Is It Time to Switch to Blender?

Diary of an Indie Game Developer: Chapter 51

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post which noted how loooooooooooong I’ve been working with Maya. I’ve been a Maya user on and off for roughly 20 years.

20 years is a long time, and stating the obvious, a lot has changed since then. Back then, Maya cost $16,000 per seat, and at the time, $16,000 was quite a bargain given that other 3D packages, like Houdini, cost around $50,000 per seat. Ouch! Fast forward to 2019, and Maya is even cheaper. Today, Maya is $1,545 per year.

That said, the truth is that these days $1,545 per year is a LOT of money, especially for a lone gun indie game developer. To put it in perspective, $1,545 is enough to buy a nice new gaming PC… every… single… year. That’s right, you can buy an entire gaming PC, suitable for game dev work, for what it costs to rent a copy of Maya for one year. I don’t know, call me crazy, but that seems… well… kinda crazy.

It sounds even more nutty when you consider that much of the rest of the industry offers “indie pricing”, which means if you don’t make a lot of money, you don’t have to pay full price:

If you make less than $100K per year you can get Houdini for $296/yr.

If you make less that $100K per year, you can get the entire Substance suite for $239/yr. For that price, you get “Substance Painter, Substance Designer, Substance B2M and access to Substance Source (30 assets to download every month) and Project Substance Alchemist.”

Even some non-indie pricing can make $1,545/yr for Maya look crazy expensive. Adobe Creative Cloud costs $599.88/yr which gives you access to Adobe’s entire library of 20 applications! Hmmm…. $1,545/yr for one application versus $599.88/yr for 20 applications? Something doesn’t add up here.

Which brings me to Blender.

Blender is FREE and open source (Free is a LOT cheaper than $1,545/yr ; ).

Version 2.8 is due to be released on October 20th this year, but you can get the beta version today and it’s pretty stable. I’ve been watching Blender’s development for many years now, and from what I hear, it’s gotten really good, and now it’s quite competitive with commercial applications like Maya. Version 2.8 in particular is what has sparked my interest in maybe switching from Maya now.

Before version 2.8, Blender’s UI was a mess. At least that’s how it seemed to me. Case in point: Prior to version 2.8, to select an object in Blender, you had to right click on it. What?!? That’s right, breaking the left-click-to-select convention that pretty much EVERY other piece of software ever created follows, in Blender you had to right click. Face palm.

Now, if you loved pre-Blender 2.8’s UI, my sincere apologies if that last paragraph offended you, but from where I’m sitting, 2.8’s UI looks to be a BIG improvement:

So there you have it. Blender 2.8 is coming out in a matter of months. It looks really good, and that’s got me thinking about maybe switching from Maya. I’ll admit, the only reason I’m really considering switching is because Maya is so expensive, but it’s really hard to justify that cost when you’re a lone gun indie game developer.

If I was running a big studio with big budgets, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I would simply consider Maya part of the cost of doing business. It’s pretty much the industry standard, and when you’re looking to put together a large team of professionals, most of the people you’d be looking to hire have Maya skills. But I’m not running a big studio, so none of that is my problem.

What is my problem is opportunity cost: Learning Blender would take time, probably LOTS of time, and as I’ve said many times before, when you’re a lone gun indie game developer, time is your most valuable resource. Would it be worth it to switch to Blender? Honestly, I don’t know, but I’m seriously considering it.

What do you think? Have any of you made the switch from Maya to Blender? If so, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Was it difficult? How long did it take to get up and running in Blender? How long did it take for you to feel really comfortable, and most importantly, after the fact, do you think it was worth it to make the switch?

Please let me know in the comments below. Thanks!!

See you next week…

P.S. “What about Maya LT?” you may be asking. It’s only $250/yr and Autodesk is marketing it as a solution specifically designed for indie game developers like me. Well, it turns out that Maya LT doesn’t support Python scripting. Without Python scripting, many 3rd party scripts and plugins won’t work, stuff like ZBrush GoZ, and The Setup Machine, both of which I use. The lack of Python scripting in Maya LT is pretty much a deal breaker.