Your opinions on the future of Cheetah, Blender and Maya

Panda Pops

Panda Pops

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Your opinions on the future of Cheetah, Blender and Maya

Hi there chaps, I teach on a digital media course at an FE college and we chose Cheetah just over a year ago as our 3D app to use for the 3D design unit (just one aspect of the overall two year course).

It is very easy to get the hang of, easy to teach and students have produced very creative and photo-realistic images and animations. More time can be spent on doing than learning.

A large proportion of the students have steered more towards the 3D aspects of their course and then want to advance to pure 3D design courses at university where they will then be using Maya or 3D Studio Max for product/tv/film production.

I'm looking in to Blender as an option to teach as the students can get a copy of it for home easily, we can update our software to new versions as appropriate (being open-source) and it can produce some very sophisticated results on a par to Maya, however it could stifle the creativity due to steep learning curve.

Blender being open-source will be around for a long time as it has many developers. Maya should be around a long time being an industry standard but with Cheetah relying solely on one developer it could dissapear suddenly.

The point of this is I have a choice of Cheetah (financially I can only update every two academic years) or Blender to teach the students and introduce them to the world of 3D. They use this software for two years and hence become very familiar with it. This is the background to the three questions below:

1) Which of these two apps would produce a more familiar environment for the jump to Maya or 3DS?

2) What do you think longetivity of these apps are (Cheetah/Blender)?

3) What would you do if Cheetah suddenly stopped production, your Mac processor type or OSX changed and old versions of Cheetah would not run anymore?

I must say though Cheetah is an awesome app both usability, quality of results and price, the developer is very talented.

Thanks

Benjy
 
I could no more predict the reliability, support, or compatibility of any of those apps for the future, than you. Having one developer can cause delay in getting newer versions of a product out, but I can also state with confidence that having a bigger company, a tight deadline, and huge $$ on the line can produce clunky upgrades, less focus on core functions, and less satisfying support (regardless of how available it is).

I dare say that Cheetah should run well on future versions of Apple's OS for quite some time to come. My understanding is that Dr. Wengenmayer has been working on a huge improvement to Cheetah that should put it more on par with the others you have mentioned. The community here and scripting support have been quite powerful in helping Cheetah be as successful as it is. Dr. Wengenmayer has proven that long term commitment to Cheetah is his intent. However, unless he releases his newer version soon, I fear Cheetah will lose some credibility to being a viable longer-term product.

As compared to Blender, I believe there's little doubt as to how much more you can do with Blender, but Blender's learning curve and complexity make it less desirable for many. I can't speak to how either compare to Maya or 3DS
 
I think C3D is an absolutely brilliant program to teach students 3D. It lets you focus on concepts instead of UI bizarreness, and every "serious" 3D program I've used is seriously bizarre. (Does Martin offer academic site licenses? He really should.)

I also think Blender is a great program to go to after C3D because once you know what you're trying to do, it's usually not too hard to figure out how to do it in Blender, but Blender is a terrible program to explore. And it's very unlikely that you'll run into hard limits in Blender -- it can do pretty much anything.

1) Which of these two apps would produce a more familiar environment for the jump to Maya or 3DS?
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None of the above, really. C3D is, if anything, C4D Lite. It borrows a lot of UI concepts from C4D (indeed, I recently started learning C4D and several of C3D's odder UI choices suddenly made sense).

That said, Blender is damn peculiar, and I'd strongly suspect that moving from Blender to Max or Maya will be a stranger ride than C3D to Max or Maya (e.g. Blender's right-click to select and cursor-centric operation is pretty unique).

2) What do you think longetivity of these apps are (Cheetah/Blender)
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Blender is going to be around for the foreseeable future.

C3D is really up to Martin. If he gets offered a job working for (say) Apple (one can dream ;-) ), then it may end up becoming abandonware. That said, there's really no reason to expect C3D to go away altogether, or become grossly incompatible (Martin has been VERY good about keeping C3D compatible).

3) What would you do if Cheetah suddenly stopped production, your Mac processor type or OSX changed and old versions of Cheetah would not run anymore?
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I'd switch to Blender because it's free and after banging my head against it for five years I actually kind of "get it". It's also part of a free/open source ecosystem that's getting to be ridiculously powerful.

If I were making actual money from my 3D work (versus basically doing it for fun) I'd probably go back to 3DS Max (mainly because I already wasted a few years learning Max).
 
podperson said:
C3D is really up to Martin. If he gets offered a job working for (say) Apple (one can dream ;-) ), then it may end up becoming abandonware.
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well I wish him so because in this short time i've had the chance to appreciate his work... but don't worry: in that case i bet we'll have iCheetah coming with every new OSX machine :tongue:

Cheers,
Alessandro
 
Hi Benjy,

Panda Pops said:
1) Which of these two apps would produce a more familiar environment for the jump to Maya or 3DS?
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Difficult to say since I've never worked with 3DS. I also never figures out how Blender works.

But generally I think if you understand the concepts behind 3D modelling and animation it shouldn't be to difficult to learn a app like Maya or 3DS. You often just have to figure out under which menu which tool is.

Panda Pops said:
2) What do you think longetivity of these apps are (Cheetah/Blender)?
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I have absolutely no plan to stop development of Cheetah3D.:smile: When I released Cheetah3D 1.0 more than five years ago I also had some customers who were worried that Cheetah3D would disappear after 1.1 or 1.2 like many new apps. But so far their worries weren't justified.:smile:

Panda Pops said:
3) What would you do if Cheetah suddenly stopped production, your Mac processor type or OSX changed and old versions of Cheetah would not run anymore?
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That can always happen, but I've always fixed this problems and made Cheetah3D run again on the latest hardware and OS.

Panda Pops said:
I must say though Cheetah is an awesome app both usability, quality of results and price, the developer is very talented.
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Thanks.:redface:

Bye,
Martin
 
podperson said:
C3D is really up to Martin. If he gets offered a job working for (say) Apple (one can dream ;-) ), then it may end up becoming abandonware. That said, there's really no reason to expect C3D to go away altogether, or become grossly incompatible (Martin has been VERY good about keeping C3D compatible).
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I would never abandon Cheetah3D just for a job. My business is running quite well and I can work where I want and when I want. And coding on Cheetah3D still makes fun. Couldn't life be nicer.:wink:

If Apple buys Cheetah3D "including its developer" that would be another story. But now I'm dreaming.:smile:

Bye,
Martin
 
As an interesting example of what can happen with indie software, a recent post on silo3d.com reveals that the silo devs have (this is my interpretation) pretty much lost interest in Silo and are writing a game engine.

I'd love to see Cheetah 3d become an Apple product ;-)
 
Panda Pops said:
1) Which of these two apps would produce a more familiar environment for the jump to Maya or 3DS?
Click to expand...
I'm no expert (I've used Cheetah and Blender, but only poked Maya once or twice), but I think Cheetah is far more similar to Maya. Cheetah's view controls, unlike Blender, are very Maya-ish, further so if you add the keyboard shortcuts QWE and R, and it's user interface tends to function in a similar manner. Blender's interface, probably as it was originally developed as in in-house tool, is very "unique", although from what I've heard it's also very efficient once one gets used to it.

Also, worthy of note, Cheetah feels like a clone of Cinema 4D. The interface behavior, the tool options, the paradigm, everything. Personally, I like Cinema. If only Cinema liked me...

Panda Pops said:
2) What do you think longetivity of these apps are (Cheetah/Blender)?
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Well, Cheetah has a horrible bus factor, although, as has been mentioned, Martin is dedicated to Cheetah. I highly doubt that it will go away any time soon. (I also doubt if it will arrive any time soon, but that's a teapot of a different color. :lol: Sorry, couldn't resist).
As for Blender, I think that the devs were going to discontinue development a week after the end of time, or something like that. As far as I can tell, Blender development is going full-steam with no sign of letting up. The more people (/companies) that support it the faster it grows, so I think it's growing exponentially.

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that, of this post, the Blender devs are industrially working on Blender 2.50. And 2.50 is to 2.49 what Leopard is to Tiger, a quantum leap. I don't know what bearing, if any, that will have on you decision, though.

Panda Pops said:
3) What would you do if Cheetah suddenly stopped production, your Mac processor type or OSX changed and old versions of Cheetah would not run anymore?
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Well, personally, I would:
A) Desperately convince Martin to open source it
B) Failing that, go to write my own, take one look at the API, then realize the scale of the task and sigh. And then
C) 80% chance of using Blender, 15% chance of using Cinema 4D, 5% chance of using another program all together.

Panda Pops said:
I must say though Cheetah is an awesome app both usability, quality of results and price, the developer is very talented.
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I second that. I tried working with Cinema 4D's radiosity (aka Global Illumination) while testing it. A 16 minute radiosity render in Cinema was unusably poor, whereas the same scene was a 90 sec Cheetah render, and it looked gorgeous.

As a summary of my experience:
Blender is about as capable as Maya, and can be freely distributed to any student on any platform, but is a relatively odd program. Cheetah is very easy to use, and to transition to Maya with, but (currently) lacks more sophisticated features. Maya is the industry standard, and could potentially be used by students with windows or linux, but it practically requires a license to fly the thing. Since 3DSMax is a windows-only program (HHIIIIISSSSSSSSSSSSSS!), I don't have any first-hand experience to share.

All those hours comparing 3D applications seems to have actually paid off (although I still seem to be writing essay-posts). Hope it helps.
 
There is a small Mac only CAD app called BOA. it started life as a joint venture between some American and French people - in about 2005 the American decided to leave the joint venture, so now there are only two French guys in charge. The two Frenchies are pure programmers, and have no desire to market the app, and development of the app proceeds at a snail's pace. Yes, it's still around, but it's lost a lot of fans and users along the way, and it's almost completely disappeared off the radar. Software on life support.

Why am I writing this ? Simply because we should all wake up every day and thank God for developers like Martin. If only he was developing BOA.

All hail the good doctor.
 
I trained for 3 years in Maya and found the Maya>Cheetah transition very comfortable and in many ways a relief.

Its an interesting question you pose though, I guess the answer lies in the resultant skilset.. If you want commercial level skills you'll be thinking Cheetah>Maya, if you want to empower people work outside the industry as serious and even professional hobbiests you could go the blender route.

I could never go the blender route, I'd be more inclined to pay for something I can use easier.

Aaron
 
Cheetah v Lightwave

I've used Lightwave for about 10 years on and off and can pretty much model what I want in it. However it has always been bugged and clunky and was a nightmare to learn but back then with no Youtube or even CDs Lightwave had a great free helpline which helped me understand 3D. I have Lightwave 8 which works on OS 10.6 intel but Lightwave 8.5 does not. 9.6 is out there and 10 should arrive soon but the originators have left to do Modo and the helpline isn't much help either now so I think the ship may be sinking.

Trying to export FBX to Unity was the usual Lightwave nightmare, even adding the plug-in and finding where it went took about a week. Then the model would not take its jpg into the Unity engine and nothing in Unity allowed the Lightwave FBX model to take any sort of bitmap texture either.

When Photoshop failed to load on the latest OSX I discovered Pixelmator as a great cheap alternative, much zippier and looks better too, which meant goodbye to Adobe and their silly prices.

So with this FBX problem I started looking at alternatives and came across Cheetah. I've only modelled in Cheetah but so far my opinion is it's fantastic, much better than Lightwave and that was always considered the best polygon modeller ever. Best of all Cheetah works seamlessly with Unity taking in the textures too. I've looked at Maya many times and could never figure it out, it also looked quite nasty like Windows does compared to OSX so I was never convinced and always felt they were trying it on.

I go back a long way and remember when a seat at an SGI station running Alias Wavefront (Early Maya) was $400,000. Now I understand about 3D I know that no demonstrator that I could find in their SGI London Soho Office had a clue about modelling or anything else come to that other than running flashy demos so I've never trusted Maya and their fancy prices even though they dropped to half-way affordable.

To any new guys out there looking at 3D, my advice is absolutely this: Don't even think about it, start with Cheetah, absolutely nothing is easier. Getting a project finished is what it is all about and nothing will do that faster than Cheetah. The reason is simple, Martin is a genius in every sense of the word. He is probably taking the best of the newest and stitching it altogether so he probably knows that it is not all him but he is in total control. He doesn't go to meetings and argue with lesser fellows who are trying to protect their jobs, he just thinks it out, racks his head about the best way to do it and does it.

If I do find that Cheetah is not good enough for animating (which I doubt) I'll upgrade to Lightwave 10, as that will cost about $500 but whether the FBX exporter will work with Unity is another question.

I see Cheetah, Unity, Pixelmator and a cheap vector program as the way to go and Apple could do well to buy them all up and weld them into iArt a graphics program that could sink Adobe in a few years time with a bit of work.

Plus there are lots of tutorials out there to help you get started. Download Cheetah, try it and buy it, not just to keep Martin afloat because he is doing a fantastic job but because together with Unity it is the easiest and fastest way to get your project out there and start making money yourself.
 
I recently picked up Maya and started learning it pretty quickly. However, it's version 2011 vs anything someone else would start with, so that may be why. It is a bit more of a learning curve than Cheetah, but I can model in it a lot faster. Yet, I haven't figured out all of the intricacies of texturing or animating (which I'm staying away from for the time being). This will obviously happen with time. I can even do some things in it like painting 3D trees and plants, etc.

I've put quite an effort into Blender a number of times, but find it aggravating and cumbersome. There are way too many options and places to find them. It's bloated, but if you can learn it, it's the one of the best and most complete, not to mention cheapest (free) programs around. As for me, I agree that I would rather pay a little and get something easier to deal with.

I can say that Cheetah's learning curve is, generally, much faster. However, I enjoy modeling in Maya more. I think that starting with Cheetah is a great idea, as it gets you introduced to the world of 3D modeling and animation much faster than just about anything out there.
 
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As already mentioned and well said, Blender is a complex program to learn at first, and if that learning curve gets in the way of "doing instead of learning", I highly suggest Cheetah 3D, which is constantly being updated, with a number of free updates depending on the version bought as of now.

I've used Alias/Wavefront for a few years before the updated Maya came about, and learned it first in college as a major, though most time was spent learning the tools by reading the manual and less time for the projects (except my thesis). Cheetah3D is great, as the learning curve isn't very steep compared to most software, thanks to the mostly intuitive interface and tools, and help guide. I love working in Cheetah 3D and new users would pick it up quickly.
 
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I don't have time to reply to each point but simply want to add that after 10 years of doing gfx work (everything that came my way) and using mostly blender or customer supplied software (I was "finishing" or cleaning up someone else's work) I have turned to Cheetah 3D a few months ago and have NEVER regretted it.
Contrary, my last few projects would have not been possible because I used features that are only available in Cheetah3d at this point.

Before you ask which ones, here's the quick list!

Cheetah 3D let's me use an HDRI to light my scene but to get rid of the image showing in the background, i simply click a checkmark! In blender, that is a full page node setup that needs tweaking on top of it!
Cheetah3D has a fast and efficient clean render engine that lets me generate artwork which blows my colleges away!
See here, web page header: http://xyloFUN.net

There is more about shaders, the render window which keeps previous renders and this and that ....

On the blender forum you can find plenty of posts of professionals leaving Autodesk and moving to blender.
Blender is good and very good for certain things. I use it when I need to.
Cheetah 3D is very good at what it does. I use it when I need to.
 
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