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Is Blender substantially different/better than, say, Cinema 4D? Or are people more excited about it because it's free/open source?

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A mix of both. It does do somethings much better (like the 2D drawing etc) and viewport quality, but lags in others (like pipelinability, renderer integrations, materials etc...). The free part is a big draw of course.

>materials

Not sure I agree here! I work primarily in Substance Designer and Painter these days because I want more portability and basically everything has a substance plugin, or at worst I can export them for a regular PBR workflow, and I've played around with mari, and there's yet to be a situation where I thought I couldn't do the same thing with blender's node system.

I guess I should have elaborated more, but I meant extensible materials. Other DCCs let you extend them with custom material types that map to renderers. Blender is kind of "use our tools or fork the app" instead.

It is mainly a side grade, if you are a 3D modeler by trade then I would tell you to learn it anyway because blender is being developed at a *far* faster pace than any other dcc packages maybe other than Houdini

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