Comparing 3D modelling programs - Pros and Cons

[Miss B]

Since then I've been working on learning Zbrush...I also own Silo which I picked up through MacHeist for $20 thanks to Miss B...iirc. I didn't realise that the serial number for a mac version also worked with the pc version. I haven't really played much with Silo yet though.

Yes, I posted about it when I saw a thread Joe/Netherworks had started at RDNA. I hadn't wanted to get involved with the version Steam was offering earlier that year, mostly because I don't play those types of games, and didn't want to have Steam software on my laptop to use Silo, so when I heard about the MacHeist offer, I questioned Joe about it, and he said you just use the S/N they give you, and go download the latest version of Silo from NeverCenter's site. I actually used the S/N on the earlier trial version I still had installed, and it worked, so I upgraded to the newer version, and all was right with the world.

BTW Pen, Fugazi has quite a few Silo tutorials that are very easy to follow, if you ever want to get into using it.

 

[Pendraia]

Thanks Miss B, I have some but not all of his tutorials.

 

[Miss B]

Thanks for moving these posts to this new thread Pen.

 

[Pendraia]

No problem...I wanted to say earlier that I like Fugazi's tutorials a lot the long sleeve shirt that I recently converted to Dawn was made using one of his tutorials. I also really like Littlefox's tutorials.

 

[Miss B]

I think the first of Fugazi's tutorials I did was the dress with 2 underskirts, and it was the first success I had with modeling clothing. In Blender I can do any kind of prop, large or small, but I have problems getting any kind of clothing done.

I'm finding it a lot easier to do the clothing modeling in Silo,though I've done a group of swords and such in Silo too, so I'm pretty happy with it. The UI is nice and clean and easy to use, though I've been using Blender for so long, it's UI doesn't bother me at all.

 

[Lissa_xyz]

Throwing my hat in for Blender. Been learning it more and more, and with the bf using Max I can better translate Max tools/tutorials to Blender. He'll even go on google sprees for me looking for Blender addons that mimic a Max function that I like (he knows more of the technical modeling jargon that I don't).

I have Silo, but kept gravitating towards Blender because it's more of a full featured app than a one trick pony.

 

[Pendraia]

I haven't got that tute Miss B...but it sounds like a good one.

@Vaskania, hey you're back to Vaskania...I've tried Blender but it makes my brain bleed.

 

[Lissa_xyz]

Yep! I'm back. lol Turning Pixolygon into more of a team/brand than my personal name. Blender does my head in if you ask me where to find the physical button for a function as I've been going by hotkeys. lol

I will admit though, if I didn't use the dynamic spacebar addon I'd get a lot less done (I love the in-menu function search on that thing).

 

[Pendraia]

Okay...I understood none of that except you use hot keys. lol...what dynamic spacebar add on?

 

[Lissa_xyz]

Heh sorry. Layman's terms has never been my strong suit.

This is the dynamic spacebar menu: https://interference22.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/spacebar_6.png

Whenever I hit the spacebar, that list comes up with most used functions, and a search box to find more.

 

[Pendraia]

Very cool...I will have to try it out.

 

[Miss B]

Go slowly Pen. I have that long list of Help, Forums and Tutorials in the Software > Blender forum, and I'm always adding to it. You start small, get comfortable, and then move on. It's taken me a lot of years to get really comfortable with it, and it will take time, but as Vask said, it has a lot of high-end functions like 3DSMax and Maya that you won't see in modelers like Hex, Silo and Wings.

 

[Seliah (Childe of Fyre)]

I have to say... I used Wings3D as my introduction to modeling. It was basic enough to avoid blowing my brain to smitherenes in the beginning, unlike some other programs. I have a very difficult time with spatial relationships, believe it or not, so modeling is not an easy thing for me.

I did try out Hex... pros? It has a direct from DS bridge. Cons? I hated the UI, couldn't stand the way it functioned, and if I got anything even slightly built, it was so unstable that nine times out of ten I would lose at least ninety percent of my work no matter how many times I saved, because it frequently crashed for no darn reason. I went back to Wings. LOL

At this point, I've been using Blender... I know a lot of folks find Blender difficult to learn, but I have to admit, the price was right, it's a much more full software set than Wings will ever be, and I actually love the UI. I've found it easier to learn how to do things in the hotkey-oriented Blender than I ever did with anything else. The Christmas sweater that I made recently for the Fantasy Attic's holiday giveaway... I modeled that inside of Blender.

I need to get a better handle on uvmapping inside of it - at the moment, I don't yet seem to be able to produce a usable uvmap for clothing items (A Skype contact of mine kindly offered to do the uv mapping on the sweater, and thank heavens she did! LOL). But aside from trying to get a handle on the uvmapping, I actually do find the interface makes a lot of sense to me and is fairly easy to navigate around in.

Blender is NOT an "open it up and poke and prod out of the box" type of application. I mean, there is no way you're going to just be able to poke at buttons and figure out how to work with it. You definitely have to read and follow some tutorials, but thankfully there are a lot of free tutorials on Youtube and other places, so that's not a hard task to do.

I thought Hexagon had potential, but the stability issues pretty much killed it for me. And Wings3D I still think is a great modeler to introduce a newbie to modeling with - just don't try to do any actual serious modeling in it. Once the beginner gets to the point that they're trying to do organics or soft body stuff... Wings has reached the end of it's usefulness for them, IMO.

 

[Miss B]

I had the same instability with Hex as you describe Seliah, which is why I finally uninstalled and said forget it.

I also use my keyboard a lot in Blender, except when selecting something for moving, rotating or scaling. BTW, if you like the UI, you should've seen what it looked like when I first started using it. Talk about an unprofessional horrid UI, but I learned to use the software slowly, and when the new UI came out I jumped or joy because it was sooooo much more organized.

As for UV mapping, I do ALL my UV mapping in Blender, even if I did the modeling elsewhere. Maybe after you have Nataani in the store, I also have Skype, and if you want to get more comfortable with UV mapping with it, I can help.

 

[Seliah (Childe of Fyre)]

I had the same instability with Hex as you describe Seliah, which is why I finally uninstalled and said forget it.

I also use my keyboard a lot in Blender, except when selecting something for moving, rotating or scaling. BTW, if you like the UI, you should've seen what it looked like when I first started using it. Talk about an unprofessional horrid UI, but I learned to use the software slowly, and when the new UI came out I jumped or joy because it was sooooo much more organized.

As for UV mapping, I do ALL my UV mapping in Blender, even if I did the modeling elsewhere. Maybe after you have Nataani in the store, I also have Skype, and if you want to get more comfortable with UV mapping with it, I can help.

I would not be surprised, most likely, at the interface's original state. It's a free modeling program, and the earlier versions of any free program are usually very, very horrid on the UI. Gimp's early UI's were nigh unusable altogether! For years, it was just horrible! Nowadays, it has a good UI. So I think with Blender, I'll just consider myself lucky that by the time I was ready to move up to it, they had worked out the UI to something nice and logical. Well... mostly logical.

They keyboard shortcuts/hotkeys are actually a big part of what makes it easier for me to use. For some reason, it's just much easier for my brain to memorize key combinations for tasks than it is to memorize which button to click for which menu to get which option and set what parameters...

Of course, that could also just be my ADD talking, too, as the hotkeys work as quickly as my fingers can work, which isn't quite AS fast as my brain goes, but close enough... LOL

As far as the UV mapping - I will probably take you up on that at some point after Nataani's made it through QAV. I do really like the program. I don't do a LOT of modeling, I go in spurts here and there with long gaps in between. But I do like it, and I have followed more than a couple of tutorials on the uvmapping already. It's helped a little bit, but mapping out the sweater was way beyond anything I could pull off. Skiriki took my mesh into her copy of 3DCoat and did all the mapping in there for me.

 

[Pendraia]

Go slowly Pen. I have that long list of Help, Forums and Tutorials in the Software > Blender forum, and I'm always adding to it. You start small, get comfortable, and then move on. It's taken me a lot of years to get really comfortable with it, and it will take time, but as Vask said, it has a lot of high-end functions like 3DSMax and Maya that you won't see in modelers like Hex, Silo and Wings.

I will keep trying it from time to time...eventually it will click.

At the moment my go to modeller is Zbrush and I'm trying to stick with it where possible as I want to learn as many of the functions as I can.

 

[Lissa_xyz]

I have nightmares about Blender's old UI. Ugh. It was terrible and I never did get on with it.

@Seliah (Childe of Fyre) UV unwrapping is also easier if you've got good polyflow/topology. If you've got things everywhere your seams are going to be a bit wonky and horrible to work with, but if you've got nice clean flow and such then it gets easier.

 

[Seliah (Childe of Fyre)]

UV unwrapping is also easier if you've got good polyflow/topology. If you've got things everywhere your seams are going to be a bit wonky and horrible to work with, but if you've got nice clean flow and such then it gets easier.

Yes, I had figured that one out pretty quickly. The sweater's mesh wasn't too bad as far as polys. I did have two faces that were floating in the middle of empty space inside of the sweater (LOL!) and Ski pinpointed those for me when she brought it into 3DCoat, so it was thankfully fixed before it got released and mapped.

But yes, I had noticed that the cleaner the topology, the easier the uvmapping seemed to be.

 

[Ken1171]

I started with DS...I initially was involved with modding elderscroll games over at Canadian Ice's forum. There was a group of us all started around the same time. Matty, Neil and Sickle all started over there and it was good times as we supported each other in learning DS. I've tried a few times to come to terms with Poser....this last time has been the most successful but I still find it hard to use. I think the trick is to have a support network of some sort.

There are things I like in DS that it does better than Poser, or just things that Poser doesn't have. The contrary is also true, where Poser has things DS lacks, and I can't live without. The interface differences are just something we get used to with some practice. Personally, I think rigging works best in DS4, but I do everything else in Poser. The rigging part sort of makes sense, since it was DAZ3D who created most figures, so they know better how to handle them. There is also the fact that people who create figures work in the same company as people who create the program, so they can help each other. No wonder conforming actually works better in DS. Conversely, SMS have no tradition of creating contents, so they only make the software.

So the pros and cons are just consequences of the history of both companies. No surprises there.

 

[Ken1171]

But yes, I had noticed that the cleaner the topology, the easier the uvmapping seemed to be.

Not only that, but poor topology will also result into poor posing, and also possibly into poor morphing. When I was making the pants for my Western Outfit, I have personally demonstrated in the forums how my original pants topology was impossible to rig for Dusk, and I ended up having to remodel them 3 or 4 times until I've got the right edge flow. Only then the pants rigged and posed with relative ease.