Best Modelling Apps for Unity

Unity Engine
1

Hey everyone. I’ve been using Blender with Unity for a few months now, but I’ve finally saved up enough money to buy a modelling application. I’ve heard that the ones that are best for working with Unity are Maya and Cinema4D, and I have looked at the “what works on what app” page on the wiki. I have a couple of questions about various applications and their interaction with Unity.

3DS Max - Even though it is decidedly a Windows application, the wiki says it works with Unity in everything. What are the downsides to its use with Unity? Are there hidden things that can’t be used with Unity? Is the import harder than other applications because it doesn’t run on the same computer as Unity? How good is the support associated with 3DS Max - books, forums, etc? How hard is it to learn? How good are its animation/rigging/character creation capabilities?

Maya Unlimited - Supposedly, everything works in Unity now. What about hair/fluid effects/fur/cloth - the things that it includes apart from Maya Complete? I noticed that all the models for the tutorial/example projects are made with Maya. Is there a reason why Maya was chosen above other programs? How does Maya compare in its ease of use with Blender or other modelling programs for character creation, rigging, animation, etc? Are its polygon manipulation tools about the same as Blender’s? I understand it has a paint directly onto a 3D surface capability - how well does this work?

Cinema4D - I haven’t heard much about C4D, but it looks like a fairly easy to use interface. Is this true - is it as simple to use as say Blender in animation, rigging, vertex painting, character creation, polygon editing, etc? What features does it seem to lack? What parts of it cannot be imported into Unity sucessfully? Are the expansion packs such as hair, cloth, fluid effects imported into Unity well enough to use in a game? How well does the painting directly onto the mesh feature work for texturing?

Lightwave - I have heard virtually nothing about it. How does it compare to other modelling programs, especially in terms of character creation, animation, rigging, etc? Does it have any kind of special texturing tool attached with it? How easy is it to use? Does it have any advanced tools like hair, cloth, or fluid creation, and if so, how well do they import into Unity? How difficult is it to learn to use?

If you have any experience using any of these applications, or any other ones that you would recommend to someone who is going to buy a first modelling application, please comment on any of the above questions. I appreciate any feedback I get.[/i]

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I am a big LightWave fan–I keep trying other apps and I keep coming back to LightWave. But I can’t make a strong recommendation because a) I’m just getting back into LW after time away, b) I’m new to Unity and haven’t used LW with it for long, and c) LW relies on Alias’ FBX exporter, and I’d prefer native support without some third-party plugin to worry about. (Now, LW 9 is out soon and I don’t know what all it might add. Following that, a Umiversal version for Intel Macs is due this year.)

So LightWave is my tool of choice… just get feedback from people with more LW/Unity experience first.

I can say that LW has some great sculpting tools and a MASSIVE feature set, including some hair and fabrics. I’d be surprised if hair could export to FBX and Unity, but I’m not sure.

The editor has its learning curve but is very productive once you get how it “thinks”–which seems to be true of any 3D app. And LW has an online community, including a Mac section of their forums.

Note: you can try LightWave for free by download.

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Thanks morgan. As a student, I can get some pretty good deals on a lot of software. I’m most interested in Maya at the moment, but could get interested in lots of other things as well. I don’t know about 3ds max - it seems like it is used more for stills than for game models, but I’m sure for my purposes it would be fine for games as well. Thanks for the info on LightWave. I’ll check it out a little more on the web. Thanks to anyone who has had other experience with a modelling program!

4

cough! splutter! Sorry choked on my coffee. Max is probably the most used game asset creation software out there. It’s market share in the game market is why companies like Alias, Maxon started seriously adding features to their software to allow artists to properly create assets for game engines. I’d say Max is still at the forefront here… certainly seems to have more tutorials about that subject then any other software out there.

But as a Mac and Unity user I think either Maya or Cinema are you best bets, I’d personally recommend Maya Complete, as it seems to be at a better price point then say Cinema 4D Studio Bundle. Then again an hybrid approach like Modo 201 (Modo 2 has some very well implemented baking/painting/optimisation tools that game artists will fine powerful) and C4D Core could be a good and ‘cheap’ option as well.

Don’t under estimate the the time saving that having direct scene import that Unity offers with Maya and C4D…

Also remember to get hair, fluids, fur, etc into unity you will need to bake the animation/dynamics to polygons. Unity (as far as I’m aware) doesn’t support those features natively… using hair in realtime would be VERY expensive… Just look at how they had to implement hair/fur in games like Shadow of the Colossus…

cheers.

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And in all fairness look at how utterly awesome the graphics on that game turned out.

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Sorry I wasn’t criticising them. I agree, I have the game and love it! Looks very awsome. What I meant to say was I think you don’t need realtime fur/hair if you are creative like they were. I believe Unity has the power (at a minimum Pro does) to create that effect… if one is smart enough to program it! :wink:

cheers.

7

3DS Max is still the 800 Pound Gorilla in game content creation as far as I know, but Maya is a close second and for the Mac I think it’s as good as it gets (never had the pleasure of using 3DS Max for more than a couple hours). As a student I think the playing field is flattened out a bit, all the student pricing for these “high end” 3d apps is within a couple hundred bucks of eachother as far as I know. All of them offer trials so I’d play around with each of them and see which one most conforms to your work flow. Of all the high end 3d apps I’d say LightWave is the odd man out. It’s a great app but the modeler/scene paradigm is certainly different from the others and can take a while to get used to. I’ve been using Maya since 1.0 though, so any other 3d app at this point freaks me out a little bit :wink:

[Edit] What thylacine said about seamless importing into Unity is crucial! C4D and Maya are the only two right now that can do this and trust me it’s GOLDEN to just be able save your scene out and have it show up perfectly in Unity. This was the #1 feature that sold me on Unity in the first place. It invites creativity and experimentation when you can so easily try out new ideas and they show up instantly in Unity.

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Sorry about that guys. I was most familiar with 3ds Max being a still-renderer program more than a game program. I’ve been looking on CGTalk and there were so many 3ds max render shots in there I figured that must be what it is for. I guess it’s just because its a decidedly Windows program (like I said before).

If you have had any experience with Maya, 3ds Max, Lightwave or Cinema4D with Unity, please put your thoughts about the process down here. Thanks to all once again.

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exactly! and well put sir! :wink:

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Thanks for the info guys! Keep it coming! Thanks again.

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as far as I see it Maya is our only real choice for ‘pro’ grade game asset creation on the Mac platform. When it comes to normal map, parallel map, vertex/prelight polygons, baking textures, multi-uv creation/sets, lightmapping and normal map transfer between hi to low polygon models Maya 7 does it all.

However, Cinema4D 9.6 might do all of the above, but buggered if I can find any info/tutorials online answering those questions. I’ve actually just posted a Q in support area asking about prelighting in C4D, as I have a colleague who wants to help create assets and he uses C4D.

Also in Australia, one can buy Maya 7 Complete for a tad under 4k, whereas C4D Studio is 5k+! Granted Maya Complete doesn’t have Cloth like C4D Studio, but aside from that they have the same feature set, and Maya’s Char animation toolset is an industry standard, whereas C4D 9.6 is lacking a bit (as far as I can tell from the forums ).

I actually like C4D interface and the way it does things, but to me, Maya represents value for money. And at the end of the day I can always get a job as a Maya TD if my business fails! :wink:

Please can some C4D gurus get on here and prove me wrong! :smile:

Cheers.

12

Well, as a long time CINEMA 4D user and tester for several applications and publisher of the first C4D magazine I can only give two thumbs up to C4D and Maya.

You can pretty much do all you mentioned in C4D but I also have to agree with you on the fact that C4D’s character animation tools are a tough nut. Baking textures, lighting and all that fuzz is pretty easy and straight forward.

As for pricing…well C4D can get expensive but then again you are not forced to buy the big production bundle. The core and a few modules should do (depends on what you really want to do with C4D).

The Maxon guys are really fast when it comes to updates and new features/modules. Maxon probably has the best “Hair” solution on the market today and “Cloth” is also a big success as is Bodypaint.

I guess the best thing to do is to download a demo of C4D and Maya and test both apps for as long as you can and make a decission based on your experience.

Thomas

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Thanks Tank for the reply. Great magazine btw, I bought several issues when I was deciding on which 3d package to buy. In the end I went with Maya for cost/benefit reasons. I still keep half an eye on C4D though, especially if Autodesk doesn’t go UB with Maya…

Pleas could you answer my Q over at support re. pre-lighting/vertex lighting polygons in C4D?

Cheers.

14

Thanks for buying our mag :wink: I answered your question but will also do it here.

CINEMA 4D can’t do “prelighting” yet. That feature simply doesn’t exist in C4D. I am sure it will come though.

Thomas

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Cheers.

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maya, c4d, 3ds and lw all are great tools. knowing 3ds or maya probably help most in terms of looking for a job. lightwave may or may not be 3rd runner up. there’s alot of production houses using it (though not as much for games as film/tv). i use lightwave and have grown to love it. as morgan said it takes a bit to get it but once you do, it rocks (same can be said for all).

agreed - native support of maya and c4d are a big advantage. but reassigning textures in unity doesn’t bother me that much. having to export an fbx and dealing with textures are pretty much the only unity import difference. for me maya’s just too expensive. haven’t looked at c4d. i have lw and it does everything i need (and then some). so i’ve pretty much stopped looking at other packages for now. the tool set i’ve pretty much settled on is:
unity, lightwave, vue, blender, pshop/gimp and zbrush.
(using gimp and unity indie the total is currently about $1650 US - not sure if you can still get the lightwave/vue bundle though. if not, it’s another $600 if you want vue i think. another $1200 or so if you need to buy the CS suite)

if you have a pc, don’t under estimate milkshape. not exactly the caliber of the other apps by any means but put it with the free lithunwrap, blender and gimp and you’ve got a pretty amazing package for 20 bucks!

oh and i’m keeping an eye on makehuman. bit of a wait til they’re done but what they’re doing is really cool. the base mesh they have now is pretty high poly for games but you can make your own low poly or even makecar, makedog, makegun, makefish… really whatever you want!

17

I’m using the demo of Cinema4d right now, and I’m playing with the Bodypaint feature (I think). It’s really cool and easy to use, but I feel like I saw something on the Autodesk website telling me that they had some kind of 3d painting thing as well. Can anyone who uses Maya confirm this or tell me otherwise? I really don’t like the hard work that goes into UV mapping - I would much rather spend my time making the coding and the game as good as possible.

Also, you said above that Milkshape is a good program for the cheap developer. Can I use it with Unity to get animations/characters/bones, etc into my game? Right now I’m already using Blender and it can do meshes and textures, but as soon as I want to do any characters I’m in trouble. How well does Milkshape go with Unity?

Thanks for the info!

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yes Maya has 3D paint, although it does seem underutilized by many. However, I do think BodyPaint is the champ.

Also get use to UV mapping, it is very important for good results. Modern apps like Modo, Hexagon2, BodyPaint do their best to make that easy for you, but it is a skill worth learning.

Cheers.

19

it is a skill worth learning
agreed. add zb to the list of 3dpaint/displacement proggies too.

to your question, first… milkshape is pc only. last i checked around $20US with a fully functional, timed trial available. take it for what it is. it’s 20 bucks - don’t expect it to be like the other apps you’re looking at. [edit to clarify: the modeling tools are good. no fk/ik last i checked but it does have bones. ogl 65k poly limit i believe]

second… and more importantly, i have not tried it with unity. milkshape now supports fbx import/export. i’m making an assumption that it works and that it will remian a feature for a while at least. the guy who wrote ms has been pretty thorough in my experience. i have it - i’ll give it a whirl when i have a chance. (sorry - probably not tonight)

if you really like blender, you should be able to model in blender->export a 3ds/obj ->import then bone/animate in milkshape. unwrap in lithunwrap. texture in gimp. export an fbx from ms. milkshape has an unwrapper and a good modeler for low poly modeling. blender and lith would be a personal pref or maybe blender for higher poly work and some peeps like blender’s uving. with this kind of workflow you must be able to uv and paint textures 2d. the 3d paint progs pretty much do that for you but they aren’t perfect when a mesh gets deformed such as in an animation. so it’s good to understand topology and uvs. though in real time you can get away with a lot most of the time. anyway…

end ramble before it gets longer…

20

Thanks a lot for the milkshape info - I hadn’t heard much about it, except I noticed it was bundled with the Torque learning book (before I knew about Unity :slight_smile: ). Tell me how the test goes, pete.

Also, thanks for the info about 3d paint apps. I knew from my trial with C4D that it wouldn’t be very precise, but it’s still nice to hear it from more experienced modellers. I would probably end up using it to give myself some well-developed outlines that I could perfect in uv mapping. Thanks for the info.