I never said it has a bad UI. Once you learn it, its fine. But like I was saying, if you know your way around blender, you dont have to look at the UI. When I model , I know all the shortcut keys. And as said above by someone else, in MAX, to edit a vertex or something, you have to go to the UI, click Mesh, click Modifier, blah blah. Blender you just hit TAB and you can arbitarily drag a vertex in any 3d diretion, or lock it to one of the x,y,z axis.

If you read that again, I said that I like the Blender UI more than the MAX UI.

IIRC, Blender is able to export/import many file formats. You could potentially start with Blender and switch to another 3D graphics program if you needed to.

Blender has one of the worst UIs Ive ever seen in any modeling tool but the only thing it's lacking is the ability to use HLSL shaders to see what your mesh will look like before you export it and thats only if your using DirectX. I personally like max but yes the modifier stack makes no real sense...

May i ask why everyone seems to hate the modifier stack design? I love it, so i am curious.

Quote: Original post by dpadam450
I never said it has a bad UI. Once you learn it, its fine. But like I was saying, if you know your way around blender, you dont have to look at the UI. When I model , I know all the shortcut keys. And as said above by someone else, in MAX, to edit a vertex or something, you have to go to the UI, click Mesh, click Modifier, blah blah...

Have you used 3ds max? Here is a list of some hotkeys for max, and that is just the tip of the iceberg, as the saying goes. In max you can hit ctrl+x and the gui pretty much all goes away, allowing an experienced artist to work mainly off of hotkeys. Not to mention you can actually fully customize all hotkeys yourself, and the ui.

Quote: Original post by Jarrod1937
May i ask why everyone seems to hate the modifier stack design? I love it, so i am curious.

I don't hate the modifier stack design, in fact I love Blender's, I hate Max Modifier Stack implementation, there is a difference, and I gave the reason why on my post above.

Quote: Original post by Kwizatz

Quote: Original post by Jarrod1937
May i ask why everyone seems to hate the modifier stack design? I love it, so i am curious.

I don't hate the modifier stack design, in fact I love Blender's, I hate Max Modifier Stack implementation, there is a difference, and I gave the reason why on my post above.

Oh i see. Though i must say those warning are few and far in between. Its only a handful of modifiers, in a certain order, that will cause that warning to pop up, and even then sometimes it can be ignored and you'll be fine.

Well I cant say I tried MAX for that long, but:

Your shortcut keys, do you still have to go through the modifier stack. like CTRL+A Gets me 1 level deep, then CTRL+B get me 1 more level deep.

Is there a way to edit a vertex in an arbitrary direction? It seemsed all axis-aligned when I used it, which was a big reason I hated it.

The UV-mapping was confusing hands down. Tutorials and materials way too much work. Blender I just select model, hit Project faces from view and bam, I have an ortho projection of the faces I'm texturing slapped right on my texture, and I views it already on my model. In MAX I believe 1.) to view the texture applied while editing I had to do a few UI things and material settings. 2.) I never even found out how to project from view in MAX which is the most common unwrap that I use. So I imported pre-UV mapped models into MAX. Again, it's a Blender Pro vs a MAX Pro. You know stuff, I know stuff, we are biased. But in the past 2 years, Blender added so many features that I'm blown away: Sculpting (Z-Brush like), Normal Baking (High Poly Mesh baked onto Low Poly mesh), and Fur.

Quote: Original post by dpadam450
Well I cant say I tried MAX for that long, but:

Your shortcut keys, do you still have to go through the modifier stack. like CTRL+A Gets me 1 level deep, then CTRL+B get me 1 more level deep.

Is there a way to edit a vertex in an arbitrary direction? It seemsed all axis-aligned when I used it, which was a big reason I hated it.

The UV-mapping was confusing hands down. Tutorials and materials way too much work. Blender I just select model, hit Project faces from view and bam, I have an ortho projection of the faces I'm texturing slapped right on my texture, and I views it already on my model. In MAX I believe 1.) to view the texture applied while editing I had to do a few UI things and material settings. 2.) I never even found out how to project from view in MAX which is the most common unwrap that I use. So I imported pre-UV mapped models into MAX. Again, it's a Blender Pro vs a MAX Pro. You know stuff, I know stuff, we are biased. But in the past 2 years, Blender added so many features that I'm blown away: Sculpting (Z-Brush like), Normal Baking (High Poly Mesh baked onto Low Poly mesh), and Fur.

No, you don't need to go to the modifier stack to use some of those shortcuts, but again, if need be, they can be customized to fit whatever you like.
And the vert editing? Yeah, you can definitely edit them in arbitrary directions, thats kind of a basic requirement of any modeler imo. You can use the axis's to move the vert, if you need fixed precision, but you can easily move it by selecting the middle of the gizmo, which allows arbitrary movement.
As far as 3ds max's UV'ing, your complaints just seem to be from inexperience with it (no insult intended). 3ds Max's uv tools are quite a bit more extensive, and allow quite a bit of fine tuning. For 1, i am not sure what you had to do, but to view a realtime update on the mesh all i had to do is have the material applied to the mesh, and apply a uv unwrap modifier, it would then update if i ever changed the uv's in the editor.
But, i do agree, as long as you can get work done with a modeler, does it matter which it is?

Quote: Original post by Jarrod1937
Oh i see. Though i must say those warning are few and far in between. Its only a handful of modifiers, in a certain order, that will cause that warning to pop up, and even then sometimes it can be ignored and you'll be fine.

It seems like Editable Mesh + Skin modifier is one of those combinations, and happens to be a very common one.

Another thing I don't like is that everything must go into the stack, all interactions between you and your geometry must be filtered through the stack, even simple vertex manipulation.