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Oh cool
(though I think I'll stick with Blender now, but anim8or is great for making simple props)
Nevercenter just released newest Silo version ... $99
http://nevercenter.com/silo/
While I own several modeling apps ( Silo,wings,Modo 401,Blender,Sculptris,Hexagon,lightwave2015)
I think the software is only as important as the types of objects you are
creating and you personal workflow.
For me I use C4D for modeling clothing but still use my older copy of MODO 401
for sculpting custom character morphs.
The clothing modeling the breakthrough for me was creating
a Full body encasement mesh for G2/G3, using Silo,
that is cut in half and placed under a symmetry object.
From that base mesh I can go from the base mesh pictured on the left
to a complete set of clothing on the right in one day by saving incremental
progressive versions in a visibility hider null in C4D's object manager.
I am sure I could I could perform a similar workflow
in some of my other apps (Except Hexagon& Wings)
But I am the most comfortable performing theses tasks in C4D.
I will echo the general suggestion from several people to try out a whole bunch of the free/cheap ones and see what you like. I tried many of the ones listed above and most of them just frustrated me, including a couple that most people seem to agree are easy (Silo. Hexagon) until finally Carrara just sort of clicked for me.
But my one regret is that I stayed away from Blender for a long time because everyone told me it was so hard. When I finally tried it out one day I discovered it made more sense to me than any of the others and that, contrary to what I had been told over and over again, you can do all the basic functions and most of the more complex ones via menus and just slowly pick up the dozen or so short-cuts that speed things up - there is almost nothing that absolutely requires shortcuts to do.
My point isn't so much about Blender in particular though, as it is that eveyone's experience is their experience and may or may not apply to you. So get a couple of the cheap/free ones and download demo versions of the pricier ones if they are available and dedicate a couple hours or an afternoon to trying them out and seeing what makes sense to you.
I loathe Blender's UI and it totally doesn't work for me.
But, as MDO said... it's flippin free, so you may as well bang on it and see if it somehow clicks for you. If it does, awesome! Same with most other stuff, if you can grab free demos or if the app itself is actually free.
We each have our quirks and ways of doing things, so...
If anyone's interested in learning Blender there are 2 paid tutorials on Udemy that are currently free for a limited time. I don't know what they're like, but they may be useful to someone starting out. Especially the first as that covers the basics.
https://www.udemy.com/blender-basics/?siteID=Q8eG3QGMrEY-VlZ39K39_PALObexfheF0g&LSNPUBID=Q8eG3QGMrEY
https://www.udemy.com/create-low-poly-game-characters-in-blender3d/?siteID=Q8eG3QGMrEY-BJYcN_sv_aevg0JidN0DUA&LSNPUBID=Q8eG3QGMrEY
The first one is 1.5 hours and the other 15.5.
I started out using Lightwave and was forced to switch to blender because I couldn't afford anything else and because Lightwave couldn't do some of the things that Blender could. Blender is an extremely powerful program with cloth simulation, water simulation, hard body dynamics, particles, tree generator. It even has a built in video editor and game engine.
Yes the interface can be a bit daunting, so if you decide to go that route I would highly recommend getting a tutorial that starts at the beginning and works its way through everything systematically so that you get a complete understanding of how it works. I spent a week going through a book and after that I didn't have a problem. Another tip is to realise that with Blender you are meant to work with one hand on the mouse and the other on the keyboard so get used to using keyboard shortcuts. It's a bit of a pain at first, but it speeds up the process significantly.
About Blender - what happened? Did they redesign the UI? Why was it impossible to use - now it seems people can use it with little problem?
Despite my new-found love of Blender I'm very much a mouse person, and if I can find a menu option for it I'll use it. It's surprising though how many of those keyboard shortcuts do creep in and become habit-forming, one or two at a time, even if you have a keyboard shortcut aversion like mine.
As well as the stuff like the tree generator, there are addons for creating stuff like landscapes, architecture, chains etc, and for doing lots of other things too. This is before you even get as far as paid addon territory. I'd always rather model my own architecture from scratch, but I think it's so cool that all this extra functionality has been created for the program and that one way or another it's got a solution to practically everything, all without spending a bean.
Blenders UI was horrid before, it's much better now. I think it's overhaul came around version 2.5 or so. It just looks worse than it is because the same option may be in 3 different places making it look a bit bloated. That and it's an all-in-one software (game engine, rendering, materials, modeling, sculpting, etc), so there's a lot of options to it. Most of it you can ignore if you don't use certain aspects.
Yes - there was a major overhaul with 2.5. There's another one coming with 2.8 (2.79 release version was just made available in the last week) expected sometime in 2018.
2.8 will add workspaces which "will allow users to build up their working environment for a specific task. For example there could be workspaces for modeling, sculpting, animation and motion tracking." (per https://www.blender.org/2-8/).
You can kind of do this now but I believe this will be more comprehensive, actually hiding tools you don't need for the kind of work you are currently doing (E.G. only showing sculpting-related tools when sculpting). I don't think it's something I would use, but it will be optional and its something a lot of people have wanted for a long time.
I do use Blender with the Sensei addon
Blender was originally designed by a commercial organisation. The primary design imperative was that it be fast to use NOT fast to learn. Personally, I liked Blender so much I spent $360 on Marvelous Designer, which was much better suited to what I wanted to create.
Cheers,
Alex.
As much as I agree that Blender can be difficult, I also think there's quite a bit of anti-hype that may not be fully warranted.
Let's be honest, for most of us a modelling app is generally used for just a handful of functions. Stuff like adding Primitives, Import/Export, Selecting, Extruding, UV Mapping (that's huge), Scaling, Moving, and so on. And honestly the present state of Blender's UI is that there are menu items for almost all of those things. So reallly the past complaints of it being a keyboard shortcut intensive app really no longer apply for the most part.
I think some of us tend to see all the features and our jaws drop and we think WTF is all this?? But if you focus on the few tools you really need and learn those basics, it's really hard to complain about it IMO.
And honestly the UV tools, which are so critical for modelling, are quite powerful and easy to use in Blender. And IMO when you add in the other features it has, like node compositing and video editing and sculpting and so on, it really is a nice way to start with something that you'll be able to stick with for a very long time.
Personally I don't care what people use, but I do think an objective analysis is important for stuff like this.
Yeah, I hear ya. There's a world of difference when it comes to clothing design between Blender and Marvelous Designer. Yeah, Blender has a stitching function that "should" do what MD does, but in practice it's pretty useless IMO. MD on the other hand is incredible.
Though another method for doing clothing that I reallly like is to use a cloth sim to shrink fit a simple primitive mesh or a slightly modified mesh. That can produce some great results, even results that compare with what you can do with MD.
As others have stated, you are best off downloading and trying out different modelers. It would be wise to take note of how long the tiral period is for each before installing any of them.
Could try this fork of Blender?
Wow, I never knew about Bforartists. Looks pretty awesome. I guess there goes my weekend...I'll be playing with Bforartists.
Thanks !
Yep they all have a learning curve. I absolutely could not without a doubt get used to Blender. It stressed me out so much. (And I'm a pretty patient person, honest!)
Then I downloaded the demo for Cinema4D and this program instantly clicked with me. Something about the user interface and where everything is located made perfect sense. Then I discovered Mograph and was blown away by its motion design capabilities. Having said that, it's a $3000 program. :-(
BforArtists actually looks pretty good. Blender should take some notes from them.
Thank so much for posting this. I'm going to try it with Blender and see how I make out.
I have actually seen two programs I'm really interested in in this thread: Bforartists (thanks bluejaunte) and Rocket 3F (found it myself...lol).
Laurie
....I remember when Silo seemed like it was on ICU life suport not long ago. Looks like it is definitely alive and kicking.
With 64 bit support it lets you use all your system's memory not just 2 GB which should alleivate crashes.
99$ is a good deal (normally around 160$).
I remember when Hexagon listed at 149$ here in the store. I got it at half price during an MM sale when I bought it (using a 25$ Gallery voucher and a coupon as both stacked back then to knock the cost down to around 40$). Had I known of the instability issues back then (and that they'd never be fixed) I would have probably looked for some way to scrape up the money up for Modo301 instead.
...it doesn't look much different to me than ver 2.45 did nearly ten years ago when I open it. Granted neither does Hexagon from when I first opened that programme back in 2008, bit then there have been no updates to it since while Daz Studio's UI has changed significantly. since ver 1.5.
What's good/bad about Silo? It looks interesting
...so how does one move the camera around the workspace that wasn't very clear. Are there the usual manipulator control icons (like Hexagon and Carrara have) or are you still stuck with the keybaord commands?
I went with Blender. I was completely lost for a while, but once I got used to it, never looked back.
For the price (free), there is nothing better.
He said something during the video about screen navigation being one of the few things that still had to be done with keyboard shortcuts. Being a mouse kind of person, that slows things down a bit for me in Blender, although I'd already more or less decided before I started watching the video that I'd probably stick with standard Blender as I've got it set up how I like it now and am used to it, unless BforArtists offered anything particularly outstanding. I lost interest all together when he said that about the screen navigation and stopped watching.
For blender it's mostly the mouse (scroll to zoom, hold middle-button to rotate, but yeah, hold 'shift' and move mouse to pan). Num-Pad to move to different views (top, right, front, camera, etc)
Looking at Bforartists I can't see a view control widget in the UI - anyone tried it?
...so still a "no go" for me then. Having to use the key commands to simply move around the workspace feels clunky and clumsy like old PC games were before the advent of the joystick.
Really had hopes back in 2013 when Andrew proposed an elegant easy to use UI that let you concentrate on the process of learning say modelling, sculpting, UV mapping, or materials creation instead of also spinning wheels trying to cope with learning how to work the UI. If his proposal was adopted, I'd be using Blender today.
...don't have a "middle button" on my trackball so I'm stuck using the keyboard commands.