Best alternative to Blender for Particles, Fluids, Dynamics, Materials, and Rendering

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1

I’ve been using Blender for a while now, but have found that these areas happen to be somewhat buggy/slow, and hard to use. Does anyone know of any other software that excels in these areas? Or does anyone know how to improve Blender in these areas?

I’m interested in:
- Richness of features
- Speed/ease of use

What I know:
- Maya – Longtime industry standard, but feature-rich and harder to use/less productive.
- Modo – Excellent modeling tools, though I don’t know much else.
- Cinema 4d – Reasonably priced, easy to use, full-package 3D product, though I’m assuming this comes at the cost of some more advanced features (like those in the topic of this discussion)?
- Blender – Free and well-rounded, but somewhat hard to use and lacking in some of the areas of this discussion.
- 3ds Max – I actually don’t know how its strengths compare to the others in this aricle (if you care to inform me, please do).

Some background:
- I already know how to model/work in 3D, and have been dabbling in it for a few years at least.
- I’ve dabbled with most of the software on this list, but not extensively.
- I’m primarily interested in creating beautiful stills, and leveraging the powers that animations/physics/particles can give me for this (kind of like a 3d “photographer”).
- At this point, I am willing to invest $ into these products, so that isn’t really an issue.

Any & all thoughts are appreciated! Thanks much.

2

Suggest looking at Houdini by SideFX. Full VFX software.
If you understand procedurals & love nodes…

3

materials and rendering are such a wide field, you can even spend in blender years in exploring this with all the various renderer availible (blender internal, cycles, mitsuba, lux render, yafaray, vray, octane, indigo, corona, …)
it will not get better if you look at a new software with even more or other options. materials and rendering are something you have to learn and practice. look at the gallery here and see the great amount of work done with staying in blender

for dynamics, fluids and particles you would like to go to houdini (has a free version and also small price indie version), maya or 3dsmax (with plugins like fume fx, thinking particles, kraktoa, …)
learning a new software is never easier and such complex topics as dynamics and fluids will never come with an easy way to do it.
for pure fluids sims you could also look at realflow
but all of them have more options in fluid sims, dynamics and particles then blender and have more optimized and up-to-date code for it, so i guess the will calculate it faster. but dont expect it to be a one button solution

4

I just looked into Houdini FX, and it looks alright, but the price is much higher than I expected. Actually, I think it’s the most expensive 3D package I’ve looked at (I’m not an indie developer, so that package won’t work for me). Does anyone know if it really is worth this extra expense?

How about Lightwave? Is it good for this kind of work?

5

You’re right about this for sure. This is actually one of the big reasons I’m interested in potentially going a different route – because I know just how much time it could take to master these parts – and so I want to make sure that I’m not going to have to relearn all the hard stuff over again in a year or so.

6

what restriction doesnt work for you?

Commercial usage of Houdini Indie is limited to following:

  • The annual gross revenue of commercial entities and contracting entities does not exceed $100K USD
  • Commercial entities and contracting entities can purchase a maximum of 3 Houdini Indie and 3 Houdini Engine licenses
  • Houdini Indie cannot be used in the same pipeline as commercial versions of Houdini
  • Houdini Indie uses its own file format for saving scenes and assets
  • It is restricted to 1920x1080 when rendering out animations
  • Houdini Indie does not work with third party renderers.

even if you take the free aprentice version, its all there to learn and see if it fits your needs.

if you want to do top fluids and dynamics then there seems only the choice between maya (with included bifrost for fluids) and houdini. from the tutorials and making of i saw houdini seems do to the more impressive stuff, but i know thats alot of experience of the artist behind it.

all other packages need more plugins and additional software to do all of your wishes.
in c4d you would need something to do fluids and there are some plugins for better particle simulation. dont know here about the state of dynamics.
3ds max you would also need something for fluids and probably fume fx and thinking particles for particle stuff, rayfire for fracture, …
lightwave dont know about its cababilities these days, surely has bullet physic dynamics and particles, had always volume rendering for explosions and stuff, but it seems there are no fluids

7

It depends. I read a forum post by a realflow user who prefers Blender’s fluid sim over Realflow, since, according to him, Realflow is a real pig to use in production, and he found Blender’s fluid sim to be much easier to setup and use, and the results were more than good enough. Amongst his musings he wondered why Realflow is attracting all the attention whilst its usability is so questionable. Anecdotal, but still informative.

You mentioned that Cinema4d’s pricing seems attractive? That is a surprising comment indeed. If there is one over-priced application, it is C4d. I used to be a C4d user, but the extremely high upkeep forced me out, and I switched to Lightwave and Blender. I am not the only one: a short visit to the c4dcafe forums will be quite convincing of the relatively high cost of C4d. Maxon also tends to implement a feature, and then stop updating that feature for a very long time: BodyPaint (the UV texturing and painting tools) have not seen any major updates in a very long time since version 2 - it used to be the king of 3d painting, and it is sad to see how far it has fallen. The IV texture tools are quite clunky.

Modeling in C4d is also one of its weak points. As is (arguably) the material system (still no nodes) and renderer. The base version is not worth it (way too many limitations) - at least get the BodyPaint version, which include the sculpt tools - but you still miss out on many tools. The newest version introduced a number of very irritating bugs (such as the mirror modifier which is broken). The studio version is very expensive for what you get. Better to go with Maya, which is less expensive and more capable.

The main strength of C4d is MoGraph - which is squarily aimed at motion effects. For that type of work it is a no-brainer - it sounds as if this is the type of thing you are interested in. However, you would have to amend it with a better modeller app, such as Modo, or Blender. If you do choose C4d, go with the Broadcast version, and add Modo and Blender into the mix as well. Each has its own strengths.

Modo is quite nice as well. But still growing, and some of the features (animation tools, for example) still need work. The newest version looks promising. It is also quite affordable.

Houdini is not that great for modeling, and again you would have to look elsewhere for better tools (Modo, or Blender?). Not the most intuitive of applications either. And forget about Houdini if you are running AMD cards (in my experience).

Lightwave is improving as well - have you looked into Lightwave?

Each product has its pros and cons. Only you can decide. You can decide to stay with Blender, by the way. I switched from C4d to Lightwave, and then to Blender - and I am quite happy.

8

Oh sorry, the following description threw me a bit:

“…independent animators and game makers who want to use Houdini during the incubation stage of their business.”

Actually that does seem reasonable, though the 1920x1080 size does bother me just a bit. I think I’ll download the apprentice version like you suggested.

Is this because Lightwave is becoming obsolete / going out of style by chance? If so, that would be good to know. I only ask this because I almost never hear it mentioned in discussions or articles, though my experience may be limited. Got any other info on it?