Switching to Blender

Hello all amazing supporters!

This is John from Angry Demon Studio. For those of you that don't know me, I'm the designer, writer, and 3D-artist on Angry Demon Studio.

I have some exciting news to share with all our patrons. After much thought, effort, and trial runs, I've officially made the switch from Maya to Blender for our future 3D work! As a small indie studio, this decision means a lot to me, and I wanted to involve you in my journey moving forwards.

Why the Switch?

Since the beginning, Maya has been my go-to tool for 3D modeling. It's powerful, robust, and has served me well. However, Blender has made some incredible progress in recent years. Its growing popularity, open-source nature, and community-driven development have really caught my attention.

The Transition

Moving from Maya to Blender wasn't without its challenges. I started by testing Blender using one of the characters from our soon-to-be-announced game. Thankfully, Blender has a first-boot feature that allows you to enable Industry Standard hotkeys, which made the initial adjustment much smoother than expected.

The Drawbacks

Of course, no transition is perfect. I quickly noticed two major drawbacks:

• The absence of Maya's Quad Draw tools.

• The lack of native UV editing tools that I needed to achieve wanted results in the UV mapping quickly.

These were crucial tools in my workflow, and I was a bit worried about how to work around them.

The Solutions

Luckily, Blender's vibrant ecosystem provided exactly what I needed through its marketplace. Here's what saved the day:

• Retopoflow: This plugin efficiently replaced Maya's Quad Draw tool, making retopology much easier. Retopoflow on blender marketplace

• Zen UV: A game-changer for UV mapping, giving me a suite of options to handle UV editing with ease. ZEN UV on blender marketplace

Final Thoughts

Despite some initial hiccups, I truly feel that transitioning to Blender for 3D work was the right move for me. It's been an empowering change, especially for an indie creator like myself. That said, I still dream of better native UV editing tools in Blender—but with the pace of its development, who knows what improvements may come next?

But honestly, to me as a developer, Blender and it's marketplace is such a fresh breath of air in the jungle that is subscriptions, logins, continuous authentication, offline unavailability and more.

I'm planning a future post to dive deeper into the pros and cons of both Maya and Blender from my perspective. I've discovered some amazing features in Blender that don't exist in Maya, while also missing a few things from Maya. For now, though, I'm thrilled to embrace Blender as a key part of my creative process.

If you want to talk more about this topic before the next post, you are very welcome to OUR DISCORD 

Thank you all for your support! Stay tuned for more updates soon!

• John / Angry Demon Studio