I enjoy blender but it has a few drawbacks for working with Unity3D. I haven’t yet found a perfect solution for the up-axis difference. The controls are also different enough that working in both programs simultaneously takes a bit more effort.
Are there any new 3D modeling programs out there that are worth checking out? I figured since Unity3D has become more important, that there might be something more tailored to its needs. Something free or with a community version is great but not necessary.
Your post made me look into that again and at first it still seemed to have the rotation issue. I noticed the “!EXPERIMENTAL! Apply transform” option and gave that a try and it seems to have done the trick, objects are now properly rotated. Has anyone ran into any issues using this feature?
I’m still curious about up-and-coming 3D modeling programs if anyone knows one they’d recommend.
It’s not new, but it is free. I use Wings3D. It is really simple to use, which is important to me as I do so everything on my games, plus have another job, so need to be able to pick it up quickly after long periods of not using it. No animation tools can be a drawback.
One other issue is recent versions don’t have FBX export (but does have other compatible formats), so I continue to use version 1.2 as I already have many FBX models in my project that I occasionally need to modify.
For an indie dev, I don’t think you can beat Maya LT.
It has a Unity exporter plugin. 2018 versrion has fantastic UV tools, no need for third party stuff. The animation and rigging is better than you will get in any other DCC, besides full Maya or a specialist program like Motion Builder, but hobbyist/soloist indie’s don’t need that much anyway. Best of all, it’s industry standard DCC and if you have a question, there is pro’s that can give you a straight answer.
Only complaint is the baker sucks, but there’s no good reason to not be using Marmoset Toolbag if you’re baking maps at all. Also, you have a 250k poly export cap. Not a big deal for me as I’m not usually doing anything with my high polys in Maya anyway.
What is the most affordable, reasonably capable CAD modeling software that can work with and export the common CAD formats like IGS and STP? And how long do you think does it take for someone very familiar with poly modeling to get to grips enough with the tool to make models suitable for mold making for the mass production of plastic figures? Shapes of the models are going to be rather organic and based purely on that I would say zBrush is the best tool for it, but the manufacturer can’t deal well with non-CAD data.
Many years ago before I used blender, i used anim8or. It wasn’t bad for my first steps unto modeling. It was simple and easy to use. Now that being said it’s most likely nowhere near what you need but I thought I’ll throw a little love for it. I might just go download it again just for old time sake.
Have a look at Fusion 360- there’s a free casual license.
Great integration of T-Splines. My usual pipeline is to model base streamlined forms in Blender with a view to making them sub-D friendly, as the NURBs converter effectively gives a surface as if you’d used a high sub-D level. You just export an obj from Blender, import into Fusion 360, and convert to T-Splines.
There’s then a subsequent conversion process to generate solids data.
Thank you for the recommendation, that looks pretty capable, but I forgot to mention I’m trying to stay away from Autodesk, subscriptions, and cloud-based services, and that seems to be all of those :(. There may very well not be a program out there that fits my criteria and I’ll just have to decline future requests for such jobs.
I have autohotkey scripts for r,x,90 and both other axis ;). They’re mapped to winkey+1,2,3 for x,y,z rotations. I use those quite often, but never for the export (for that I use apply transform in the settings).
