A fully dedicated video-game 3D software ?

Yeah, I'm not a fan of the Autodesk buyouts that are happening. (Not a fan of monopolies :evil: )

I've recently purchased Modo and Lightwave. Personally I love using both of them. I absolutely love Modo's texturing/painting/sculpting features. I also like its quick layering/UV creation and it works very well for level/map design.

Lightwave, personally I like its animation features, it seems very user friendly and fast to learn.

Both also have an excellent amount of tutorials/videos/docs available.

 

Well, quite some time since this thread creation, so I feeled I'd have to upadte with the latest news :

I bought Cinema 4D MOCCA character animation module, and damn ....


LOL @ 3DS.


:roll:


More seriously, everything in C4D is so much more gamedesign-friendly, even for a simple rigging !

In my whole life I tried modeling animating humans with : Blender, Lightwave, 3DS, Maya, Modo, XSI, and now C4D.

From my little experience point of view, I can tell C4D R11 is far better. Everything is visually clear, you got plenty of little plugins to add to your meshes, with full control on it.

There is also a large bunch of clever visual helpers, which are easy to customize. Native keyboard&Mouse shortcuts are far more intuitive than anything I have seen.

Well there's too many good vibes coming from this goddamn software, I can't write a full review here.

All I can say, to make it short, for C4D R11 :

- Everything you need for gamedesign and Unity integration is in C4D
- Every pro tools are in C4D, but they are way better brought to user.
- Animation GUI approach is similar to Adobe Flash, which is the best feature that could come to my mind in term of gamemaking.
- Rigging is made ridiculously easy ... *clic*, *clic*, *BONES*.
(I was able to rerig a whole human in 1 hour, as 3DS took me a whole night)
- Objects hierarchy can be controlled to a very extent, and is visually the clearest thing I ever saw in a 3D software.
- Cool icons everywhere ...
- A very helpful community if you search on the net (www.c4dcafe.com for example)
- Price is made for indies (700 € C4D core + 400 € MOCCA)

Well, this software is just ... a frackin' relief.

 

Well good luck with it. I own c4d R11 as well and I'll say that for me it's nearly flawless when it comes to exporting to Unity. That's a huge plus. It's weird though, 3ds max is designed to be the best for game art creation. But I guess not (the learning curve is too steep).

I recommend buying one more piece to add on to c4d for game art creation:

http://www.cinemax4d.de/simplemakerpro/home_us.html

I don't actually own the plugin, but they have a demo mode that you can use. This is the only real way to do polygon reduction in c4d (unless you count that piece of crap polygon reduction deformer).

P.S. Brush up on the Bodypaint module. It's awesome. :wink:

 

Thank you for the link !


Personnally, I always prefered to have full control over my polys by not using any polyreduction module

 

The plugin is for organic models mostly. Trust me, you don't want to do this stuff by hand on a high poly organic character. You'll go gray by the time you finish.

The plugin though gives you far more control than the polygon reduction deformer.

 

Oh that's right then, organics are definitely a pain to model


On another hand, I can't help but find myself giggling at my screen while rigging under C4D ... it's so much superior to 3DS in term of easiness

 

Man, this thread is making it so hard to pick a 3D application for the Mac. I was going for Maya 2009, but after reading all this I think I might go for Cinema 4d.

I realize I didn't give the C4D demo a proper look, I will pick it up again and push it a bit harder (still have 3 weeks left to evaluate).

gr.jakko

 

News : I found a very simple way to build physics for a character's feet on the ground with C4D. The script was maked in 30 min with Xpresso (the native scripting language), as I knew nothing about it before.

Xpresso is plainly awesome ...

It's just givin me tons of ideas about character rules and constraints customizations.

Happy face



edit : Also, as I said in another topic, the object modifiers approach in C4D is very similar to Unity objects and parameters, which close more and more the gap between the 2 softwares.
Perfect workflow for now.

 

I have a list of Cinema 4D resources on my links page if you ant some good plugin and training stuff http://www.artzfx.com/links.htm

Make sure you checkout www.xpresso24.com for some really cool scripts in their Downloads section.

@jakkovanhunen, go to www.c4dcafe.com and download the Jet Plane tute. That was the first tute viewed prior to purchasing C4D and sold me on it.

I avoided using BodyPaint the first couple of years but now could not do without it.

 

Thank you dude, awesome !

 

Thanks @artzfx, those are great links. Watching the plane tut right now, haven't decided which application to go for yet.
I'm getting more and more comfortable with modeling in the Maya trial, but I still find the interface cluttered and outdated. It is one of the industry standard applications though, so at the moment Maya has a little edge over Cinema 4D right now.

Didn't properly UV map and rig a model in Maya yet, maybe one of you guys can tell me how Cinema 4d compares to Maya 2009 in these areas.

Still need to spend quality time with Cinema 4d. Finding out that properly testing 2 3d applications AND developing a game at the same time is quite a bit to chew at.

gr.jakko

 

Well, I don't think I would be a good adviser about Maya vs C4D, as I only used Maya for non-rigged animations (TV generics mainly).

But you pointed exactly what made me run away from Autodesk products : the outdated interface.

Cinema4D got a 10 times better one, I swear. As I come from a graphism world, this was very important for me.

For example, yesterday night I discovered a great function : You can very easily add some user data sliders to objects, like a % slider, a degree slider, an input form, etc ... Then you link those values to some Xpresso script and make whatever you want with it.
You can even add those sliders to the modeling HUD, and have them always visible.

That way, I created a 2 x 5 sliders HUD on my project, which controls the fingers retractations.

Very powerful and easy to setup.

Starting from that, imagination does the rest.

 

After spending only half of the afternoon in Cinema 4d I have to say I'm very impressed with it. Seriously. Modeling tools work as expected and are easy to find (only tried low polygon modeling so far). The interface is a breeze of fresh air.

Up till now I like it very much. Now if I can get something textured and rigged that is usable in Unity I'm a happy camper. I will probably hit a couple of walls, but that is to be expected.

Combined with Modo's (gathering dust on a shelf at the moment) excellent hi to low geometry baking, I think I have found the tools to work with.

Thanks for nudging me in the right direction.

gr.jakko

 

It was a pleasure

I ran through the exact same hesitations and expectations as you, so I had to help

 

This is good for people like me who purchase models on TurboSquid since modelling of human character is not that easy
On the other hand for animation there is , in practice, no other choice than self production

I have two question :

#1
Is Blender good for rigging and animation
I mean, is it reasonably user friendly ?
Generally speaking it is appalling, at least for me

# 2
Many import ( export file formats
Fine
But do they really work ?
Also MilkShape can export a lot of file formats including FBX, and Collada, but I have been trying and trying to import human character animated files into Unity
No chance

Thanks in advance

 

Hi,

What are your opinions about Houdini?

Thanks

 

Hi!

I am totaly newbie in 3D scene and I need to learn a tool for iphone games development. My game will have simple graphics (just stick humanoids and simple background items) but a lot of rigged character animation (bones). Actually I am going to implement the mesh skinning technique that was used in Zombieville (for those who read the iphone forum).

I want to spend the minimum required time for 3d graphics, as this is not going to be the selling point of my game.

What software tool is right for my needs? Is Cinema4D R11 capable of doing non-problematic non-hassle character rigging? I dont mind to pay its price.

I am also considering Cheetah3D as an easy-to-learn option. What is your experience with character animation in it? (I wish it had a windows version too).

 

I don't have experience of using C4D with Unity, but it's rigging is fairly solid and most non-native 3D artists prefer its interface.

I'm very biased toward Maya because it was what I was trained on back when Silicon Graphics workstations ruled the games industry. Maya in combination with Motionbuilder is a flawless setup in my opinion for games and character animation.

Can't comment on Cheetah.

 

I agree that C4D is a well done simple and powerful program with an affordable price, I started to use it recently and was very easy to start on it compared to my past experience with 3Dmax and Maya, I actually started 3d back in the amiga 500 era.. and lightwave 3d :roll: :wink: when I switched to PC's I never liked 3dmax that much, but there was not much choice on that platform as you all probably remember, interface of both are exagerately complicated and non user friendly. Making easy stuff complicated is not really the way to go but they both seems to do just that.


Both Maya and 3D max need a serious interface rebuilding. So now I am happy with that new C4D tool and really think I found my defintitive 3d tool.
I also use ZBrush for some organic modelling.

 

How do you combine/merge two objects in a single mesh in C4D ? I have done this once but now I cant do it again properly!

For rigging, do you use joints in R11 or insist in using bones? For me joints works ok but I have to bake any animations for using them in Unity. Also, textures needs baking.


On the other hand Cheetah3d seems to work flawlessly with Unity. It also offers poses/takes which seems as a very clean way to organize character animations.

At this stage Cheetah offers what I need, since I dont need advanced 3d graphics. However, C4D offers a lot of features that could be time savers during my next steps (huge materials collection, modelling features etc). Do you believe that it is better to stick with C4D despite its Unity incompatibilities?

 

Once again, as I stated numerous times in these forums, I'm using C4D for a fighting game with really complicated human body animations (so I'd better choose the right tool here), and I find it just perfect.

The rigging options and customizations are outstandingly fast, and you can clearly achieve an ultra realistic rig in no time.
I easily scripted physical dependancies, member sliders, constraints, and stuff. This led me to a point where all I got to do to animate my chars is to display a bunch of 10 bones rotations and a HUD of sliders. Then manipulate here and there, and bam, got a very precise martial art animation.

That's my personal experience.

For your needs, Noocell, I would advise C4D, as I don't know Cheetah. But I guess that Maxon (the ones who are behind C4D) got a lot more experience that those behind Cheetah, even if this tool seems to be pretty complete, according to users.

Cheetah seem to be the choice for artists who don't have more than 100$ to spend on a tool, though, if I read correctly different topics in here.

So if you got the money, you should turn yourself toward C4D + MOCCA (the character animation plugin).

P.S : using joints, I got no problem at all to export to FBX -> Unity. I even found that C4D FBX exporter respects your displayed bones hierarchy, unlike 3DS.

 

Nomad, thanks for the answer, I am going to spend more time with C4D before making a decision.

Have you found how to properly merge two objects into a single mesh in C4D? I cant find this info in the docs... Thanks again!

 

I'm not in front of my computer at the moment, but the last time I had to do it, I found this very easy. The least I could advise is to just type something like "merge meshes" in the Help

(I think it's in the "functions" menu)