The 3D Art Programs thread

  • Guest, it's time once again for the hotly contested and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!



    Go here and fill out your bracket!
    Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Once again, only you can decide!

Kharza-kzad_sl

shitlord
1,080
0
Lets talk about art stuff!

To start, here's my rather dubious opinions of the various packages I've used:

3DSMax:
Expensive! Powerful. 90% of it you'll never use. Really good modeling, terrible selection (but you get used to it). I've not used a new version since 2010. Tons of user made scripts and such.

Maya:
Used to hate it but I just got Maya LT. The big version is probably really expensive, not sure. LT is 30 a month. Hopefully you can just cancel when you won't be using it. LT is limited, but I've been begging for a limited version of 3dsmax for years. I'm guessing LT and Blender are the two packages most indies will end up using because of the cost. So far modeling with it is easy once you get used to the backwards selection modifiers. Currently hacking up some mel scripts to do stuff LT isn't supposed to be able to do (splines for hair guides for hairworks type stuff). Hasn't crashed on me yet as of a couple days, despite me doing strange things to it in scripting.

3DCoat:
Only 100 bucks for the indie version! Pretty good normal map and uv mapping software once you get used to the quirks. I only ever did the very basic stuff with it.

Blender:
Someone will have to fill this in because I've only tried it a couple times and gave up in disgust. I'm poor though so the idea of it is appealing.
 

Kharza-kzad_sl

shitlord
1,080
0
Maya LT patched on monday. Lotsa new stuff but the only thing I've checked out so far is the autorigging. It works pretty well, but doesn't do fingers, and the head got rigged a bit into the upper body so the jaw went all sideways when I turned the head, but that was easy to fix.

Should be a big timesaver.

Now I just need nvidia to update their plugins. I discovered that though LT doesn't support plugins, apparently they made an exception for nvidia's stuff. Or at least physx and hairworks. I didn't find out about this until I'd already patched, so the versions don't work together.
 

Kharza-kzad_sl

shitlord
1,080
0
That looks like fun
biggrin.png
I'd love to see what some of my art friends could do with that.
 

Kharza-kzad_sl

shitlord
1,080
0
Someone at NVidia hooked me up with a plugin that was failing to install. I think there's a bug if you install maya LT it writes the wrong reg keys.

Looking at MODO on steam, that is hella cheap. 15 a month or 60 for 6 months. Looks like the new version isn't on steam yet though.
 

Kharza-kzad_sl

shitlord
1,080
0
BTW a new maya update hit the monday after Ludum Dare and it comes with an auto rigger! Does a pretty good job too!. For my character it glued the head to the shoulders a bit, probably because it is animu style so has a huge head, but it was really easy to fix in the weights.

Going to be a huge time saver.
 

stankwoo

Silver Knight of the Realm
167
92
I have been slowly working through Lynda tutorials on rigging in Maya. I have never touched anything like this before so it is challenging but fun.

It started because I saw Kharza's thread about the UE4 engine. Working through some tutorials I built a hallway with lights that when the user walks in, they turn off and a monster appears after a bit. I wanted to animate the monster, so here I am.
 

stankwoo

Silver Knight of the Realm
167
92
BTW a new maya update hit the monday after Ludum Dare and it comes with an auto rigger! Does a pretty good job too!. For my character it glued the head to the shoulders a bit, probably because it is animu style so has a huge head, but it was really easy to fix in the weights.

Going to be a huge time saver.
Where is that located? Sounds awesome!
 

Kharza-kzad_sl

shitlord
1,080
0
The little tpose man button in the upper right, then quick rig tool, and there's an autorig button.

I hope to play with is some more this weekend. Post screenies of your fun Unreal stuff!
biggrin.png
 

Kharza-kzad_sl

shitlord
1,080
0
I did a full day of art stuff yesterday making stuff in maya LT. Discovered a few more differences from max:

The detach functionality is rubbish. In max you can select a bunch of polygons on an object and hit detach, and the selected polygons become their own new object, removing them from the object they were in. Maya has a similar thing, but there are two ways to do it and neither work. Both will either crash, randomly scramble the entire scene's materials, or both. Best way to do it is duplicate the object, then delete everything but the faces you wanted.

There's no triangulation control. In max if a non planar quad had funny lighting, you could target it and show how it was being triangulated, then flip through the available ways it can triangulate. Maya just does it however it wants, so if you have a non planar quad, it is best to just manually triangulate it yourself.

Normals are done via softening or hardening edges. I really like this, but it is a great deal slower than max's smoothing groups. Unfortunately the edge data just will not export. I guess the various formats just don't support it. You can export with "split per vertex normals" and that will make 3dcoat and unity get the right normals. However none of the hard/soft edge information survives export. If you reimport something back into Maya LT you'll get the correct normals, but all edges show up as hard.
 

Kharza-kzad_sl

shitlord
1,080
0
I did a full day of art stuff yesterday making stuff in maya LT. Discovered a few more differences from max:

The detach functionality is rubbish. In max you can select a bunch of polygons on an object and hit detach, and the selected polygons become their own new object, removing them from the object they were in. Maya has a similar thing, but there are two ways to do it and neither work. Both will either crash, randomly scramble the entire scene's materials, or both. Best way to do it is duplicate the object, then delete everything but the faces you wanted.

There's no triangulation control. In max if a non planar quad had funny lighting, you could target it and show how it was being triangulated, then flip through the available ways it can triangulate. Maya just does it however it wants, so if you have a non planar quad, it is best to just manually triangulate it yourself.

Normals are done via softening or hardening edges. I really like this, but it is a great deal slower than max's smoothing groups. Unfortunately the edge data just will not export. I guess the various formats just don't support it. You can export with "split per vertex normals" and that will make 3dcoat and unity get the right normals. However none of the hard/soft edge information survives export. If you reimport something back into Maya LT you'll get the correct normals, but all edges show up as hard.
 

xrg

Golden Squire
180
59
I've mainly only used Blender. It probably has the largest overall feature-set, but its notoriously shitty default keybindings make it frustrating to learn/teach and hold it back a lot. If you can get past it though, it does virtually everything: modeling, uv unwrapping, texture paint, sculpting, rigging, animation, sim stuff (smoke/fire, water, softbodies, etc), particles, video editing, motion tracking, compositing, and probably a bunch of other things I can't think of off the top of my head.

If it is of interest, I have a relatively in-depthvideo serieson making this dagger/short sword thing. It can give you an idea on the modeling/uv unwrapping/texturing workflow in Blender.

 

stankwoo

Silver Knight of the Realm
167
92
About half way into the Lynda rigging tutorial. Stopped, imported a random monster model, and was able to rig the jaw to open and close like it was "RAWWWWRRRRRing". I feel like I accomplished a lot, but in reality it was jackshit and very small. Definitely have to pace myself.
 

Kharza-kzad_sl

shitlord
1,080
0
Learning rigging is a curse. Once you know it you begin to see how sloppy games are, in particular western games. Flattening thighs and smooshed warped asses during bending. Car accident victim style shoulder movement.

And then you see a soul calibur where the rigging is absolutely flawless and forever wonder how they did it.
 

Kharza-kzad_sl

shitlord
1,080
0
I was coding on some outfit stuff for changing gear out of inventory and swapping out meshes and materials. I needed some test data and made a really crappy outfit and got it working with that.

Then I remembered that torchlight 1 and 2 come with lots of cool outfits, so I decided to throw a few outfits together out of that.

It probably would have been faster to just make something myself haha. So the torch stuff is all max files from 2009, and I just happened to have that version on an old machine. So I'd open the stuff, export to fbx, load it up in Maya and... crash. Some kind of bad fbx node (possibly related to the ogre plugin) would lay maya low.

Whatever it was it was impossible to find. I kept deleting half the stuff in the scene, half the materials etc, then the other half, then more then more. Everything was tainted and I couldn't see anything in the fbx file in ascii. So I started exporting, then re-opening in max, then reskinning, then exporting again.

That got it by maya's crash, but the scale was off. So I redid with the right scale, and then got it into unity and played a few animations and such. Then I did a second outfit and got it in and when I went to play an animation on it, it was sideways and scaled.

I started looking at the nodes for both and they all had all these wacky scales and rotations. I ALWAYS reset xform and I made a script hotkey to do the same in maya. I keep everything zeroed out at 0 0 0 because I know what havoc that can wreak on game code.

So I went in and found some of the strange transforms and zeroed them out, and sadly all the skinning information was lost. Apparently saving weights goes wrong in two ways, the xform reset scrambles the vert indexes (why!?) and the weight positions for matching up without indexing are stored in object space. So if you have a true scale of the verts, they don't match up.

So I rerig, bring it across to maya, click bip01... scale 10 10 10

Start reading around, and apparently reset xform sometimes doesn't actually do anything. To check you can open the graph editor with your mesh selected and look at the scale. Mine was 100. I reset xform, stayed at 100.

The thing that will actually scale the verts properly is an XForm modifier. Very bottom of the modifier list. So I hit that, scaled, go back in graph editor, STILL 100. Turns out you have to expand xform and click gizmo otherwise it thinks you just have the mesh selected. Bril. Finally I'm at 1 1 1.

I can kind of half understand why they store moves and rotates and scales in an xform stack. If you modify the verts directly you lose a bit of precision every time. But art programs can be really super annoying with all that. At least Maya lets you see the values directly.
 

Kharza-kzad_sl

shitlord
1,080
0
Hah I actually never got rid of that scale. When I got it all zeroed out, the exported file has a scale of 10, and an LCL scale of 0.1, so they sort of cancel each other out. It annoyed me so much I hand edited all the scales to 1 1 1, and it still had a 10 10 10 scale when imported into Maya. I give up
biggrin.png
 

xzi

Mouthbreather
7,526
6,763
vPXM0fs.gif


This is my first model/texture I've done without tutorials. Still very new to this so any crits welcome of course.

I posted the modelover on Sketchfabso you can get a much better look if you want.
 

xzi

Mouthbreather
7,526
6,763
Hahaha, yup! I just remember how dirty and gross the screens always are, I know I've certainly smeared my hands all over the screens when I was a little shit.