My experience with Blender is very limited, however I can say that:

* UV Mapping in Max works fine. Besides procedural generation (box, planar, spherical, cylindrical), there is also pelt mapping best used for organic models. To enable realtime update, you have to check "show in viewport" button on the Material.

* I never had any reason to remap keyboard shortcuts in Max, defaults work well.

* I had very few problems with Modifiers in Max. They can indeed be troublesome, but the key is to use them as little as possible - for non-destructive editing in the beginning (so you can roll back) or for animation. By the way, you can lookup definition of "stack" in computer science - you are not even "supposed" to pull stuff out from the middle, only the top. As long as you keep this in mind, you won't have any problems.

* Rigging in Max is quite painful. Have to watch bone orientation really closely, or everything gets screwed up (this means you MUST create all your bones in the same viewport, preferrably the Front, otherwise you will spend hours messing with pivot points). Setting up IKs is also painful, but Reaction Manager really takes the cake.

For those who don't know, you can use Reaction Manager to create custom controls (like sliders) in the user interface, for adjusting animatable parameters of your model. For example, you can create a "Right Foot Roll" slider, which will animate right foot shifting its weight onto the toes and back. Or you can create "Right Hand Thumb Curl" slider which will animate the thumb on the right hand curling in and out, and another parameter for "Right Hand Fingers Curl" which will curl all other fingers separately. That way you can animate resulting Reactions, making your character do the "thumb up" gesture by gradually setting thumb curl to 0.0 and fingers curl to 1.0. This is unlike the Morph feature, which only works with vertices and is used for facial animation (through vertex interpolation, where each keyframe is called Morph Target), because Reactions can work with bones and other objects.

* The link modifier used for linking objects during animation (I don't know if Blender has this feature, but I would assume it does) is difficult to use and very frustrating. It's typically used to attach a sword to a character's hand and keep it there, and then at some point pass it into another hand or drop it on the ground.

* I think Blender is more friendly when it comes to import/export. With Max, I find myself having to use Deep Exploration and whatnot.

* Blender supports molding like Mudbox (creating hi-res organic shapes that you can then use to bake normal maps into low-res meshes). Max supports influence painting (forgot the actual name of that feature), but that can only be used for terrain making, not really for molding characters.

* After some customization (I highly recommend Blender Underground tutorials for getting started with Blender), Blender feels a lot like Max. Unlike Max, Blender is more difficult to break because it doesn't remember any settings unless you tell it to.

* Blender has a Game extension that allows you to create games that run within Blender. I would imagine this means you can do a thing or two about using Blender for level design in your own game. Max has MaxScript, but it's not meant for realtime use.

* In Max, to start editing verts/edges/faces of an object, the usual (but not non-destructive) way is to right-click on the object, then Convert To->Editable Poly (or Mesh, if you want to work exclusively with triangles). There is no need to add a modifier. Convert to Poly/Mesh command also clears the modifier stack.

* I don't know about Blender, but Max crashes all the damn time. When I used it, I kept loosing hours and hours of work under very tight deadlines. Max has an incremental save feature, so typically when you go to File->Save, you click a little Plus button, which creates a new file with the same name and a number at the end, and if there was a number there already it gets incremented. So you usually end up with several hundreds of incrementally saved files in your working folder after a few days of work. The problem is, if Max silently crashed at some point, all of your 50+ iterations you created over the past 3-5 hours are corrupted. You just lost everything you did and you have to go back and figure out which iteration it crashed on. I am talking about Max 8, because I couldn't get Max 9 to even run on my machine.

* Max supports HLSL shaders and Blender does not, however it wouldn't be in my list of "required" features. All I really care about is that my vertices, texture coordinates, bones and bone matrices are all exported well. That is quite enough trouble as it is. If you work with DirectX, you can use its model viewer to verify materials.

* Blender does have user interface issues, but guess what you do? Learn it. Max, by the way, also has a terrible user interface, although not as bad. I can't remember ever "enjoying" the Max UI (I did however enjoy the XSI's UI). Cinema 4D is supposed to be the friendliest but I never used it.

Quote: Original post by Kwizatz

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.

Skinning in blender is not something i have attempted, but does blender allow you to alter the verts and edit the mesh after skinning? It is impossible, for any program, from what i understand, to maintain the skinning if any addition/subtraction/alteration is done to the verts, for the very fact that skinning takes into account every vert.

Quote: Original post by Jarrod1937
Skinning in blender is not something i have attempted, but does blender allow you to alter the verts and edit the mesh after skinning? It is impossible, for any program, from what i understand, to maintain the skinning if any addition/subtraction/alteration is done to the verts, for the very fact that skinning takes into account every vert.

It does, though you'll have to weight in any new verts, which is not too hard, you can either add them to the proper "skin" group (I forgot the actual term) or just use envelopes.

I used to think it was impossible as well since my first contact with skinning was with Max 5/6 when I took a short curse on modeling, but it isn't, in fact XSI is able to do it as well.

I'd like to take the opportunity to ask how can I rotate a fully rigged and animated character in Max using biped 180 degrees along Z, so its front faces positive Y rather than negative Y? Thanks [smile].

Quote: but does blender allow you to alter the verts and edit the mesh after skinning? It is impossible, for any program, from what i understand"

I dont know if you know how skinning works as a programmer, but it would add no trouble. There should be a way to add and move vertices in MAX (Maybe they make the mesh 'read-only' after you skin it?). In the end you just have per-vertex data to what bone and what weights.

Quote: Original post by Kwizatz
I'd like to take the opportunity to ask how can I rotate a fully rigged and animated character in Max using biped 180 degrees along Z, so its front faces positive Y rather than negative Y? Thanks [smile].

You asking how to actually rotate the biped? Just simply select the entire model, biped and all, group them, then rotate. If you don't group them, each bone piece will attempt to rotate on each of their axises, resulting in the biped bones turning rather than the model as a whole.

Quote: Original post by dpadam450

Quote: but does blender allow you to alter the verts and edit the mesh after skinning? It is impossible, for any program, from what i understand"

I dont know if you know how skinning works as a programmer, but it would add no trouble. There should be a way to add and move vertices in MAX (Maybe they make the mesh 'read-only' after you skin it?). In the end you just have per-vertex data to what bone and what weights.

No, i am just an artist, and web programmer (hardly comparable to a 3d programmer). I just figured that if you were able to edit the mesh after skinning, like move a vert to the opp end of the model than were it started, add/delete faces/verts...etc, that while it would be possible to continue with the current skinning data, it would be useless. After all, if you are allowed to alter a model a large amount after you're done skinning it, would the skinning data still be useful? Meaning, beyond simply adding or subtracting one ot two verts, you'd have to redo the skinning anyways.

[Edited by - Jarrod1937 on September 14, 2008 8:36:32 PM]

It's just that crazy interface that puts me off (and the fact that I was trained in 3dsmax).

I have to admit that some of the work being produced by user of Blender is very impressive.

Quote: Original post by Jarrod1937
You asking how to actually rotate the biped? Just simply select the entire model, biped and all, group them, then rotate. If you don't group them, each bone piece will attempt to rotate on each of their axises, resulting in the biped bones turning rather than the model as a whole.

Alright, thanks.

I might throw in my two cents in the area of rigging and UVs.

I've not used Max's pelt map, though it seems quite flexible. Blender's unwrapping, however, is the best I've personally experienced so far. It's easy to mark the seems and then unwrap them almost proportioned to the model.

As for rigging... Rigging in Max seemed very problematic. Every time I wanted to change the pose to check the rig, I had to dig through the interface to get to the proper button to do so. I also found positioning the "plane" to mirror weights on the rig quite a pain the in the arse.

Blender was a lot easier, though I don't know if it is the best. It's easier to switch between posing and painting. Mirroring the weights was a piece of cake, as long as the model is positioned correctly.

I’ve used max for most of my projects and its crap. I spend most of my work day fighting with it’s insane rotation system. I spent almost a week of eight hour days trying to figure out how the biped applies its keys… result? Zilch. No idea.

The biped sucks. The rotation system is embarrassing. The modeling tools are antiquated and not designed for artists. I have very little good to say about it except that despite all of its many faults, you CAN make games with it.

I have used Blender. I like it a great deal, principally for modeling, but due to the native support for python, getting it to dance whatever tune you want it too is fairly easy. Unfortunately, python is actually a barrier in many cases, as most game programmers are trained in C++, and most game engines are ancient monstrosities of code, ponderous yet disturbingly fragile under years of aggregated tweaks and workarounds.

I would love to build a game with blender, and it’s certainly possible, but the overhead for doing so in a studio environment would be immense.

Quote: Original post by JackTheQuick
I’ve used max for most of my projects and its crap. I spend most of my work day fighting with it’s insane rotation system. I spent almost a week of eight hour days trying to figure out how the biped applies its keys… result? Zilch. No idea.

F1? Not saying anything bad, but you can't expect to learn everything just by trying a million things, unless you have a large amount of time on your hands. Use the resources available to you to learn faster. That, and if you really hate biped that much, why not just make your own skeleton?