Curious about Blender... is it viable for a production pipeline?

Hey everyone,

I’m curious about Blender.

I currently work as a freelance 3D artist and primarily work in 3ds Max / Zbrush / Photoshop. From what I’ve heard and read Blender is pretty advanced and full featured. I currently pay for max on a sub, but as everyone knows it’s not cheap.

Is Blender viable to fill in for Max for most tasks? I currently use max for hard-surface modeling, modeling stuff to send to zbrush and for rendering out normal/ao maps. I usually have to work with .FBX alot, both importing and exporting files for clients.

How is Blenders modeling toolset in terms of efficiency to use?

Are there any limitations of the program I would run into?

Yes it is. However there are couple of things missing or in development.

3dMax’s “Fix Uvs” mode is not available for vertex or face editing. It is however available for edge sliding (With limitation for UV seams- the sliding edge must not be a UVseam).

One of the most missed features was “Edit Normals” modifier in max. Custom vertex normals are being supported however editing custom vertex normals is being developed currently (Coming soon hopefully).

Even though Blender is similar to max in a “modifier stack” context. Blender doesn’t have some helpful modifiers of max; for example “Edit Poly” so making combinations from multiple edit poly modifiers is not possible.

The Array (modifier) of blender compared to max array tools is a little bit more manual. You can do the same things however blender depends on user input to do some complex arrays. For example max array has rotation values in the tools to quickly create a circular array of objects. In blender this is done by using another objects rotation in blender > you choose a object offset and blender uses its pivot as center for array. So if you create an empty and set a modifier to use object offset of empty, when you rotate the empty you will create a circular array.

Edit: Ah forgot about vertex colors. Blenders vertex colors are hard to paint and manage. You can’t paint very dense meshes unfortunately. There is also no vertex color alpha by default. However if you code a custom exporter for a file format you can use multiple layers of vertex colors , so one can use first layer for color info and a second layer of black & white vertex colors for alpha. Of course such a thing is not possible by default.

These are the things you might find missing from the the top of my head. Blender also has a GOB addon for Zbrush which is very useful for switching between ZB and Blender.

Never ditch your current software until you are satisfied with a replacement.

Start a new project that allows you to determine if Blender is able to do the tasks you can normally do in 3ds Max. This could be another try on a past project or even something new. If you manage to complete the project, and satisfied so far, then ask friends and contacts to test the resulting files on other computers, OS and 3D packages. If Blender - or any other package - passes these tests then you can assume its safe to start using it on projects for clients.

yes it is, go for it!

If Blender fits into your workflow and pipeline depends heavily about your needs. But be prepared for a few downgrades. Blender is not Max. You cut yourself away from the commercial plugins for example.

I would do some tests. There is nothing better than own experience. And the only person who can tell if Blender is good enough for you is you.

anything modelling related or baking normal maps by sculpting(like you do in zbrush) i have not had any problem with… then again i have not used zbrush or maya.
you have to see it for yourself

one annoying limitation is that import/export of for example big obj files is rather slow.
.FBX got some heavy updates in recent time making it much more reliable than before.

Normal and AOMaps can be baked with the GPU in Blender. -a good time saver.

it depends what you want, for movie editing, games, product demo pictures, animation movies; its a nice tool.
Personally i find doing exact works that depend on mm measurements is a bit hard to do, but still possible.
However it will require some time to learn blender, lots of key combinations, and new things to do common things.
3DFX support is troubling sometimes, but its not a fault of blender, its a lack of open standards and company x changing fbx formats whenever it suits them better.

Like in the the time where Microsoft kept its word doc file format a secret (eventually under EU pressure they where forced to also support odf format an open standard)… something like that is fbx to the gaming world. Fbx is a bit of a cartel in gaming industries, but support for other formats is rising (i think). Personally i think gamers should push the industry to become more open to opensource standards instead of fbx.

Only you can decide if Blender fits your needs, all I can tell you is that I’ve been earning my living for 5 years doing technical visualisation using Blender as my main software, with no more or less software troubles than with Maya before that.

the biggest one is you are locking yourself out to a lot of plug-ins as mentioned a few post up.

as for other answer, i need to know what kind of market are you in? low poly / high poly? real time? arch vis? commercial? film?

for example if your answer is commercial, just look at commercial done in blender and see if your product is in that range. then you know its doable.

I do freelance 3D character art for games.

I’m primarily using max for modeling, then into zBrush for high poly and back to Max for baking.

Those things are certainly possible.

Personally I’ve chosen to use Xnormal/Substance Designer for baking before Blender had Cycles baking, and I’ve been satisfied enough with that workflow that I haven’t tried doing it inside of Blender.
With a few (free) addons, I find Blender’s retopology workflow to be really capable (on par with topogun), and unwrapping (while different to Max, which will take some adjusting) is really good as well. Again, there are some addons that improve it for gameart, but they’re optional.

Equally if not more importantly though: It needs to click with you. While you can never expect to just pick up such complex software as a 3d content-creation program, it’s imporant that you’re familiar and comfortable with the basic workflows (for instance: the way tools operate).
I suggest you go through a few tutorials to familiarise yourself, the thread see360 links to up there has a few recommendations from a fellow max-to-blender refugee.

As a freelancer though, it’s possible that your customer will ask for a .max file so it’s important that you keep your current copy of Max for those cases (so if you’re currently on subscription that’s a shame), or you make sure your customers will accept fbx/dae/obj.
Fbx works well enough in Blender, although with my colleagues we regularly had to use Autodesk’s (free) fbx convertor if the other program had an older fbx exporter (Blender only takes fbx version 7100 or newer).
Similarly, your customer will probably ask for psd’s, and I can confirm that Blender loads those without issues so you don’t have to export to tga/png all the time.

Oh, another thing: If I’m not mistaken, Blender’s normalmap-baking is synced with Unreal 4, as they both use Mikkt space.

I work with 3ds max at my work. And its the biggest pain in the ass, slow, intolerable software in the world. Modelling in it is horrible, animation is OK, and mental ray makes me sad. I often just do what I can in blender for speed. Blender lacks good integration with production standard 3rd party addons such as realflow and vray. The biggest production studios at the moment are using Arnold for rendering, houdini for fx and maya for animation (I’m not accounting for proprietary software).

Max is getting old and outdated, only smaller studios and game studios use it still really. You’ll have a hard time porting clean files between max and blender if they’re anything but models, so its worth getting to know how max works so you can fix issues etc after porting.

Maya is pretty horrible for modelling, nothing really beats blender for me (modo comes closest).

As a freelance VFX artist you would be missing a trick not to go with blender. There’s no licence fee to worry about and the quality it can produces is easily competitive with industry standard software.

If you want to end up working for a large studio, you’ll need to know maya, its what their software will be based off.

thats funny so the “big” industrie is using Arnold… well in that case we’ve been on the frontline all the time :slight_smile:

Please see this, that might be useful also do not forget to see the confrence video I saw it yesterday on youtube.

from my experience more than 10 years (worked some other softwares like 3dsmax, maya and softimage) , yes and may no, yes for modeling & uv, sculpting, rendering, compositing, some good effects with fluid and particles and good scripting, and may-no for, for example sometimes its tricky like feathers on hair particles, Model instances deformation on hair (strands cuz deform) this one has modifier but is slow compare to other software ones on particles, there are some good free addons may help like sverchok and molecular.

Yes, most definitely.

You might get some issues with bone rotations when exporting skeletons, but in general FBX works really well.
We still use Maya as a gateway to the game engine (our model converter is a bit pick with FBX formatting) but have no trouble sending files from Bleder to Maya with FBX.