The Ultimate Showdown: Blender vs Cinema 4D

Should you learn Cinema 4D or Blender? But what about if you already know Cinema 4D? And isn't Blender super hard to learn? Those are the big questions both new and veteran artists are asking these days. That's why we've enlisted Marina Nakagawa, 3D artist and School of Motion alumni who switched from Cinema 4D to Blender 3D and found that it significantly improved her character design workflow. In this video, she shares her personal experience and insights on the key differences between these two powerful 3D modeling and animation tools. From sculpting and rigging to texturing and animation, our guest explores how Blender's intuitive interface and powerful tools worked better for her creative process, while acknowledging that both tools have their own strengths and weaknesses depending on the artist's needs.

‍🎨 Awesome Blender Artist list and tutorials mentioned:

🔌 Plugins Mentioned:

Ready to Learn Cinema 4D? Register for our C4D classes.

[richardxs]

I love how easy to use Cinema 4D is but...
if you want to sculpt - you need Z-Brush
if you need good particles or fluids - you need X-Particles
If you need to render faster - you need Octane or Redshift
So, you have to pay a lot of money compared to Blender that is FREE.
PS: I am a C4D user, If I were younger and looking to begin on 3D I definitely would go with Blender

[moht]

For my C4D people looking to try out Blender, look up a tutorial on how to remap Blenders viewport navigation shortcuts to mimic C4D, this alone will make moving around in Blender feel comfortable and you can focus on learning instead of being frustrated trying to navigate your scenes. There are tutorials on Youtube on how to remap to match C4d

[DerekElliott]

Really great video! I've been so deep in blender I didn't really know much about c4d but this seemed like a fantastic overview of each!

[ObscureHedgehog]

3:21 Ctrl + Alt + Q to get the 4 split views in Blender

[FlavioDiniz]

11:23 thank you a lot ! I'm very happy my plugin is being useful to you !
I think the same, even after the UV tools in C4D got updated, I'm more used to use my own plugin to unwrap UVs 😁

[snm_dyxtra]

Great video!! Another tip for new Blender users, you can edit multiple objects at once by selecting them in object mode and then going into edit mode ( you can also access Edit mode using Tab)

[maotao]

Amazing comparison between these two awesome 3D software. I've been using Cinema 4D and Blender both for quite a while and from my experience I found there are a few tiny but quite important things Cinema 4D is still better than Blender.

1, User friendly. So many tiny things like changing parameters for multiple objects at the same time. Blender can do that by pressing alt but it's not working for timeline. If you want to change settings like key modifier for multiple objects in timeline, you have to do it one by one. Also in Cinema 4D you can pretty much drag any settings to the viewport and convert it to a slider UI instantly. Something like this Cinema 4D easily beats Blender....

2, teamrender. Cinema 4D has a really handy team render workflow to let you use the client machines to render your scene without copying the assets to each one. Blender so far, I haven't found any thing similar to this. The teamrender in blender is the same as After Effects and you have to copy your projects to each machine to do it. Maybe it's because I don't know the right way. Happy to know if someone knows a better way to do team render in blender.


3, Easier and faster workflow to achieve multiple objects' motion. Don't get me wrong, Geometry nodes in Blender is really good and I've been learning it. What I'm saying is efficiency. Sometimes you just need to get the job done and make a result with fewer clicks, Cinema 4D is the king for doing this kind of task.

Nevertheless, Blender is still quite an amazing app, it has some really good workflow you mentioned in the video and the more important thing is Blender is growing really fast. Also I really love the community cos you can find any resources really quickly. It's like a toybox with tons of toys you can play with. I love Blender but I can't leave Cinema 4D from my work. Both of them are amazing tools

[azizakhmedov]

In my opinion, since you've learned any of the 3d software, it's not difficult to learn another one.

[inknpaintCW]

I used C4D since version 6...I'm old. I stopped around v20 or so. I have been able to adapt my workloads to fit Blender and occasionally Maya. At first Blender was rough for me but now I find it quite approachable.
Although I still have FOMO around C4D fun, I am enjoying the shift so far.
Keep creating great things!!!

[Pesto-]

Really great comparison. I've been through some courses at SOM including C4D Basecamp (great course btw). I started with Blender many years ago, switched to C4D for the course, and a little after, and find myself using Blender again. One thing I miss are the mograph tools of C4D but I recently purchased the addon Animax 2 and it gives me a lot of the same functionality. So learning Geo Nodes and Animax 2 enables me to do what I need. The sculpting and modeling of Blender are too good to pass up.

[effectatron]

As some one who started in blender years ago, then moved to 3dsmax then to C4D, I now teach C4D and redshift. But I have to know. Will I like blender just as much for what I want to create? So I am going to learn it this year.

[Pesto-]

One thing I’ve noticed is there aren’t nearly as many videos on YT for C4D, like there are for Blender. There are channels with very comprehensive Blender tutorials and I don’t see similar for C4D. For C4D they all seem to be paid course etc Not that there is anything wrong with that but I think it could make someone not consider learning C4D. Just my 2 cents

[JordanCHLand]

I love seeing marina on the school of motion channel, love her work. Thank for the tips Marina! I think it's time I get on the blender grind ig. The potential for this free software looks incredible

[lenavasconi]

congratulations for the content, it helped me a lot, I'm a motion designer in aftereffects and I'm migrating to 3D, at first I started with 4D cinema, but as I'm enjoying modeling and animating characters, I believe blrnder will suit me better, not to mention the options of diverse styles and improved rendering in Blender. Thank you for this content, it will certainly help many designers and animators as it helped me, congratulations again.

[TajemoutiAbir]

best c4d vs blender vdieo i ever seen. it has a lot of practical comparison witch help to understand the topic a lot.
Thank you

[Dantti]

I would go with Blender. You can do so much with it. From 3D work to even 2D animations thanks to Grease Pencil. Lots and lots of free tutorials here. Community is awesome 🥰

[flyingcameraz]

One of the reasons why Im going to learn c4d is because I’m getting after effects and I heard they go well together I wanna do product commercials.

[poursaee]

Thank you very much for your useful information. The problem is that after learning C4D and spending a lot of time, thinking about new software is difficult (At least foe me)

[stephencurah]

Love your comparison between both packages, it's one of the best I've seen

[rafaelriva]

I use both on my workflow here, Blender for Freelance and C4D for studio projects.
Cinema 4D is very powerful with simulations, the falloff and fields give it a great starting point, and it's the feature that I miss the most when using Blender, as she said in the video, Cinema 4D has some powerful procedural deformers that are easy to use.
Blender has procedural deformers too, but some of them are very tricky to use (Like the bend deformer), But modeling in blender is very fast, and you can easily switch modes with a simple click,
cycles it's a complete powerhouse like Redshift and Octane, the only thing that I miss on Cycles is caustics.