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Underground > Art, Fashion & Design >

3D illustration software

00:07 / 05.02.05

I do a bit of packaging design and a few years ago got into producing 3D Illos for the purpose. The client loves them and I love doing them so it's a win/win thing, except they can take way too long to do when I've got a lot of other jobs on so I'd like something faster and easier for certain tasks.

I've been using Lightwave Modeler 7.5 for producing the nuts and bolts bits (literally sometimes, but often it's furniture, oddly shaped body parts or 3D bits of logo or type) and Poser for background people or just hands, arms and feet for more cartoony charcters, and then I import everything into Bryce where I build houses and landscapes and assemble all the imported bits with textures and lighting.

Yesterday I was given a new job to design packaging for the various turnbuckles, eye bolts, snap hooks and d-shackes it takes to erect garden shade sails and I want to render them all in 3D. I'm not very good at Lightwave Modeler really and this'd take me AGES using that software. Some of these things are very complicated shapes, bastard things.

I went on a search to see what's available and ended up with demos of Amapi Pro, Amapi Designer, Silo and Swift 3D - but now I don't want to have to learn 3 or 4 new programs just to find out which one is easiest to use, or discover that none of them are and I should be trying something else.

Does anyone here use any of these programs, or others, that they could recommend (or otherwise) for the types of tasks I've described? Your answers could save me days of needless learning!

00:22 / 05.02.05

Every 3d modeling program I've used has a pretty steep learning curve. If you have any grasp of Modeler, which is considered by most to be the superseded only by Maya in terms of quality, use Modeler.
Admittedly, my opinion is that of a dilettante. I've played with Modeler, Wings3d, Blender, Poser, Bryce, Amorpheum, and a few others. Having to relearn a program, the commands, the environment, the timeline (if you're doing animation), the tools... Ugh. Stick with something you already know.

All Acting Regiment

00:45 / 06.02.05

That and the prohibitive cost- I don't know about anyone else but I've seen people ask upwards of £600 for this sort of program.

If these shapes/objects you need are very complicated, why not just take a look at them and try to work out how you can build them out of primitives, like cubes and spheres etc?

16:12 / 07.02.05

maya is still the most popular in the industry as a whole, so if you wind up learning a of 3D and can upgrade your job, you might find that having learned maya to be most lucrative use of time.

09:14 / 08.02.05

Thanks for the replies, I took the first bit of advise and went with what I know, which is Lightwave Modeler, then realised that I was right in thinking that I'm rubbish at it and gave up. It took me an hour just to work out how to bend a 'steel rod' into an S shape and it all just seemed too hard.

As has been pointed out, these programs are expensive but, um.... how do I put this... Limewire! OK so I'm a bad person and I do own a parrot, my left eye isn't so great either but I don't need a patch, yet.

Primatives just won't do this job but I've decided that photography will, so I'm doing that. I was just hoping that someone would say "hey, such and such is really easy to use and it'll make 3D turnbuckles with ease". It was worth a shot! I'd love to learn Maya but, despite having 'acquired' an installer disk image, I can't get it to actually install without registering with the website and there don't seem to be any cracks available for this 'problem'. Never mind.

I would be interested, for future reference, in hearing about anyones experience with various 3D rendering software though. There are so many alternatives about and I'd really like to know which ones people use and find to be useful for various types of task.

18:13 / 08.02.05

I personally tool about in Wings3d and Blender. Why? They're both free and cross-platform.

Wings is a simple modeler, and would probably be the best at modeling a simple shape like a turnbuckle, but the built-in renderer sucks and it doesn't support skinning or surface maps. Wings actually became my favorite modeler once I figured out how it worked. Simplicity isn't always bad.

Blender is a modeler, renderer, animation and game development platform, but has a horrible learning curve. The two don't play well together unless you load them up with free add-ons and plug-ins, but there are a lot of both available. There is even a poser-style plug-in for Blender which allows you to create and modify a humanoid via morph targets.

22:53 / 12.02.05

you might want to try a design forum like yayhooray. It may not look like it at first glance, but quite a few industry professionals actually post there.

21:05 / 13.02.05

Has anyone mentioned Rhino ?

I found it much easier to learn than Maya - its just very intuitive, everything seems to be pretty much where you'd expect it. Theres no animation function and its not brilliant for rendering, but for quickly producing geometry I love it

11:24 / 17.02.05

What a shame, Rhino sounds good but doesn't work on Macs and there's NO way I'm trying out anything that relies on Virtual PC, especially the earlier versions it seems to require. *sigh*

01:16 / 03.10.08

too much, too late

03:30 / 03.11.08

Maya, naturally. Followed by Modo and Lightwave.