Likelihood to Recommend Blender is an excellent tool for everything from simple to complex 3D animations, the creation of 3D images, etc. It performs excellently in all of these areas. In the realm of 3D modelling, animation and rendering, there is very little that Blender is not suited for.
Read full review Corel Painter does have a lot of great brushes, and they do emulate real art supplies very well. Especially the thick paint is well done. But unfortunately there are so many functional and UX bugs that overall it is just horrible to work with. When contacting customer support about it, they really seem clueless about the seriousness of the situation, and clueless about what proper UX is in general. They have tried to make it work a bit like Photoshop, which is a good move but then some things are absolutely not intuitive at all and they are definitely missing the mark horribly with so many issues. I would highly recommend using Photoshop instead, though you'll have to download them separately; it also offers a lot of great brushes nowadays and works much much smoother without all those aggravating bugs of Painter. The price of Corel Painter is just not at all worth all these horrible bugs.
Read full review Pros Creating complex polygonal geometries is very easy in Blender. Edit Mode and Sculpt Mode helps in creating non uniform surfaces for objects like rocks, surfaces, terrains etc. Blender can use various external plugins to make it work in more smoother way. For example to import any 3d object one can use sketchfab plugin and easily import the free assets from web after logging in. Blender has a better rendering engine known as Cycles, it is far more better than any other stock rendering engine which can generate realistic lightning, shadows and reflections. The animations can easily be generated with blender animation toolbar and also it incorporate any other animations made in any other software. The bone generation and its behavior of animations can be achieved easily in blender. Read full review Watercolor Compatible Multiple variety of Brushes and shapes Captured Dab Library Read full review Cons It's really a hard question, but it could be: a game engine. Older versions used to have it; I would use it to simulate machines game-like. I'm struggling to find another one; maybe the fact that it is so powerful and has so many features that learning it can be daunting; better documentation WITH examples and/or a map of Blender capabilities would help to know where you are in terms of knowledge and the planning the roadmap to where you want to go. Precision modeling. Coming from CAD and using Blender as part of my design workflow, I'd love to be able to model inside Blender as I model with CAD tools. At this moment, it's simply impossible. Read full review Way too many functional bugs, makes it hard to work with Bad UX and usability, too much unintuitive behavior, makes it particularly hard to work with Overall looks and behaves as if it was coded in the '90s, it really needs a complete UX overhaul Did I mention the many bugs yet? Yeah? I'll mention it again because it's bad Read full review Usability If it wasn't quite clear yet, I'll state it again: the usability of Corel Painter is, simply put, horrid. And I am not talking about rendering, lagging, etc., it is not even all that bad there. I am talking about the weird issues like being unable to move a brush into a custom brush palette when you work on a second screen, like being unable to move the software onto the second screen in the first place unless you separate all the palettes and the windows (and if nobody tells you upfront there is no way of knowing because the manual doesn't state this at all), and then having to drag all your separate windows and palettes over one by one every time your computer wakes up again, and they won't really want to move to the other screen but only through a tiny corner of your screen, and the fact that you have to scroll through lists and lists of fonts but can't search and when you apply this font, add another piece of text the font jumps back to the default font of all the text already applied even when you haven't selected any of the text. Just to name a very small few.
Read full review Support Rating It was really hard to get them to understand what I was having problems with. It was hard to get the message through that Painter has an unacceptable amount of functional and UX bugs. When I finally talked to someone who was easier to communicate with, he was very stoic about the situation, like they didn't really care about the awful amount of bugs.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We've only used the consumer (non-pro) version of
SketchUp , which we love, but is very limited in features and output capabilities compared to Blender. While Blender's learning curve is MUCH steeper than
SketchUp , it feels like truly complete, professional design software.
Read full review Corel Painter has support to multiple OS and across all the devices. Coloring and multi layer imaging works very well. The new enhanced brush settings and the redesigned brush libraries.
Read full review Return on Investment As it is a beginner-friendly software with increasing demand in the animation sector again, it positively impacts the business. Except in some specific cases, no one will use Blender on their own at a professional level. When I was a beginner, it took me a lot of time to learn, consequently designing the creation. But if we want to learn to master Blender, we can do it. As long as we have time and a lot of willpower, since, we repeat, it is not a simple program and hides thousands of tools and possibilities. Read full review Customer support could be improved in my opinion. Multiple bugs while working with layered designing. Read full review ScreenShots