I just started drawing on Blender yesterday and I am already half way done with a female figure that is starting to look pretty good….
well… not half…
but I got a lot done for jsut jumping in…

its a lot easier than learning to work in Flash…

I have friends that do Maya for a living… it looks cool… but you know why I use Blender? its free, easy to learn from tutorials online, the app is very small in size and very fast and powerful. once you get the idea of how the system works you can pretty much figure out the rest quickly if you are an artist with a little bit of a design background (I’m a graphic designer)

THINGS I WANT…. ( I really want) out of blender….
1 ability to import and use more files such as adobe formats.

2 I think it would be very possible to have an export for flash option and maybe even some control… The Collada file would come with a Actionscript file and a FLA laying it all together… tweak it a little here and there and you could be making 3d websites practically on the fly… Actionscript is an open language with available SDKs….. I just hope that wouldn’t fall into the hands of Flex… Collada is cool though… but with some improvement and not much Blender could be pooping out papervision3D interactive flash games… Papervision is really not that hard and is also open source…

3 the render options are just bad… I should be able to save the animation out easily… insted I have to make a million tweaks on this huge panel to even get it done the simple way… if I want to pump Blender out to work on my animations in after effects it is almost as hard as making the animation to render it out properly…

4 better custom GUI options with various work flows and set ups and window lay outs as well as the ability to make your own… this is one of the only things I can say is Great About CS4 (I’m pissed none of my old AE 6.0 plugs work)

5 navigation is really important we need more options with nav…. If I’m building a house I want to be able to walk around…. as far as I can tell I have to drage everything to the center to zoom in and edit something and then I can spread out and place things and move them…. that is bad… and if I can move around like I can in AutoCAD than it should be more obvious on how to do it…. Nav has to be simple because when you are designing this stuff you down want to think about how to move around it…. if you are building a house its helpful to be a natural at walking….

6 More font support…. that is just really important…

7 I love the grease pen… make it do more…

8 a light touching freehand sculpter tool… I used to have a 3d app that did it when I was a kid… it was really useful for being creative and inventing blobby forms I could go back into and clean up later… almost have it with the metas… The metas are a really nice tool though…

9 templates….

10 a built in help menu that isn’t just a hyperlink… (that means you need to find a good technical writer who really likes blender)

BUT
these issues aren’t anything but room for improvement…. I learned everything I need Blender for as a Flash Designer in once day…. and then I was having so much fun I decided to give it a shot playing with the animation and physics stuff…. the game design stuff looks iffy to me but I might even give that a whirl….

Honestly… I almost hope Adobe buys blender and makes it part of CS5…. or I hope they just make a brand new 3d tool…

which leads me to the question again…. WHY HAVEN:T THEY? they make tools for everything… why not 3d?

lol they say AE is 3D but it is only sorta kinda little bit there… anything real you have to do with an ap like this…

but…. I love this
Blender is wonderful… so much I’m spending much of my christmas vacation playing with it…. its my favorite new toy… (and I just borrowed Gears of War 2… haven’t touched it… Blender is so fun)

OH YEAH and if you really still think blender is weak go to youtube and look at the stuff people are making with it… the end product ends up looking a lot like maya… not better but not worse either…. the facts I can use it on my macbook thought….. is awesome….

I have a 6 hour train back to NYC on the 28th… Blender.

Question though… is Maya Easier or harder to use? can I translate my Blender skills easy to a Maya workspace?

go to my website and email me if you have any answers or retorts…
alexdobbs.com

I don’t know Maya, but I need just animate on it… So, can I configure the Blender hotkeys on Maya??

If you can help me I will appreciate a lot!

Cheers

-Reyn