I have spent my career in Maya.
Learning Blender has been very tempting seeing the quality it is capable of achieving. That coupled with it being free, containing tools that cover a wide range of 3d tasks it is hard not to at least look into it.
The main reason I have yet to take the leap is that in previous version of Blender things were too different. There was multiple version where I downloaded, jumped in and was immediately frustrated and confused. Proceeded to uninstall and forget about it until the next release showing again it's features.
Blender 2.8 has changed drastically and seemed like it was time for another round of pain!?
My main goal, fluids that can be cached out as .vdb files and brought into Maya and rendered with Redshift3d.
Coming from Maya, Blender is different in so many ways. After following some tutorials and getting an idea of how it is supposed to work things started to get better.
Blender has many of the same tools as Maya, called different things and in different places but accomplish the same thing. It also has some tools that make me cry a little inside because Maya doesn't have them.
Trying out sculpting with Dyntopo (amazing tool!) and getting a feel for the modifier stack, Cycles and some Smoke.
Figuring out caching and some rending.
Unnecessarily high res fluid solve (resolution divisions set to 512). I discovered the Smoke has a "High Resolution" option that can up-res a Smoke solve, maintaining the overall shape but adding extra details. Similar to SoUP's fluid up-res node.
Messing with simulations to get some puffy clouds. Also having fun with simulating.
Taking some key moments from the caches, I brought those into Maya and made Redshift3d proxies. Those were then scattered over a plane and rendered.
