Recommendations for programs

[ZoraidaTsura]

Hi,

I know a lot of people asked this before, but I am stuck in a bit of a pickle. I got the student edition for Maya, and 3D Max, but I have been mainly working on blender. I know that second life has some stakerights with blender, and a lot of people use it do to Maya not being affordable to just anyone. By the way, if you are a college student, autodesk will give you a three year student license for specific programs for free. Just would let people know that tidbit at least.

 

I was curious, what is the major differnece between these programs? I know most here prefer blender, but if I could get insight on the other programs, i would appreciate that too. Blender isn't hard for me or anything, just keeping my options open. I know for professional rigging, for let's say if you went to a video game or movie company, they would use 3D Max, Maya, or Zbrush for a lot of things, but blender seems to be hte popular choice especially for mesh makers. Please help, I would like to get some insight from other users.

 

Thank you!

[Sassy Romano]

One aspect not often appreciated is that the student versions generally do not allow for commercial use and as such anything made and sold with it (including in SL) would be breaching that licence.

[jordanit0]

I would say most people prefer blender due to the facts it free.  Most people dont have hunderds or even thousands of pounds spare to spend on software.  Yes you can get pirated versions of the software and im sure people prob do use them here. 

 

[Gaia Clary]

I think the big difference between Blender and Maya is documentation. At least that is what Chosen few always pointed out when he was active in this forum. And i can agree that the Blender reference documentation is ... well, it has a link:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Reference judge yourself :matte-motes-evil: (ok, we are working on this)

However from what the tools can do it appears to me that they all pretty much cover everything that is needed for working with 3D, regardless whether you are modelling for games or for animation film or whatever else.

Each tool has its strenghts and weaknesses. so it actually depends on what your particular field of activities is and whether you need the one tool that works awesome in Maya but not at all in Blender. And even this judgement seems to be very user dependent. Some report that Maya is the superior tool for weighting characters, others tell its Blender... I bet al of this is just a matter of experience.

You see, your question does not seem to have an easy answer (at least i don't know one) :matte-motes-sunglasses-3:

[Jake Koronikov]

If you are starting (or learning) to create content for SL, then Blender is better starting point. Not because of it's features but because of the large user community and support. Gaia's Avastar for example is a great tool for SL avatar and clothing work.

Personally I find Blender much easier to work with polygonal models, hard surface or any models that are made using just vertices and stuffs. That is my personal opinion, I find Maya modelling interface a bit slower to work with.

On the other hand, Maya has some far better features regarding animation, fluid and physics simulation. Maya is also superior when dealing with massive projects that use memory and CPU, or need complex production pipelines and caching of processed data. Or when multi-processor capabilities are needed. But are those superior features needed in SL..well not necessary.

Where is Maya better? I find that rendering and texture bakes. Maya license includes mental ray and Turtle renderers. Mental ray has huge amount of options for Final Gather, Global Illumination, Photon simulation, Advanced light and shadow rendering, transparency, translucency, anisotropic reflections, displacement mapping...neverending list. The final quality of renders are more realistic than in Blender.

(One example of mental ray power, a commercial video:

Would it be too time consuming to make that with Blender? Or even possible? Dont know...)

But Maya is not free. It requires some enthusiasm to make such an investment for a software.

 

 

 

[Nalates Urriah]

The significant dirrences in capabilities are pretty small from what I can gather.

The major significant advantage of Blender for Second Life is Linden Lab supports it, ...in the sense that they make sure their stuff works with Blender Exports. Also, it is the only tool that has add-ons that address the oddities of modeling for Second Life.