Re: blender

[Ingo Ruhnke <grumbel@gmx.de>]

Anarky <anarky@rdslink.ro> writes:

>     hmmm .. it seems like you've got experience .. with that in mind
> I'd like to ask you how do you feel Blender compares to those
> comercial software in terms of: -productivity -features

I am not the one that was asked and I don't have much experience with
commercial packages, but still I can try to give an answer. From the
number of features Blender is pretty nifty, with the buildin sequence
editor, inverse kinematics, texture editor, animation support,
scripting, game engine and all that stuff Blender is a pretty complete
package, you can do everything from simple models, to game sprites, to
short movies, to complete games. So from the overall features is
pretty good, however if you look at the details, it doesn't look that
good. The scripting API isn't 100% complete (no support to batch
render, limited access to the amature stuff, etc), the UI has its
bugs, docu is often lacking, etc.

Especially when it comes to simple polygon modeling Blender isn't all
that good, the boolean operations are still pretty buggy (leave holes
in the models, lead to ugly polygons, etc.) and beside extrude or
plain vertex-moving there aren't really any other ways to edit the
mesh, there is no way to select edges or faces in a sane way, one can
only mark the vertexes that form a edge or a face, but that is often
pretty limiting. If you look at Wings3d[1] (another Free Software
modeling programm) for example, it has of course much less features
than blender, well, it really can't do more than polygon modeling, but
it offers a magnitude more features then Blender when it comes to
manipulating the mesh. Stuff that still after years of using Blender
gave me a headache, was just trivial after using Wings3d for half an
hour. Wings3d simply feels much more natural when handling the mesh
than Blender.

BTW. Has anybody used OpenFX[2] and could comment a bit on that?


[1] http://www.wings3d.org
[2] http://www.openfx.org
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