can work faster in Blender. Once you learn the main hot keys, you may not want to use Max again. That’s my experience, and I have a license for Max through my work.

Here’s some exteriors from these forums for your inspiration:

It works well for exteriors. I have only done a couple, like this one.


This is probably the most stupid thing I have red on this forum. If you want to do 3d graphic than learning the standard archivis tool is NOT a wasted time. I have already missed few job opportunities because my knowledge of 3ds max is very limited. People in the industry usualy don’t even know what Blender is.

To the topic: I personaly find it quite challenging to optimise the rendering of the vegetation in Blender. The viewport in Blender is quite weak in handling large amounts of objects and polygons. So you have to optimise the viewport which is not exactly easy in Blender.
Cycles itself (if you use it) can handle large geometry data quite easily, but it is still quite memory heavy, so no GPU rendering unless you have a GPU with lots of vRAM. All in all it’s quite a hassle to render the vegetation and it is usually not the thing you want to struggle with if you are on a tight deadline.

Thanks for your replies.

Thank you riveter, I do hope 3ds max experience will help me in learning blender because it’s interface is so different that I will forget how 3ds max works :-/. Some of the renders in your links are amazing. (Especially those made with Octane). However, I am not 3d artist, I am an architect and I will need to work with premade models most of the time I won’t be creating all the objects from scratch because it would take a lot of time and I have to do the visualizations as fast as possible. So do you think I can find enough free models/plugins on the web for my use ?

Good job on your render, it looks great ! May I ask how did you scatter the grass and flowers on the field? Did you use any external plugin for spreading the grass objects?

Thanks, mara. Well, I hope the 3ds experience will help me learn blender faster, though everything seems different here and after a few hours of tutorials I still don’t understand the logic behind the interface. In 3ds max used to be structured on a more logical basis.
I’m really curious how the computer could handle complex vegetation, because exteriors are 0 without vegetation. In max, You could use instance objects so that the program wouldn’t store more similar meshes. IT would instead occupy the memory with one object and the other would be a pointer to the first one. It helped the max file remain at a operable size and the speed in viewports was highly increased if you used instance objects instead of copied objects because it would use less memory. I hope blender has similar capabilities.

In max, You could use instance objects so that the program wouldn’t store more similar meshes.

I think what you want to look at are: “Duplicate linked” from the object men (alt-D) and particle systems. You can use a particle system to randomly scatter objects (vegetation) over a vertex group on your landscape mesh. Add a particle system, set the type to hair and in the render settings set the type to “Group” and select your group of objects. For vegetation, you probably want to check the “size” and “rotation” options for the group.

I used a particle system for the flowers. It works much like instanced objects in Max.
For teh grass, I used the hair system. I think using instanced geometry for grass used less memory though.

Nahhhh, no matter what you are doing with a digital computer, there is always room for (and career-value in …) being aware of “one more tool.” :yes:

I’m quite sure that you will benefit from your years of experience with 3DS, even though (at least, at first) the differences in user-interface and so on will perhaps make you feel like your first evening at an ice-skating rink . . . :wink: It just comes with the territory, though. Computers are always finding new and creative ways to make us humans feel stupid.

Yes, blender is different from 3ds max, but I will comprehend it someday…, I see in most tutorials nobody uses lights for example… They use planes with emission instead … Thanks for ecouragement :smiley:

Ok, thanks :smiley:
How about the trees… do you have any free library ? I haven’t found anything on the web for blender

Thank you for the tip :). I will try that