A world by itself, extremely powerful and free!
January 23, 2023
A world by itself, extremely powerful and free!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Blender
I use Blender mainly for rendering machine designs and occasionally for animation of those. For modeling, I use Onshape (great software, by the way) and then export models to Blender for final presentation touches. Blender helps me deliver a realistic design proposal with its awesome rendering and animation capabilities. Believe me; there is a HUGE difference between using a CAD-integrated renderer and a professional animation tool used for creating actual movies. Paired with a raytracing-capable computer, the power it gives to you is immense.
- Rendering in a realistic way.
- Animation with movie-grade capabilities.
- Integration of said renderings/animation with real world with motion capture.
- 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.
- Powerful rendering capabilities that can use ray tracing.
- Awesome animation tools that can be easily used for technical models.
- It's FREE
- Once I was requested to do an animation of a whole production line so my customer (an international company) could show the biggest electric vehicle manufacturer of the world their capabilities and plans for producing a piece of the actual car. The income received represented like 20% of those years' income, but more importantly, it increased my services offering and reputation.
- Delivering a quotation of a project accompanied by a nice rendering to explain my concept gives me a huge advantage over the competition. I can't put numbers on this, but I know it increases the attention of my proposal and gives the sense to my customer that I'm taking the project seriously. As a customer, the difference between reviewing a quotation with simply a number and a quotation with the number and a great concept rendering is huge, they can perceive that time was invested in it.
Well, in fact, I haven't used any of that software, but there is one thing I know: Blender is free. That's huge for small business owners like me; it is the difference between having the tool and not having it. I have heard other people saying that the Autodesk offerings have some other tools Blender doesn't have and are better for animation, especially Maya, but no small-engineering business owner cares for that. Now, from the animation and artistic point of view, even if my business was making animated movies indie, I'd used Blender simply by its cost.
Do you think Blender delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Blender's feature set?
Yes
Did Blender live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Blender go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Blender again?
Yes