Not Blender, Wings 3D, Or Milkshape


mindlord

Notices Two Things
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Once upon a time, oh about 10 years ago, I was heavy into 3D modelling using VRML. I was pretty good at it, too. The tools of choice back then were Cosmo Worlds, Spazz3D, and Milkshape. They weren't heavy, and they did the job.

I abused the free trial of Cosmo Worlds pretty heavily, and grew quite fond of it's interface. It did something that really set it apart from other modellers. It made editing vertexes painless, easy, and dead-simple intuitive.

It had spot on camera control, grid snap, and vertex alignment indication.

But the best feature was it's vertex editor. Click/shift-click/control-click on vertexes to select them, as you selected them a bounding box with handles in the corners would appear. Centered in the bounding box would be 6 green arrows.

* If you clicked and dragged on a face of the bounding box it would transform the selected vertexes locked to the plane of the face that you clicked on. This made it easy to manipulate the vertexes along a specific axis.
* If you clicked and dragged on one of the corner handles it would scale the vertexes centered on the green arrows. You could also hold shift to constrain the scaling to the plane you clicked the handle on. Perfect of manipulating extrusions.
* If you clicked and dragged a green arrow it would rotate the selected vertexes about the center of the arrows. You could move the arrows anywhere you wanted to change the center of rotation.

It also had easy to understand tools for adding/removing/chipping polys of the selected object. Tools for slicing and merging faces and seams. Tools for extruding selected faces, merging vertexes, and for removing co-linear points. It had tools for doing UV mapping and simple texturing as well, but lacked per-vertex color, so I usually pulled finished models into something else for finishing. In short it was a perfect low-poly 3D editor.

I can't get it to run under Wine, the licensing algorithm can't seem to read the registry and it won't activate the trial. Being a 3D app it won't virtualize very well, and I sure as hell am not going to install windows into a partition again.

Does anyone know of a 3D editor that behaves anything like this? I have tried and failed to understand Blender. I'm sorry, but it chodes at being a low poly editor, unless I'm missing something obvious, I can't even seem to get it to snap vertexes to a grid. I didn't like milkshape, even when it was new, and Wings 3d doesn't seem to have as fine tuned control over the vertexes either.

If you can point me to some tutorials that will help me use Blender or Wings in a way similar to Cosmo Worlds, I'd be happy. But finding specific tutorials to Blender is like giving a hamster a lobotomy.
 
I'm not sure quite what you're doing, but in Blender you can press "g" then "x", "y", or "z" to translate vertices along an axis, and "shift + x", etc. to translate along the other two axes. (i.e. "g" then "shift + x" will translate in y and z, but not x")

Then you can use "r" and any axis to rotate about that axis.
I don't do much modelling in Blender, but it's always done what I've wanted.

Merging vertices is Ctrl + M, I think.
Slicing edges can be done with the Knife tool, Ctrl + K I think.
If you want all the vertices in face, switch to Face Mode with Ctrl + Tab, 3 then switch back to Vertices mode with Ctrl + Tab, 1.

All this occurs in Edit mode, which you enter by selecting a mesh object and pressing Tab.

It sounds complicated but once you get used to it, it seems natural.
 
I dunno Blender just irritates the shit out of me... It's like Here's a bunch of cryptic buttons you're rarely going to ever f'ing use taking up a quarter of your screen. Instead memorize a shit-ton of keyboard shortcuts to prove your worthy of using me. Whoever designed the UI to Blender needs to be pimp slapped with a trout.
 
Nope, sorry, Blender is fucking shit! I can't fucking stand it. I just spend the last hour trying to align a fucking face to the grid and it fought me every fucking step of the way. It is an unintuitive steaming pile of horse manure that needs to burn in the everlasting firey pits of damnation. It really shouldn't be hard and I know for someone who wants to spend hours reading the docs and become a Blender guru it's probably a piece of damned cake. If Blender ever fucking hopes to become some sort of gold in 3D modelling it's going to have to go a whole fucking lot farther to welcome the casual user, cause this shit is infuriating.

I give up.
 
I`m not a 3D modeller, But i did use to use Cinema4D 1 and 2 way back on the Amiga, It was a great, Basic and very easy to use 3D modeling program, And really enjoyed using it. But then Amiga support dropped and it was ported to windows. It has now since turned into a gigantic, Extremely difficult to use program, Pretty much a shadow of it`s former self, Well, In my eyes it has.

Back on topic, I`ve never used any 3D modellers in linux, So apart from the well known ones (Blender, POV-Ray etc), I would not know where to start regarding recommendations, But you could try some of these in the link below. Though some of then maybe old or out of date.

http://www.linux.org/apps/all/Graphics/3D_Modelling.html

Trooper
 
I personally like blender and consider the time spent learning it's interface well spent but if it just doesn't work for you have a go at Art Of Illusion could not ask for friendlier, it's written in java and works very well. Follow the tutorial and you'll be producing something recognizable in just a few clicks.
 
mindlord said:
Nope, sorry, Blender is fucking shit! I can't fucking stand it. I just spend the last hour trying to align a fucking face to the grid and it fought me every fucking step of the way. It is an unintuitive steaming pile of horse manure that needs to burn in the everlasting firey pits of damnation. It really shouldn't be hard and I know for someone who wants to spend hours reading the docs and become a Blender guru it's probably a piece of damned cake. If Blender ever fucking hopes to become some sort of gold in 3D modelling it's going to have to go a whole fucking lot farther to welcome the casual user, cause this shit is infuriating.

I give up.
:lol: I've had similar GIMP rants.
 
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Gruso said:
:lol: I've had similar GIMP rants.
Now, GIMP I understand. The main trick there is to learn to live with what should be in a toolbar in the right click menu. No big deal - You get the hang of that if you use Enlightenment for 10 minutes. GIMP's main downfall - indeed what Photoshop has on every other art program out there is those layer effects. There is nothing quite like building up a composition and being able to adjust things on a layer you did two hours ago without having to redo that layer from scratch.

Blender is just ass-backwards. Right click to select stuff?!? Spacebar to open the context menu?!? WHAT THE FUCK PEOPLE?!? I just don't see the point in messing with tried and tested UI semantics like that. The thing that I loved about Cosmo Worlds is that you barely had to use the keyboard at all. ALT, CTRL, SHIFT, and SPACE. Four keyboard buttons, plus the mouse and you could beat the shit out of some polygons.

I started to get the hang of Blender after I "gave up" but I still don't like it. I doubt I ever will, but I feel that I must learn it. I want to do some 3D programming, and I need models. I'm not the type of person to rely on other people to help me with stuff like that.

While I was finally able to figure out how to snap vertexes to the grid it was only after hitting a bunch of extra keys and buttons when it would've been much more sane to just snap the vertexes to the grid as I was moving them around. Holding CTRL does not work as advertized. It moves vertexes in grid sized chunks relative to the starting position of the vertex. You have to either first hit SHIFT-S and click a menu option, or do it after you finish moving the vertex, but you can't force a vertex to snap to exactly to the grid while you're moving it. Unless of course it was aligned to the grid to begin with. This is counter-intuitive to me. I really wish there was a way to enforce snapping to the grid as a toggle, that way I could work without fear of left-clicking for a split second and throwing everthing off by a few decimals. You never had to worry about this happening in Cosmo Worlds. Toggle snapping on, work with diligence. need to make something "organic" toggle grid snapping off and wiggle those decimal-points.

Blender makes my brain WANT to have a stroke.
 
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Blender is like vim. If you don't 'get' vim, you won't get Blender. Blender is designed so you can have one hand on the mouse and one hand on the keyboard at all times, and your keyboard hand is mostly going to be doing a lot of the contextual work.

I really, really encourage you - if you're a 3D modeller - to keep at it with Blender. The new alpha version has had some radical changes made to its GUI engine, and this will result in a much better experience for those frustrated with the traditional Blender methods.

But really, keep at it.. get all the tutorials done that you can find, get the Blender book, do the exercises. I've been modelling as a hobbiest for 20 years, and while I really miss my ElectroGig 3DGo days, I've become very, very happy with Blender. It took a bit of investment, but man was it worth it - its just a very fun app to use, once you get beyond hating it for being different. Its like, the Brazilian exchange student that everyone thinks smells funny, but then she shows up at the school beach outing in a bikini, and .. yeah. Underneath that culture clash is a honey. :)
 
What's that modeling program from Google? It's no good for stuff like people AFAIK but brilliant for structures, objects, etc. Pity, though, you can't export stuff quite right in the free version...

Ah, Sketchup.
So I'm going to try and learn Blender (yes, I'm jumping in!) I have a book and an online tutorial, any recommendations?
Also, does anybody know any other engines easy like Sketchup, but freer?
 
mindlord said:
Four keyboard buttons, plus the mouse and you could beat the shit out of some polygons.

This 3D modeling stuff sounds pretty hardcore.
 
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Jourdy288 said:
What's that modeling program from Google? It's no good for stuff like people AFAIK but brilliant for structures, objects, etc. Pity, though, you can't export stuff quite right in the free version...

Ah, Sketchup.
So I'm going to try and learn Blender (yes, I'm jumping in!) I have a book and an online tutorial, any recommendations?
Also, does anybody know any other engines easy like Sketchup, but freer?

http://biorust.com/tutorials/browse/8/added/desc/1/
 
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There I didn't give up. It's not much to look at, but there it is. No points for guessing what it's supposed to be.

0001.jpg
0001-1.jpg
Edit: Yes it's supposed to be boxy. I was doing a pixel->voxel conversion of a thing you might have seen before.
Edit: added spoiler tags and another view that should make it easier to see why I did what I did.
 
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