Deep comparison — strengths, typical pipelines, and who should pick which
1) Blender — the full-pipeline, open-source powerhouse
Strengths: No cost, increasingly professional feature set (Cycles/Eevee rendering, geometry nodes, sculpting, animation, video seq), massive add-on ecosystem and community assets. Best for indie devs, freelancers, hobbyists, and many studios that adopt it for cost reasons. (YouTube)
Weaknesses: In some legacy studio pipelines, proprietary tools (Maya, ZBrush) remain entrenched; plugin quality varies and you may need to stitch workflows manually.
Typical workflow: Modeling → sculpting (or retopo) → UV → PBR texturing → bake → render (Cycles/EEVEE) → export to Unity/Unreal or video compositing.
Blender — Beginner/project demo (Blender Guru donut / official content)
(Source: Blender / Blender Guru demo.) (YouTube)