Modeling and what program?

nickybakes

You should've played Rumbleverse
aa
Jul 28, 2015
911
1,739
Blender is free, I've used it but I've never really tried to get into modeling. Gonna try someday, as it seems to be something good to learn.
 

dryerlint

L5: Dapper Member
Mar 28, 2016
204
190
Do you guys know if SketchUp would work?

(Yes, I know SketchUp is Satan's own modeling program... but come on, it's really easy to use!)
 

YM

LVL100 YM
aa
Dec 5, 2007
7,135
6,056
For models:

How serious are you?

Serious -> 3DS Max / Maya
Not serious -> Blender
Literally The Joker -> Sketchup

What's your budget?
Zero -> Blender / education versions of 3DS Max or Maya (free for students, unemployed and morally flexable people)
Small -> see above
Modest -> see above
Huge -> 3DS Max or Maya

Do you want to sell or ever earn any kind of money from what you make?
Yes -> Blender / 3DS Max / Maya
No -> 3DS Max/ Maya education license (Important note: Blender does not fall into this category)


For textures:

How serious are you?
Serious -> Photoshop
Not serious -> GIMP / Paint.net

What's your budget?
Zero -> GIMP / Paint.net
Small -> see above
Modest -> Older versions of Photoshop (good luck finding them)
Huge -> Photoshop

Do you want to sell or ever earn any kind of money from what you make?
Yes -> Photoshop / GIMP / Paint.net
No -> GIMP / Paint.net / Student licenses of Photoshop
 

Hyperion

L16: Grid Member
aa
Jun 8, 2015
840
659
I recommend blender, but when I tried it, it was really hard.
It probably feels hard because most of the commands are behind shortcut keys and it doesn't really tell you what is where
 

fubarFX

The "raw" in "nodraw"
aa
Jun 1, 2009
1,720
1,978
alternatives that come to mind would be lightwave and cinema4d. Having used both, they are good tools in their own right (definitely not as buggy as 3ds max) but you'll get very minimal source engine support, you'll be on your own on for many things. lightwave is 'reasonably' priced compared to others

I'd almost be interested in making an SMD plugin for either of those to force myself to learn models as data structures
 
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MaccyF

Notoriously Unreliable
aa
Mar 27, 2015
914
1,544
What's your budget?
Zero -> GIMP / Paint.net
Small -> see above
Modest -> Older versions of Photoshop (good luck finding them)
Huge -> Photoshop

you can also download photoshop CS2 for free from Adobe's website, I'm not going to post a link because officially only people who owned CS2 are supposed to use it, but anyone can in practice.
 

Freyja

aa
Jul 31, 2009
2,994
5,813
Photoshop is actually pretty cheap if you get the creative cloud "Photography" package, which includes photoshop and some other less useful programs. It's about $12 a month here for the NON education version, which is very affordable for me.
 

YM

LVL100 YM
aa
Dec 5, 2007
7,135
6,056
I object to that, Blender is very serious.
lol k

You keep telling yourself that if you want to.

Very few game studios use blender because historically blender has been a UI nightmare. Things may have changed but the games industry won't have changed from tools they know unless a new tool does something better, which blender doesn't.


This is great, thank you! As a corrolary question to this, how similar are blender, Max, and Maya? If i'm not sure how serious I want to be and I start with blender, will I have to learn everything again if I upgrade to 3ds max?
I started with blender back in the day and swapped to max. I found max hard to learn after blender but once I got to grips with it I found it waaaaaaaaaaaaay better to actually use. Max and Maya are pretty dang different, I have opened maya a few times and holy moly I have no idea what to even begin to do. I'm sure Maya users feel similarly about Max.
 

hutty

aa
Mar 30, 2014
538
444
Never used max before, but I have used Maya2016 and OOOH BOY was that an adventure.

That thing crashed constantly, took time think about simple things like opening a dropdown menu, and had a workflow so inefficient it was a painful drag to use. It was also broken as hell, there was one case where a specific tool stopped working until I restarted the program.

How anyone would pay thousands of dollars for that is beyond me.

Blender isn't seeing much professional use yet mostly due to its unfamiliarity with experienced max and maya users and incompatibility with old 3rd party plugins (like the ones used for cinematic fluid physics)

That and blender's ui still needs work, even though its getting better.
 

Pocket

Half a Lambert is better than one.
aa
Nov 14, 2009
4,694
2,579
The good thing about 3DS Max is that you can use Wall Worm with it, which is a very robust and easy to learn Source importer/exporter. Even before I had learned how to actually model in 3DS Max, I was able to use Wall Worm's VMF importer and SMD exporter as a makeshift replacement for Propper.