I think blender is awesome for free, but like others say. it's severely cripled by useless UI that makes it painful to use.
Also for games a tool is only as good as ite exporters.
As far a 3dsmax needing plugins to get things done. that used to be true right up untill around V6. I don't bother with any plugins these days, just a couple of scripts that provide shortcuts for texture baking etc.
Oh actually I do use shaderFX, which is a node based GPU shader editor similar to what comes with the Unreal3 engine and is awesome, especially with the new bridge to my Ogre exporter.
Having said that I believe someone has been trying to integrate the Ogre engine into blender in a similar way to how my current exporter has realtime WYSIWYG ogre rendering with sahders in a standard max viewport.
http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=169950#169950
Wonder what came of that?
Also for games a tool is only as good as ite exporters.
As far a 3dsmax needing plugins to get things done. that used to be true right up untill around V6. I don't bother with any plugins these days, just a couple of scripts that provide shortcuts for texture baking etc.
Oh actually I do use shaderFX, which is a node based GPU shader editor similar to what comes with the Unreal3 engine and is awesome, especially with the new bridge to my Ogre exporter.
Having said that I believe someone has been trying to integrate the Ogre engine into blender in a similar way to how my current exporter has realtime WYSIWYG ogre rendering with sahders in a standard max viewport.
http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=169950#169950
Wonder what came of that?