Blender vs Unity

Blender is licensed under the GPL. Some Blender modules such as the Cycles rendering engine are licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.

Support lots of modern 3D formats including DAE and FBX - ideal for game developers.

Blender runs the Cycles path tracing engine under the hood. Cycles is a very powerful rendering engine capable of full path tracing (light fall off, caustics, volumetrics). It is mostly compatible with OpenCL and CUDA rendering, and is implementing mycropolygon displacement features. The upcoming release has a viewport engine called EEVEE whereby you can see and interact with your work in render mode in real time!

Blender embeds Python 3, which can be used to write add-ons, tools, extend the interface, rig characters and automate tasks.

Blender provides a full rigging system, and automates animation by interpolating between keyframe positions.

Releases are made every ~3 months.

Although Blender's 3d painting and sculpting tools (mostly painting) are not at par with specialized software like Substance Painter, ZBrush, or Mari, it is more than capable of getting most jobs done if the user takes the time to learn and understand it.

Blender's node-based compositor has comprehensive video sequencing and post-processing features.

Good keyboard shortcuts for everything. Keep your left hand on the keyboard and your right hand on the mouse.

It offers a round solution (it covers many areas and professional fields) for a freelancer, for free, constantly updated, very polished, and allowing high quality results that clients do require. After some learning, it becomes very useful for professional work.

There's a huge community to help you get started immediately.

The trick with Blender is to get used to its usage philosophy, as it keeps consistent through all the application. Once you get it, every feature or addition is learnt naturally, almost effortlessly.

You don't have to switch between software when you want to do different things. Because modeling, sculpting, composting, video editing etc can all be done in blender.

Unity is bolstered by a huge, helpful community via its official forums, wiki, Unity Answers, and Unity Asset Store; plus the most-subscribed subreddit of any game engine.

Unity offers over 20 platforms for publishing including mobile, console, web, VR, and more.

Not tailored for specific types of games (like Unreal...), so it won't get in your way if you want to make something unique.

Overall, a coherent engine with a rational approach. People who complain a lot about being forced to hack around it usually do not read the docs, like the one that describes orders of execution, or specific functions hooks and such. Some like to say it lacks raw power where people who are used to standard optimizations have no problem. For example It is not uncommon to encounter users who complain about low FPS but forgot to activate occlusion, flag static elements, activate animations culling, and so on. As for complaints about C#, people who are transitioning from C++ were already bad at C++ before being bad at C#. They often come from the PC world where the sheer power of today's machines is very forgiving compared to the platforms we had to develop for in the 80s~90s. One of their errors is for example to never read this doc.

Unity runs very smoothly even on systems that are considered "weak" by today's standards.

For those developers who can't afford an artist, or aren't skilled enough to create their own art, Unity features an Asset Store full of a wide variety of free and paid assets that can be easily added to a game. The Asset Store has more than just music and art. It also has code and modules that can be added to games including unique lighting or GUI systems. It also has powerful asset management and attribute inspection.

You can use any C# IDE for it, but the ones tested which have Unity integration are:

• Microsoft Visual Studio
• MonoDevelop
• Visual Studio Code (much faster than VS, but a bit harder to set up for Unity development)
• JetBrains Rider (very fast, has lots of functionality and best Unity integration, but it is not free)

Unity provides a great state machine animation system called Mechanim allowing to separate animation from the model and assign the same animoations to different models.

The built in standard shader in Unity 5 is incredibly optimized and supports PBS/PBR.

Unity's modular system and usability allows for quickly developing a prototype of an idea. It has features like drag & drop editing, shaders, animation and other systems already in place to allow diving right into developing a game.

The way the editor is structured, by setting scripts on objects, and the use of a high-level language, C#, makes it easy to learn.

Unity is a proven game engine. It is used by a wide range of developers - from small indies to triple-A companies such as Microsoft, Paradox, Square Enix and Sega.

Unity3D provides an exhaustive documentation where everything is given a full description supplied by a number of examples as well as video and text tutorials and live training sessions to understand the ins and outs of the engine. In addition there's an ever-growing community that can offer advice to help resolve any situations that may arise.

Along with the official Unity resources, there are many high quality (and often free) third party tutorials available.

The editor GUI is very powerful and intuitive. It allows pausing gameplay and manipulating the scene at any time as well as progress gameplay frame by frame. It also has powerful asset management and attribute inspection.

This allows it to be more powerful than other, simpler drag-and-drop engines such as Game Maker Studio, although it can take a bit more experience to learn the workflow.

As long as the company makes $100k or less, Unity's free version can be used to release games without purchasing the pro version.

With Unity knowledge of just one engine is needed to be able to create both 2D and 3D games.

Great Community support through Forums and Unity Answers.

There's an Asset Store, providing free and paid assets (including components). It also has powerful asset management and attribute inspection.