I am a creative professional who loves the 3D animation that I see from anywhere from sports broadcasting, to title sequences on my favorite TV shows. 

There are many great 3D software that can be used to create 3D projects. In this article, I will go over three of my personal favorites. 

Maya

The Hollywood Standard in animation. Maya is most commonly used in making animated films and TV shows.

Pricing

$1,875 paid annually
$235 paid monthly

Pros

If you want a career in 3D animation, learning Maya is a safe bet. It is the industry standard in animation so there is a high likelihood that your dream company is using it. 

Cons

The price would be the only downside. I know that Maya is an amazing program, and the only reason why I haven’t gotten around to using it myself is the pricing. 

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Cinema 4D

The favorite among the commercial industry. Used to create motion graphics, product visualizations, and animated typography. 

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This is my go-to 3D software. I used it when I created the Friendsgiving ad. 

Pricing

$1,399 paid annually
$149 paid monthly

Pros

The Maxon Bundle is included in the pricing. You get access to resources like Cineversity, Redshift, and Z-Brush. 

Cons

Some of the features are not as good as the free option Blender. Pricing is cheaper than Maya but still expensive.

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Blender

The favorite among independent creators. Blender is an open-source software making it free for everyone to use. This software can be used in doing similar animated projects as Maya and some motion graphics like Cinema 4D.

Pricing

Free

Pros

The price is the biggest upside to the blender. It is free because it is open-source. Its being open-source leaves room for more periodical updates and improvements compared to other software.

Cons

There is a lot packed inside of this software so there is a bit of a learning curve.

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Recommendations

Of the three programs, Maya is the only one that I haven’t used. Mainly because of the price, but I love animated movies and Maya is used in creating a lot of them. 

I use Cinema 4D quite a bit for work, and luckily they pay for the fee. But there was a time when I didn’t have a company paying for the program so I switched over to Blender for a while. 

Blender is a great software and I got the hang of it the few weeks I was using it. Barely scratched the surface of the program and I do not use it now, but I do think that Blender is a very powerful software and I will revisit it later in the future.

So for the people who are interested in getting into the 3D world, I would highly recommend using Blender. I’ll recommend Blender, not just because it’s free, well that does play a big part in it, but mainly because it is a powerful program. 

If you are looking to get into 3D animation I would also recommend checking out my article on ‘Technical Terms in 3D Animations’. This list is a little Cinema 4D term heavy but the concepts extend to everything in the 3D space.