learning 3d question

Hi,
im new to 3d modelling and i wish to learn it. from all the 3d modelling software ; maya, 3ds max, blender etc

which one is the best tool to learn?. im talking about integration into unity. which one is the best in factor
1)easy to learn
2)importing to unity
3)features

thanks in advance..

 

All work well with unity. All have pretty comparable features (at least for common game needs). But, they are all pretty different in terms of ui and generally how they work. A lot of people have reasons why the prefer one over another, but I don't think it is very helpful to put much weight into that until you understand 3D modeling better and can decide for yourself.

If you are just starting I would recommend Blender, mostly because it is free. Once you are comfortable with it (and 3D in general), give the others a try, find out which one you like best.

 

thank you @zombiegorilla

which one is easiest to import to unity. eg: is there any file format issue that i should be aware of... or animation, im confuse with the new unity animation mecanim, with the old legacy system. which of the 3d tools is better handling this issue..

 

Asking which DCC is the easiest to import to Unity is like asking which brand of shoe is easiest to put on your feet.

With that said, Blender is your answer.

 

All are pretty much the same. There are few differences, but nothing to worry about at this stage. You can export from all to fbx, or you can put the native files in your project and unity will handle the conversion. (Though I am not 100% sure on max, I've never tried it ).

 

Look, there's no such thing as "easy to learn" 3d software. It all takes time. Also, usually that software costs money. Ease of export is the last thing you'll care about, really.

Speaking from money perspective, you can grab blender3d and learn that. It has sculpting and modeling features and can be imported/exported into unity and it is free. Feature-wise it is fairly close to commercial packages like maya/3dsmax, although there are some quirks.

 

Of the large studios I worked at it's always Max/Maya... Between 3dsmax and Maya... I'd say go for Maya...as it's multiplatform and not windows only...

...coming from maya I really have a hard time with blender but I agree that there is so much to learn about 3d modelling... so just roll with blender as it's free..then try a free trial of the others in a few months and pick the one you prefer...

 

Frankly, I don't like that both Maya and 3dsmax are now owned by autodesk, and I don't like autodesk licensing policies. If you're part of studio and studio has cash to burn, and maya/3dsmax/whatever are part of the pipeline sure they're the way to go.

For indie, I think blender would be the best idea. Costs nothing, fairly powerful. Sculpting tools are quite close to zbrush, IMO. People are really lucky to have this kind of suite available for free.

 

thanks for your input guys.really appreciate it. i think i will start learning with blender first to see how it goes.

 

We've recently talked about this in another thread. I have since then tried blender sculpting again in v2.76b and with 1 million vertices the performance still is unusable for me. I have VBOs enabled, but I get ~3 fps while sculpting with fraps. viewport performance in object mode is about 20fps because of a bug in blender. When I add an array modifier to the stack that does nothing (count set to 1, so no duplication), I get 60fps again. Don't remember what exactly that was, but it somehow seems to be a workaround related to subsurf and multires modifiers. Any idea what else I could try? I used Matcap shading as you recommended.

I agree on everything else you said. I'd start with blender too.


Obligatory blender getting started links:

http://blenderguru.com/
https://cgcookie.com/learn-blender/
http://blenderartists.org/forum/index.php <- go there if you have questions about blender

 

Hmm. Are you sure you're using dyntopo sculpting there? It doesn't exactly use ANY modifiers. Select mesh, switch to sculpt mode, press Ctrl+D. There are two sculpting modes in blender. One is dyntopo based, another one is multires based.

I'm using that on 64 bit windows 7 system, by the way, in 64bit blender. With sculpturing you'll have a slowdown when you use large brush over high detail. Dyntopo also adds/removes detail, when necessary. So you could start with low detail (just zoom far away with default settings) then refine them when you get close.

 

Uhh yeah..they pretty much got monopoly on "professional" 3d Software...that is not the best thing from a competitive point of view even though the software is great.. I wonder what the long term impact will be..other than we might end up paying more...

One thing to take into consideration is..considering the complexity of 3d software.. anybody looking for work in a larger studio..proficiency in Max or Maya is almost a must...there are of course exceptions but the bulk of open positions would be using those tools.

 

Thanks for your help! I also use Win7 64bit and 64bit blender. I used multires, not dyntopo. I tried dyntopo now and that is worse for me both in quality and in performance (which makes sense since it is doing more calculations and creating chaotic topology). I also tried applying the multires modifier and sculpting on a plain highres mesh with 1 million vertices and that had pretty good performance. I'd prefer to have the advantages of the multires modifier though. In terms of sculpting feel, I prefer Sculptris, but I remember that to be very crash-happy and it doesn't support a multires workflow either.

 

I'd guess they'll raise their prices to the ceiling and maybe nuke one of their products, leaving only one of them active.

Level of detail is configruable in the left panel (which can be brought up by T key, IIRC. Or maybe that was N key). Default size of detail is 12 pixels per polygon, and they're related to distance from camera. I.e. if you zoom in, you can model fine detail just at that area. (If you zoon out and touch high detailed area with destructive brush, you can lose detail though).

I'm starting to suspect that I might have better hardware, although that shouldn't be the case. Or maybe you got different GPu and that one doesn't play nice with blender. Or maybe you want way more details than I wanted.

You could try blender forum for assistance with performance, but aside from that I don't know what could be causing the problem. It worked for me when I used it.

 

Learn Blender to become competent enough to make good use of Poser, DAZ 3D (Morph 3D in the Asset Store), MakeHuman, Adobe/Mixamo, or iClone unless you plan on making game making or 3D modeling a serious hobby than consider Maya LT but I'd still use Poser, DAZ 3D, Mixamo/Adobe or iClone to learn one of them as a quick test of portability of your modeling work. If any of the above ever create the base style models for morph-ready birds, fish, quadrupeds, and insects in the style of DAZ 3D's Genesis characters learn that software of course. Be prepared to be patient and be prepared to throw out artwork you don't like.

 

I'm guessing this and me wanting to use bigger brushes is it.
I run an i7-3820 CPU @ 3.60GHz with 64GB of Ram and a GTX 670.
Looking at the system monitor blender doesn't remotely use 100% of the CPU while sculpting and it is still very laggy. My guess would be that it is either not multithreaded (in which case you might have better performance with a dual core that has a higher clock speed than my quad core, if that's what you use) or it's GPU limited or something else. Oh well, doesn't really matter. I rarely need sculpting anyway, I just thought I might be missing something.

As it stands I still think that zBrush is miles ahead of blender in sculpting related tasks. Not saying you can't do something decent with blender though, if you don't need a super high polycount. For a free sculpting tool it certainly is pretty good.

 

Do you understand colour theory? How good are your traditional artist skills? What about anatomy and proportion? How are your drawing skills? You won't make much of an artist until you have your artistic foundations, regardless of which tool you end up with.

 

You can be an untalented artist and become capable through shear time and effort, but time and effort are really needed. And you can do it directly in the medium of your choice.

 

I personally hate blender, but my preferred alternative to that costs thousands of dollars.

Maybe if I started with blender it might be a different story because I wouldnt know any better.

Also interesting 'studio name'... Interesting because my mate started it way back, and somewhere along the lines youve taken the name. He stopped doing games a while back though. I told him, he didnt really care. Dont think he overly cared for the name. He still has the facebook page name as far as im aware though.

 

That's why I use Modo and in all fairness it's come a long way, plus the fact you can set up just like Max and Maya (thank the heavens as the standard controls suck)..

The only issue I really have with Modo is it's difficult to figure out compared to Max / Maya with a lack of training material even from the likes of DT. Although once you start to "get it", it's far more flexible without having to turn to scripting. It's box modelling features are the most advanced I've seen in any DCC (even though I prefer Deformers in Maya) and it's a decent all round package with painting / sculpting / animation / mesh fusion / re-topo / awesome rendering etc.

I can see Modo being a key player in the future as an alternative to Max Maya, epecially as it's a third of the price..

 

What does Modo have to offer in terms of nondestructive workflows with modifier stacks?

 

I'm a Max artist - so Max is the best.
I've never liked blender either because it feels like a software created for programmers to use. Never really felt comfortable in it.
I also dislike the fact autodesk owns Max, Maya and defunct XSI.
If you don't run with blender - Maya LT is the next logical choice if price is a concern - though I would suggest downloading a trial of Max just to see how simple it is to use.
Maya also has the best non destructive history independent structure of all the 3D packages. But Max's modifier stack is sufficient once you learn how to use it properly.

Maybe 3DCoat will provide a worthy alternative down the line. They seem to have a solid package right now, though it's not an animation package.

 

Hell no. It is power-user tool at best, not programmer's tool.
Blender gui heavily relies on keyboard hotkeys, once you get them, you'll be very fast, but wrapping your head around the workflow will take some time.

Now, that one actually feels like something a programmer without proper designer would make. Green on black color scheme and ugly gui.

I think you should investigate houdini.

It is generally not a good idea to try and "export" existing workflow you liked in one tool into another tool. Different 3d modeling software approaches same problem DIFFERENTLY. And when you try to use foreign workflow, you're not using the tool efficiently.

 

I wouldn't say it is about knowing better, more about what you are used to.

I started in blender (back when it's interface was truly horrible). I have since had to learn both maya and max. For game stuff they are all are pretty much equal in terms of capabilities (though blender is missing a couple of minor things that I have to switch to maya for). But interfaces are so different I usually do most stuff in blender because of muscle memory. It's faster for me simply because I have used it so much more. Even things I know are a couple of more steps in blender, it's still faster. I know that had I put as much time in something else, I am sure I would feel different.

It's one of those things that people often feel strongly about. More often it seems with maya vs max. But at work or online, those debates are almost always about ease of use. Almost never about actual capabilities. The leads on two of our teams are vocal advocates for one over the other, but the are both kickass modelers regardless of the thier preferred tool, so it's kind of a funny debate. We have made our pipeline tools support both, so it's just a preference of the artist.

Really it just comes down to what you prefer, modeling is the real skill, separate from the tool. Though it is a good idea to have a working knowledge of the others in case it comes up.

 

Cataral + Z , I thought mod stacks were Max only? Anyway general way of working is to use "mesh" components, it's not far away from Unity's prefab system. So you can just keep adding mesh components in a tree, work on bits and then just merge them all down into one mesh at the end (that's if you want to). So you don't really need modifiers..

 

Maya's version is called construction history. Blender also has something similar, but IMO, does not work as well as either Max or Maya. The main problem I have with the Blender modifier history is that the Undo / Redo stack is context specific, which can be confusing at times.

 

Thanks for the info. I've started out with blender and knew that max has something similar so I took it kind of for granted. When I tried a Modo trial a while back I couldn't find any equivalent and was a bit confused.

The undo in blender can indeed be confusing at times.


Edit:

I'm guessing smoothing groups/custom normals, and what else? Some recent updates have been made in those areas.

Edit2: (I realized my intention didn't come through as clear as it should and I'm possibly just sounding like a blender fanboy.)
I'm trying to help find a solution to optimize your blender pipeline because I know switching programs because one is missing that one important feature can be quite annoying.

 

Those, and one I need often is setting the alpha on verts. I haven't checked recently so those may have been added. Usually I model in blender the pop it into maya to set the alpha on the verts.

 

Ok, seems like the vertex painting color picker still only has RGB. I found a hackish workaround here:
http://polycount.com/discussion/136663/blender-vertex-alpha-hack
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/vertex-rgba-blender-2-5x.254038/

and this mentions RGBA being exported from the FBX exporter with full alpha by default:
http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/34239/remove-alpha-from-vertex-color

So you could either modify the exporter yourself to stuff whatever data representation you prefer to use into the alpha channel or you could try the script from the forums. I realize that probably both aren't worth the effort compared to the workflow you have, but it's the best I could find. Have you made a proposal to add Alpha to the vertex paint system? I remember the blender foundation once asked what game artists are missing from blender because they don't have enough people themselves with experience in that field. Maybe its not that hard to add native support for this?

For the smoothing groups if you really need groups, then I fear you are out of luck. If you just need sharp edges, then you can select edges and use ctrl+e and "mark sharp", set the whole mesh to smooth shading and add an edgesplit modifier. If you have any displacement modifiers make sure they are applied before the edgesplit or else I think the mesh will rip open. I think The OBJ exporter has several options to handle smooth groups. One is "bitflag smooth groups" which I think tries to mimic the autodesk variant with a max of 32 different smooth groups.

For editing normals in a more deliberate way, e.g. for trees, there is a new modifier called "normal edit" under the "modify" list of modifiers. It is not really the thing many blender users hoped for though. You still can't just grab a normal and move it where you want it, you have to try and get them were you want with different control objects and masking the influence of the modifier with vertex groups. So yeah, probably easier in Max/Maya as well .

On a side note, another new thing that you might want to take a look at is the "data transfer" modifier. It can transfer different kinds of mesh data from another mesh based on proximity to the other mesh. This is one of the things that I currently have no idea how I'd ever need it, but knowing it's there is always good in case a weird usecase comes up down the road where this might be helpful. Seems like you can for example transfer UV seams from one model to another which I could see to be potentially useful.

Let me know if any of that was useful or if I can help with any other blender questions.

 

Yeah I used Maya for the past couple of years. Modo "technically" speaking has the equivalent of construction history and mod stacks. So best of both worlds really..

Again the problem with Modo it's hard to describe, so you have a mesh tree. So let's say you have a sphere and a rectangle for example. Now let's say you want to do work on one and not affect the other, you can CTRL C + X then CTRL V it into another mesh "item". Now the construction of that segment will now be separate, again once you're done you select your mesh components and merge them down.

You can again further segment the item tree but still have all meshes affected from a root node, so you can stack various root nodes as well.

The component based setup isn't new, Maya has it.. But I did find it far more "faffy" and not as comprehensive. Modo finally got smoothing groups and cage baking sorted in 901 which is nice.

One thing I was really interested in which just went EOL is the mARCH kit, which makes creating buildings of all styles a breeze. But apparently it's getting replaced by a tool which comes with LW.. LWCAD or something.

 

Yea, I had looked into those options for alpha verts before. Honestly, it's just very quick to open it in maya and tweak them there. It would be nice to do it in blender though. Same with normals, for that I just wrote an editor tool to adjust them unity, which actually works better for my needs as I can see/adjust in editor. And as bonus, i can now animate them.

Thanks for the info, always nice to see another dedicated blender user.