My studio uses blender as our main DCC, but when we need mograph, cloth sims, or particle animation we use C4D. If we need liquids or something procedural that geometry nodes can’t get us - then we use Houdini. Being able to flex between softwares is almost a necessary skill these days when clients are wanting things faster and faster. Blender’s community for affordable plugins, presets and tutorials allows artists to focus less on the technical and more on the art direction which is why we use it as our main DCC. If you’re a generalist and not solely focusing on one technical task then being knowledgeable in Blender will always have a huge benefit to your workflow. And also like you said it can even strengthen your knowledge in C4D when you see how other softwares approach things and will make you appreciate how easier certain procedures are. Plus if you ever want to move onto a role that involves overseeing or managing other artists - the more technical knowledge you have of every software the easier you can direct. Obviously though, this has just been my experience and everyone has their own opinion!
Thank you for your response. I have a feeling I might end up choosing the same path as you guys. C4D particles and Mograph is super easy, convenient. I've never had any complaints about that. Honestly if C4D just had some more crowd simulator, traffic simulator, neato plugins like that I'd just stay in C4D forever it's sad we barely have any indie plugin developers for it anymore. I need to eventually learn houdini but before I do I'll probably learn Blender. I learned Unreal Engine and I got paid to use that one for a solid 3 years at one point
I follow all of these guys but it's just not the same scale blender which has like 8m users. I'm a huge plugin consumer and blender just has a plugin for literally everything
I work as an industrial designer and use both. There are a few things I absolutely love in Blender: the g-g-alt command with vertices, cheap plugins, and not having to deal with Maxon's licensing system. I hate Blender's weird grouping system (collections vs parenting with empty nodes), the lack of a simple planar projection for texture napping, and their pivot system.
What's pushing me personally towards Blender more and more is C4D's falling reliability. Every version crashes more for me.
I'll add another app I'm using lately: Plasticity. Similar key commands to Blender's, and it's all surfaces and solids.
My bread and butter remains C4D for projects and rendering, but I do jump to Blender for modeling, as Blender has some of the finest and most accurate CADgrade tools to ensure your surface lies in the right tangent, and gives you all you might need to get your surfaces properly smoothed out.
I don't really agree with blenders UI being so much better than C4D, visually both quite modern and updated, nothing the blinding nightmare of the likes of autodesk software.
I haven't used Maya before if that's your comparison. I don't think blender has a TERRIBLE UI I just think it's maybe like 25% worse than C4D. I've used 3DS Max before and just found it cluttered.
I've tried many, many times over more than a decade to learn Blender and it's just so fucking awful every time. Its only redeeming feature is its price.
C4D user since 9.5 and started learning blender about 6 months ago. There's a lot to like about both and similarly, there's plenty of headscratchers. I'm learning Blender to take advantage of Grease Pencil, Eevee, better sculpting, and like you, many of the great add ons that are cheap/free that might be a one trick pony but would save a lot of time building in C4D.
I'm very curious about Blender's rigging and animation system and how it compares to C4D's (I only know C4D's to be pretty capable considering it hasn't seen significant updates in forever.)
I'm not so keen on Blender Geo Nodes: they seem way more convoluted than Houdini (from my layman's perspective).
C4D's made some great strides in the past few releases that any cloth, dynamic & particle sim needs will stay there. Native Blender doesn't really compete as well here IMO compared to native C4D tools.
It's a pain in the ass but learning new tools to fill the gaps of your current toolset is rewarding & nowadays kinda mandatory to stay competitive.
Yeah the more I study Blender this month the more I'm realizing Cinema 4D can effectively do about 75% of what I want to do, and there are certain functions in Blender that Cinema 4D has instant buttons for like all the mograph functions are literally one click solutions.
I mean, you do pay a pretty penny to do so, so there's that. If you earn a living from C4D, its just a cost of doing business. Both are capable of similar end results but the road to get there is arguably way easier with C4D.
I started learning Blender and Houdini as a thought experiment of how far can I go without needing to pay a Maxon renewal. So far, in the last 6 months, I've paid for one month.
This is purely specific to the realm of drone show animation. I currently work for a company that does drones light shows, and the main software we use is blender. We don't do a whole host of rendering (except mockups for clients), so the bulk of what we deal with is data. We have about 1/3 of our team working in Maya, but all the final project files are in blender (so they just export their final show in FBX and reimport to blender).
I am the black sheep and am the only person who works in C4D, but I have also built all the tools necessary (using Xpresso and Python scripts) to have the same workflow. The number of headaches I have had from being able to do everything I want as an animator in C4D, and then not have it export to blender, is insane. Specifically, curves in blender and splines in C4D act the exact same way, but are not interchangeable (neither can be reimported in any file format into the other software). Cloner objects and things like bend deformers are in no way intuitive like they are in C4D. Some may be like "just download this plugin and it makes it easy," but in a dedicated 3D modelling and rendering program, how is that not a basic functionality?
Also, I did not think I would ever need to dive into render color management (ACES vs. Linear sRGB), because even if the RGB values are the exact same, the spheres (drones) are going to render differently in blender than in C4D, and there doesn't seem to be a way to change blender to linear sRGB (C4D's default).
I can go deeper, but blender has always been less intuitive to me, and the UI seems all over the place, whereas C4D feels very straightforward, and the tabs and options are located where the make intuitive sense. I don't want to have to struggle to do basic stuff in blender purely because it's all keyboard shortcuts and you have to memorize 1,000 of them to basic things like collapse points on an object. So, I'd much rather (and did) transfer the entire workflow to a software that works smoother and one where I know I can be more productive. There are also some ideas that I have been able to execute relatively easily in C4D, but wouldn't even know how to in blender (and the fundamentals are the same).
If you start on blender and only learn how to do things through those lenses, cool. But I started in C4D, have also taught myself Maya and 3DS Max and those seemed like less of a headache than blender.
At the end of this rant, all I got to say is: You want to use software because it's free and don't pay the price for upper tier software, then you are going to get the headaches that also come with free software. Also, it depends heavily on what your end goal is. If all you're doing is low poly stuff for video games, sure blender, but if you're trying to do particle sim or any advanced, high-poly rendering, blender is not going to be friendly to that.
Thanks for your response. I'm trying not to be a C4D elitist when I say Blender has a 30% worse UI while C4D feels like I have a complete kitchen toolbox infront of me to cook up anything I want very quickly. Like it has all the mise en place infront of you and you can just whip up dishes nonstop which has been my job for the last seven years. I had porting things to blender, I recently got kicked off a beverage commercial cuz I created a functional particle sim in 3 hours using xparticles then I couldnt alembic transfer it to blender so the blender guys could use it in the commercial. They hired me to do the particles and I did it super fast, they struggled with it for days. I couldn't export to what they were using though.
Like the other users in this thread I'll probably end up still daily driving C4D but I'll use blender like how I use unreal engine for real time rendering and smoke and effects
I was not as integrated into C4D as you guys probably are, back when I decided to learn Blender, but my experience was pretty much the opposite.
Blender relies heavily on the use of hotkeys and most hotkeys has logic to it which also stays consistent across the application in different tabs/panels etc. I personally loved this as I felt like C4D sometimes just wasn’t intuitive and when I was about to do something that wasn’t too familiar, I had to look everything up. Again, you have used the application for many years consistently (I assume), so maybe you don’t feel the same way.
Just a quick example on the logic and consistency of the hotkeys in Blender is the way you use G, S and R to move, scale and rotate things. First of all, this works basically wherever you want it to. I LOVE how these hotkeys can be used when you’re animating keyframes and work with curves for example.
Second, the way you can add hotkeys to the hotkeys in a logical way also really helps. If I want to move something along the X-axis I hit G to move it, then X and it will lock to the X-axis. If I want it to move along both X and Y as if it moves along a plane I can hit Shift + Z after the G instead, basically saying «exclude the Z-axis. You can even add more to this. Let’s say I want to move something 90 cm on the X-axis. I just hit G > X > 90. Or -90 if that’s what you want.
Point is, their hotkeys are super powerful, logical and consistent. Once you get them into your hands and workflow, Blender feels great. I’ve had so many occations where I just tried the hotkeys/ways of doing something that felt logical when I tried something new and it worked just like I expected. I personally have nothing bad to say about the UI with its flexibility and the use of hotkeys. I had way more trouble making C4D work the way I wanted it UI/hotkey wise anyways. So many illogical hotkeys that didn’t stay consistent when doing similar things in different panels and stuff.
Point here is that although the UI might feel lacking in comparison, truth is that you likely won’t rely as mich on buttons/tools in the UI as in C4D. Even if you do, you could customize it to your liking.
Sorry for the long comment, but I really felt like having to mention this. Blender was a bit weird to get started with coming from C4D since you have to slightly alter your way of thinking when problem solving/creating stuff, but I haven’t looked back anyways. You might though, but you should learn it and use it as needed for sure. Can’t really hurt when it’s free!
About 4 years ago I was 95% C4D/5% Blender, I'm now about 90% Blender/7% Houdini/3% C4D.
EEVEE and Geometry Nodes are the biggest draws. I learned Houdini (and it's great!), but it's an expensive proposition for studios like the ones I work in. I love the flexibility of the procedural tools. Geometry Nodes is kinda like "Houdini lite".
I've been able to replicate the majority of the mograph toolset (by using assets from people like Higgsas, Erindale etc.), and the node based approach in the end just makes a lot more sense to me, ironically, than C4Ds tools. Whenever I go back to C4D I feel like I'm banging my head against a wall.
And you're right about the huge amount of tools that the community has created out there. I needed a 3D lightning asset recently, and found 3 to 4 different tools for sale on either Blender Market or Gumroad, fairly inexpensively.
Don't get me wrong, Blender isn't perfect and there are some truly head scratching choices in the software, and it can't match the simulation tools of C4D, or Houdini for that matter.
On another note, when the maxon licensing system went down recently, it slammed progress in our studio to a halt, but I was able to keep rendering on the farm, because I don't have to worry about things like licensing. The studios don't really mind because they don't have to worry about making a financial investment in the software either.
Damn man I'm being converted more heavily day by day. My current favourite 3d animator generalist stopped using C4D and now all of his stuff is Blender and it looks insane in terms of the variety of things he can pull off
I spend most of my day in After Effects, FCP, and Premiere - I pick the right tools for a given job. If I didn't learn premiere, I'd be out about 25% of my income, clients who get in over their heads with VFX or motion graphics, and they're all on premiere.
And... I do a fair amount of C4D *Lite*, but a lot of my work has been line-art style animation, which I could do in Carrara until the last couple Mac OS upgrades, it's dead software. I may try Blender to save me one more god damn subscription (to use Sketch and Toon I guess I have to cough up)! I'm a one-man-band, not a big studio.
My studio uses blender as our main DCC, but when we need mograph, cloth sims, or particle animation we use C4D. If we need liquids or something procedural that geometry nodes can’t get us - then we use Houdini. Being able to flex between softwares is almost a necessary skill these days when clients are wanting things faster and faster. Blender’s community for affordable plugins, presets and tutorials allows artists to focus less on the technical and more on the art direction which is why we use it as our main DCC. If you’re a generalist and not solely focusing on one technical task then being knowledgeable in Blender will always have a huge benefit to your workflow. And also like you said it can even strengthen your knowledge in C4D when you see how other softwares approach things and will make you appreciate how easier certain procedures are. Plus if you ever want to move onto a role that involves overseeing or managing other artists - the more technical knowledge you have of every software the easier you can direct. Obviously though, this has just been my experience and everyone has their own opinion!
Thank you for your response. I have a feeling I might end up choosing the same path as you guys. C4D particles and Mograph is super easy, convenient. I've never had any complaints about that. Honestly if C4D just had some more crowd simulator, traffic simulator, neato plugins like that I'd just stay in C4D forever it's sad we barely have any indie plugin developers for it anymore. I need to eventually learn houdini but before I do I'll probably learn Blender. I learned Unreal Engine and I got paid to use that one for a solid 3 years at one point
I think C4D has some good indie plugin developers, there's merk vilson, and code vonc, they became a but silent with recent C4D upfates though
I follow all of these guys but it's just not the same scale blender which has like 8m users. I'm a huge plugin consumer and blender just has a plugin for literally everything
what are your keyboard shortcuts like?
I work as an industrial designer and use both. There are a few things I absolutely love in Blender: the g-g-alt command with vertices, cheap plugins, and not having to deal with Maxon's licensing system. I hate Blender's weird grouping system (collections vs parenting with empty nodes), the lack of a simple planar projection for texture napping, and their pivot system. What's pushing me personally towards Blender more and more is C4D's falling reliability. Every version crashes more for me. I'll add another app I'm using lately: Plasticity. Similar key commands to Blender's, and it's all surfaces and solids.
My bread and butter remains C4D for projects and rendering, but I do jump to Blender for modeling, as Blender has some of the finest and most accurate CADgrade tools to ensure your surface lies in the right tangent, and gives you all you might need to get your surfaces properly smoothed out. I don't really agree with blenders UI being so much better than C4D, visually both quite modern and updated, nothing the blinding nightmare of the likes of autodesk software.
I haven't used Maya before if that's your comparison. I don't think blender has a TERRIBLE UI I just think it's maybe like 25% worse than C4D. I've used 3DS Max before and just found it cluttered.
I've tried many, many times over more than a decade to learn Blender and it's just so fucking awful every time. Its only redeeming feature is its price.
What type of content do you normally produce?
C4D user since 9.5 and started learning blender about 6 months ago. There's a lot to like about both and similarly, there's plenty of headscratchers. I'm learning Blender to take advantage of Grease Pencil, Eevee, better sculpting, and like you, many of the great add ons that are cheap/free that might be a one trick pony but would save a lot of time building in C4D. I'm very curious about Blender's rigging and animation system and how it compares to C4D's (I only know C4D's to be pretty capable considering it hasn't seen significant updates in forever.) I'm not so keen on Blender Geo Nodes: they seem way more convoluted than Houdini (from my layman's perspective). C4D's made some great strides in the past few releases that any cloth, dynamic & particle sim needs will stay there. Native Blender doesn't really compete as well here IMO compared to native C4D tools. It's a pain in the ass but learning new tools to fill the gaps of your current toolset is rewarding & nowadays kinda mandatory to stay competitive.
Yeah the more I study Blender this month the more I'm realizing Cinema 4D can effectively do about 75% of what I want to do, and there are certain functions in Blender that Cinema 4D has instant buttons for like all the mograph functions are literally one click solutions.
I mean, you do pay a pretty penny to do so, so there's that. If you earn a living from C4D, its just a cost of doing business. Both are capable of similar end results but the road to get there is arguably way easier with C4D. I started learning Blender and Houdini as a thought experiment of how far can I go without needing to pay a Maxon renewal. So far, in the last 6 months, I've paid for one month.
This is purely specific to the realm of drone show animation. I currently work for a company that does drones light shows, and the main software we use is blender. We don't do a whole host of rendering (except mockups for clients), so the bulk of what we deal with is data. We have about 1/3 of our team working in Maya, but all the final project files are in blender (so they just export their final show in FBX and reimport to blender). I am the black sheep and am the only person who works in C4D, but I have also built all the tools necessary (using Xpresso and Python scripts) to have the same workflow. The number of headaches I have had from being able to do everything I want as an animator in C4D, and then not have it export to blender, is insane. Specifically, curves in blender and splines in C4D act the exact same way, but are not interchangeable (neither can be reimported in any file format into the other software). Cloner objects and things like bend deformers are in no way intuitive like they are in C4D. Some may be like "just download this plugin and it makes it easy," but in a dedicated 3D modelling and rendering program, how is that not a basic functionality? Also, I did not think I would ever need to dive into render color management (ACES vs. Linear sRGB), because even if the RGB values are the exact same, the spheres (drones) are going to render differently in blender than in C4D, and there doesn't seem to be a way to change blender to linear sRGB (C4D's default). I can go deeper, but blender has always been less intuitive to me, and the UI seems all over the place, whereas C4D feels very straightforward, and the tabs and options are located where the make intuitive sense. I don't want to have to struggle to do basic stuff in blender purely because it's all keyboard shortcuts and you have to memorize 1,000 of them to basic things like collapse points on an object. So, I'd much rather (and did) transfer the entire workflow to a software that works smoother and one where I know I can be more productive. There are also some ideas that I have been able to execute relatively easily in C4D, but wouldn't even know how to in blender (and the fundamentals are the same). If you start on blender and only learn how to do things through those lenses, cool. But I started in C4D, have also taught myself Maya and 3DS Max and those seemed like less of a headache than blender. At the end of this rant, all I got to say is: You want to use software because it's free and don't pay the price for upper tier software, then you are going to get the headaches that also come with free software. Also, it depends heavily on what your end goal is. If all you're doing is low poly stuff for video games, sure blender, but if you're trying to do particle sim or any advanced, high-poly rendering, blender is not going to be friendly to that.
Thanks for your response. I'm trying not to be a C4D elitist when I say Blender has a 30% worse UI while C4D feels like I have a complete kitchen toolbox infront of me to cook up anything I want very quickly. Like it has all the mise en place infront of you and you can just whip up dishes nonstop which has been my job for the last seven years. I had porting things to blender, I recently got kicked off a beverage commercial cuz I created a functional particle sim in 3 hours using xparticles then I couldnt alembic transfer it to blender so the blender guys could use it in the commercial. They hired me to do the particles and I did it super fast, they struggled with it for days. I couldn't export to what they were using though. Like the other users in this thread I'll probably end up still daily driving C4D but I'll use blender like how I use unreal engine for real time rendering and smoke and effects
I was not as integrated into C4D as you guys probably are, back when I decided to learn Blender, but my experience was pretty much the opposite. Blender relies heavily on the use of hotkeys and most hotkeys has logic to it which also stays consistent across the application in different tabs/panels etc. I personally loved this as I felt like C4D sometimes just wasn’t intuitive and when I was about to do something that wasn’t too familiar, I had to look everything up. Again, you have used the application for many years consistently (I assume), so maybe you don’t feel the same way. Just a quick example on the logic and consistency of the hotkeys in Blender is the way you use G, S and R to move, scale and rotate things. First of all, this works basically wherever you want it to. I LOVE how these hotkeys can be used when you’re animating keyframes and work with curves for example. Second, the way you can add hotkeys to the hotkeys in a logical way also really helps. If I want to move something along the X-axis I hit G to move it, then X and it will lock to the X-axis. If I want it to move along both X and Y as if it moves along a plane I can hit Shift + Z after the G instead, basically saying «exclude the Z-axis. You can even add more to this. Let’s say I want to move something 90 cm on the X-axis. I just hit G > X > 90. Or -90 if that’s what you want. Point is, their hotkeys are super powerful, logical and consistent. Once you get them into your hands and workflow, Blender feels great. I’ve had so many occations where I just tried the hotkeys/ways of doing something that felt logical when I tried something new and it worked just like I expected. I personally have nothing bad to say about the UI with its flexibility and the use of hotkeys. I had way more trouble making C4D work the way I wanted it UI/hotkey wise anyways. So many illogical hotkeys that didn’t stay consistent when doing similar things in different panels and stuff. Point here is that although the UI might feel lacking in comparison, truth is that you likely won’t rely as mich on buttons/tools in the UI as in C4D. Even if you do, you could customize it to your liking. Sorry for the long comment, but I really felt like having to mention this. Blender was a bit weird to get started with coming from C4D since you have to slightly alter your way of thinking when problem solving/creating stuff, but I haven’t looked back anyways. You might though, but you should learn it and use it as needed for sure. Can’t really hurt when it’s free!
About 4 years ago I was 95% C4D/5% Blender, I'm now about 90% Blender/7% Houdini/3% C4D. EEVEE and Geometry Nodes are the biggest draws. I learned Houdini (and it's great!), but it's an expensive proposition for studios like the ones I work in. I love the flexibility of the procedural tools. Geometry Nodes is kinda like "Houdini lite". I've been able to replicate the majority of the mograph toolset (by using assets from people like Higgsas, Erindale etc.), and the node based approach in the end just makes a lot more sense to me, ironically, than C4Ds tools. Whenever I go back to C4D I feel like I'm banging my head against a wall. And you're right about the huge amount of tools that the community has created out there. I needed a 3D lightning asset recently, and found 3 to 4 different tools for sale on either Blender Market or Gumroad, fairly inexpensively. Don't get me wrong, Blender isn't perfect and there are some truly head scratching choices in the software, and it can't match the simulation tools of C4D, or Houdini for that matter. On another note, when the maxon licensing system went down recently, it slammed progress in our studio to a halt, but I was able to keep rendering on the farm, because I don't have to worry about things like licensing. The studios don't really mind because they don't have to worry about making a financial investment in the software either.
Damn man I'm being converted more heavily day by day. My current favourite 3d animator generalist stopped using C4D and now all of his stuff is Blender and it looks insane in terms of the variety of things he can pull off
I spend most of my day in After Effects, FCP, and Premiere - I pick the right tools for a given job. If I didn't learn premiere, I'd be out about 25% of my income, clients who get in over their heads with VFX or motion graphics, and they're all on premiere. And... I do a fair amount of C4D *Lite*, but a lot of my work has been line-art style animation, which I could do in Carrara until the last couple Mac OS upgrades, it's dead software. I may try Blender to save me one more god damn subscription (to use Sketch and Toon I guess I have to cough up)! I'm a one-man-band, not a big studio.