Out of Pod Experience

I was going to post a thread in GD about horizontal ships and why we don't have enough of them but thought I'd rather use my energy on something more constructive.

I'm looking for the best 3D Design CAD Model thingy software for making spaceship models oh and its got to be free or super cheap.

I've got sketchup 8 at the moment but hopefully something better will be suggested/posted/brought to my attention.

o7

Looks like it. As long as you can make pretty 3d (horizontal in my case) spaceships then yeh

Thanks

Modelling clay

I made a thorax for my friends kid...got arrested.

Maya is free if you are a student.

Maya and 3ds max will always run circles around freeware any day. The problem you will face is none of the people here have any earthly idea how to import eve assets into it. If they do, they sure aren't telling me.

TriExporter is the app you may be looking for...

That actually looks workable and based on the manual, seems to be fairly simple with good features and a proper assortment of tools. Never heard of it; sort of impressed.

Not sure I feel like getting into 3D Modeling again, but might be interesting to look at.

Thanks,

NO! You let the biggest secret that would take all of 2 seconds to google out of the bag! What were you thinking!

So you want to take the time to learn or just jump right in and make a few models then be done with it? Because there is a difference between the two and so would change my recommendations. Then it depends how technical you want these ship models to be, and what you are going to do with them once you are finished.

My assumption is that you just want to make game models, texture them and do a basic rendering, nothing too fancy. Not functional models for a game engine, right? Just taking drawings you did or will do (reference images) and making them 3D.

In that case, Wings3D is made for this. You can get the main site at http://www.wings3d.com/ They just redesigned the site so not everything is linked yet. This is probably the fastest modeling app out there, very intuitive, easy to use and excellent for beginners. It's not so complicated that you are going to spend huge amounts of time just trying to figure out the interface (e.g. Blender), while it's not so limited that you cant make the ideal model of your imagination (e.g. Sketchup), as well as you retain full rights to any model you make with it even for commercial use, unlike some modeling apps (e.g. MayaPLE), while it is designed for this type of work rather than designed for making high detailed models and scenes for DAZ Studio, Poser and Bryce which is totally unacceptable for a game model (e.g. Hexagon). Did I miss any? Oh modeling clay is awesome! Though I haven't used that since I was a kid, while I've been working with CAD software and then 3D modeling apps for almost two decades. So I took more drafting classes in school rather than regular art classes, so haven't worked with clay since. hehe

Oh um yes Gmax, it's designed to be used as a mod tool, or as it was released. Back in the day, yeah it was good. Limited use for what you want to do though, mainly with rendering and model format exports as it's meant to be a mod tool, though abandoned for many years now. What really killed off Gmax for a lot of it's users was when gameSpace came around, which too was aimed at not only modders but indie and commercial model development as well. Downside is that it wasn't free, but it was very affordable and had good support and community. Unfortunately, Microsoft bought Caligari (maker of gS) and took it off the market. However, M$ had Caligari release it's other modeling app to the public for free, which is trueSpace, and has many-many hours of training videos.

Lightwave rocks. It's the best indie/freelance level modeling app and also used by some professional studios. There is a PLE (personal learning edition) but as with any PLE it's really too limited to work with imo, and just meant to be a demo. Also I think you need Windows Professional to run it... unless that's changed. Some of the $1000+ modeling apps req win pro due to added security support that crackers usually have broken the first day of beta heh. So not only loosing features you may need with PLE editions, but the added OS upgrade factors in I'm sure.

As for Wings3D, you would want to download the documentation and work through the written tutorial. Wings3D has limitations as well, but for what you want to do you absolutely positively don't need that extra stuff at all and just gets in the way while you are trying to figure out the basics. Yet it's beyond the over-simplicity of sketchup which is really nothing but a google earth tool and not very good for anything other than making boxes with building photo images for textures. Like I said, it's probably the fastest modeling app out there, and imo the fastest by far for making small models (e.g. low-poly game models) and pre-fab objects to export to other modeling apps. There is no official training videos for wings3d, but there are lots of training videos at youtube. I've made videos in the past, but they are too old now, early beta stuff when there were very few videos circulating.

Now before I get flames for dogging on peoples favorite apps, I've spent time with nearly every modeling app out there worth trying, and a couple mentioned here I often use for what they are meant for. I use quite a few apps since not any one app is perfect for everything and if it were it would be too bloated to use imo. Although you can flame me over Blender, it just sux


tl;dr bland and I don't care about 3d modeling: WoW is that way --->

edit: Missed this one... CNC is awesome, it's what I used CAD for. Got into 3D modeling due to CAD software. But CNC's are awesome, worked on those for a number of years, programmer and set-up technician. CNC = huge Mechwarriors with an attitude

Oh yeah and as for this.. I'd say http://www.pixologic.com/sculptris/
And really, you could make organic ships with it, such as a Battle Crab. As if EVE's future = organic ships. I'd vote for some organic ships for EVE