[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Simple modeller



Steve Baker wrote:
> Jan Ekholm wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, 11 Oct 2002, Steve Baker wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Jan Ekholm wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> What suggestions for *simple* modellers do you guys and girls have?
>>>
>>>
>>> AC3D - very simple, easy to use. Not OpenSource, costs $40.
>>>
>>> Blender - 'quirky' user interfact, some people *love* it, others
>>>          (me included) find it to be so horrible as to be quite
>>>          literally unusable.  This has *just* become OpenSource
>>>          freeware.  Quite complex.
>>
>>
>>
>> Yeah, Blender could be ok, if the UI designers hadn't been too high on
>> caffeine or something. :) Once you spend a few weeks with it I think
>> you'll appreciate Blender's interface, but during my first hours with 
>> it I
>> didn't even find the "File" menu. 
> 
> 
> I can't stand using it enough to stay with it for a few weeks - and I have
> run through the tutorials and read the manuals.
> 

Older versions of blender (<2.0 IIRC) didn't even have a "File" menu in 
the normal sense ;).

Blender needs *much* getting used to. It is in no way intuitive and easy 
to learn. But for a professional who has climbed this barrier this 
interface is fast, fast, fast! This does not mean that I'm in favour of 
blender - in no way!

Having spent half a year bothering with exporting scenes and trying to 
get things like texturing right I must say that blender is in some ways 
no more than a hack. The official sources are pretty clean except for 
two areas with which I had to deal: file saving/loading (autogenerated 
code getting compiled in to blender here!) and python interface (3 
different, halfway finished implemenations being compiled into blender 
simultaneously!) But enough OT for now.

>> But if you do think an idiot like me could actually learn AC3D I'll give
>> it a chance. The 40$ is no problem, good software is allowed to cost
>> money.
> 
> 
> There is a 'playable demo' too - it does everything (including saving
> files) - the only problem is that none of the formats you can load models
> from are available for saving them in.
> 
> I couldn't imagine a simpler interface for just putting polygons in - 
> although
> sometimes aligning textures just the way you want can be a bit ugly.  There
> is a new beta version out that allegedly goes some way to addressing 
> that - I
> havn't played with that much yet.
> 
> If your alternative is to start writing something from scratch, then it's
> certainly worth the $40 + a couple of hours effort to give AC3D a chance.
> 
> Writing even the simplest modeller from scratch would probably take a 
> thousand
> hours.  Pretty Poly came close - but it's a lot of work for an OpenSource
> team - which is why there aren't any really good OpenSource modellers 
> yet (IMHO).
> 

Let me point out another modeller that comes pretty close to what you 
mention here - except that it is open source ;):

<shamelessPlug>
Well... I revived development on Moonlight 3D last year (rather by 
accident, but that's a different story). Some of you might maybe recall 
that this modeller was widely spread on linux before blender spread. But 
unlike blender being freeware, Moonlight started as open source and 
stayed open source for a long time (only the last one or two releases of 
the original developers were closed-sourced).

We have made a new release about a week ago which got cleaned up a bit 
and should compile on modern systems (the old code from 1999 or 2000 
suffered from bitrod already). I have to admit that texture mapping 
hasn't made it into this release, but our goal for the next release is 
this feature.

ML has powerful NURBS and mesh editing functions and - as a big benefit 
- is rather simple to use (now that the interface is drawn correctly 
again ;) and has shown to be quite stable.

Just visit

http://www.moonlight3d.com

and give it a try!

And besides, we are grateful for any contribution to this project!

</shamelessPlug>

> ----------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------------
> Mail : <sjbaker1@airmail.net>   WorkMail: <sjbaker@link.com>
> URLs : http://www.sjbaker.org
>        http://plib.sf.net http://tuxaqfh.sf.net http://tuxkart.sf.net
>        http://prettypoly.sf.net http://freeglut.sf.net
>        http://toobular.sf.net   http://lodestone.sf.net
> 
> 
> 

PS: There are always some ML team members hanging around in IRC that you 
can talk to!