3ds Max vs Blender - animation

[Wheelhouse]

Just wondering about the effectiveness of 3ds Max vs Blender for Oblivion (and in the future Skyrim) animations.

A little background:

I've been messing around with modding stuff, off and on, since the days of the Original Campaign of Neverwinter Nights from Bioware. I've never really been a mod releaser, but just sort of tinkered with things to put into my own games.

I had always used 3ds Max and Photoshop, but but around a year ago my hard drive crashed and I had no access to the disks with Max and PS, so downloaded Gimp and Blender.

I quickly found that Gimp was easily a replacement (for me) for Photoshop, but that Blender seemed...incredibly complicated compared to Max, and I had to go back to Max ASAP to do anything.

Well, to the question - pretty much every time I read about animations for Oblivion, they're always done in Blender. I can easily import, modify, and export .nifs in Max (I'm using the 32bit version of 2011 3ds Max), but my brief experience in trying that in Blender was...not successful. At all.

So if I was going to start tinkering with learning how to animate for Oblivion (and in the future, Skyrim), do I pretty much need to learn Blender, if only for ease of use and getting import/export tools?

I get the impression that I should just use Blender, as every thread that I've come across that talks about doing stuff to either .nifs or animations always contains the line "Open blender and....", and at that point I tend to stop reading.

(honestly, my brief attempts at working Blender - it seemed so completely unintuitive to me - but then again I've been using 3ds Max for like 8 years - though only as a hobby - I'm not any sort of model or game designer by trade)

[Symon]

All I can suggest is that you persevere. Blenders interface is totally different from that of 3DSMax. Most of your Max skills will be of great use to you, but you will need to wrestle with the interface for a while.