Blackmagic Forum

Hello everyone,
hope you are having a fantastic week.

I was wondering what 3D software do you recommend with Fusion 9.

i wanted to try modelling and animating a character or do some particle simulations in those software and bring them to fusion.
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I Learned Maya in College last year, but the problem is the price and like other software with
subscription based-licensing i don't have the money to invest.

i tried blender 2 days ago, but it has some bugs so i'll try it again in the future when it's fixed. (Too much headache with the cursor).

what has worked best for you?

Thank you and have a good week

I use Cinema 4D and it works very well with fusion. Export the projects as FBX and import them in fusion.

Hi,

Then I would still recommend Blender. I studied Maya, too, so I know what you are going through.

Blender is very powerful, but it takes time to learn it. It do have bugs, but so does all other software that evolves, even Maya.

What you can do is mixing both Maya and Blender. If you can afford to rent Maya LT, you can build your models there and export them to Blender. In blender you do your texturing, animation and particle effects etc.

Hope it works out!

I think that if you wait for a software to be bug free, especially a complex software like a 3D modeler is, you will wait forever. If you are dipping your toe in 3D modeling, Blender is the best choice, then you can evaluate if it offers all the funcionalities you are after.

Blender all the way!

Btw, what bugs did you encounter and which version did you try? Maybe you got some beta that is not that solid, 2.80 is in the works now in beta phase and as it has some major changes to internals, there are lots of issues that are being ironed out. Version 2.79 should be very stable now, I am yet to encounter any problem there (I'm on win).

When someone mentions Blender and cursor error it's usually the right-click instead of lef-click to select that he's wrestling with. At least that was it for me the first couple of weeks.
Not sure if that's the case as well here of course.

+1 for Blender.

There is also a fork of Blender called Blender for Artists that makes the interface less idiosyncratic. The Blender community at large hates it, apparently, but it felt quite nice when I took it for a test drive a while back. Granted, though, I was evaluating it against my experience with the main Blender a few years earlier, so it might not have been a fair comparison.

We use Max, but I couldn't recommend it at this point unless you're into architecture. The choice you make depends on a few factors:

Do you intend to integrate with an established VFX pipeline? That is, do you expect at some point to work in a facility or need to use assets built in a facility? If so, then you'll want to learn something that's in use in the companies you want to work with/for. That would usually be Maya for generalists or Houdini for FX artists.

If you're independent or a hobbyist, then Blender's a fine choice. A couple of ex-Lightwave users have also said that Modo makes modelling fun again, although it's limited in features in comparison to Maya and Blender. Houdini, again, is a good choice for procedural work. It's not a great modeler, and it's behind the curve as a character animation tool, but its node-based workflow is quite similar to Fusion. It also has an inexpensive Indie license for $99/year, but it's limited to HD resolution if I recall correctly.

If your primary interest is motion graphics, then Cinema 4D is a good choice.

Think about renderers, too. I'd strongly consider GPU rendering options—it's just faster and cheaper on both the hardware and software end. Blender has Cycles, which is pretty good and faster than most CPU renderers. Max, Maya and Houdini have access to Redshift, which is an extra spend, but it's incredibly fast and production-proven. If absolute physical accuracy is important to you, then Octane is out there, but it operates significantly differently from other renderers—experience gleaned from Arnold, Mental Ray or VRay isn't likely to transfer as easily to Octane; I've never seen it used in production, but my experience is admittedly narrow. On the CPU side, Arnold and VRay are the engines I have seen most often in production. We were using VRay for Max before switching over to Redshift.

Just to add to the render engine theme, the Cycles engine in Blender is similar to Arnold and Octane, meaning it is a physically based pathtracer. It is quite nice and fast, if I have to render smaller stuff I do it in my workstation, for anything bigger I use AWS EC2 virtual machines and Brenda scripts, which make starting a render farm in Amazon Cloud very easy once it is set up. The faster C4 series VMs are faster with CPU rendering than my GPU is and they chew through lots of frames very nicely.

Bryan Ray wrote:It also has an inexpensive Indie license for $99/year, but it's limited to HD resolution if I recall correctly.

Houdini Indie is currently $199/year. Everything else is spot-on

lightwave is very good and a decent price compared to all but blender. But blender is missing so many productions tools and its particle system is not the best. BUT it works for a lot of things. Lightwave is still used a fair amount and has a complete and polished tool set. Just not as easy to find a gig.

Its really going to matter what you want to produce. What is that?

https://www.lightwave3d.com/buy-lightwave/

Andy Witkowski wrote:

Bryan Ray wrote:It also has an inexpensive Indie license for $99/year, but it's limited to HD resolution if I recall correctly.

Houdini Indie is currently $199/year. Everything else is spot-on

Whoops! My bad. Still a good deal.

Hi.
As much as I love Lightwave, be aware that the newest version is 3 years old. There are quite a few discussions at the newtek Forum about the future of Lightwave and nothing heard from the developers.

+1 for Blender

+1000 for houdini indie. Steep curve at first, but the reward is very very sweet...

Bryan Ray wrote:There is also a fork of Blender called Blender for Artists that makes the interface less idiosyncratic. The Blender community at large hates it, apparently, but it felt quite nice when I took it for a test drive a while back. Granted, though, I was evaluating it against my experience with the main Blender a few years earlier, so it might not have been a fair comparison.

We use Max, but I couldn't recommend it at this point unless you're into architecture. The choice you make depends on a few factors:

Do you intend to integrate with an established VFX pipeline? That is, do you expect at some point to work in a facility or need to use assets built in a facility? If so, then you'll want to learn something that's in use in the companies you want to work with/for. That would usually be Maya for generalists or Houdini for FX artists.

If you're independent or a hobbyist, then Blender's a fine choice. A couple of ex-Lightwave users have also said that Modo makes modelling fun again, although it's limited in features in comparison to Maya and Blender. Houdini, again, is a good choice for procedural work. It's not a great modeler, and it's behind the curve as a character animation tool, but its node-based workflow is quite similar to Fusion. It also has an inexpensive Indie license for $99/year, but it's limited to HD resolution if I recall correctly.

If your primary interest is motion graphics, then Cinema 4D is a good choice.

Think about renderers, too. I'd strongly consider GPU rendering options—it's just faster and cheaper on both the hardware and software end. Blender has Cycles, which is pretty good and faster than most CPU renderers. Max, Maya and Houdini have access to Redshift, which is an extra spend, but it's incredibly fast and production-proven. If absolute physical accuracy is important to you, then Octane is out there, but it operates significantly differently from other renderers—experience gleaned from Arnold, Mental Ray or VRay isn't likely to transfer as easily to Octane; I've never seen it used in production, but my experience is admittedly narrow. On the CPU side, Arnold and VRay are the engines I have seen most often in production. We were using VRay for Max before switching over to Redshift.

I believe i live under a rock and i just noticed it now because i have never heard of "Redshift" looks pretty awesome. since it's used on big projects do you think this renderer will be a great competitor with v-ray or do you think that is far from it's league to surpass it. i want to hear your opinion on this I'm eager to learn more about everything VFX like

Sander de Regt wrote:When someone mentions Blender and cursor error it's usually the right-click instead of lef-click to select that he's wrestling with. At least that was it for me the first couple of weeks.
Not sure if that's the case as well here of course.

the problem that i encounter was that the cursor will not click on top of the icon, it would only work if i clicked it a little below it, which does not let me click on precision and the way to solve it was to drag a script inside the blender files, but here's the catch...bender got really slow with everything (Camera, mouse-clicks, etc...)

it was either work slow and accurate or fast and inaccurate.

i understood the "right click/ left click" problem, i saw the 1st tutorial from blender guru and he explained this and how the community was tired of it not being left-click by default.

Edwin Rivera wrote:I believe i live under a rock and i just noticed it now because i have never heard of "Redshift" looks pretty awesome. since it's used on big projects do you think this renderer will be a great competitor with v-ray or do you think that is far from it's league to surpass it. i want to hear your opinion on this I'm eager to learn more about everything VFX like

Redshift is a relative newcomer to the rendering game. When we adopted it last year (Spring 2016) they were still in beta testing for the 3DS Max plug-in. Our previous renderer was V-Ray, and Redshift is comparable in quality and ease of use, but 8 times faster (on average for HD frames). The speed gains are more dramatic the bigger the frames are. The project we first used it on was an 11k multi-projector venue project with very exacting clients. There is simply no way we could have completed the work with V-Ray.

I find working with Redshift to be very similar to V-Ray. I didn't have much trouble at all translating my skills, although I'll admit that I'm still rather green with lighting and shading. For small shops and anyone that doesn't have a great deal of money already invested in a CPU farm, I think Redshift is the way to go.

Thomas Milde wrote:Hi.
As much as I love Lightwave, be aware that the newest version is 3 years old. There are quite a few discussions at the newtek Forum about the future of Lightwave and nothing heard from the developers.

1 Genuary 2018 Will be out Lightwave3D 2018
With a lots of enhancement.
Official news from newtek

Inviato dal mio E6653 utilizzando Tapatalk

Yep, saw that, too. Let's see if it turns out good.

LightWave 2018

The new features list (render engine, buffers,...) is very interesting for compositing. And then db&w exrTrader also went to version 2018.