I took a couple of days to try to really get into blender. While I’m fairly proficient with 3D Studio Max, i don’t think it’s where the future is. While max has a wide array of plugins available, they are almost all made by for profit entities, add to this that Blender has a much better file format support and has always been the tool set of choice for SecondLife ( all the way back to sculpted prims, then meshs, then rigged meshs and now fitted meshs), you can see why I’m interested by it.

Blender is kind of a strange beast, getting used to its control scheme is quite difficult when coming from something more “Standard”. But the tools are not very different from Max really. But unlike Max where hotkeys are there but optional, on Blender it’s almost a requirement to know a good amount of them, while most of the hotkeys have their UI equivalent, it’s not true for everything (that or i haven’t found them yet).

The new Blender rendering engine take a lot of time getting used to it. The results are very pleasant and realistic even with just a sun light and a basic sky but the tools available are… strange to say the least, and I’m not talking about the “noodle” interface, that’s not the issue. Some materials turn out to be extremely difficult to produce and what should be a very simple thing turns out to be not so simple to produce. I get the feeling that on Cycles, material creation is very close to what shader programming would be.

Ironically I have yet to touch the “old” rendering engine which might be more appropriate after all, it’s just the old reflex scanline < mental ray that you tend to have in Max.

I don’t think I can just move to Blender “like that”, I’m gonna need a lot of practice to get comfortable with it.