When you’re in the business of creating with your computer, there sure is a lot at your fingertips. Do a quick Google search for whatever you’re trying to do, and up comes a staggering amount of programs. It has an option-paralysis effect, doesn’t it? There’s so much software out there that picking one to learn is daunting. The pressure of investing time into the right software — the software that will be the most useful to us in the future — is stressful. While there are plenty of forums, message boards, and how-to guides, we thought it might be enlightening to make a poll of what tools fill the working hours of 3D artists. Over the course of a few months, we ran a survey which looked at 100 professionals who work with 3D graphics in a team setting in order to get a better look at what tools artists use in the design workflow.
Software for creation
First thing’s first: we started with the software that 3D artists use in the purely creative part of their work. This is tough — while most of the software has the ability to accomplish all of the same things as its competitors, there are differences in the strong suits of each. We took an in-depth look at these differences in this blog post.
We asked respondents to either select all of the 3D modeling they use from a list of the top 10 most popular, or write-in an alternate software under “other.” Rinse and repeat with rendering software. Here’s what we found — keeping in mind that many workers use more than one software:
Software for communication
An important yet often-overlooked part of designing on your computer is communication and collaboration. Project managers, graphic designers, sales… they often have more than a little hand in the process. Many of us have remote coworkers that we’ve never even met before. There’s a lot of communication we need to do with a lot of people, and quick. We asked our respondents about this: we asked them to check all the methods they use to send and receive their work files. Here’s what we found:
Software for delivery
Design is a process, full of twists, turns, and two-way conversations — but if we’re lucky, we come out on the other side with a product. After final decisions that graphic designers, project managers, and clients make, sharing the completed 3D projects with the end user is the other final piece. How does that usually happen? Here are the tools that our respondents use:
Software solutions
Although our survey was relatively small, it provided some insight into how things get done! Autodesk products are still crowd favorites, email still dominates communication, and cloud products are on the rise. As the industry continues to morph, shift, and transform, we’re excited to keep scoping out the tools that form it.
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