What's Your 3D Modelling Workflow?

Hello all!

I am a beginner in the whole 3D modelling scene (however I have access to any program I want because I'm a student) and I am wondering, what is everyones choice of 3D workflow?

I've heard of people using Cheeta3D, Blender, 3DS, heck even Sculptris. How do all of you do it?

And also, how did you get started?

Personally, I am just getting into it. I followed a few tutorials on Blender and actually got stuff done but Blender is horrendously ugly IMO and I've been able to achieve more in my first few minutes of 3DS than my first few hours of Blender.

I am now hoping to stick with 3DS, however there's a lot of debate around the 3D workflow and Maya seems to be pretty cool and so does Cinema4D...

 

Personally, I have traditionally used 3ds max, which used to be the best modeler around. Autodesk has left 3ds max in a dark dusty closet lately, given Maya a lot more love these days, and the recent versions of Maya have caught up with max in the modeling department, as well as being an overall great animation and general pipeline tool. Check out Modo too.
Ultimately if your goal to model things for a personal project or game, your choice is irrelevant as all of those softwares can do the job and have great learning resources.

 

My workflow changes a bit depending on what I'm modelling. Generally, if it's realistic and organic (but often hard-surface too) I use sculptris to knock out a concept sculpt to build in all the basic forms and shapes. I then import that into Blender and do a quick bit of retopology and make a properly subdivided high poly model. I then retopo that again properly as a low poly mesh and bake the details down in xNormal and then texture in Photoshop.

If it's stylised or just a low poly with no normal map, I'll generally poly model in Blender alone.

It really is worth sticking with Blender to learn it. Sure, it defies industry convention in several ways, but I think that's a very good thing - considering Max has been the standard for over a decade (more?) I think people should consider change. Having selection and moving vertices etc (via the widget) on the same mouse button is stupid in my opinion. There are a lot of things I could go into, but I'll refrain!

My biggest nag with max is the navigation and button-based tools. Blender is really, really fast because every action is hot key based; you can do basically anything without knowing where the cursor is, you just know you have to move it, but not to a specific place. This for me is the best thing about blender. It has a barrier for learning, but once you're past that the UI and way of using tools actually makes a lot of sense and it comes into it's own.

But then.. I guess 3DS Max is the standard for a reason (though I would hold age and familiarity as that reason) so it makes sense to learn it, I suppose.
I'm also a student, and planning to go to University (if you're in the US I think you call that college), so I thought I should learn either Max or Maya, as they seem to be the standard. I hated using Max with a passion, particularly its navigation, but found Maya much better in that respect. However, I thought its modelling tools were a bit weak, and I hate the Autodesk way of moving vertices etc with the arrow axes widget. I think I will have to reluctantly give Max another go, and see if I can better customise its navigation.

I hope I didn't sound like a fanboy, I'll happily admit Blender has a lot of downfalls, but the industry needs to start finding a better reason not to use it now that it's grown so much. I know a lot of people who've made the switch from Autodesk (Maya in particular) to Blender and say they wouldn't go back. It really is quick to model with as well.

Sorry for the essay, but I thought I may as well make one big detailed post than explain myself in several more.

 

All in all it's a bit of personal preference. I used to use 3ds max and then started learning Maya. Now I'm using Blender and I'm finding it's interface to be a happy medium between max and maya (with a couple of hiccups of course). But I've been using the Paint branch of Blender and I've found it to be a great tool by itself for low poly hand painted stuff.

For high poly stuff I tend to model out a block out in blender, use the dynamic topology sculpting to rough out the shape, retopo with better edgeflow for sculpting in Blender, send it over to Zbrush to finalize the sculpt, make the game res version in Blender and then bake the textures in Xnormal and finish up the textures with a mix of Krita and Blender.

For Blender I really enjoy it's painting tools (in the painting branch) and the mix of using hotkeys and the nondestructive modifiers (like max). Retopology is a breeze in Blender which is why I have 2 steps for that rather than using a quicker and less clean method like zremesher in between the rough sculpt and the clean sculpt phases.

Currently I don't see too many downfalls with Blender other than the lack of editing normals and the vary different workflow Blender has for viewport shaders but for flat shaded games that's not really a problem.

Soon I may just fix that problem by getting Substance Painter though since it's not that expensive compared to other software for texturing and it's painting with materials to create the albedo, roughness and spec maps at the same time should be a great time saver.

 

Damn, there's definitely a lot of variety between each people.
Personally, my statement still stands. I have learnt so much more in 3DS Max and it was all so much quicker and rewarding that I might just have to stick with it.
I like the mouse stuff btw, I'm more of a mouse guy.

Due to being a mouse guy I'm definitely going to have to give Sculptris a shot and make it low poly and rig it in 3DS.

 

You have to consider, once your'e not a student anymore, or you want to make some money from your games, you'll have to buy 3DSmax for the full price.

It's also quite a time since 3DSmax saw a significant overhaul. All you get since years are just minor updates. Some people believe that 3DsMax gets abandoned like Softimage sooner or later, in favor for Maya.

So if you really want to go the Autodesk route, I'd suggest to go with Maya.
It has not the best modeling tools compared to Max and Blender, but the animation and rigging tools are better than 3DSmax' if that matters to you.

Also, if you're serious about 3d modeling, you should get a drawing tablet. Otherwise you'll have a hard time to sculpt stuff with a mouse.

 

The student stuff doesn't concern me now as I still have 3 years left of normal school, and of course 3 years of the license. After that I plan on taking a course in Computer Science which is another few years on top so I'm pretty much set ahaha.

I'll start following tutorials in Maya as well. I now know pretty much the raw basics of how 3D works (materials, textures, polygons, faces edges vertices, etc) through Blender tutorials I followed. With that I can't imagine trying out different programs and finding which one "clicks" being hard.

Thanks for the help!

And the tablet can come later, I really just want to nail down the basics ATM since I'm not very serious at this point in time.

 

Eek! A mouse guy!

Most people can't do any sculpting with a mouse, and a tablet becomes a necessity; I'd include myself in that bracket. Don't leave it to that much later, they're handy for all sorts of things but getting a good workflow from the start can stop bad habits from forming.

You and I might be set with free software for a while, but not for work, it's entirely non-commercial (I'm sure you know that) and watermarks all your work (I bought an extended student version to stop that). So it's good for learning but not much else. I've also heard many people saying Max has been left behind a bit lately, so it might be wise to go with Maya.

You'd be surprised how hard it can be to settle on which one 'clicks' better with you. I hate Max's interface but thought it's range of tools was great, but hated the way they worked. I really liked Maya's interface and navigation, but thought it's tools were much weaker.

At the end of the day, it is almost entirely preference, so carry on with Max if you want to! It gets even harder to choose once you go deeper than the basics.

I'm sticking with Blender but learning Maya before Uni to get ready for the industry-standardisation nightmare I'm sure I'll face!

Now I'm used to Blender I can't imagine why people use a mouse-driven interface, it's incredibly slow. But I understand that must work for some people, so fair enough!

 

Holy damn I did not actually know about the watermarking and non-commercial. I just assumed it was a full license D:
Back to Blender for me then aha.

Which I don't mind because I seriously just fell in love with Sculptris. Made a character head in 2 minutes that I was actually proud of. Look out for my next game called Nipple Man, working on the cartoony character now.
Will make low poly and rig in Blender it seems.

Thanks for all the help guys!

EDIT: And I definitely like the idea of using a tablet. What's stopping me however is that I'm a high school student with no cash, I can't draw so half of it's intended purposes are gone and I actually like my mouse aha.

 

You can build your own one



But jokes aside. If you want to sculpt, you're better off with a proper drawing tablet. The Wacom Intuos costs around $80. Beg your family to get that money

 

Oh damn. I remember about a few years ago I was intrigued by them but was like hell no because they were like $300 or something.

I guess it's time to start applying for a casual job. Gotta save up a Mac and a tablet aha. Oh and new drum cymbals but that's unrelated to the topic at hand.

Also, how hard do you think it would be for a person who can't draw (my drawings look like absolute garbage) to start with 3D. I mean, I can't get two dimensions down how will I handle three? (Especially since most people use concept art :/)

Oh and that tablet is beautiful. I'm guessing that's one of the higher end ones?

 

It's always desirable to have basic drawing skills at least. Anatomy, color theory, perspective composition etc.

It makes your live so much easier as 3d artist if you have some fundamental knowledge in the classical art disciplines.

Here are some links you might be interested in to sharpen your 2d skills.

http://www.ctrlpaint.com/ (really good for beginners)

https://www.youtube.com/user/Sycra (lots of useful video tutorials)

https://www.youtube.com/user/idrawgirls (also lots of useful tutorials and drawing process videos)

http://www.artstation.com/ and http://drawcrowd.com/ are both good inspiration resources.

 

Myth time again ...

You know that you can use hotkeys in Max too? Just that you need one click where you need 4 in Blender. And that you can use a graphical menu for not so often used items without bigger hassle. No need to learn and to remember 300+ hotkeys. (regular 170 official or so, Plus the hotkeys from the official plugins that comes with Blender. Plus the features that needs badly a hotkey and which you have to set up by yourself. Like mark and clear seam, or switching between point, edge and face select. Which is black magic because there is no useful hotkey left, and the hotkey manager is pain in the ass. )

Blender is a good start because you can do everything needed with it. No need for other software really. Which is a good thing at the beginning. And when you are at a low budget then Blender is your best bet.

The bad thing is that it has a bad UI, and that it is not really good at something. That's where you start to use other software to get the job done. Sculptris for sculpting for example. Or 3D Coat for sculpting and texture painting. Or a better unwrap solution like Unfold3d. Or a better bake solution like Xnormal, or ...

 

Oh hey! Ive seen you on another thread before from like 2010 where there was an argument about using Sculptris for Unity and the guy had no clue about topology and what not.
Whats your stance on the topic now considering all the retopology tools available like Topogun?

 

Yo Tiles, I gotta stay I still think Blender is fast using hotkeys. There was no attempt at distinguishing it as better than 3ds max. The post was about Blender being functional and working well as a free alternative.

And you don't need to learn 300+ hotkeys. If you need that many hotkeys in your workflow I'm afraid that would be a very complicated and disorganized workflow. And you can easily set a sort of temporary hotkey using the spacebar command.

For changing selection modes you can make a hotkey like in this tutorial.
http://cgcookie.com/blender/2010/05/17/custom-hot-keys/

And the hotkey manager has a search menu which makes it pretty much a breeze. It's honestly not that much different than making hotkeys or making adjustments in other softare. Heck I remember having to do some Mel Script in Maya just to get some of the comforts of 3ds max when I switched to that back in version 8.5

The UI isn't the worst of the worst and I actually prefer how it uses mainly words in its buttons than maya's cramped image buttons.

Also I find Blender's UV Unwrap tools to be fantastic so I don't see why I would need to use something else, though I've honestly never heard of Unfold3d.

For baking though most professional artists I know use an external baker anyways save for maybe setting up color masks before taking it into Substance or dDo. Though traditional XNormal is quite common to use even for Maya and Max users. At the end of the day when you get to a professional level you tend to adjust and improve your worfklow as much as possible and generally if that means using more software that's not a bad thing if it means you cut down on time due to streamlined tools and interface and specialized software. FBX and OBJ formats are very stable for moving back and forth between software and lots of tools have plugins that allow 2 different pieces of software to talk to eachother making things faster as well.

Some examples of this are the GoZ plugins including the one someone made for Blender, the Xnormal plugin for Blender and so on and so forth.

For topology it's still just the edge results that matter. People use lots of different workflows to get to that end result. I use Blender with a mix of modifier stacks and vert extrusions. Others find Bmesh in Blender faster. Other prefer topogun or 3dcoat and others have plugins for max or maya or will use ZRemesher in Zbrush with well placed guide lines and clean it up a little in their 3d modeling software.

 

I don't know Topogun, sorry. And i also have stopped using Sculptris since quite a while. It is still better than Blender sculpting, better performance for example, but it is a bit limited. I use 3D Coat nowadays. It' s not ZBrush. But it is a good sculpt modeler, has great retopo, has paint abilites, and a good unwrapping. You could create a whole character without leaving it. And it has a great ratio between what you get and what you pay for.

But it is still slower than other tools because the graphical UI is too cluttered and not user friendly. And it is slower because lots of things requires lots more clicks than in other software.

I have a job for you. Try to find clear seams. That one is in edit mode under the unwrap options. So you can surely find it with your favourite search tool ...

I have another job for you. Try to find duplicated hotkeys.

Still think the hotkey manager is super cool?

Never heard of one of the most common commercial solutions? So how can you judge?

Follow active quads is a cool feature. The angle based unwrap algorithm is nice. And Smart UV project is okay. But the rest is far away from fantastic. The primitive mapping methods like cubic mapping are basically fubar. And the job is not done with marking the seams and clicking the unwrap button.


Don't get me wrong. I don't want to talk Blender bad. I hate this black and white thingie anyways.

Blender is great when you look at the price. Blender is also my number one recommendation when you are short of money. And even i use it regularly. But it has quite a few flaws. And the industry big boys are the industry big boys for good reason. So when your goal is the industry you better go with them.[/quote][/quote]

 

Blender is far from perfect so its not black and white. But you seem to go into every thread and make it sound much worse than it actually is. And in my entire time working on 3d art and discussing stuff with professionals on Polycount I have never heard anybody mention Unfold3d. I don't think many people have until it was recently integrated into Maya either and even them, I know more people that used Roadkill with Maya than they have with Unfold3d.

So I would say it's hardly one of the most common commercial solutions. Most people I know simply use the unwrap tools of their modeling app with possibly some small plugins to expand the tools. For clearing seams you can just hit 'a' to select all and then use the Clear Seam button, or if that takes up too much time you could make a hotkey for that as well but generally that isn't a command that you will be doing over and over in repetition anyways. And it didn't take me any time to find clear seams. I just searched for the term "Seams" chose the option available and checked "Clear" in the options in the left side. You can skip that by making a hotkey that ends with (clear=True) at the end of the python identifier.

As for duplicates you can filter the keybindings by key rather than by name and it will show you all combinations that include a key so you can check for overlapping.

Furthermore I don't find my workflow to be any slower with Blender than if I used other tools. If anything I'd consider it faster. Especially compared to maya since I can use modifiers for a less destructive workflow. This is especially true when I model coats or anything with thickness. If I decide later that I wan't the coat to be thicker, I can adjust the modifier easy enough whereas it would take a little more time or a less accurate method to work in Maya. It wouldn't be much different in Max though since it also uses a modifier set up.

Also keep in mind that any UI can be cluttered if you have it all visible at once. I keep my workspace clean by having different layouts based on the work that I'm doing which makes things much easier. It's the same way I worked on Maya or Max. By having a modeling layout, a UV Unwrap/Texturing Layout and then an animation layout, which are all easy to access from the top Info bar I can keep things managed in a clean way.

In all honesty, from my experience using Lightwave, Max, Maya, Modo, Truespace, Zbrush and a bunch of other software over the years I can honestly say that Blender isn't bad with it's interface and it's not that foreign.

If you want a foreign interface that can easily be cluttered if you don't know what you are doing, look at Zbrush. Yet once you adapt to using it, working with it becomes second nature and you can work quite fast with it. In that sense I would say that a professional 3d artist will know the fundamentals and should be able to adapt to any software in a pretty short period of time. So with that said yeah Blender is far from perfect but I feel like you are making a mountain out of a mole hill when it comes to the flaws you state that Blender has when compared to other software.

 

Nice try to trivialize the problems. But for me the problems in Blender stays a mountain, not a mole.

At least we are at the point where you agree that Blender is not perfect

 

I never said Blender was perfect. The other software isn't perfect either though but from my experience I found I enjoy using Blender the most and I haven't hit any real problems other than with viewport shader and vertex normal editing. If anything I feel like Blender is higher quality than it has any right to be and it's usefulness justifies it's use compared to alternatives that require payment for 3d modeling and animation software.

 

Agreed. No Software is perfect. And when Blender is the best solution for you then i don't have a problem with that. Everybody has to decide by himself if a tool fits his needs.

I have simply a different opinion here. Which is minimum as valid as yours. For example the slow and cumbersome workflow in polygon modeling is something that nags me in Blender. Especially because i know better solutions.

 

Thanks Beardbotnik for your first reply, pretty much summarised my thoughts. I was indeed simply stating Blender is a good free alternative, and never said its tools were better than 3DS Max's, just that I prefer it over Max.

And I'd also like to add I explicitly said "I'll be the first to admit Blender's flaws" - it is far from perfect, I know that, I'm 'at that point' as you put it, as are most half-competent Blender users .

Sorry, what? That's the point with Blender - I never understand why people bang on about this! You should rarely have to touch the Graphical UI! How can you argue about hotkeys and then argue that Blender is slower because it requires more clicks? Also, how the heck can you compare Blender's so called 'cluttered' interface with 3DS Max!? That's got way more buttons on screen than Blender, and they aren't intuitive icons for that matter.
(And I actually don't have a problem with memorising hotkeys, even if I can't reel them off one by one now, when I need to use the tool it comes back to my memory, so I must have at hundreds of hotkeys stored in my head, I find they're usually mapped appropriately as well; there are only a few which suffer from a poor, illogical choice of key).

For this point, I don't want to sound patronising, because I'm sure you're a lot more experienced than I am, but if you honestly think Blender's poly modelling is slow - you are using it differently to how it's intended to be used. Your previous words about 'requiring more clicks' highlights this perfectly - you shouldn't need to be clicking that much, and that's without remembering 300 hotkeys. In fact, you're probably trying to use it like you would 3Ds Max. You have to adopt a different mindset because it's so different from most software, whether you like that or not. You might say 'I don't want to adopt a different mindset from that of the industry standard' but that generally inhibits change and is a really dumb way of looking at things (sorry). The questions are 'Why does this software do it in this way?' and 'How does this compare with the industry standard?' - for better or for worse. The trouble is that now we're getting into personal preference wars! Hehe.

I'm not directing this at you, but in general, for anyone else reading this, don't just say that the industry standard way of doing things / using a tool is the only/best way - look at Softimage. Used to be the standard, now it's being dropped, and many would say for the better. What people think of as the best way of having a tool set up now is likely to be totally different in 10 years.

Please don't patronise me with 'You know Max has hotkeys', yes, funnily enough I do thanks. Sorry if that's blunt, but you're reply to my post was ranting about a lot of stuff I didn't even compare to Max. As BeardBotnik said, I didn't say it's better than Max - heck, I even said 'there must be a reason why they're the industry standard' - as you've just gone and said! I just prefer Blender's way of doing things. I'm not arguing Blender's hotkey system is the best (because that is solely a preference flame war), nor am I saying it's faster than Max, I just said its hotkey system makes it fast and I also think the defaults are very intuitive (like 's' for scale, 'g' for grab, and the corresponding letter for each axis). Me saying 'Blender is fast because everything is hotkey based' doesn't mean I'm arguing the opposite - that Max isn't. But just by looking at Max you can tell its UI was designed with buttons in mind (I think you'd struggle to argue with that). That's why they brought in the ribbon panel, but the button-based UI goes right back to its earliest versions. Blender is far more minimal when it comes to buttons, so you can tell it was designed with hotkeys as the main way of accessing things.

I have relatively little experience with Max, but I know that Maya's hotkeys are plain odd. Having no key for extrude (easily in my top-3 used tools), and then even once you set that up you have to move what you're extruding by clicking and dragging on the widget (switching from keyboard to mouse in that way is not intuitive or fast), perhaps I don't know how to set moving as a keyboard action, but it wasn't at all apparent. I will also add that Maya's hotkey editor is laughable.

If there actually is a hotkey for extrude, then it just goes to show how useless the editor is. When you want to know what hotkeys are set and finding them is so long-winded, it doesn't make for a pain-free experience. If I sound like I'm hating on Maya, which I'm sure it does, I really do apologise. I think it's a solid package, and I prefer it a lot over my first few experiences with Max, but there's a lot of teething problems one faces when moving to a different package. Mostly preferential.

How much does pressing 4 hotkeys impact you, compared to 4 buttons in your graphical UI? With blender, moving something along the x axis is done by just hitting 'g' and then 'x'. Now, unless you are the laziest person on the planet, pressing one key followed by another about 5cm away from it is hardly time consuming, is it? You can probably tap two fingers in succession within a quarter of a second. Again, I can't speak for Max's hotkey system because I'll probably say something incorrect, but with Maya it seems every vertex/face movement has to be made with a mouse click. (Again I could be totally wrong on that, please correct me if I am).

Also I want to ask - why do you think the smart UVs tool is handy!? It produces the most unhelpful and segmented results; I actually think thats one of Blender's most redundant UV tools! Haha, shows how much is subjective.

I'm afraid sounded rather rude when you said to Beard "Never heard of one of the most common commercial solutions? So how can you judge?". Leave it off a bit; just because someone hasn't heard of a specific package it doesn't reflect their skills and ability to judge a process - it sounds like Beard has used Autodesk products, so was just comparing Blender's tools with theirs, which is a perfectly fair comparison. Especially given they're the main focus of this discussion.

Also, unless I'm mis-understanding you, I find your comments on other packages for tasks (i.e. xNormal for normal baking etc) completely redundant. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but don't a lot Max users also use xNormal? I'm pretty sure that's actually a fairly-industry-standard solution now. Wouldn't you say it's better to use software for what it's good at, and use other packages along your pipeline because they provide better solutions for certain things? I've heard many people crit 3DsMax for poor baking tools, which is why they use programs like xNormal. You can't criticise blender for not having as good normal Baking tools as a dedicated normals baker, and having to use other software for doing different tasks, when 3Ds Max doesn't either and you probably still use xNormal in your 3DsMax workflow anyway!

Regarding Beard's comment:
"If anything I feel like Blender is higher quality than it has any right to be and it's usefulness justifies it's use compared to alternatives that require payment for 3d modeling and animation software."

I couldn't agree more. Considering the £3200 price tag attached to Maya it's incredibly unstable and buggy. I'm sure Max fares much better in this deparment, but it's criminal charging that for a program that has so many small bugs, or such serious minor flaws that prohibit really important tasks from being handled efficiently. For example, for an animation package, Maya has a silly way of handling blend shapes. You have to clone the object and make your changes to it, then clone it again, and then select them in order to apply the two shapes to the final clone. Not exactly a clean workflow for such a key animation feature.

Sorry for the essay, but I did feel I was being attacked for putting Blender over Max when I wasn't. I like using Blender, but I know it's flawed, I know Max is the more complete package, I know it's the standard, but Blender is a solid free alternative, which I know you know .


And pjde_, at least now you know about the license! Have fun with Sculptris, I think it's a very cool program and I'd almost always use it over Blender for tessellated sculpting. As already mentioned, you can pick up tablets quite cheap now as well

 

Hey Tweedie,

don't mind Tiles. He trolls this forum with his crusade against Blender for years. Any slight topic about Blender and you can be sure he will jump on it with his ramblings, decorated with hyperboles and ignorance.

Here is one of the last examples, where he also demonstrates his lack of actual knowledge about Blender. He fights against people who have been working with Autodesk software for years, people who work at Disney etc.

The funny part is, he self never worked with Maya, or Max. Nor had he ever really dealt with Blender's modeling tools (which shows the thread I've linked)

Conclusion is, you can wholeheartedly ignore his posts and save your creative energy for better tasks, than writing long replies to his crude views. He is totally stubborn and won't move a inch from his stance.

It's a shame that he didn't learn anything and now is about to derail the next thread of a newb who is seeking for advise.

 

Wow, thanks for that nipoco! I was close to writing arrogant in this thread, and after reading him say 'do you know any magic like spinning in a circle', I think that would have been a fair comment. I can't stand replies that are sarcastic to that level; it's rude and unnecessary. I thought he was a respectable member, but after him arguing with that many people (especially zombie gorilla given his experience) I think I've re-evaluated my opinions. I think your advice to save the energy would indeed be better used through fuelling my work! Haha!

Also, slightly unrelated, but thanks! I've read a lot of your posts around the forums and they're always very polite, helpful and informative (and very patient with the noobs). People like you and the temperament you have are very much appreciated

 

Am I the only one who, after following a basic beginners tutorial for Blender, finds the interface not that bad?

I really like the idea of selecting verticies, edges and faces separately as well. Layers could use some improvements mind you but it's still fine!

 

You're welcome Tweedie!
I just wanted to prevent you doing the same mistake as me and others.

@pjde
No you're not the only one. If you start with 3d and you have no prior experience in that field, you will find Blender's interface not that strange. In some regards, it could be better of course.
There are things that Blender handles better and other things not so well, compared to commercial DCC packages. Eventually it comes more down to each individual.

I'm mostly a 2d guy, mind you. So what do I know

 

I see the holy knights to defend Blender agains the bad world are all there now. Should've known it that you will never let this opportunity pass

And again you start bashing and accusing instead of answering arguments. Nothing worse than fanboys -.-

It's unfortunately the other way around. It's two or three people lilke Nipoco who trolls the forum with nonsense statements about Blender since years. When you would listen to them then you could trash Max, Maya and any other big boy. They are all worthless, Blender beats them all.

True. But that wasn't the point.

Maybe he knows Unfold 3D? Or Mari? Or Headus UV Layout. Or any other state of the art and common unwrapping solution? I wouldn't mind as long has he would know another common solution. I wouldn't mind when he would be able to compare.

But it is definitely NOT a good idea to say, hey, the Blender solution is the best without knowing other common solutions. And that's the problem of quite a few of you fanboys here. Blender simply does not play in the same league than the big boys.

Another thing is this statement here: Blender is superfast because it uses hotkeys.

First, this implies that in all other software you cannot use Hotkeys, which is plain wrong.
Second it implies that the workflow in Blender is in general faster than in any other software, hotkey or not. Which is again plain wrong.

Now guess why i answered to that.

Blender has a complicated, cluttered and slow to use graphical UI. Guess where the advice comes from to use hotkeys instead. So while you might be as fast with hotkeys ( when it wouldn't require more steps than in other software), you loose at the latest when you need to touch the graphical UI. Settings anybody?

The myth about the super fast Blender workflow is exactly that: a myth. And i will always chime in to correct this statement.

 

Lol whatever dude. Rock on!

 

I see now, even more, why people call you a troll, you've clearly either not read my reply, read it and want to troll, or read it and don't know what you're talking about. You've just regurgitated the same spiel again, even though I gave a very fair argument against your points, and proved that what you were accusing me of saying was untrue. You've shown total disregard for my reply, and basically admitted that you were fine with being rude to BeardBotnik.
You really do spur on the hatebale. Stop.

Ditch the word big boy for goodness sake. It's not pretending to be one anyway.
I know what you're going to say - but no, it's not. It's the 5minute user fanboys which pretend that.

---------Back to sanity:-------

@pjde_ Aha! He's stuck with it and found the love. I would say that Blender's UI is flawed, yup, but not because it's all that unintuitive (in most cases). I think the better word is inconsistent, because it really is. But once you've played around for 10 minutes it doesn't feel too bad. And nipoco's right; if it's your first time in 3D it might even feel quite logical, but some people just don't take to it which is fine.
I would also like to see a huge overhaul of the layers and an entirely new system implemented. Especially with paint. Although there is an add-on for this, I'd like it in trunk. But I think a Google Summer of Code project is currently working on an awesome paint improvement, looks sweet.

I'm sure you've come across them, but if you haven't, check out Blender Cookie. That might be what 'basics of blender' course you're following, but every one of their tutorials is great. I probably owe at least 70-90% of my knowledge of Blender to them, I started young and learned almost exclusively from them once I found them. Awesome tutorials, and really cool guys who run it. Some tutorials are unfortunately behind a payment barrier, but if you can ever scrounge together a month's subscription (and your broadband can handle it) log in and download looooads of the paid tutorials. They're fantastic.

 

I've come across them but never really checked them out :/ The majority of my knowledge comes from a tutorial on YouTube which follows this WikiBook called Blender Beginner to Pro (or something like that) but he updates it for the new (at the time) UI.

I'll be sure to check out Blender Cookie now

 

I choose number four here. I know pretty much what i talk about. I provided even proof as usual. Not that i ever have the hope that you folks even try to understand it.

And it is ONE person that calls me names. Not the masses. Well, you do it too here now. Makes two.

The strongest weapon at a forum is sometimes not to answer. Don' t feed the ... , ah, forget it.

Don't post walls of text full of twistings and accusations and i may answer you in the future.

There are even quite a few points where i agree with you. But i have better things to do than battling with stubborn fanboys here that twists every word and calls me names. So nope. No answer from me to that one.

When proving somebody to be wrong is rude, then yeah, i was super rude. But i would call it rude to call other members trolls for no reason.

For the records: It's not me who twists this thread here into a personal attack show at the moment. It's once more some Blender fanboys who are in trouble with truth.

 

Blender Cookie is quite good. Their instructors are skilled and the videos are easy to follow.
Not much focused on game specific topics, but you can learn a lot nonetheless.

For game related stuff, you can look at sites like polycount.com They have a really useful wiki with tons of topics. Most of these can be easily adapted to Blender.

You can't go wrong with Blender these days. Even more and more professionals recognizing it as valuable addition, or replacement.
Once you are behind the steep learning curve it gets a walk in the park with a rewarding fast workflow. It has it's itchy bits here and there. But no real roadblocks, that would hinder you to make awesome stuff.
I use Blender professionally among some commercial 3d apps and it serves me very well.

If you still want to go the commercial dcc route, there is also Modo, which has highly praised modeling tools and also got lots of awesome updates lately.

 

Tiles I give up with you. Perhaps I'll take your advice of not to reply. I only posted a wall of text because you made about 3 posts, so I needed to answer all your points.
Nobody's calling you names, other than a troll. You're the one repeatedly calling us fanboys, holy white knights etc. That contradicts your statement that you're not making personal attacks, which effectively brands you as a troll.

I am not calling you names. I call you a troll, for reasons I've just explained, and have said that I thought you were rude and arrogant. These are not names. It is you that has called me a fanboy and a white knight. Grow up.

The fact you said my wall of text has twistings of the truth is further evidence that you either didn't read it or are just trolling. I was perfectly straight up about blender's many issues.

Argh! I'm breaking my rule of not replying but you do infuriate me. It takes as much energy to refrain as it does to reply, I definitely need to get better at this.

----

Ah, yeah I probably should have mentioned that. Blender cookie is mostly unrelated to anything game based. But very good for learning blender in general. It has one course on a low-poly game asset, which you might find useful, but personally I didn't think it was the best.

Oo I didn't know Polycount has wikis etc, I shall have to check that out. I thought it was mainly just a showcase forum.

Nipoco's pretty much summed up the way you should look at blender, can't really add to that.

I also really want to give modo a try, I keep hearing a LOT of people praising it, so it sounds interesting. Also nice to see a much less expensive commercial alternative to Autodesk that's still very competent.


And actually, does anyone have any good tutorials for workflows etc with Maya? I need to learn it for University, if I want to come close to getting a place, and I won't be happy until I'm as efficient with it and comfortable with it as I am with Blender. Or at least close. I was struggling to find any tutorials on what sort of workflow you should adopt, because currently I find the poly modelling very slow. I suppose just working with it is the best solution.

 

Here you go

Regarding Maya resources...
There are lots of tutorials on YT. But lots of them are not really good, (even Autodesk's own ones)
There is also 3dtotal.com It has some good ones that are free. Some are a bit dated tho.

The really good ones are on commercial sites like Eat3D, Digtaltutors, Thegnomonworkshop etc.

 

Thanks for that! I can't believe I missed it, feeling dumb.

Yeah that's what I found, I wasn't particularly impressed with many, including the official, tutorials I came across. I'll check out 3dTotal for some more, and maybe I'll have to start saving for a paid tutorial! Will keep at it though. Thanks again!

EDIT: The polycount wiki is very good, even for 2D digital art it seems. There's a wealth of topics and all look very informative and well written.

 

Tiles I feel like one large miscommunication is the idea that for generally modeling purposes, when people defense Blender they aren't saying that it does things faster or better than other software all the time. Rather, people are just saying that it gets the job done on an equal level to other software.

At that point it largely comes down to personal preference and workflow, which I think is how we sort of ended the discussion yesterday. I was sort of hoping we could have ended it at that anyways since I feel like the topic has really de-railed from the original topic which was just about your 3d modeling workflow.

So with that I'd just like to re-ask people including Tiles, tweedie and nipoco:

What is your workflow for 3d? and maybe to push it further...

is there any software you are looking into or any parts of your workflow that you think you could improve?

 

I'm also fairly new to the world of 3d modeling. I started learning it because my prior experience with the Source Engine is of no use in Unity. In Source you had a dedicated mapping tool (Hammer), while Unity has no such thing.

Even though I'm new I can tell you at least one thing already:
There is not a single, perfect tool.
Some tools just handle some tasks way better than others.

Take for example SketchUp.
You wouldn't want to do detail work in it, but for strutures and basic geometry the workflow is amazing. Creating houses, interiors and simple props like doors is incredibly comfortable.


I am in charge of creating the maps for our project and this is my entire workflow from start to finish:

SketchUp:​

• Create basic geometry using multiple layers:
  • "Geom" is for the geometry of the model (what the player will see later)
  • "Col_Fast" is for basic colliders like boxes*
  • "Col_Slow" is for mesh colliders *
• Export to Blender

Blender:​

• Fix the apparent export (or import) problem that causes a lot of double vertices using this script (select all, then paste it in the python console and hit enter)
• Do the UV mapping for the visible geometry
• If necessary: Create proper parenting
  • Create empty objects that contain others and parent them to each other to allow bug-free animations**
• Export to Unity (Geometry & Fast colliders go together, slow colliders are exported seperately)

Unity:​

• Import the Geometry and Fast colliders with the correct settings (scale, don't generate colliders, etc.)
• Create an empty "World" GameObject
  • Inside, place the imported model at 0, 0, 0
  • Select all and run this script, which automatically turns all the stuff from the initial "Col_Fast" layer into highly efficient colliders
• Import the slow colliders with the correct settings (this time have "generate colliders" checked)
• Place it in the "World" GameObject at 0, 0, 0
  • Make sure it has no mesh renderers
• Do the texturing

* There's various kinds of colliders. The complex mesh colliders are painfully slow, but allow, well, complex geometry. The box-, sphere- and capsule-colliders are simple, but very efficient. I use a special script that automatically generates the required colliders out of the meshes.
** Basically I create a hierarchy. I just worked on the doors of my game and did the animations. You need to parent them correctly to each other to allow the door handle to be animated independently of the rest of the door, but not vice versa.

I am currently in the process of optimizing this workflow.
If any of the more experienced Unity-Gurus thinks something could be done better, any help would be appreciated.

 

I'm afraid I did add to the derailing, by fuelling the discussion. But I was hoping to leave that as my last response to it all, so at least these recent posts add a bit of finality.

------------------------------------------------------------------

I pretty much summarised my workflow in my first post. Currently, it goes:

• Concept sculpt in Sculptris
  
• Import into Blender to do a very rough bit of retopo
  
• Sculpt a proper High poly in Blender (Subdivided surface rather than dynamic tessellation)
• Retopo properly in Blender to form the final Low poly mesh
  
• Unwrap in Blender
• Bake tangent/object space normals and cavity maps in xNormal.
• Bake AO in Blender
• Texture in Photoshop
  
• Export to Unity (or soon to be UE4 - Blasphemous I know)

I don't think I would have such a Blender-centric workflow if I could afford commercial licenses for software, but I like to retain the option to sell something (I've only sold one model). I like to have that available to me, just in case the model turns out well. Obviously I don't have this option with student-licensing.

However, for Uni I'm going to have to adopt Maya and Zbrush as my primary tools, so it'll probably go:

• Rough Sculpt in Zbrush
• Use ZRemesher to produce a model with reasonably good topology for a high poly sculpt
• Sculpt the proper High poly in ZBrush
• Import into Maya and create low poly through retopo
• Unwrap in Maya
• Bake maps in xNormal.
• Texture in Photoshop.

At least with that I won't have to switch between packages too much. Hopefully it will work quite well.


I started using Sculptris for sculpting a while ago, which is what I would consider one of my most recent optimisations. It's performance is overwhelming in comparison to Blender's, so it just made sense. That being said, I have to do my highpoly sculpting in Blender because my 'OCD' flares up at the thought of baking normal maps from a model made solely of triangles ! I'm sure it makes little or no difference, but I can't bare the thought, I just think 'artefacts galore'. Once you tweak Blender's settings around though, its performance does improve by quite a large amount.

For anyone wanting to know more about that - to seriously increase Blender's viewport performance, you can make these changes to your User Preferences / Display options:

• Turn off 'Outline Selected' in the side panel. Everybody mentions it, but it's worth doing so. If you leave it on, Blender has to draw the mesh a second time to create the outline behind the model.
  
• Turn off 'Double sided normals' in the Mesh's data. This is mainly an improvement for sculpting, as it means it doesn't have to calculate brush influence for faces pointing away from you, which you probably don't want anyway.
• Most importantly of all - enable 'VBOs' in the System tab of your User preferences. This is the magic tickbox for me. It probably doubles or triples my viewport performance for very heavy meshes. Unfortunately, Blender tries to use a much older OpenGL version because VBOs aren't supported on all cards. Most modern cards do though, so you should probably go ahead and turn it on.

That's by no means a complete list, but they're the biggest things I can think about off the top of my head.

In terms of other optimisations, for smaller assets I think I will now use dDo for texturing. I like to hand texture more major models, as it's a rewarding process, but for less important items it definitely pays off to have them textured in a matter of minutes using dDo. Awesome tool, that has of course now been released for free!

If I could afford it, I would be wanting to buy TopoGun or 3DCoat. Heck, if I could afford it I would go straight ahead and get ZBrush. I'd love that kind of sculpting capability. But Topogun would make the long (but very fun) process of retopo less stressful and a lot, lot quicker. I have to say I find retopo an enjoyable process though.

I'd also check out more UV unwrapping software, because that part of my workflow might benefit from a speed boost (though I think it's reasonably quick currently). It's always good to see what's out there and what does the job better.


----A Question I began thinking about whilst writing----

Can anyone clear up the terms on licenses (Autodesk's specifically) for what defines 'Commercial'? E.g. - Can I have a Youtube video showcasing a model made in Maya Student edition, that has adverts on it? Could someone have a website with work made in Maya Student Edition presented with a Donate button below it, or would this be taken as using Maya for a commercial purpose? I'd find the latter of the two particularly ridiculous if it was true.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

@TheSniperFan I wouldn't use Sketchup for anything more than Mockups, personally. It is indeed fantastic for quick architectural stuff, but the amount of triangles and verts it creates is ridiculous (anything with a curve for example). I only used it for a little while, and things may have changed, but it always made far too complicated a mesh for my purposes.

You sound like you know your way around it well though, so you probably have this sussed and know how to avoid it
Your layer setup for Sketchup looks like it'd make things much tidier. Things like this is why I'd love to see an overhaul of Blender's layers system.

 

Commercial would be anything that makes money I think. I think I recall the educational version of the software leaving watermarks on all renders, there are ways around it though I don't think it would be legal.

I think there may have been limits on the file types you could save as for Maya as well. Not totally sure with the newer versions.

Adobe allowed for commercial use with the educational license but Autodesk's is a bit more stingy I think.

Also is there a reason you do AO bakes in Blender rather than Xnormal? I always found that the anti-aliased baked of AO using a cage were much better results than the AO from Blender. I also like to use the normal map to make a cavity map in Xnormal to make some of the details pop out more in my textures.

Ddo looks good if you have Photoshop. For me though I mainly use Krita and FireAlpaca so I think it's cheaper for me to go with Substance Painter/Designer for the newer fancy stuff. Though I'm currently without a graphics card so I'll wait on that investment.

I use the Blender Paint Branch for hand painted textures though. You can see a good video of that workflow here.

Something else I like to use Blender for is baking out a linear gradient for my characters to make them pop just a bit more, works especially well for characters viewed from top down.



It's a subtle effect but this is an example of a character that uses the gradient map, the top the model is a tad brighter than the bottom.

 

That's what I'm slightly unsure about, because you wouldn't be making money directly from the work produced with the software. Better to err on the side of caution though, I suppose! I bought an extended student license of the Autodesk Creative suite from Studica when it was on sale, which doesn't apply watermarks or limit resolution. Though I don't know whether saving /exporting is affected.

Adobe allow for it on commercial!? I always thought they were just as stingy! Argh! That means I can save buckets of money then. Thanks for saying that, I will have to read more into their T&Cs!

I do cavity bakes in xNormal, but I don't generate them from the normal map. I'll sound silly now, but I read a very good set of reasons why this isn't the best idea, and it's better to have to wait for it to calculate the cavity properly from the two models. I seem to remember one reason was because of inaccurate calculations, but I forget the rest. One which I'm thinking about now though, is that if you're calculating a cavity from a normal map, all that detail is being displayed anyway. This means you'll either see a relatively small amount of difference, or it might even conflict with your lighting. I think by calculating cavities from the low/high poly you capture either more detail, or there is less potential for some form of artefact or problem arising. I'm sure this sounds like I'm making it up haha, but if I come across the reasons why I don't do it, I'll be sure to post them here. Like I said, I read through a very well-made argument about it, as I used to save time by making them from Normal maps too. Absolutely fine for smaller assets though I think.

The reason I bake my main AO in Blender is simply because it tends to produce a much broader and (to me) more aesthetically pleasing result. I do use xNormal for AO on occasion, but I find it doesn't differ much from the cavity. This is probably because I haven't had the time to fiddle with the settings enough yet, but Blender produces much heavier and larger areas of shadow, which is useful to complement the cavity. That's just what I've found works best for me. If you're happy with your AO workflow, don't consider my points as reasons to change, because Blender does unfortunately add in a fair amount of grain to AO even with higher samples. I don't have a technical reason for doing it, so if yours works for you, there would be no reason to change.

Krita is something I originally wanted to look into some more, actually. Back when I could only afford an exclusively open-source workflow, I hated using GIMP, and Krita was something I came across, but never got round to using.
Substance looks awesome, and definitely a worthy investment. It looks equally (if not more) capable than dDo. It's another program I'd love to give a go, but I've gotta watch those pennies! The trouble with getting trials for things is I get hooked and become obsessed with buying that piece of kit, so I try to avoid it to being with!

Ah, that was the branch I was talking about for painting! It looks fantastic, I'm very excited for it. Could you go over baking linear gradients with Blender? I know people use the technique, but didn't realise Blender had a way of doing it. Is it a lighting based bake?

Ouch, did the card break on you then? My condolences to you at this painful time then, I can't imagine what that'd do to one's workflow!

 

The way I do it has by doing a UV projection of my model from the front in ortographic and then applying a gradient. I tried using a Color Blender shader but could never get it to work. But yeah, basically I duplicate my model UV project from view from the front in orthographic and apply the gradient as a texture with a flat shade shader and then bake that as a full render to the original model with the correct UVs.

For the Cavity I make it from the normal because it looks very different. A cavity map baked from a high poly to a low poly looks a lot like an AO map. But a Cavity from a normal map looks more grey and with highlights at the edges. Since it's converted from the normal map it also takes an extremely short amount of time to get. But compared to a baked cavity map it seems like an entirely different map and the normal to cavity is the one that suits the needs for making details pop.

Honestly if you can get dDo I see no reason to get Substance unless you want all the prodecural stuff. I just know I wont go with dDO because it requires Photoshop.

Krita is nice. I never used it much before because it never had a stable Windows release until it's recent 2.8 launch.

And my graphics card didn't die. It's just that I built a new computer and so far haven't had the budget to get the graphics card I want yet. I have an older one but it's a geforce 9600 GT so I feel like it would be a bit of a waste of time since I'll be replacing it with my next paycheck.

 

My workflow depends pretty much on the task.

For hand painted low-poly work, I use Photoshop to create some model sheets (Front, side, back). Then I import that into Blender with Image empties and model after that.
I usually start with a plane and delete all vertices in edit mode. With control+click I pull out some vertices, starting with the eyes, to get the topology right. Then a lot extrusion, loops and all that stuff until I'm done.
After that, UV unwrapping and then texturing in either Zbrush, or 3Dcoat.

Interesting approach to bake the gradients in Blender Beardbotnik. I use them too, really subtle. But I use the gradient tool of 3DCoat usually. Or make that in Photoshop CS6.
It's a nifty little trick, to give your character more depth.

When I'm done, usually something like this and this is the result.

For more detailed models, I usually start with some concepts as reference. Based on them I start sculpting in Zbrush. I prefer to use a basemesh with even quads as a starting point, rather than Zspheres, or one of Zbrush's base meshes.
It's just personal preference, because I feel to have a better control about the end result this way. The basemesh is done in Blender with the Skin modifier and hand tweaking the final mesh, once the modifier is applied.
When I'm done with sculpting, I retopo the sculpt with Zremesher. In some rare occasions I use 3Dcoat for retopo.
For the textures I use a mix of Photoshop, Zbrush's Polypainting and 3DCoat. dDO or nNDo are not in my toolshelf simply because I'm on a Mac right now. And they're Windows only.
Baking is done through Maya, Topogun, or Blender (for simple bakes). Hopefully Cycles baking is good enough in the future, to use that exclusively.

Rigging and animation is done in Blender, if it's a character.

That's pretty much it, I think.
There is always stuff that can be improved. I'm sure my workflow is far from being optimal. My excuse is, that I'm still mainly a 2d artist.
Regarding Software. Well I'd prefer to do all in Blender. But that isn't really working. The sculpting and painting in Blender feels still to clunky to me. I mean, it is more advanced what Maya, or Max offers. But not as good as dedicated painting, or sculpting apps.

 

When you select a tool you can set certain parameters in the lower right corner. The length of a line, the dimensions of a rectangle or the number of sides of an arc or a circle.
By default SketchUp creates your circles with 24 sides which can be overkill depending on what you do. Then you just select the circle tool, hit "<12>, <Enter>" and your circle will only have half the sides.
So it's not like it's uncontrollable.

Other than that there's only the issue with the double/triple/... verts that either happens upon exporting from SketchUp or importing in Blender. The script from before fixes it automatically though.

Also, the layers in SketchUp are a mess.
The thing is that the geometry doesn't inherit the layer from its parent. Say a bunch of cubes are in the layer "Bananalayer" and you want to move them to the "Fresh Prince" layer, you'd have to select all the cubes and set the layer to "Fresh Prince". Now the S***ty part starts. Afterwards you have to doubleclick a cube (to edit its group) and select all the edges/faces and then set the layer to "Fresh Prince". You have to do this for each and every single object. Oh, you have nested groups? I hope you haven't planned on doing anything today.
So you better have your layers figured out from the start...

If I had the power to change one thing in SketchUp, I'd add a hierarchical layer system.

 

@Beardbotnik Thanks for the info! I wasn't sure if you'd be using a shader with a colour ramp as the diffuse input, I'll have to give that a play and see if I can get it to work. Still, your way can't be much slower, still relatively quick!

Yeah that'd what I always find - my cavity and AO look very similar from xNormal. I use the cavity because my computer seems to bake that a lot quicker than the full AO. It is indeed very fast to generate one from a normal map, but like I said, if I were to do that and let xNormal bake the AO, it takes forever to calculate it. So instead, i bake the cavity which is fairly fast, and then just use Blender for a broader AO.

That's what I keep telling myself, and dDo isn't costing me anything (unless you include PS, but I use that for separate tasks too). The procedural stuff looks handy, but I should just be happy with dDo!

Oh that's good to hear! Yeah, not much point in switching them out if it won't give you much of a boost anyway.

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@TheSniperFan Aha! Thank you, if I ever use Sketchup for anything again I'll be sure to tweak those parameters. Shows my ignorance, apologies

Wow, that is ridiculous. What advantages are there for having sub-mesh items on a different layer? Can you for example have an edge, where the two endpoint verts are on one layer, but the actual edge is on a different one? It does sound like a very convoluted system. I honestly can't see why you'd design it like that. Hierarchical is probably the best way it could go.

 

It looks great!