Maxon, headquartered in Germany, offers Cinema 4D, an animaton suite for 3D artists, which the vendor states is suitable for beginners and seasoned professionals alike, who can take advantage of Cinema 4D’s wide range of tools and features to achieve stunning results for demanding, fast-paced 3D production.
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Figma
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Figma, headquartered in San Francisco, offers their collaborative design and prototyping application to support digital product and UI development.
Photorealistic Rendering (it takes a LONG time to render for print, but it's insanely realistic). Commercial Production Graphical Integration into print materials (and digital) We did a lot with brochures and billboards. Hi Res rendering takes hours, but the output set us FAR apart from the run-of-the-mill competition we had.
I would recommend if you need to start from scratch a product UI or any customer journey that you need to implement that requires designing and visualizing different steps to complete a process. I would recommend that any design/UI/UX team brainstorm and make proposals that they can compare and discuss in a visual way.
Figma allows us to create universal content. This means that if multiple designers want to re-use a piece of content, and if everyone's content should be dynamically updated from time to time, we can easily accomplish this by turning design elements into a universal instance. Then, if an update is needed, we can push the change out to all assets at once. It's very efficient and ensures we're all updating content accordingly.
Figma also allows us to set parameters for the company's brand guide and share them across various designers. This way, we can easily pull from approved brand fonts, colors, and more, which allows our assets to remain unified across multiple touchpoints.
Figma also allowed us to create and install our own plugin, which we use to export every slide we have in a frame at one time, versus the default export feature, which limits you to one slice at a time. This is particularly useful for us when we're working on email templates, since we tend to have a ton of slices in any given series.
It will be great if Figma will consider having the Pages where interactions can be stitched together among the Pages and not just one page with so many Frames to create the stand-alone clickable prototype that can be used to simulate the intended UX
Bring back the Inspect Mode tab right on the right-side panel of the main workspace instead of hiding behind the Dev Mode.
Figma Slides feature could be improved quite a bit more in order to be easier to assemble slides into a presentation deck and having pre-built templates for slides can be useful too.
Figma is a pretty cool tool in many areas. My team almost uses it on daily basis, such as, brainstorming on product/design topics, discussing prototypes created by designers. We even use it for retrospectives, which is super convenient and naturally keeps records of what the team discusses every month. Furthermore, I do see the potential of the product - currently we mainly use it for design topics, but it seems it is also a good fit for tech diagrams, which we probably will explore further in the future.
For reasons mentioned before: an intuitive interface and speed of the viewport, speed of loading, and ease of plugin integration. The MoGraph module encourages experimentation and the creation of highly modifiable scenes. Crashes are extremely rare and the support team and community are hyper-responsive to requests for help. For real... Maxon's staff hangs out in Slack and Discord communities, regularly assisting users with issues. No support ticket required.
There's a bit of a learning curve, but generally I think it's both more powerful and intuitive that other UX design tools. Most of what I need to do as a designer can be done in this platform, from basic wireframes to creating a design system, to creating pixel perfect designs, to prototyping to dev handoff.
Maxon's staff regularly hangs out in Slack and Discord communities, ready to assist. This goes beyond the support ticket system, which is also extremely robust. Hundreds of optimizations and bugs are fixed in every patch, even when the user experience is already 99.9% smooth. This is a proactive, not reactive, support and engineering team at Maxon.
I haven't used their support lately but in the past, they had a chat that I used often. They often responded in a few hours and were able to give a satisfactory solution. I would imagine it's less personal now but the community has expanded drastically so there are more resources out there to self serve with a bit of Google magic.
In-person training has its own benefits - 1. It helps in resolving queries then and there during the training. 2. I find classroom or in-person training more interactive. 3. Classroom or in-person training could be more practical in nature where participants can have an hands on experience with tools and clarify their doubts with the trainer.
Online training has its own merits and demerits - 1. Sometimes we may face issues with connectivity or the training content 2. The way training is being delivered becomes very important because not everyone is comfortable taking online training and learning by themselves. 3. With the advancement of technology online training has become popular but there is a segment of people who still prefer class-room training over online one.
Well, I go for cinema 4D if I want to create dynamic animation instead of Autodesk 3ds Max as I can easily create that animation compared to Autodesk 3ds Max.
Miro is more user-friendly than Figma, but is less robust in terms of web prototyping and graphic design. While Figma isn't made to be used as a design tool, our team has taken to using it as such because it's richer in functions and personalizations compared to Miro and Figma.
