>>2156324
Blender is a 3D creation suite. You can do every process of 3d creation, namely; Modeling, Sculpting, Modifier/Geonodes manipulation, UV, Texturing, Rigging, Animation, Shading, Rendering, and Model exporting.
It can do Sim work, namely; Particles, Hair/Fur(this is getting a major upgrade), fluid/Gas, Cloth, SoftBody(this is currently getting some upgrades) etc. It can also do composting, tracking, matching, VFX, Video editing.
In short blender is a Complete Suite for 3D, so you can not only create models and rigs, you can do the animation and render with a far far better set of renderers, Cycles for path traced, EEVEE for "Realtime PBR" (like Unreal).
Blender also has a full featured 2D animation tool called greasepencil, that is like a combination between TVpaint and Adobe Flash/Toonboom.
The obvious benefits are the ability to control and easily fix every aspect of 3D animation, without having to constantly compensate for SFM.
To fix a rig for example you only have to select the rig, or if it is weight painting issue/Shapekey issue, and go to the appropriate editing mode to fix it.
Whereas if you fuck up a SFM model, you either have to return back to the software (usually blender) to fix and reexport it, or if you are an "user" of someone elses rig, you have to bitch at the rigger, or decompile it.
SFM has one big advantage, which is the steam workshop.
But this is also a downside, as it means often animators are reusing assets and everything looks the same or "bland".
A less talked about, but easily a deal breaker, is on the rendering side.
SFM can only export nonlinear screen space color, and has no support for floating point formats. Often with many SFM animations you can see them clipping speculars, or crushing black levels. It's a huge problem, because you work with the limitations of a rasterizer which cannot do real global illumination or caustics. All pretty lighting has to be baked and preplanned with the limitations of non path tracing in mind. SFM exports frame sequences in non linear targas or PNG or JPG, and so, if you fuck up, making a light too bight or make the environment too dark, you can't do what a blender/maya user could do, where you could adjust the linear EXR exposure to compensate. (assuming the user is smart enough to actually export in a linear format for mastering/color correction/editing)
This leads a lot of SFM scenes looking rather bland, over or under saturated, too bright or too dark, and thus having to re-render entire scenes over and over again.
SFM has no Transparency rendering options, so you can't do really complicated VFX like blender can.
Most SFM users go for chroma keying where they render in a "Greenscreen scene" and then have to chroma key their renders in a Video editor.
Just look at the feature set here for blender: https://www.blender.org/features/ & https://www.blender.org/download/releases/3-2/
You can see why many people would prefer blender to SFM.
It's worth remembering what SFM is for. SFM was made so that valve could...
1. Show off the rendering ability's of the Source 1 & later 2 engine.
2. Provide a tool that would render premade cutscenes using the ingame engine, both so valve could save money, and so no one would say "oh the in game cutscene looks different than the game"
3. Provide a community tool that allows for people to use their game assets to make fan content to promote said game.
SFM was never intended to be a tool for serious independent animation. It became that way because at the time, there was no "real time" animation tool unless you knew how to use unreal, which it also wasn't built for. It lacks the very common tools and features that make it easier to do production animation, and is seriously out of date when comes to the tools it has.
TLDR;
Blender is for doing everything 3D, from feature films to indie, 3d models for game dev, 3d printing, etc.
SFM is a specialized animation/render only tool for Valve and a toy for the community that by virtue of it being "convenient" and widespread. It is severely lacking in the most important and necessary features.
You could make a cinema quality film in blender by itself, SFM is utterly dependent on 3D software like blender to even be usable on it's own.
if you want to see some demos https://www.blender.org/download/demo-files/
This is the range of blender.
>>2156352
Whilst I agree, chill. You'll scare off the newb.
Edited at 2022/07/20 20:36:01
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