Wings anyone?

I was thinking about what inexpensive / free 3D modeling tools there might be for the Mac and then it dawned on me: Wings3D ( http://www.wings3d.com/ ). If you've never used it, it's a pretty decent polygonal modeler and was my mainstay modeling app until I discovered Silo. It's free, exports .FBX files and might be the perfect combination to use with that "DIM Inspire" animation tool I haven't tried yet.

At any rate, a new version was released recently (x.35) and a MacIntel binary is available (check the Wings forums).

 

I really don't like wings3D. Seemed too clunky to me. Heh, mind you, I am not a 3D artist either.

-Jeremy

 

I've never used it on a Mac (yet) so I'm not sure how it will "feel" on that platform. But I have used it under Windows and Linux. What I liked about it was the clean, uncluttered screen, all commands are accessed through a right-mouse click and it seemed pretty fast on all the machines I tried it on. Not sure how it will work with that -funky- 4 button thingy Apple calls a mouse (sorry, but it will take some getting used to for me). The only things I didn't like about it was that it sometimes was a bit flakey, the windowing system baffled me as did their UV system. The last two I probably would have figured out had I not switched to Silo. BTW, it doesn't look like Nevercenter will be creating a UB version of Silo any time soon...

 

I bet it'd work just the same as on those other platforms.

Just to note, you can plug about any USB mouse (or whatever) into the Mac when you get it and it should work. No need to stick to Apple's crummy mice. I like Microsoft's basic 3 button optical scroll wheel mouse, personally.

There are enough first time Mac users getting a Mac for Unity that I think it warrants a page on the wiki for getting started.

Like useful Mac game dev apps, etc.

Cheers,
-Jon

 

Yeah, I'd recommend not bothering to "get used to" any Apple mice, and just use whatever you want. (Logitech MX518 here, and I have the near thumb button mapped as the third button, because I always find the scroll wheel too annoying to use as a button, and 3D stuff uses the third button a lot).

I don't like Wings3D either, and find Blender to be far more comfortable and powerful (and slightly more Mac-like, even though it's exactly the same on Linux and presumably Windows). However, I've heard a number of people express a preference for Wings, so I wouldn't want to discourage anyone from playing around with it. Can't beat free!

--Eric

 

I'm surprised to learn so many folks have dumped the "mouse with a nipple". Nice to know I'm not the only one who didn't like it.

Regarding Wings, just thought I'd throw it out there to the budget minded Unity folks. What makes it a viable option is it's .FBX export, and I'm guessing it would work OK with that Dim animation thing.

Going OT for a moment, FYI, the guy who's been working on the Collada exporter for Blender just go SOC (Summer Of Code) funding for his project and is working on the animation part of the exporter. Good news for folks who use Blender with Unity.

 

That's great news! I would still rather do all of my skinning and skeletal animation in Blender. (There's no other way to say it; dim3 Inspire is tough to use for character animation--unless I'm missing something that the lack of documentation is hiding from me.) Yesterday in my desperation I downloaded the .fbx converter from Autodesk, only to discover that it can't convert any of Blender's animation-preserving files to .fbx :cry:

Today in my desperation I was looking into Maya and Motionbuilder and wondering how many meals I would have to skip in order to purchase one of them.

 

Here's a link to the developer's website so you can watch his progress and download the script as soon as it becomes available:

http://colladablender.illusoft.com/