Can't stand Blender, what other free/cheap modellers can I use?

Hi Tiles....OK, so I guess we can agree to disagree. Let me first say - trust m...I can afford any application on the market that I want - no problems there. However, price is not the issue here (its nice that Blender is free, but its not my driving motivation). I've actually tried Maya, Cinema 4D, 3DS Max, etc and really don't find any of them appealing. That said, I hated the older version of Blender (before the complete overhaul), but the new platform has really grown on me to the extent that I find it to be quite good. So, I gather from your post you don't...OK, so what can you not do with Blender that you can with your favorite modeling platform (which BTW, which is that) -- I'm not challenging you, I'm simply curious and hopeful to learn why something I believe to be quite good really isn't.

Calixto

 

Forgive my noobiness, but what's an Ngon and why does it matter?

 

I just discovered Silo and I love it! The interface isn't as damn bulky as Blender.

 

A face of a 3D mesh is called Polygon. There are three types of Polygons: Tris, Quads, and N-Gons. A Tri has three edges. A Quad has four edges. A N-gon has five edges and more.

The importance of N-Gons, well, it makes life much easier when the modeler can deal with N-Gons. And this everywhere where you need to modify the mesh structure. Just one example: with Quads limit it was a real pain to reconnect edgeloops in Blender. Because the moment when you removed a edge was the moment where Blender immediately triangulated away the N-Gon that gots introduced by removing the edge. And the by that created Tri was always in the way. I had cases where i would`ve had to remodel the whole mesh to fix such a geometry then. Something that can be done with three clicks and the knife tool now.

 

Well, Silo is just a modeler. Blender a full 3d content creation suite.

 

That's why I always say: try the thing yourself. I cannot tell you or anyone else what workflow you are going to like. If I know a program I can teach how to use it but I cannot make someone prefer one workflow over another. If it was that easy there would be only one program of each category left on the market.

 

True. How about Cheetah 3D? From what I looked at it is a full 3D content creation suite. It's also cheaper than silo.

 

If you're on a mac and you want to use it for Unity game models only, I would say Cheetah is a nice and cheap alternative for Blender.

 

Blender still remains and will always remain the crowning jewel reference model of
"How to get absolutely everything wrong when it comes to usability"
If it wasn't for the unfortunate fact that some other tools use Blender as a backend and therefore you are forced to use blender in order to operate said tool. If it wasn't for this one fact I would gladly cast it away into the abyss of the ultimate Crapware ever created.

 

You necroed this near 9 year old thread to say that?

 

A rousing excerpt from the book, "Everything You Don't Understand Is Bad: How to Skate through Life Without Being Adaptable".

 

i also struggled learning Blender for years - the turning point was when i saw a tutorial saying that most of Blender usage can be shortened in some few keys: spacebar, a, g, r, s, x, y, z - and everything else comes later

 

@nitrofurano
What in blender, did you struggle with?

 

i'm using Blender fine since years now, and i was struggling a lot on the whole thing, how to start using it, and later, how to use it effectively and productively - what truly made me rocket in the learning curve is realizing that with those keys i cited above we can do almost everything there! so, as it happened to me, perhaps the same affects to a lot of people still struggling on Blender's basics...

 

I think learning Blender (or any major 3D package) is like learning to cook...you can't get mad when you don't know what every gadget does, just concentrate on the task you need and repeat until it's second nature.

That and Blender 2.8 is so much more approachable than the old versions.

 

Sorry, but what essentially you are saying is that everyone is wired the same way, I still don't get blender and I have used both SoftImage back in the day and 3ds Max. Even with the changes the UI is still somewhat impenetrable for me. Also some things just seem to be counter to logic, it's still not great for 3d polygon editing. I would rather pass and try something like Silo if I can get results quicker and don't have to work out their bats**t UI.

 

I hated blender Until I set my own shortcuts. It's a big task, because the shortcuts are terribly organized and you need to google some code, but when you make everything work the way you want it's quite decent. The new blender it is.

Examples: rotate camera around active element with right mouse button. Q,W,E,R for Select Move Rotate Scale.
Also learning some shortcuts and getting used to them helps a lot like the L key to select all connected faces under the cursor.

 

Customization is nice. But the tutorials are usually made with the defaults. And so the defaults needs to be good. And customization goes also just so and so far. We at Bforartists are "customizing" Blender since over four years now, fulltime, and are not done yet. An artist has to use the software, not to rewrite it.

Blender 2.8x UI and UX design is indeed much better, compared to Blender 2.7x. But still suffers from old problems. And from new created ones.

For example, Blender has still lots of double entries that crowds the menus and panels for no reason. I have never understood why Blender devs needs the very same setting or tool two, three, four or even five times in the UI. One at the right place should be more than enough. And it's not that this is old mistakes that they haven't ironed out yet. They still repeat it. The new Tool Settings exists three times in the UI at the moment, with the very same content. And every update brings usually some new double menu entries.

They made it even worse with the new tool shelf concept. Which is a gigantic hack that introduces a second toolset on top of the old one, and doesn't really integrate well with the rest of the UI. So you have the same tools twice in the UI, with minor differences in functionality. On top of that, the keymap is now completely mixed up by that. To introduce monochrome icons was imho also plain crazy. And also this time they did not manage to create a good readable standard theme. And so on.

Blender UI design still lacks in big parts. Provable. As my examples shows. But there is Bforartists. We try to fix these things as good as we can

 

People either LOVE blender or HATE it. I have been using it since 2001. I am by no means a professional 3d artist. More of a hobbyist then anything. BUT It was the first 3d modeling program that I ever tried. So I have gotten use to it. And you cannot beat the price. `!!! It has come a long way in the last 18 years. I remember when the isterface was basically a straight of an SGI workstation. None of the familiar windows menus or buttons were on it.. The documentation was almost none existent. When I first downloaded it I launched it and took on lone at the interface and shut it down. I did not fire it up again for six months. But then I went through a WRITTEN tutorial that went step by step and finished a model and I have been using it ever since.