Why I switched to Blender
I was a hardcore Modo user for more than fifteen years. I loved Modo, and I was fanatical about it.
However, the truth is that being a Modo user had some drawbacks, even if I didn't always acknowledge them at the time.
As nostalgic as we were for the Luxology days, not many of us Modo users ever had much love for Foundry after they took over. That nostalgia kept us loyal and kept us using Modo, but the old vibe was gone, never to return.
And our beloved Modo was slowly falling behind the competition. Slower development, fewer new features, and fewer new technologies integrated. And all the while, too much technical debt was accumulating.
So when the axe finally fell, we weren't all that surprised.
I had been dabbling with Blender for four or five years at this point. But, of course, I resisted fully diving in because it wasn't as familiar to me as Modo. I resented the differences, and some of the UI and workflow decisions were irritating.
However there were things that Blender could do which Modo could not. Fluid dynamics being one, which I needed to use on occasion. The realtime viewport was also exceptionally good, an absolute pleasure to work in, and much faster than Modo's.
So once Modo was killed off, I decided to dive full-time into Blender, more out of necessity than love, because I wanted to embrace the future rather than cling to the past.
But then Blender took me by surprise.
After two or three months of using Blender as my primary app, I found that I was having as much fun there as I ever had in Modo. The UI feels modern, and the working environment is polished.
I've always loved Modo's flexible workspace: you can open or collapse panels to reconfigure your interface on the fly. You can do this in Blender too, and it's actually more flexible and less fiddly than Modo.
Geometry nodes were another fun discovery. A turbo-charged alternative to Modo's Meshops, that are seeing continuous and rapid development and improving with each release.
And once I had become accustomed to most of the little differences, they stopped bothering me so much. Rather than griping, I was now creating and having fun with 3D once again.
While I am still sad about the loss of Modo, Blender has given me something to be excited about again, and a reason to look forward to the future.
Modo, under Foundry, always felt like a second-class citizen. The underperforming afterthought that could never compete with Nuke.
Blender, on the other hand, has a substantial dev team and a vast amount of financial support, both from users and from corporate sponsors.
And so, being a Blender user is exciting. The future looks bright. I know that the app will keep getting better every year. Shiny new features are added with every release. The UI will keep improving, the workflow will be refined.
In short, with Blender, there is a future to look forward to. And that's why I switched to Blender.