Anybody from the industry know how much better is the closed source modelling software like lightwave, 3DS, Maya, Softimage compared to Blender. I know they are all different but is blender a peer a step above or a step below?
Blender 2.8 is on par in most areas, better in many. For example, the sculpting tools available right inside of your standard modeling package rival dedicated sculpting programs like ZBrush, and you never have to leave Blender.
Likewise, the Cycles render engine is built into the package, without the need to go to VRay or Octane. The texturing pipeline in the modern PBR era make most rendering environments much more of an apples-to-apples comparison.
There are other features like particle systems and cloth simulators that are bonuses to have inside of the 3d package, although the best in the business like Houdini are as available to Blender users as they would be to Max/Maya.
I think it's hard to say which is better, each software has quirks that will drive you insane.
In 3ds Max; simple things like selection are broken. You double click to select an object and its children in the Hierarchy (contrary to single click in every other software ever made), the problem is, this is laggy; you get a loading spinner when selecting objects!
In blender despite the UI refresh in 2.8, the interface is still horrible. There are hundreds duplicate menu entries, and many functions without any menu entry at all, accessible only by keyboard shortcut.
The only software I've use that doesn't drive me mad is Cinema4D, but it's missing some features from other softwares.
This has been solved since version 2.5. In blender versions prior to 2.8 hit spacebar and start typing the operation name. In 2.8 and later the default keybinding has moved to F3.
If you're criticising blender at least use up-to-date nitpicks instead of stuff that has been fixed literal years ago.
If I was a large VFX studio in 2019, I would not spend a cent on proprietary stuff anymore.
With an OpenSource base like Blender, anything you need to add to your pipeline can be grafted on top of blender by a small team of coders, and you are guaranteed that it'll keep on working for the next 10 years.
having the option between free maya on an educational license and blender, i still chose blender. before 2.8 the ui in blender wasn't fantastic, but it's always been better in terms of features (at least as long as i've been doing 3d), and the community is super friendly.
3ds max and maya are both owned by autodesk. So the former is better for architectural stuff and product design, the latter for modeling, rigging, animation etc. Blender is fairly close to both. Especially with useful addons. A lot of major players customize things like their rigging so in that sense blender is far from being able to remove maya's position. Objectively, I would say blender is even slightly better at things like modeling. Blender's animation tools are good, rendering... is in some ways really good with the new eevee engine. Cycles is horribly slow.
I would say the real standouts are probably Houdini and Substance3d with kind of zbrush. Houdini is just a step up in simulations and particle effects. Its insane how good it is at the things it does especially with its procedural workflow. Blender's materials and painting system is there, but even with tweaking its only somewhat as good as designer+painter let alone the extensions that allow to export materials to unity/unreal. Even though the painting is primitive, the material node system is fairly powerful if used with textures instead of procedural generating everything. So depending on the workflow its still pretty powerful and can achieve the same results.
I mentioned zbrush for sculpting, and it just has a way higher ceiling. I don't know if most people will reach it, but zbrush can handle way more polygons and is just a way better tool for sculpting since that's what its main purpose is. Blender's sculpting can still be used to sculpt complicated things, but it probably has to be planned a little bit better by separating the mesh up. It has things like dynotopo to add details and the brush engine can do a lot of the things zbrush can do so its possible to make things. But you quickly have to start using textures and normals to simulate details whereas I've seen people just sculpt those details directly in zbrush.
tl;dr Blender is a jack of all trades and covers a lot of bases fairly well. Its good now, but it will be an absolute beast once the kinks get ironed out with eevee and the painting + sculpting tools get improved.
