I believe Blender 2.5 is suppose to be out in Oct.
Perhaps during the Blender conference this weekend?
From what I hear, there’s been a major revamp of the UI.
I think Blender 2.5 warrants serious consideration as an alternative to Max/Maya/XSI which are all owned by the same company.
Correct, they are all owned by the same company, but two of those three products have over a decade of rigorous battle testing… Max, Maya and XSI all had secured their niche prior to the buyouts.
It’s not even like they’re more capable of collaboration either, they just all use FBX… They’re still very separate products with extremely different pipelines.
A team of Max users will not be able to jump ship to XSI and expect to produce a reliable pipeline in a month, just won’t happen 
Even though actually ‘learning’ the functionality of the app might only take a few days.
Sorry, but Blender 2.5 won’t be out until some time next year. The first -beta- of 2.5 (far from a final app) is due the end of this month. There are several “early release” versions (not fully functional) available on graphicall.org.
Lack of fbx import remains the big problem with mixing Blender in a workflow with Maya/Max/XSI. Blender fbx export works great, but afaik there’s no workable way of importing character data (skinned meshes and armatures) into Blender from those apps.
But in a room with 1 Blender guy and 1 Maya guy, who’s making life harder for whom? 
yep, modo seriously rocks. Only drawback is lack of bones, so you can’t create animated characters. But it is perfect for static and ‘by object’ animations.
I’ll mention it because it has not been.
Cheetah3D. Fairly inexpensive (OSX only) and to my experience, integrates quite well with Unity.
You’re right. Still no way to do it. I read that someone is working on the Collada import / export script again. Apparently started from scratch… again. This is the third time I know of that someone tried. Hopefully this time they’ll succeed.
Yes that is coming and you know it will rock, I’ve never had any problems with Unity and modo’s fbx version just works.
Just Sooooo happy with modo and Zbrush (and GoZ), so happy that I went this route and NOT maya/max/mudbox which is overpriced and with yearly update plans ($$$) that looks like it adds nothing new to the software 
Long live modo and Zbrush …
How do you do character animation with modo/zbrush (if you do any of that type of thing)?
dont use modo for animation just level building, but modo will add rigs one day soon.
I’m extremely happy using LightWave plus the LWCad plugin set. It’s cheap and works great, plus with CORE coming soon (picking up LW now will get you a free upgrade to CORE) LW will just be blowing away the competition. All of my sculpting and texturing is done in 3D-Coat. Which works much better than zb or mb and is a lot cheaper to boot.
Nice portfolio Phil. Lightwave is cool, I’ve just never been able to learn it. Guess Blender has “ruined” me. 
Thanks, personally I can’t stand blender’s interface, nothing seems to make sense, so maybe LightWave ruined me.
Have you had any issues importing assets into Unity from LW? How about animated meshes? Do you export via .FBX?
I haven’t really tried yet, I’ve only just picked up Unity.
OK I haven’t tried any animation yet, but for static meshes Unity did a fantastic job, better than I expected. I just exported a FBX with the 200611 option. I should think the 200900 option would be the same if not better.
Here’s my Starfighter model exported from LW to Unity:
is another freebie but it didnt run on my MBP using Leopard.
Theres others like http://www.cbmodelpro.com/
and makehuman+ Topmod (for specific tasks), and some people use google sketchup I believe, but from memory the geometry is a bit of a mess.
HTH
Threads like these are good, cheers y’all
AaronC
Being able to just try out Cheetah3D was one of the 2 major reason I purchased my Mac Mini (being able to develop/test natively on Mac with Unity was the other). I have yet to get the time to look into Cheetah3D but hopefully it will turn into a tool that I can use to create some 3d models content.
