Max Williams

I’m studying computer animation. We mainly get taught in Maya, but I’m keen to learn Blender, for the following reasons:

• It loads in two bounces, whereas Maya running under Rosetta takes about 20.
• It’s 31MB, as opposed to Maya’s 444MB.
• I love Blender’s interface, and the way it doesn’t crash when you close the render window, and the way controls look fairly professional compared to the Maya / Aqua attempt that you get from Maya on the Mac.
• I love the way Blender costs nothing. I love that.

I’m getting the hang of it, too. Messing around with polygons seems really easy, once you remember some basic key commands. I was nearly put off when I couldn’t work out how to scale things in one axis only, but when I found out how you can do it with the middle mouse button, I instantly started to love that more than Maya’s method. Unwrapping a mesh into UVs was easy enough, and applying a texture didn’t seem to be a problem, but I haven’t yet worked out how to make it show up when it’s rendered.

But above all, I think that Blender’s interface is just… lovely. It seems so elegant, with clever and useful application of OpenGL’s built-in technologies. They’ve made a little transparency go a long way.

Of course, I’m going to continue to learn Maya, because a) that’s what they teach in my classes and b) it’s an attractive skill to future employers. But wherever possible, I hope to use Blender. Not because I’m freakishly fanatical about open-source software, not because I’m too lazy to find a pirate copy of Maya somewhere, but because I want to use an application that has been written properly.

My name is Max Williams, and I live in London.

I’m currently studying computer animation. I also design websites, and I’m working on a few programming projects. I’m very interested in technology and computing.

I hope to fill this blog with anything interesting I come across as I learn new things in these fields, as well as anything else that intrigues me.