a hand at modeling!

[Nuk3m]

I want to start branching out in the community and learning different things such as texture development and model fabricating mainly. i remember milkshape 3d but that was ye4ar ago im not sure of the "pro" program people use.(ahem as pro as you can get for 0$)

btw as far as my mapping issue, i downloaded a map viewer but that is as far as it got. im going to just have to start from scratch and this time just FF base it now and do it for the HL2 engine

[GambiT]

im with you on this...i to am looking to learn how to model...

[Loader]

Get a camera and some kinky undies. Take different pictures with you leaning over some object, whilst having your hair blown with the wind.

[Ihmhi]

afaik Maya is used heavily in modeling, but there are other programs of course.

If you want to play around with some stuff you can use Valve Hammer and tinker with some shapes, see if you can make anything interesting.

[Jiggles]

If you wana learn modelling, I suggest you install the XSI mod tool or the Maya free edition, or whatever, and use Google to find some tutorials online.

[Lost]

Originally Posted by Loader

Get a camera and some kinky undies. Take different pictures with you leaning over some object, whilst having your hair blown with the wind.

Hahaha, a good lawl that one!

[GambiT]

Originally Posted by Jiggles

If you wana learn modelling, I suggest you install the XSI mod tool or the Maya free edition, or whatever, and use Google to find some tutorials online.

which one is better?

[Nefarious]

XSI is probably the best there is but its going to cost you a fortune.

EDIT- off topic but... how come you guys have colored names? I want one

[Elkz]

Yes XSI will really empty your pocket. It is practically impossible to download from illegal sites because of its advanced piracy protection.

Nerfarious: they are just 'groups' that you can join from the User Control panel, I suggest joining Blue, or if you are feeling rebellious then join yellow.

[Fail]

The industry level software is Lightwave, 3ds Max, and Maya. 3ds more so in the game sect and Maya more so in the movie sect.

[Nezumi]

Did valve uses XSI to make HL2?

(p.s. Red is the team to join.)

[Jiggles]

Yeah, Valve uses XSI. From what I've seen, Max and Maya are the most popular with game studios -- XSI is a bit more expensive than the others, though it's popular with a number of movie studios.

[Decs]

Well, if you want to focus on modeling I'd recommend 3ds Max, but if you want to focus more on animation i think Maya is your best choice. Those are the two "Giants" so to say. Most industry people (movie/games) that I've talked to seem to prefer Maya as far as animation goes, and then max when it comes to modeling. I don't know about the animation part, as I'm not much of an animator but I've modeled with both Maya and Max and i have to say that Max is my favorite.

You might also want to check out Modo. Find a software that appeals to you. Try to stay away from stuff like Milkshape 3d though :P

[TwiNCannoN]

apologies in advance, I seem to have written a novel :O

Originally Posted by Nezumi

Did valve uses XSI to make HL2?

(p.s. Red is the team to join.)

Supposedly.

The XSI mod tool with valve addon is basically everything you could ever need to model for half-life 2. The main downside is you can't render with the mod tool, but it's not a big deal really. Just set up your .qc file and whenever you need to see a fully detailed texture just export the scene to .smd, smack the .qc file to compile and refresh the model in model viewer.

Obviously, the biggest upside is that it's absolutely free.

I've learned both XSI and 3ds max 8 over the past few weeks and I have to say both have their downsides. For me, XSI just didn't want to goddamn work, ever. First I got a problem that a lot of people seem to get where the program just didn't want to start up - of course, this was after 2 days of spending all my time and effort learning how to use the program. Then it starts working again and I'm not sure whether or not to trust it (on the support forum, there was a thread from 2004 about the problem in question, lots of pages, no developer replies at all - makes me wary of their support). Anyway, I make another model in it, all is going fine... HOWEVER - for some reason I absolutely can't make my collision model (physbox) from it (which is one of the main reasons to use XSI - to skip the bullshit involved in exporting your models from 3ds - in 3ds you have to set up a bone structure and make sure everything is tied to the bone, and has a material applied - XSI basically does all of this for you). But yeah, no worky, after many hours of trying to get a very simple physbox to work (talking 2 cubes, here) it absolutely refused to. Which is damn weird because I had just made a harder physbox a few days before.

(http://www.twincannon.com/pics/crapcamera.jpg vs http://www.twincannon.com/stopsign2.jpg) yes I know the camera is ass, it was just to make sure I understood the model/unwrap/texture/compile process start to finish :)

Also UV unwrapping in XSI simply blows balls. Some people say it's the best UV unwrapper out there so maybe I was doing something wrong, but from the tutorial I followed it's much harder and dumber than 3ds's process. I mean, the base uv unwrapper itself is pretty much the same, select polys and it correlates onto the UV map, but the automated processes seem much different. In 3ds you can do different types of fully automated unwraps - like flatten mapping - and it gives you a pretty damn good unwrap right off the bat, you just have to resize everything and fit it. It also is good at making sure things are the same size, i.e. two connecting polys are the same size and near each other. In XSI, one of the only options I could find was selecting all faces from one side and unwrap that side - so you do left, right, front, back, top bottom... that's 6 operations, and at the end you basically have a giant mess of misaligned stuff and have to do tons of tweaking. I can't remember how long it took me to get the stop sign UV into workable shape but it was definitely quite a task for something so simple. http://www.twincannon.com/stopsign1.jpg

So yeah in any case I finally gave up on XSI for good and am working in 3ds now. Other benefits from 3ds aside from stability is better plugin support and easier access to tools that speed the whole modeling process up (i.e. that giant panel depending on whether you're selecting vertices, or faces, or edges etc. - there's a lot of tools that XSI seemed to be lacking).

Anyway the whole reason I even started XSI up was because Generalvivi's tutorials were down and I had forgotten basically everything I knew about modeling when I started back up a couple weeks ago. Unfortunately some of them are still down, but the first few are up, it seems. His tutorials really helped me go from "opening max = brain explodes" to being able to model map props quite efficiently. A friend sent me the last tutorial I had needed (compiling your bench model) and that pretty much refreshed my memory of how to work around in 3ds (since that's basically what it's all about, is learning the hotkeys and how to use things efficiently).


edit: and yeah, obviously I'm just an infant modeler at this point so take everything I said with a grain of salt ;). Mainly learned to do simple map props but I must admit, I watched some character and animation tutorials and the process seems pretty straight forward so I may try it someday. Sadly I can't do concept art to save my life, and it's a pretty important part of it.

[Anshinritsumai]

I remember awhile back when Valve finally released the Source SDK they also made a deal with SoftImage to release XSI for free with a HL2 Export feature, so it could only be used for HL2 modding and crap; but I don't remember much more than the activating; that thing was a bitch and a half.

[Jiggles]

I'll testify that XSI is pretty damn unintuitive, but it works pretty well when you figure how you're supposed to do something

I haven't used Max since like version 3, and I hated it then -- I'm sure it's better now.

[SizeableSSonic]

Of all the modeling progs I have used (Maya, XSI, Blender, and Max), I prefer Max. I would imagine that XSI is good too- one you get past making a box.

[Coronius]

Sketchup 5, nuff said.

Nah but seriously its so easy to use its frigthening. Do ya basic shit in Sketchup hand it over to something else(xsi maya or whatever) and fix the small small things in there. You can do _everything_ in sketchup but there are no kind of "chamfer edges" scripts and the like.

[Defrag]

I personally like max, but I also loathe it in equal measures. I don't think you can really make a bad choice these days; max, maya, xsi etc. are all good.

[nodnarb]

I personally prefer clay...