I've kept an eye on Blender for the last 15 years and tried it again recently after having almost exclusively used Maya. It's continually improved in just about every way, is relatively easy to use with just a trackpad, and it performs really well.
In contrast, Maya is has more features overall but is... a piece of shit in many ways. It doesn't matter what hardware I've used; it's a rule that Maya has to crash randomly when doing basic things. I used to be able to just open the Hypershade, but with Maya 2020 merely opening it causes the entire application to crash.
So I've decided to ditch it for Blender. I'm not doing character animation anymore, but I still enjoy modeling and rigging some things I want to conceptualize in 3D space, as well as create 3D printables, and Blender is absolutely up to the task.
It kind of baffles me how little interest the motion picture and television industries have had in Blender. Big studios are still using Maya, which I know also crashes for them and has performance issues. They could pour all their money into improving Blender and eventually not have to pay Autodesk anymore for licenses for poorly managed software that seems to rarely receive bug fixes.
In contrast, Maya is has more features overall but is... a piece of shit in many ways. It doesn't matter what hardware I've used; it's a rule that Maya has to crash randomly when doing basic things. I used to be able to just open the Hypershade, but with Maya 2020 merely opening it causes the entire application to crash.
So I've decided to ditch it for Blender. I'm not doing character animation anymore, but I still enjoy modeling and rigging some things I want to conceptualize in 3D space, as well as create 3D printables, and Blender is absolutely up to the task.
It kind of baffles me how little interest the motion picture and television industries have had in Blender. Big studios are still using Maya, which I know also crashes for them and has performance issues. They could pour all their money into improving Blender and eventually not have to pay Autodesk anymore for licenses for poorly managed software that seems to rarely receive bug fixes.