- Jan 4, 2018
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I pretty much just use Blender for all things 3D. It can do pretty much everything: modeling, sculpting, retopo, unwrapping, rigging/weighting/animating, painting, materials/lighting/rendering and even video editing. A few of those use cases can be done a bit more efficiently in a dedicated package (like ZBrush for some sculpting tasks or Substance Designer for making PBR materials), but in most cases Blender is more than good enough and often quite a bit better than any of the other general 3D design packages out there (I used Maya for about 6-7 years before moving to Blender and I don't miss it one bit).Just curious, what software did you say you preferred? We only started working with Daz a year ago but we've worked hard to shoot around the learning curve.
I focused on the old Blender Internal (BI) renderer and the Blender Game Engine (BGE) for rendering most of the time I've used it over the past ~12 years or so. I'm familiar enough with the Cycles workflow to get by (mostly in preparation for 2.8 and Eevee, the new real-time viewport renderer which mostly uses the same material nodes as Cycles). I haven't messed around much with any of the 3rd party render engine options, so I can't say anything useful about any of those.
I tend to prefer making my own stuff, so I don't bother much with Daz and the like. It runs like ass on my system anyhow - both because this rig is old and decrepit and because I run Linux and Daz lags pretty bad in Wine still for some reason. I'm still trying to feel out how well my system can tolerate PBR materials in Eevee now that Blender 2.8 is in beta. With any luck I will be able to start working in that full time to get my materials set up for export to Godot (my game engine of choice atm). If I still get a bunch of crashes like I do when trying to work on PBR stuff in Cycles, then I will be going back to focusing on BI in 2.79 again, so I can bake out AO, shadows and lights to merge into lightmaps I can use as an overlay on some shadeless models instead, probably with different lightmaps for different times of the day and such.