Aren't most of these programs interchangeable?asked by SwedishFishtank
TL;DRPrograms are largely interchangeable in fundamentals, though operations differ; Blender is free and its modifier stack is less versatile than 3ds Max, which has production functionality, so concept artists use Blender.
Yeah, for sure. I know the core fundamentals of 3D, so learning Blender isn't as hard as it would have been if it was the first program I ever learnt, but the operations you do in them are a lot different. We have this in 3ds Max, which is called the stack, and basically it lets us put different modifiers on. Blender has a stack as well, but I don't think it's quite as versatile. The other cool thing about Blender as well is that it's free. So, say for example, I wanted to make something that I wanted to sell online, I think I could do it in Blender and you wouldn't have to pay the prices that you have to pay for 3ds Max. That being said, there's a lot of functionality that we use that comes with 3ds Max for production, which is why concept artists will work in Blender to create things, because they're not going directly into the game, they're kind of just being used to show us what we can do.