Choosing the right 3D application on your journey as a 3D artist can indeed feel daunting at first. However, realizing that all these applications fundamentally do the same thing—manipulating vertices to create stunning renders—can simplify the decision-making process. Once you understand that it’s not about the tool but how effectively you can use it to bring your vision to life, you’ll feel more confident in making the right choice.

if all 3d applications including houdini, blender, cinema 4d, maya and 3ds max where all free and open source, blender would still be the best choice. yes alot of people will say but cinema4d is better at motion graphics, houdini is better for procedural generation and simulation, and maya is better at animation, all valid points, what makes blender still a better choice is that its always not far behind.

Modeling

for example, if these applications are just competing on modeling, no addons or 3d part plugins installed, blender would be the best for general polygon modeling, plasticity for SDF and hardsurface modeling, Modo for product modeling and more, if you install addons like meshmachine then blender becomes as good as plasticity for hardsurface modeling and even better than Modo for product modeling and rendering, these plugins also bring more functions from other applications at a fraction of the cost. and even without any additional addons, blender is filled with alot of tools, modifiers, operators and has the best shortcut combinations in the whole software industry, no other appllication i have ever used uses shorts so well as blender does.

Animation

when it comes to animation, just look at this animation from P2design Academy, its a full course about animation in blender, that takes you through every thing from start to finish, basically showing you that everything you need for animation can be done easier in blender, thats the other beauty about blender, is that you will always find detail guides, tutorials and structured courses like these about animation, rigging and more, more easily than for any other application, when you look at animations done in blender vs other applications, there is no way for you to tell which one was made in which application, that’s why some studios are already using blender in some areas, like the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, what is amazing about this is that even when you want to move away from blender the animation skills you learn hear are applicable to all other applications including gaming engines.

Texturing

when it comes to texturing, substance painter is the top dog here and if all 3d applications where free to use, it would be miles ahead of blender but its a subscription of 50$ a month owned by adobe whose terms say they own any work you make with there applications yikes, alternatively you can install addons like extreme pbr nexus, which is a collection of pbr textures and tools to help you mix and blend materials, and Sanctus material library which is an ever growing library of procedural materials and forget about monthly subscriptions or your work being stollen by a multimillion cooperation.

Proceduralism:

when it comes to proceduralism there is no way around it, its houdini and who is second, you guessed it blender with its Geometry nodes system, i mean just go to twitter and do a search for houdini procedural, blender procedural, and cinema 4d, maya and 3d, the most impressive generators will be for houdini, then blender and a few from cinema, nothing from maya, and a few from 3ds max, this just shows you that in most scenarios, while blender may not be the best at that particular task, its always close to the best. just take a look at the number of geometry nodes generators out there from the cable generator, to add detailed wires, cables onto objects, a river generator that produces realtime results with out the need to bake, a neon signs generator to make your cities look detailed, a procedural crowds generator, a building generator for any style of building, a collection of tools to add damage and destroy buildings and more, these all are just a reminder that when working in blender you are never alone, someone out there on the other side of the corner has thought of you, created a tool that will make your life easy.

The Community

its this community that exists no where else, that elevates blender to a level no other can be, to tripple AAA studios this may not be that important, but to individuals and small studios who can’t afford mulltiple licenses for each employ or artist they have, whose making a gumble on a project without knowing if they will make back the money they have invested, blender might be the only choice, its the choice between paying a monthly subscription to create trees from scratch using the standalone tree generator speedtree or just buying a collection of already made trees, with textures, different spiecies, with wind animation from addons like botaniq.

VFX

and it does not stop there say you need a powerful explosion simulaltion for your movie, your first choice should be houdini, then ember gen, then other applications and somewhere on that list there will always be blender and if you install some additional plugins like Vdblab for fire and smoke simulation and rbd lab for debris and shattering objects, blender can be a great alternative for you if you are on a small budget and again what makes blender better is having the choice to make everything when you want to your self without spending a dime or just using what others have produced through addons, content libraries and more, like the blender visual effects course by topchannel1on1 and Grant abitt teaches how to make explosions, destruction, and vfx without any use of addons, if you learn that you will be prepared to handle any project that comes your way and addons will just help you work faster

Rendering

in some ways blender is just better, blender might be the only application that comes with a buillt in real-time rasterization engine, the others that have this type of engine are unreal engine, unity, marmoset toolbag, lumion and others, but those are in a different category of applications, while eevee is not meant to produce realistic results now that its has been upgraded to eevee next, its become a valid alternative to offline render engines like cycles, for small studios who don’t have the time and budget to use render farms. there also tools that help make cycles a faster render engine like renderboost, thats speeds up the render by 80%, it does this by only rendering half of the frames in your animation and uses frame interpolation which is faster than rendering to fill in those missing frames.

Motion tracking

Most indie film makers find blender to be the most suited software for their projects simply based on its object and motion tracking tools that make it easy to create set extensions, add objects into live footage and more, something that other applications can do but for some reason most artists choose blender for things like this.

Many artists say that blender is only great if you install addons, but why do you think studios have refused to adapt it as the industry standard for making cgi, in most cases its better and alot of artists are already using it, well its simple, studios who use houdini, max, maya, cinema 4d are not using bare bones max, maya or c4d, they are not using the same fresh copy of these softwares we use, they have technical artists who have been developing tools, addons and plugins for them for the application they use, if you compared your version of cinema 4d and what Weta Fx uses, it will look unrecognizable to you, the main reason why studios have not adapted blender as much as we expected is because they already have plugins developed for the software they use, its the same reason why most blender artists would find it hard to switch to other applications, mainly because they have collected hundreds of assets, models, materials, generators, shaders and more that work in blender that they would loose alot if they change.

the difference between blender and other applications and what makes it the better choice is that everything developed for blender is accessible to everyone, while for other appllications there is tight gate keeping, you will never access the tools wetafx uses for creating creatures, what Pixar uses for there movies, or what DreamWorks uses to rig in there animations unless you work for them.

there are way more reasons why blender would still be the best choice for most artists even when all other applications where free and open source, these where just the main ones.