I’ve been investigating 3D modelling software. I’ve used Blender, Cinema 4D, and I’ve had a brief look at both Art of Illusion and Maya. I thought I’d give a summary of my thoughts on them. Be warned, I am a 3D modelling noob, don’t take offence to any negative comments, these are just my first impressions.
Blender is free and open source. It has a moderately steep learning curve. After a couple of tutorials and some playing I got the hang of it. If you download it and try to use it out of the box I expect that you won’t have much luck, especially if you’ve never used 3D software before, but if you do some short tutorials and get a handle on the hot keys and windows I think you can pick it up quickly. There are still a lot of features and buttons that I have no idea about, but I’m gradually learning.
It seems to be very powerful. It has a lot of features that expensive software has, perhaps all of the functions that the more expensive software has. The uder interface isn’t as pretty as some other software though.
There are plenty of resources that you can download to help you model, including meshes (already moulded shapes) to work with, and materials, for example if you don’t know how much reflection to give something to make it shiny you can get a ready made material and work from that.
Art of Illusion is another free modelling program. It uses slightly different methods to Blender, for example rather than giving you a cube of standard dimension when you add a cube, you actually drag out where you want the cube to go and how big it will be. I actually prefer getting meshes of set dimensions because I know they’re even, then I can bend them to my will. Art of Illusion doesn’t seem to have a grid reference to work from, I found it more difficult to line things up the way I wanted to. It does have nice handles like other programs for resizing and dragging objects around. It has a more friendly appearing interface than blender, with buttons on the side and easy to use preferences, but compared to cocoa based software its a bit ugly. It’s written in Java, so I’m not surprised that I didn’t love the user interface, I usually don’t like the look of java software. It seemed this program would be good for simple jobs or for beginners getting the hang of modelling in “3D space”. I don’t think it’s for me though.
Cinema 4D is sweet. In functionality I found it to be pretty similar to Blender, but the interface is much more pleasant. I was able to quickly figure out how to do things that I still don’t know that I can do in Blender. I think this software is good for noobs and pros. The demo version is nice to play with, but don’t invest too much time in it because you can’t save your projects until you buy a version. The student price for the core version is $100-200. You can look up the price that applies to you. I think it’s an amount that I’d be willing to pay, I was fairly impressed with the simplicity, ease of use and prettiness of this program.
Maya looks to be nice to use. From what I could tell it has the drag your object size out, method of adding objects. It has a nice user interface and it’s powerful. I believe it was used for things like The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, War of the Worlds, The Da Vinci Code and King Kong. I was impressed that they have a free full version. They call it the Personal Learning Edition (PLE), you can use it and render your productions and save your projects, you just can’t use them commercially until you pay for a commercial version – $6000! So if you never want to sell any of your renders then definitely play with Maya (PLE), but if you think you might want to make a little money someday then perhaps it’s beter to learn a cheaper program. However, having looked at these programs it’s obvious there are similarities between all 3D modelling software and using any of them will help your skills.
For now I’m sticking with Blender. Yesterday I learnt to make grass. 🙂
