Personal Tech

Free 3D Software V.S. Industry Standard 3D Software

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By: Phu-Duc Nguyen, Journalist

3D software is really crucial to have for many things. It is used for games, animated movies, and many more uses. There are many features of 3D software. You can model, texture, animate, and composite just to name a few. It is overwhelming, but one person can get a job just for 1 feature of 3D. In this article, we are going to talk about free vs industry-standard 3D software.

What Is Blender?

Blender is an open-sourced free software under the license, “GNU General Public License” according to Blender’s website. That means you can actually download the program’s code and then alter it.

What Is Cinema 4D?

Cinema 4D unlike Blender is a closed source software. This means you cant access the code to it. Although there is more industry-standard software than just Cinema4D and Blender, Cinema4D is considered to be industry-standard software by many forums and has similar features to Blender.

Blender Advantages:

Free:

Blender the 3D software is entirely free. However, there are some external plugins (not necessary) that charge money.

Good At Everything:

Blender is either decent or good at every type of 3d tool. Some types of tools are modeling, sculpting, animating, lighting, etc.

Many Learning Resources:

Since the software is free, many people can give out free tutorials. There are many channels on YouTube whose sole purpose is to teach Blender.

Huge Community:

Like the last point, since the software is free, there are going to be many people using it and that causes the community to be really big and helpful.

Cinema 4D Advantages:

Very Easy To Learn:

Cinema 4D is considered to be easy to learn. You can make complicated things very quickly after getting the software.

Very Good User Interface:

Cinema 4D also has a really good interface. The interface is based on the steps you would create something.

Super Stable:

The software is stable. Stable in software terms is it doesn’t randomly close out the program when you don’t want it to.

Motion Graphics:

Cinema4D is known for being really good at creating motion graphics. In the 3d community, many people agree that Cinema4D is really good at creating motion graphics.

Blender Disadvantages:

Not Specialized:

Blender does not have any type of creating tool that makes it stand out from other competitors. But that doesn’t mean that the tools are bad.

Difficult To Learn:

Blender takes a long time to learn. It can take years to fully master one section of Blender.

Crashes Occur Sometimes:

Even though Blender doesn’t crash that often. It will occur. If you spend a few hours on a file and it is not saved, you can lose hours of progress because Blender crashed.

Not Very Intuitive User Interface:

The user interface of Blender is not intuitive. Compared to cinema 4D’s UI, Blender’s are not that good.

Cinema 4D Disadvantages:

Expensive:

According to medium.com, “Cinema 4D costs about $700 for a user license, not to mention its new variant system means paying extra in all sorts of new places, totaling around $3,700.” Compared to Blender, cinema 4D is an undefined more expensive.

Making 3D Objects Are Not As Easy As Others:

Compared to other software, making objects is not as easy or efficient as others.

Aligning Textures To Objects Are Not As Great As Others:

When you apply a texture to an object, the object does not automatically look right. That is why we have tools for fixing it. Cinema 4D’s tools for aligning textures are not as good as other 3d software.

Community Not As Big:

Since Cinema 4D is a paid software, there will be fewer people using it. So the cinema 4D community is not as big as Blender’s.

Conclusion:

Everything has its pros and cons. It is really impressive that Blender, a free 3D software funded by donations is the same or sometimes even better than industry-standard 3D software. Blender is being used more and more by professionals. But if Blender is this good, then how come it is not considered Industry standard?

The reason it is still not an industry standard is because of one of Blender’s disadvantages. The fact that it is not specialized in anything. Studios that already have industry-standard software don’t need Blender in their resources. There is not much of a point in adopting Blender if studios already have industry-standard software that can do either the same thing or even better.

So in an opinionated answer, Blender the free 3d software is just as good as any other industry-standard 3d software.