Blender is becoming ever more popular for creating 3D models. The reasons for it’s popularity are plenty:
- Free and Open Source
- 2D & 3D Animation
- Sculpting
- Camera Tracking
- Rendering
- Post-Processing
Blender really is the Jack of all trades which explains why it’s started to make its way into industry projects such as Spiderman (2004). Along with the praises came a brief mention of the steep learning curve. Below is a glimpse of the confusing and overwhelming Blender welcome!
If you don’t want to count, there are 14 sub-menus to the right. As tempting as it is to jump into the deep end and go for it, I had to evaluate whether or not it would be worth the the initial slowdown in production over using Unity’s built in editor.
In comes Unity’s ProBuilder! It has significantly less features compared to Blender, but it was made for prototyping within Unity. It allows a creator to block out levels, structures, or architecture and uses Unity’s constructor’s and mesh’s which makes the rendering time similar to that of building everything from scratch within Unity.
While learning Blender is still on my list of things to do, ProBuilder meets all of my requirements and doesn’t require an initial time investment upfront nor does it require additional space & time resources within the product. As such, ProBuilder fits my needs just fine.
