[Bf-education] Migrating from 3D Studio Max to Blender, at what cost?

[Roger Wickes]

Hey Timothy! 

I have written a good bit of the user manual, tutorials, training, support, and have used Blender professionally for 10 years or so.Converting is mostly just a process of terminology changes (self illuminating in Max is Shadeless n Blender) and UI changes (the controls for a lamp are both on panels, but just organized differently in each app). Blender has fewer controls and knobs to tweak than Max overall, but is very strong in mesh editing tools, and has an excellent UV unwrapper. Blender is well suited to large scenes, with an addressable resolution of 20000000 in all 3D axis. Currently, there is a BlenderNation article walkthru on using Blender for a Sci-Fi city scape. Future work is ongoing to add multi-resolution mesh generation and rendering, so progress and releases are always forthcoming. 

Blender can use many different renderers, from yafray, indigo, and its internal called Blender Internal. BI is very fast, depending on the options you choose. Blender can render from a command line, and the BBB used a network of renderers. The advantage with Blender is that you can set up your own distributed render farm quite easily using a variety of machines AT NO COST. There is even BURP, which you could run internally. It would be easy to automatically kick off a render job when a .blend file was dropped into a directory. I rendered a commercial using the 8 PCs I have here.

As far as how Blender stacks up against other packages, see http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Competitive_Analysis

I recommend Blender, and am located in Atlanta if I can be of any assistance. For support, there is also the forums and chat rooms.
Roger
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Atlantica Investments, Inc.
PO Box 680310, Marietta, GA 30068 USA



----- Original Message ----
From: Timothy Parez <timothyparez at gmail.com>
To: bf-education at blender.org
Sent: Friday, August 1, 2008 2:19:22 PM
Subject: [Bf-education] Migrating from 3D Studio Max to Blender, at what cost?


Hi,

Currently our designers are using 3D studio max to create and render high profile content.
Because of 3D studio max's closed nature we cannot optimize our rendering process enough
which results in unhappy customers.

If we had the ability to render on multiple machines, preferably Linux, we could change this
so we are currently investigating a possible migration to Blender.

Can someone answer the following questions for us:

 - How steep is the learning curve coming from 3D studio max and going to Blender
 - The designers design buildings and environments, is Blender usable for this type of scenario
 - Can we automate the rendering process... ie are there command line tools to render in batch
 - Why would you advice to use Blender and why would you advise against it

Thank you


Timothy.



      
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