You can think of a 3D engine as having four major factors: 3D modeling, Animation, Rendering and Useability.

In 3D modeling, Max is first, Blender second and Maya third.

Blender has all the basic tools and advance tools. Some of it's special tools are unique to Blender, because they are unstable and can cause crashes(although it's rare). The tools Max has that Blender doesn't is special tools that are maybe used by a 3D modeler once a year.

The types of modeling Max and Blender specialize in is also different. Blender is Sub-D modeling focused with great support for other types of modeling. Spline and Boolean modeling is what Max is great for.

Blender's Boolean modeling tools are very hard to use, it's spline modeling doesn't work with the Boolean. This could be a temporary problem as Blender developers are working on a better layers system, that will allow for better Boolean tools.

Blender's Auto UV is as bad as any Auto UV, Blender has ALL UV functions, there is payed software that I know off that doesn't. Blender's Auto LOD tools are also as bad as most of the standard stuff, in fact Simplygon is the best.

3D sculpting in Blender is the same as in most 3D software, it just can't compete to 3D sculpting software like Zbrush. Still you can make great levels with the sculpting tool and it has a unique feel to it. It's 3D painting tools are average.

In Animation Max is first, Maya second and Blender third.

Blender supports all the basics and advance tools, it doesn't have any special tools that I know about.

Rigging can be a pain in Blender, however the worst is the way blender allows animations to effect and change other animations. For example if you had a walking man on frame 1-24 and a jumping animation on frame 100-132 then the jump could have small effects on the walking animation. To prevent this brake animations into NLA actions, the actions are also easier to export and work with.

It works for game animations, although there is a lot of room for improvement.

Max is best at Rendering, Maya is second, Cinema 4d third and Blender fourth or maybe fifth.

Blender uses Cycles as it's rendering engine, it can produces very realistic results however it is among the slowest renders I have ever worked with. You also need a understanding of real world lighting and materials to get a good result. You will only use this for movies or posters so it doesn't matter. I just want to point out, that render artists do make top quality renders with it; some even better than Max or Maya renders.

The default render in Blender is a outdated OpenGL renderer, check that it is on when using Blender. It's more than whats needed to model and bake textures. At the moment it doesn't have BPR, I hope it has BPR with the next release. There are addons to allow BPR materials in Blender if you need them.

Useability, Maya is first, Max then a bunch of other software, with Blender dead last.

Blender works completely different from any 3D software you have ever used. When I am using Blender my screen looks like this:

The main thing about Blender's interface is that it isn't on screen, it's on your keyboard; like a game. The buttons, sliders, number inputs and menus are just your training wheels or setup tools.

When using normal software it's advised you ignore shortcuts, because they are just one more thing to learn. In Blender the shortcuts is key to using Blender, don't think of Blender as having shortcuts think of it as Blender's input; when playing a game you don't think of WASD as shortcuts for walking.

Blender has menus, and in the menu will be the shortcut key for you to learn. Sometimes you need to hover the mouse to read the shortcut. Some shortcuts will open menus at the mouse pointer, like W_key (Specials), Ctrl_V(Vertices) Ctrl_E(Edge), Ctrl_F(Face); these are all near the WASD keys and are the most used.

With the correct addon enabled Space will act as a search tool, allowing you to find complex task fast.

To learn how Blender works start with the Blender Wiki, read it like a manual. If you are unwilling to do this just search how to do X on the internet. Blender can do everything other software can, it just doesn't have a convenient menu button for it.

Some major things people who don't read the wiki miss:

[spoiler]

To align the view with a plane/ vertex/ edge hold Shift when pressing the camera num key; example Shift-Num_1 to align view with the plane from the front.

When scaling/moving/rotating pressing X/ Y/ Z will move along that axis, Shift-X/ Y/ Z will move on the other axis: example pressing S to scale then Shift-Z will then scale on the X and Y axis.

Pressing G_Key (grab) twice in edit mode enables edge slide. R_Key twice enables free rotation.

There are also some specials about Blender that makes it handy, like it supports 3D printing and uses Python for addons and mods.

[/spoiler]

Because professinals mostly use shortcuts after years of modeling, Blender's interface can be considered a great tool for them. Modeling in Blender is faster than in any other 3D modeling software.

Hi, i was planning on using Blender in the future, is it bad compared to 3dmax ?, i,m used to 3dMax.

If Max and Maya where free, then I would say that there is no point in using Blender.

Because Blender provides you with all the 3D modeling tools you need and want, can do what animations you need for games, renders amazing images even if slowly, all of this for FREE with no strings attached. I can without a doubt say that Max and Maya aren't worth the price they are charging. So no it isn't bad when compared to Max.

Even if money wasn't a problem there are so many other software that you still need after the 3D modeling tool, like a 2D software, 3D sculpting sofware and material software; getting the most important one for free is a nice treat.

Blender is on par with other 3D software, even if harder to learn, it isn't like Photoshop vs Gimp.

Which program is better is a matter of opinion. I prefer Blender because it doesn't cost as much as a used car and I do tutorials where I want people to be able to follow along without having to go buy thousands of dollars worth of software.

I used Max for awhile. I started with Max before I knew how to do much, mostly following tutorials. I wouldn't mind using it again as long as I don't have to buy it.

But I really love Blender. There might be other software out there that does things better. There's a lot of software I've never tried. I had a lot of trouble with animation in Blender, but that may be simply because I haven't learned to use it well yet. However, when I worked in Poser years ago it seemed like animation was an order of magnitude easier.

So far, animation is really the only issue I've ever had with Blender. I'm not sure how much better Max is at it as it's been many years since I've done any animation in Max and I think that was just a tutorial or two. I think Poser was easier for humanoid animation than either of them, if I recall correctly. Even my Poser experience was several years ago.

I'm enrolled in a 3D art program where I'm learning 3D modeling and we're using Blender for the class. My DeviantArt site shows some of the finals I turned in for the class including a bucket, Mons Meg, and a Cold Blast Lamp. I did the modeling in Blender, then I exported them to Substance for painting/texturing, then I imported them back into Blender to render them in Cycles. The backgrounds are HDRI environment maps. Basically, they are 360 degree spherical photographs. Blender Cycles uses the photo for lighting, which is a big part of what makes everything looks so realistic.
http://virtuallyprogramming.deviantart.com/

If you are coding DirectX, you may want to check out my simple DX 11 engine on my website. The entire Visual Studio project is there for download including all art assets and such. For example, the Python code for the Blender exporter is in the download. I made a Blender model exporter written in Python (forgive my Python code as I literally taught myself Python just for this project - the exporter code works, but has room for improvement) and the source code is there to load the model file and create a model object from it. It should work well for rigid animation, although it doesn't support skinned animation. But it's modifiable so you could make it do whatever you like. There is a video of my OpenGL engine on my website. You can watch that and get an idea of what the DX engine does without having to actually download the DX project. The OGL engine is basically the same except I never got around to adding the code for models and all the models in the OGL code are hard coded. My modeling skills weren't all that great back when I programmed this stuff; they've gotten a lot better in the past year as I've been in this art program.

I think a lot of people use ASSIMP to load models and I think it supports a lot of different formats. I assume it supports skinned animation as well.

I started with XNA and then went straight to DX11. So, I skipped DX9, but I guess it natively supports .X files? They took the whole model class out and such in DX11, so it no longer natively supports much of anything although I think it will natively support .DDS images.