Shopping for software...

I'm shopping for some 3D modeling/animation tools.

I've been using Wings3D, and I do like it. I've done some good learning. But it has it's limitations. Lights just plain suck. No animation abilities. Render a 100 sided cyl and export as obj and at least one point will be screwed up. Not sure why. But all in all, it's been a good tool for learning the basics.

Now I want to do more. I don't want to spend more than $300. I'm not a student so don't even go the acedemic route. I've done a lot of freeware/shareware searching and haven't found anything that doesn't require a degree in programming in python or some other language, so I don't want to go there either.

I need something that will export to at least some standard formats (3DS, lwo, obj, etc...) and won't watermark everything. I want a tool I can use in FanFilm work.

TOS prevents us from linking, but we all know how to froogle a product search.

I was looking at Carrara 3D Basics. Has anyone used this. Anyone want to look it over and see why I wouldn't buy a $99 product that was this powerful?

Hey, I can even score Carrera Studio 2 for only $259.

Anyone used these? Good, bad, ugly?

Other ideas in the price range?

Thanks!

 

I've tried all of those mentioned... I am afraid to say that in that price range you may be SOL.

If you can save some more pennies, maybe try to get your hands on a copy of Lightwave (maybe an older release) on ebay. But I have yet to find an app in that price range that is suitable for even decent quality stuff... unless you can wrap your melon arond blender, but good luck with that.

I am curious about the proble you are having with Wings3D and exporting .obj files. I quite literally do this on an hourly basis most days and have never once seen a problem like this. Have you posted the issue and your specs over at the W3D forums... if there really is a bug, bjorn needs to know about it so that it can be addressed.

As to lights and animation abilities, you want to much, wings is a modeler... it tries to be nothing else (except it is begining to move into the texturing domain) but the two are intertwined.

 

I think you misunderstand me.

I know that Wings 3D is just a modeler. In fact I like it a lot more than the Carrara modeler for basic shapes and aligning things (at least with my limited experience with Carrara it seems difficult).

At this point my question is whether or not Carrara Studio or Carrara 3D Basics would be good "get your feet wet" apps.

This isn't my job. I'm playing. I don't need Maya!

As a side note, Carrara Studio has been used to make FULL 3D shorts that would blow the socks off of most of what any of us have ever or will ever do. I think the guys name is Brian Taylor. I can't find a link to his site (I've been there in the past) but here are some pics toward the bottom of the page of some of his work.

Remember, it's not necessarily the hammer. It's the worker that determines the quality of the work.

 

It's just hard to find a 3D Software for about 300 dollars that won't make you go crazy. I tried Animation Master first, before 3ds Max and it had so much problems with it and it cost 300 dollars, also most of those programs can't export or import files from like Maya, 3ds and other major 3D programs, and they can't export right either, the reason that they have those really good looking animations of the cheap software is because the person spent a lot more time and effort than they would if they just used one of the more expensive programs, and you can almost never get the same results. As for FanFilms, if you are trying to integrate 3d objects into film it's next to impossible to do it.

 

Get the 3D toolkit at dvgarage.com comes with hours of tutorials with alex lindasy a man who worked on sw.

and here is a link to ad discussion on 3d toolkit and bryce. i recommend getting both as i did. you can get both and the price all together would be about 180

link

 

You could always get blender. Its free.

 

I checked out the 3D toolkit for a while last night. It seemed unintuitive to me. Very hard to even understand what you were looking at. Didn't seem to work like most modeling programs in general.

I've tried blender. Several times. Blender is a perfect example of software built on some underlying compiled language (in this case Python) that just doesn't play very nice with Windows. I wanted to add in some scripts so that I could import and export some other file formats. I had to install Python! And even then I couldn't make it work. I want to learn 3D. Not Python. I already know a host of programming languages. Don't need anymore...

I bought Carrara Studio 2 last night for only $89. I can upgrade to 3 for only $169 once I get it. And it can produce some really stunning stuff including terrain and trees.

CGTalk had a few remarks about Carrara and they were all pretty good.

I think I'll stick with Wings3D for most of my basic polygon modeling and then import into Carrara for textures, composition, etc...

 

To me, Carrara isn't a bad route to take. It's basically how I got into 3d. Except I went Ray Dream 3d> Ray Dream Studio (both from the same company that created Cararra)> Lightwave. It's got some high end feature, though still somewhat limited. If I were you though, I'd consider jumping straight to version 3. It looks like they've added quite a few new features, like soft shadows, bevelling and UV texturing.

It should definately keep you interested for quite a while. Then when you've outgrown it there will be lots of other progs out there to get you excited all over again.

 

Thanks DT! Good to know that others have had good experiences with a product.

 

FYI, the short I was speaking of was Rustboy.

If you haven't heard of it, you should. He is using Carrara for at least the texturing/rendering. I've gleaned a few good ideas just from browsing his site.