If you have been working in 3D and you haven’t heard of Blender before you really should take a look at this FREE software. http://www.blender.org/ Seriously..
In a past article I compared Animation Master and 3DS Max. Both of which are pretty cool 3D packages, and definitely worth anyone’s time who is interested in 3D graphics to check out. However there is one major downside to those packages, they all cost money..
Who can turn down a free 3D app? I don’t know but you would be a fool not to go ahead and download Blender. There are a number of free learning resources to get you up to speed with how the program works, which is awesome. With that said, you might notice like I have if you have spent time in other 3D apps that blender does not have the most intuitive controls or UI. It uses a few concepts I have not seen in other apps, in particular the 3D cursor is a strange tool to learn at first. The weirdest part is the use of the mouse buttons, as the secondary mouse button is the one you will use to primarily interact with things. Very strange, and it takes some getting used to.
With a little time it becomes a bit more natural, but it is definitely a bit tricky to get the hang of. Blender relies on your learning a lot of shortcuts to do a number of things as well, and at least in my limited experience I have found some things like 3D modeling are not nearly as easy with some of the basic procedures as in a number of other packages. It might just be me though, as I am a complete n00b with blender. I found that making a lathed object is NOT straight forward at all, which makes no sense to me as this is such a basic modeling task. Using a spline, you must convert it into an object which seems to loose much of the spline editing features which make adjusting the lathe ( or spin as blender calls it ) difficult to manipulate after the fact.
What I really like about blender is the amazing set of features you get built in, such as dynamics simulation, fluid simulation, nice rendering capability with Cycles render engine, and even some decent character animation tools. It seems you can do quit a lot with this free tool that you might not be able to do without spending a lot of cash in other apps on plugins. With the cycles render addition, you can get some lovely renders, although to get a quality rendering it seems to be very slow when the samples are set very high. You also don’t get nearly the level of control over material properties that you might using 3DS Max and mental ray, but it is still awesome.
Many programs have pro’s and con’s. For example, 3DS max does not have a built in fluid simulator despite the number of features built in. Maya does have one which is pretty sweet, but the app is not cheap by any means. You can buy realflow, which is more advanced than blender fluids, but rendering complex fluids is no easy feat on anything but a super computer. Animation master does not have any fluid capability at all from what I remember, other than maybe some metaballs particles, but I am not sure.
Cinema4D is a great programs, especially with the cool things you can do with the mograph plugin for motion graphics. However the pricing of the app is a joke compared to other apps. They force you to shell out tons of money to be able to use things like the advanced renderer or mograph. The program sells everything that is important as a separate plugin, and they don’t maintain legacy packages very well at all. So if you have an older version of C4D, like I do, you cannot even upgrade later or buy any plugins after a few years go by. I was holding out thinking the advanced renderer would get cheaper as new modules and versions of C4D are released and I would pick it up when it does, only to find out they no longer support anything about my version anymore. What a rip off company, my app is only a few years old and is treated as though it is completely obsolete by the company.
The bottom line, check out Blender. It really is the perfect starter 3D app since you have NOTHING to lose as it is totally free. You can even achieve some awesome motion graphics as well as it has a fairly interesting particle system. Have a look on youtube for some of the awesome blender videos.
Here is a great show reel I found.
