I guess this is more of a poll kinda thing...

What are the top 3D modeling programs used by vendors here?

I have been debating on whether or not I need something more powerful than Hexagon.

Everyone's information is greatly appreciated!

Not a vendor but Blender is becoming more popular and has many tools that would be suited for most modeling job. I still use hexagon as well it is where I first learned modeling will be very interested in hearing what others do say in this thread 

Well, blender is your value for money winner but I'd choose on the gui rather than features.

A lot of content creators on Renderosity use Blender, but I think there's a lot who use 3dsmax or Cinema4D, and some that use Hexagon and Carrara as well.  I think the most commonly used app among them all is going to be Zbrush.  Almost every time I read a featured vendor on this site, and they are asked about their software of choice, Zbrush plays a part in the workflow somehow.  Same in most professional pipelines, if you read 3dWorld or 3dArtist mags.   I know a couple of the big architectural and scene builders for Poser use 3dsmax.  For example, DreamlandModels, and of course, Stonemason.

I'd suggest definitely investing in Zbrush if you can.  That app is wildly popular with professionals in every category of pipeline workflows.  I think Teyon makes all his characters in there, and doesn't even utilize a standard poly modelling software.

I agree Zbrush is probably the most popular 3d software around today.  Used by almost everyone.  If you wanna get a job in 3d, seems you must at least know your way around Zbrush.  I understand it's a super powerful application, but I personally hate it.  Such an unintuitive and hard to use interface, it makes Blender seem like a child's learning game.  I'm in the total minority on this, I'm sure.

If I decide I must sculpt something, then I'll pick up Sculptris once in a while, and I have tried 3dcoat, and found it much easier than Zbrush. 

thanks guys, it is good to know, as I am ''fresh'' too ;)

I know people who use blender, silo, shade, hexagon, lightwave, maya, 3dsmax, and one more that I forget. maybe C4D ?

There's no way to know what most people are using on this site.  Most of the modellers who come here are creating stuff for Poser, so most of them model with software that converts to Poser or exports to Poser easily.  I think there's some modelling software out there, like Hexagon and Carrara, that have a direct link to Poser or Daz software in it, so you could make a model, and then export out directly to that software.I would think most Poser modellers are using one of those apps.  You sometimes see Carrara and Hexagon advertised with Poser or Daz models, and the Daz company owns both of those modelling software.  As the guys above have mentioned, there's people here using everything from Silo to Maya, and C4D to Lightwave, but I don't know how many of them are vendors here.  Almost all the vendors here are strictly modelling Poser stuff, so it really doesn't matter what they use, as long as the models work well in Poser, which isn't really hard to make happen, unless you have to rig the stuff in there (YUK).

The most popular 3D software in the world right now, in terms of licenses sold, might be Zbrush.  I've not been in any studio to date where there wasn't a GoZ pipeline active, regardless of what the primary apps being used were.  With paid software, you can measure popularity in terms of units sold, active licenses, and render nodes. I think Zbrush wins the software licensing battle, and Vray probably wins the renderer battle. But if you are trying to measure how many people use the free stuff, then that's harder to get right.  It's a toss up between Blender and Sketchup.  Blender might have as many or more active units out there as Maya or 3dsmax, but there's no real way to know.  I hate 3dsmax, but back some years ago, there were some figures floating around saying that Autodesk had about 350,000 active 3dsmax licenses, which was by far the most of any app in their software lineup, including Maya.  I don't know if that's still true today, I doubt it.  This was before Blender got really popular, and Zbrush was still only a sculpting app, and retopology had to be done in another software.

" I hate 3dsmax, but back some years ago, there were some figures floating around saying that Autodesk had about 350,000 active 3dsmax licenses, which was by far the most of any app in their software lineup, including Maya." 

The Blender website states that the current unique downloads of Blender are 366,672 per month.  Due to the fact that Blender is free not all these downloads convert to regular users but it does give an indication of its popularity.  I am a vendor here and I do use Blender for all my modelling and uv mapping needs.

I gotta vote for Blender too.  I used it at home for years and proposed it to the bosses where I work as a replacement for 3DSMax.

We trialed it for several months, found that it did everything we wanted and created a path to our desired output.  We let our subscription

lapse and I got the pleasure of telling Autodesk to eff off.  

" I hate 3dsmax, but back some years ago, there were some figures floating around saying that Autodesk had about 350,000 active 3dsmax licenses, which was by far the most of any app in their software lineup, including Maya." 

The Blender website states that the current unique downloads of Blender are 366,672 per month.  Due to the fact that Blender is free not all these downloads convert to regular users but it does give an indication of its popularity.  I am a vendor here and I do use Blender for all my modelling and uv mapping needs.

I'm hardly surprised by those download numbers.  It's free.  Before Google sold Sketchup to Trimble, back in 2012, Sketchup boasted 2 MILLION users per week.  Yes, per week.  If Trimble paid 5% of what Sketchup was worth at that time, it would have been $90 million US dollars, according to this article. http://gfxspeak.com/2012/04/26/google-sells-sketchup-to-trimble/

3dsmax was the biggest of the pro studio apps some time ago.  I think it lost ground to Cinema4d, Modo, and Maya over the past few years though.  The only decent upgrade they gave it was just this year.  I don't like it because of Autodesk.  I hate their policies.  I don't like Blender either.  I think 90% of those download figures are just curiosity downloads.  I have Blender on my machine too, but never open it.  I'm a C4D user for life.

2 million downloads a week is hella impressive.  It also states Sketchup had around 30 million users in 2011, which I think clearly makes it the most used 3d software. If you added up all of the Autodesk products together, I don't think it would come close to those numbers.  I never really liked Sketchup, because it's really not friendly with other 3d packages, and doesn't create good topology for exporting.  It's a good CAD software though.

I still keep going back to XSI, but you can't buy it any more.  Modo has my interest.  I think it is the new horizon.

I love the idea and concept of Blender and the spirit of the Blender community, however despite the work on it's user interface, I still hate Blender's gui... Confusing as hell and as equally frustrating...

I love the idea and concept of Blender and the spirit of the Blender community, however despite the work on it's user interface, I still hate Blender's gui... Confusing as hell and as equally frustrating...

Believe me, I used to think the exact same way about Blender not too long ago.  I've been a 3dsmax user for almost 15 years now, and needed to find a potential replacement, because I feared I couldn't afford the expensive upgrades anymore.  So I tried Blender, and hated it because of the frustrating UI, and found it very difficult to understand how to do even simple models, and couldn't find the tools I needed, and so on.  Anyway, long story short, a user here in the forums turned me on to a few simple addons, which have made life so much easier. Have you tried using the Pie Menus, combined with the Dynamic Spacebar Menu and Icons addons?  Those 3 included addons made my experience so much more enjoyable, and really made learning the software EASIER.  No it will never be as easy to learn as Hexagon or some other Icon-driven UI software, but having all the power behind Blender, and the ability to create anything just the same as in any high end software apps in a very similar time, made it well worth the extra effort.  I was very surprised that I could literally model anything in Blender that I could in 3dsmax, and in some cases, even faster.  Sure, there's things about Max I still miss to this day, but overall, I've been very impressed and amazed by the depth of features in Blender.  It's not easy, but so far has been very worth it.

The add-ons continue to amaze me. From motion tracking to composting, green screening and video editing, is there nothing this program won't do?  We had a technical video clip from a support company in some weird proprietary format which nothing (Premiere Pro, VLC,  Avidmux, VirtualDub) would touch.  Blender's video editor opened it and quickly spit out a nice play-it-anywhere H264 clip.

Lotsa Blender love goin on here.  To get back to the original question, it's clear that you won't ever know what software vendors are using unless you take a official poll somehow, or interview them privately.  Most Renderosity vendors don't participate in forums, especially in threads dealing with techniques or software debates, because they don't wanna lose sales.  The last thing a vendor wants is other modellers to know how to make things, because then they lose their ability to sell things.  They also won't usually debate or post opinions about software, because that usually gets people mad if your opinion isn't the same as theirs on their fav software, so then you might not buy their products.

Imagine a guy who sells bras for Poser girls coming in here and saying he uses application X, because it's better than Blender for this or that, etc.  There'd be a dozen fanboys who wouldn't buy his products.

 The last thing a vendor wants is other modellers to know how to make things, because then they lose their ability to sell things. 

I believe that this is the main reason that there are no complete tutorials on content creation.  All the tutorials I've bought leave out some vital section with promises of "It's coming soon!"  They seem to feel that figuring this stuff out on one's own is a rite of passage.

 The last thing a vendor wants is other modellers to know how to make things, because then they lose their ability to sell things. 

I believe that this is the main reason that there are no complete tutorials on content creation.  All the tutorials I've bought leave out some vital section with promises of "It's coming soon!"  They seem to feel that figuring this stuff out on one's own is a rite of passage.

There seems to be a large chasm between being a Poser modeller, and being a professional modeller in other genres of 3d.  Unlike other modelling communities, the Poser world is a community where modelling is still a big, scary, dark black magic, and only a handful of people truly know how to do it, and sell their creations.  Poser modellers are very protective of their craft, because they make money directly from their output.  In other words, you only make money when you model for Poser by selling your products directly to an end consumer, and there's little money to be made by selling the knowledge or skills.  90% of Poser users don't want to learn how to model.  This isn't the case in most other professional 3d genres, where modelling is considered part of the entire procedure, and you can make money in other ways if you know how to model.  So knowledge of the craft is more openly shared, and exchanged freely.  In the architectural communities, or game creation, or even 3d printing now, knowing how to model is only a part of the overall picture.  It doesn't matter if someone else can model the same thing.  It's the creativity, speed, and other factors that matters, and makes you the money, and lands you the job.  In other communities, everyone knows how to model at least a little bit.  Even people who specialize in texturing or sculpting, or whatever... know a little bit of modelling, or care to know, and the commodity of the knowledge isn't as valuable.  In the Poser community, no one cares to really know how to model, except a handful of people.  Everyone else are just consumers.  So the commodity of knowledge there is much more valuable.

  So the commodity of knowledge there is much more valuable.

I believe that this is one of the main reasons that there is no longer (at least to me) any real sense of community in the Poserverse or Dazville.  When it was new there was a feeling of camaraderie as we where all in it together figuring stuff out.  Folks like Dr. Geep explored the program and made his knowledge available for free.  This exists only on the fringes now, where like minded folks play with Poser/Daz and freely share our knowledge.  There have been rumblings and hints in dark alleys of Blenderville about a plug-in that will allow Poser and Daz items to be imported directly into Blender and used in a similar manner.  It'll be like working in Poser/Daz but using Blender's rigging and render tools.  One will also be able to fiddle with the mesh directly.  Last I heard they (no idea who 'they' are) where working on the rigging conversion and creating a library for content.  One of the problems is that the CR2 file is quite old and is somewhat undocumented.  Once this goes gold ("Comon guys!") I'm hoping it will bring back that sense of community that I so loved and still miss.  That's one of the strengths of Blender...a massive user base that is gregarious and loves to share knowledge.

Oh, I think it would be very cool to have Poser directly linked with Blender, but I'm not as optimistic about how that would be received in the Blender community in general.  Especially by the serious Blender enthusiasts, when "Poserville" begins to invade the Blender communities, and begin the NVIATWAS renders.  I think the core foundation of Blender users will begin to resent the plugin if that were to happen, as there will be tons of people suddenly using Blender only as a render vehicle (Cycles), for hobbyist Poser use.  The core Blender users, who had long been very eager to have Blender taken seriously as a high end tool for VFX and game production, may become very unsettled about the flood of new users, who likely aren't interested in the progression of the software for studio use.

Be prepared for a lot of Anti-Poser backlash, if that actually happens.  Then again, there's tons of Poser users who just don't like Blender, and probably wouldn't even use the plugin, because of how complicated Blender seems.  There's a high percentage of Poser users who don't want to learn another software application just to render scenes, and may simply ignore the plugin.  It may end up not being a huge influx of new Blender users after all.  I guess we'd have to wait and see.

Hmmmm,

 I feel that Blender already is taken seriously.  When I proposed that we switch from 3DSMax to Blender, my bosses didn't even bat an eye.  It's worked out well and saved us some bucks.

I don't feel that there would be any real backlash or animosity since the Poser/Daz userbase is likely much smaller than the number of Blenderists.  There are so many different type of users now that Blender is seemingly the do-everything-app and they don't always interact a lot.  Where they would interact and where it would be a huge boon is in the gaming side although I can't say much about it since I'm not a gamer (anymore...sigh).  

My understanding of the plug-in is that it would be complete.  Ie, one would be able to do anything in Blender that one does in Daz/Poser.  It would certainly make a couple of companies sit up and take notice (panic?) if folks no longer needed their program to make dirty little pictures and stuff.   :-)

Oh, I totally agree that Blender IS being taken very seriously, for sure.  But unlike your personal situation, where your bosses were more than happy to save on licensing seats, a complete pipeline move to  Blender in most pro studios wouldn't be nearly that smooth or easy.  In studios where there's 30 to 100 seats in the pipeline, there's tons at stake when you're thinking about switching to another software, and it's not a matter of making a quick decision.  Consider mid to large size studios needing to re-trainin 30 to 100 people on a different software platform, and basically telling them that their years of schooling and certifications in whatever professional software will no longer be useful.  This isn't something to take lightly. Many studios allow their modellers to use whatever software they personally like, so long as it has a way to transfer into the downstream pipeline easily, like FBX.  Depending on the genre, I'd say Blender is probably making up only about 1-3% of professional studio piplelines.  I'll see if there's any officially documented numbers on this, but I can't imagine it's any more than that.  This is something I'm sure Foundation would like to see change, but in all honesty, I don't see it happening soon.

I will be very curious to see what happens with this plugin, if it does exist.

I'm pretty lucky with work.  It's a small section that does a wide variety of stuff in support of technical training, and testing & evaluation.  We can use what we want as long as it gets the job done.  At the same time I have to be quick to respond to last minute requirements that can change in mid-stream.  Some of the jobs have been truly bizarre from a technical standpoint...but usually fun too. 

And boy, me too....would love to have real numbers regarding usage.

It would literally be impossible to accurately determine how many studios are using Blender.  There aren't many who are admitting to it, that's for sure. The reason for that is laid out quite intelligently in this article by Sean Kennedy, about Blender's use in Hollywood:

http://blenderdiplom.com/en/interviews/548-interview-sean-kennedy-on-blender-in-hollywood.html

As Sean puts it, you have studios which invest big money into developing their own proprietary software, or extensions to existing software, and those studios like to talk about that when asked how they accomplished certain shots.  Deservedly so.  So much of the ground breaking technology brought to VFX is the result of countless, uncredited nights of hard work by largely unrecognized but extraordinarily talented individuals.  While Blender is being used in some studios, it's usually a minor or very specialized role somewhere in the pipeline, where a particular need is required, but expense doesn't justify paying the TD or programmers to create a customized extension to the current toolsets.  This is where the open source nature of Blender comes in very handy in saving resources or expenses.

One major misconception also is that all professional level studios use all proprietary software.  This is completely false.  Many many high level VFX and Game studios are using commercial grade software, usually in a highly customized and extended modular form.  Some studios are also being indirectly assisted by major software companies, and given unprecidented access to  in-house technical support, and privatized or micro-focused development, in exchange for crediting their products in behind the scenes interviews, and special features.

As for hard numbers, the most we could glean is that Autodesk is a major powerhouse in the world of VFX and 3D.  Let's look at numbers provided by Forbes about the company:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/shelisrael/2013/01/23/1785/

Over 100 million users have downloaded their software, or accessed the company's online properties.  As of 2013, this number was growing at the rate of 15 million users per month.  Even if just 1 percent of that number translates to active registered users, per package, per month, that's a very respectable and hugely influential number.  The price point of their software also means an incredible flow of monetary resources, which translates to access to some of the best programmers and developers money can buy.  Regardless of your personal opinion of them, it's clearly evident that they have the financial backing to do some incredible things.  It's fair to speculate that no software would be generating figures like this if they weren't proven effective, and worth the investment.

It's fairly evident that for independent artists, Blender is probably the best investment one could make, but large companies and studios have reasons to use other resources.

Good points, Daniel, but you're incorrect about one thing. I'm sure it wasn't intentional, but it's misinforming how you included the figures in that Forbes article about Autodesk. I read that when it was first published, and what they are referring to there have nothing, or very little, to do with Autodesk's studio grade software.  They are talking specifically about their 3d print related apps, with products like 123D Catch, Design, and Make.  The downloads indicated in that article were for their 20 products for iOS, which do NOT include 3dsmax, Maya, or XSI.  So they aren't talking about potential studio seats there at all.

I agree on most of your other points, and I'll have to read that article about Blender through.

I'm not a vendor as well. I'm actually starting to learn 3D modelling. I use Blender too, my friends are also using it.

I use Maya because thats what we use in school. I know guys who love Max as well as those who love other softwares. Consider what you need to do and what softwares have those features. Dont pay for more than what you`ll need down the road. Granted different tools will do different things better but I think that the most important factor is the artist and how much time you are willing to put into the program. There are some excellent resources online for learning just about everything. Pick what fits your needs and budget, have fun, suspend your frustration while youre learning, and show off your work so we can see it :)

 Oh, and if youre a student or teacher look into the educational licenses.