Just wait to see the improvements over Blender's GUI, more people will be capable of using all that Free Software power for their own projects ;D

I saw the petition Andrew Price made, but are they actually going to fix it? Perhaps not everything he suggested will work, but he has some good points.

I just learned the basics of Blender to sculpt and animate a game character model. I found the animation part easier than the sculpting part. It wasn't an easy program to learn in any way! But once it is learned you can do great things with it.

I saw the petition Andre price made, but are they actually going to fix it? Perhaps not everything he suggested will work, but he has some good points.

You can see I do a bunch of Blender stuff one can see in these threads:

http://forums.intpcomplex.com/showthread.php?191-Refrigerator-Art

http://forums.intpcomplex.com/showthread.php?517-CG-Requests

And an increase in skill as I went on my youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/user/lordlatch/videos

Most of my apps and games have some Blender in them:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=latch

Now that I have been using Blender for 2 years(on and off in bursts), I have become an intermediate in terms of skill.

Someone suggested I use a 'real' 3d program presumably because he saw a bit of potential in my work.

I've watched a couple tutorials of professional cgi programs and the workflow seems bizarre and not very quick. Their interface is more mature and there are features of it I like, but after that bit of research I chose to stay with Blender. Where I ever to make a living with cgi, I would reconsider relearning how to model, animate and composite in a new program.

It can't be that hard- just like learning another programming language.

I use Blender almost exclusively now, most recently for this game art tutorial series, but its what I actually use on a daily basis.

I've been a hobbyest 3D artist since I first got my hands on an Amiga with Lightwave ages ago. I even purchased a copy of 3D Studio ( no max... ) for DOS when I first got in to school. Since then, especially through professional artist friends, I've dabbled with pretty much every single 3D application released in the past 2 decades, even the completely impossible to figure out Houdini and ultrarare Nichimen nWorlds/Mirai. So, ive got some perspective on how things compare.

I will honestly say, in the > Blender 2.4 days, anyone using it used it because it was free or familiar to them and well, that's about it. Those days are long behind now.

With the 2.5 revision and 2.6 refinements, Blender is certainly moving in the right direction. On the other hand, all of the AutoDesk offering seem to be going the wrong way. I think this is a side effect of Autodesks yearly release schedule... shit gets added every year, even if it doesnt really need to be. More importantly, every time something is added, nothing is removed! This is creating some serious bloat, especially from a UI perspective.

Every so often a company needs to bite the bullet and do a full retool, and generally people do. Maya is a reworking of Power Animator. XSI was a reboot of Softimage ( then XSI had a second reboot I believe as well ). Blender 2.5 was another such reboot. It's a good time to push out the old, bring in the new and clean shit up. That said, its costly, disruptive and not always immediately popular ( go back to when Blender 2.5 was released for example! There are still a few die hards that think 2.4 was just all around better! ). Thing is though, a yearly release schedule and a reboot just dont go together, and Autodesk simply dont do it. Instead they just bolt more and more shit on top.

It's amazing to open up Max and see all the same primitives and operations available from Max one in Max 2014. It's also mind numbingly stupid... people dont use metaballs anymore for example. Also have 3 different Edit Mesh modifiers is just outright confusing. All the other products that Autodesk now own ( Maya, XSI specifically ) are getting the same treatment. Each year, bolt on more shit and remove nothing else. Look at Maya's "Quick windows" now... it's almost a joke.

In many ways, I think this is where Blender is gaining and the other tools aren't. Usability is the driving factor for Blender at this point. Powerpoint charts and feature matrices seem to be the driving factor at Autodesk.

Now Blender is no longer just the application that you use if you cant afford the other ones. Now, its just like all the other apps... a viable option with it's strengths and weakness.

Now, I would just love to see them continue working on one of its biggest weaknesses... pipeline support. 2.69 adding FBX import was a good step, but it needs to keep improving.

As to stability, Blender has been absolutely rock solid for me. I almost never experience a crash, I would actually say I found it more stable than most. That said, the NLE video editing is a different story. That is a crashtastic pile of crashing goodness.

Yeah, the last time I used max was in 2009, and it was relatively clean and light. I have no idea where they are now. I think too many companies are stockpiling features onto software. For instance, photoshop is so feature crazy that every tutorial on using it uses filters in some way to achieve effects, so it impossible to follow along in gimp. And they have integrated it with 3d packages and all.

I could never use all the features.

Andrew price was right about the interface though, it needs help. I saw his talk at the blender conference also (they shredded him) and they also had some good points.

The lack of consistency is a major thing.

I hope blender stays on the right track, and we don't get to the point where we refuse to upgrade from our beloved version.

Right now I am using the custom 2.7 version that has that BEPUIK plugin (not standard yet).

Low Poly is popular these days so I started this game because of the style and the idea of game play has grown as I've designed the elements.

All in Blender.

I've been working with blender for many years now, it's probably not the tool that major companies use, but for us small developers it's a wonderful software. The community is very supportive and huge.

This is the project that I've been working on:

[VIDEO]http:

[/VIDEO]

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My Thread in the Blender Artist Forum

Nicholas I am stuck at how to get character animation like you have. There. You have any tutorials? Can animation blending be done in blender? I am only using blender for the animating, then I have to export to the engine I am using.

I can confirm that Animation blending can be done in Blender, both with skeletal animation, and with vertex morphing on top of that if you'd like(for facial movement and bulging muscles, anything that isn't easy with bones).

As far as exporting that, the engine is the one that does the blending usually as part of the shaders used when rendering. So Blender's being able to do blending won't help with your engine directly. But if you want to use Blender's game engine, then it will help greatly.