Unity ArchViz: From 3dsmax to blender?

Hi,

we are doing ArchViz with Unity and our modelling tool is 3dsmax/VRay.

For many month/years I see that 3dsmax is getting weaker
(see this Website and an article about the risks of Rental Only subscription model)
while Blender is continuously becoming more powerful.

Especially after 2.8 Blender is a serious alternative to Max/Maya.

What do you think - time to switch?

Looking forward to see an interesting discussion!

Best
Carsten

 

We still have max and maya in studio but started using blender in our pipeline also. We actually do around 60% of work in blender now and more and more daily. Eevee renderer is amazing for archviz workflow, it allows you to iterate so much so quickly.

To be honest our artists actually prefer blender 2.8 to max and maya now.

 

((Opinion

I am not aware of a feature that Maya/3dsmax would offer compared to blender and which would be worth the subscription cost compared to blender's price tag of "free".

The author of the article, despite a bit of "anti-corporation" spiel has a point in that the subscription tends to be a bad choice for the customer.

The only thing that COULD matter is support. Blender is community supported, and developers have zero obligation to listen to you in any way. Meaning you can end up being on your own and that can happen often.

(relatively) recently, blender developers took steps to make blender more compatible to other modeling packages, and tried to employ more common control scheme. I personally view this development negatively (as the new control scheme is less efficient compared to the old one, at least when it comes to how I used it), but it might be a god send feature for someone who is migrating from another package.

Blender has been successfully used for producing short movies, and this has been used by some people to suggest that blender is now movie production ready.

I mean it does have motion matching tech built in, has modeling and animation capabilities, and is also usable, for some reason, for 2d production.

The weaker part I'm aware of is somewhat awkward parts of animation system (pole targets, I'm looking at you), but if you're in archviz that shouldn't matter.

2.8 version also added eevee renderer which allows you to create visuals at game engine speed in the viewport with fairly high quality, using that you can quickly switch to cycles when you need better visuals quality.

That's the rough idea of it.

Given that you're probably a studio, a decent idea would be to set 1 or 2 months aside to evaluate capabilities of the package and then make a decision as to whether switch or not.

 

Will do so as soon as there´s time between the projects.....!
Also will write here about my experiences.

 

You can probably save yourself a bit of time by finding someone who can show you the ropes.

Just so you won't need to suffer through youtube tutorials.