My first try at modelling, have mercy with criticism

[Halleck]

Blender is the most feature rich tool of all the legal free options, but I see absolutely no reason to limit yourself to one app. Following the Linux philosophy, you can work very modular. Create the toolchain you like best and work from that.

Lots of people find that simple modelling and sketching your shapes, is very intuitive and fast in Wings. You can then import what you've done in Blender and continue from there...

I agree with DualJoe here... wings is pretty damn efficient with low-poly meshes. I always start in wings, and if I need powerful manipulation tools or high-quality renders I then bring it into blender.

Chuck, you claim that by getting wings, you will be discouraged because your results won't look professional. I argue the reverse: a complete newbie trying blender is more likely to get discouraged because he needs to read through fifteen tutorial pages just to see some results! Wings is a far better sandbox than blender- the interface is highly intuitive and you see results immediately. Wings is also a useful tool for teaching people the basic concepts of 3d modelling. A production quality modeller it is not.

I think that's the rut- when people try to use wings to model from start to finish. It just isn't powerful enough. As a sandbox, you can build sand castles, but you need better tools to construct a real fortress. Okay, bad analogy, but you get the idea.

[Ryder P. Moses]

Kangaroo22: A lot of people buy it. The noncommercial version is the single most popular 3D application there is, or at least was two years ago when last I paid attemtion. If you plan on spending any real time doing 3D, it's very very worth it. One of the few applications of any real value I've bought legitimately, simply because it made back the $600 in pure awesomeness in the first two months I owned it.


Well, that and my trial version time-limit crack failed during a hard drive transfer.



But yeah, if you're not willing to pay that much I still wouldn't much recommend Wings or Blender. Wings is, at the very least, functional and painless, which I appreciate in a program I'm obligated to use, but if my Mesher outputs ever started not completely destroying the game I'd ditch it in a second. Not so much from any particular limits I've seen- while it may be a "low-poly" modeller I've had no real trouble manipulating more complex meshes in it, but because it's just boring. Using it is no fun, and after all I'm not getting paid for any of this so it damn well better be fun. It's also pretty much useless for anything but assembling the mesh itself- crappy UV-unwrapper, no real texture support, skeletal renderer, no real nothin'.

Blender... Blender is pretty much a summary of everything that's wrong with open-source software in general. Buggy, clearly designed by committee, uses an interface that only the guy who coded it could ever think of as simple or convenient, requires a compiler and a lot of experience in OOP to actually make the thing even resemble useful- experience which, naturally, the support and dev guys assume every end-user has. Available on every platform, usable on none.

For a sandbox or a toy, really the best option is to download Maya's PLE. Powerful, well-designed, customizable, and gets you used to the one program pretty much every last professional design and game developer uses.
For something that you can actually export from and use for stuff, there's no end of $25-$100 commercial apps out there that provide a more well-balanced toolkit. They also come closer to approximating the capabilities of one of the really serious 3D applications. I'd steer clear of the ones from around the year 2000, that whole "intuitive interface" era, because the control schemes on those abominations exist pretty much to inspire hatred of all life and all it may stand for in users as part of an evil scheme to overthrow the world using an army of blood-crazed artist/assassins, but there's some okay stuff in there too. 'S certainly better than having half of a program like Blender gives you.

[klauss]

Blender... Blender is pretty much a summary of everything that's wrong with open-source software in general. Buggy, clearly designed by committee, uses an interface that only the guy who coded it could ever think of as simple or convenient, requires a compiler and a lot of experience in OOP to actually make the thing even resemble useful- experience which, naturally, the support and dev guys assume every end-user has. Available on every platform, usable on none.

Really... really... really false statement.
If you want anyone to believe it, you should clarify or rephrase it in a way that it... well... isn't false.

[Ryder P. Moses]

Do you have any idea how much of a pain in the ass it is to customize that thing?

I do. I tried. There was a point when I honestly needed to make Blender workable. And I couldn't do it. For precisely the reason stated.

[klauss]

Again vague - custimizing in which way? Authoring scripts? Yes, I admit Blender's script interface is painful, but it is a script - it is not intended for non-programmers, though the word script may fool you. "script" stands for "interpreted code", actually, not for "user-readable code".
Any other task, frankly, it's a rampaging lie to state that it requires "extensive OOP experience". Even scripting, actually, but I wouldn't expect a non-programmer to notice the difference there.

[DualJoe]

I couldn't agree with you Ryder, even if I wanted to.

I'm not a Blender or any app fanboy, nor do I object to anyone who really buys their software. But if even a complete newbie and non-computer-wiz like me could get the hang of Blenders interface in a short time, then your remarks don't make sense to me.

I'll grant you that I found wings easier to get started with and it takes more than 5 minutes to learn Blender. The online manual however was enough to get me started and after I did my first model, it all came naturally. Sofar I haven't reached any limits in Blender other than my own.

If you could be more specific as to why you find that Blender is half an app and other apps are not, then maybe I could start to see your point.

Btw pretty soon even the interface will be completely user adjustable.

I also looked at maya and max when I wanted to start with cg-3d and found a lot of complaints against both apps. From what I read on the forums, I got the impression that maya is great for film and stills but utterly crap for game-devs. Last time I checked max was the preferred app for game-devs. All the same to me, because I find that Blender works just fine for me at the moment. Since I don't make any money with my 3d app I certainly won't spend much money on it. That pretty much rules out either maya or max for me.

[klauss]

I'm not a Blender or any app fanboy, nor do I object to anyone who really buys their software.

Nor am/do I - I just don't like leaving such a false statement unexposed.