Okay,
I want to learn this unity thing. I’m trying to learn JavaScript but then after that I will need to make my objects. I don’t want to use blender because after toying around with it, I don’t like it, it lags, and I don’t understand the interface. I don’t have thousands of dollars or any money to be exact, so making it free or very cheap, but still a good product, would be excellent! Any suggestions?
THANKS!
Grant Williams
I can understand not liking the interface, but it doesn’t lag at all, it’s extremely fast, even on old computers. Personally I’d suggest trying it some more, because once you get it, it’s really ultra-fast to work with. There’s nothing remotely close to it that’s free, although some people seem partial to Wings for modeling.
–Eric
question,
after looking at wings, it says I need OpenGL, I’ve googled and I can’t find anywhere to download it. Any help?
And, by lagging I mean it freezes up and occasionally black boxes show up in certain places.
Again, thanks for the help!
opengl is a driver thing. either your graphics driver supports it or you can’t use it.
its though impossible to have a 3d card that does not support at least basically. Even intels cpu to DVI adapters (Intel graphic chips) support OpenGL 
Never seen anything like that; sounds like your drivers need to be updated.
–Eric
there just little boxes, so its no big deal. It might just be my resolution I need to change.
so if I have an Asus that was bought last year with Windows 7 64-bit integrated graphics card, i should be good to go?
And, it says it doesn’t support animation. how does animation play a role in modeling? I thought that was a in game thing.
Thanks for the help guys (and girls)!
Grant
(I used game maker for a short time and animation was done through sprite editing in the engine. lol)
Ideally you should get a real graphics card, not integrated.
If you have people, monsters, etc., you animate them in a 3D app. You can’t do that sort of thing in Wings, only static objects, but you can in Blender.
Only as far as moving objects around, not actual animation such as walk cycles and so on.
–Eric
I agree with Eric here.
Blender is the best free option you have.
As for the black boxes and such… that sounds weird. Update your graphics drivers and see if you still have the same problem.
If so, you could buy a cheap graphics card for under $150 or so that should do you fine. (I’m assuming you’re working on a desktop computer)
I am on a desktop. To update my drivers do I just go to the graphics card manufacturers website and find driver updates or something? Ive never done that before, lol, is that a bad thing?
Having graphic glitches is a bad thing.
–Eric
Yes this is what you do.
Use simple and cheap tools such as MilkShape and / or Fragmotion
You need a few days to become familiar with and you can pratically achieve the same results as with Blender
Okay, I will update my drivers and try out milkshape and fragmotion. Thanks for the help guys!!!
I happen to think that’s the worst idea in the world.
Silo and Hexagon are both nice modeling tools for under $200. I preferred both of those to some of the other ones that people always suggest, like Wings and Milkshape.
I ended up going with Carrara and have been really happy with it. I think feature wise it straddles the gap nicely between the $100 tools and the big boys, and it’s about $400 for the pro version.
I’m just starting to play around with the Unity workflow for it, but it appears that the FBX export is much improved in Carrara 8 compared to previous versions, which had a lot of issues.
I’d second not using milkshape it’s like trying to dig the foundations for a house with a teaspoon and not very friendly for modeling.
I’d recommend trying a few different modelers and seeing which one suits you personally. They almost all have free time limited demo. If you find one at a reasonable price that doesn’t support .FBX you can always get something like Ultimate Unwrap 3D as an intermediate art pipeline tool for converting between 3d model formats.
TheaveStor
I am not sure but I would suggest to make a check before buying Carrara
the import and the merge of .bvh files seem to be critical issues
This is a key feature for a game programmer which is btw well supported by Fragmotion
For the rest it is just a matter of opinion
Is Carrara a more advanced tool than MilkShape / Fragmotion ?
of course, it is
Is it also the most suitable tool for a game programmer ?
Well… ok I dont want to start again a useless discussion
I give you just a suggestion
Go through the posts in the Carrara forum
You can check yourself that none of the members speak of games
They are intersted in movies only
All the example, tutorials etc everything is geared towards movies
The high polys off line graphics ( movies)
and
The low polys real time graphics (games)
are still two different worlds with very little in common
AlbertoT - you bring up some good points. I’m not claiming at all that Carrara is the uber-game-tool solution, not by a mile. But after looking at what was out there, and what was in my pricerange, it looked to be a worthy addition to my tool set. Time will tell as I get into more detail developing my first game - for now I’ve only been playing around with different techniques, etc.
One thing that is encouraging to me is that Daz seems to be making a serious effort to break into the game development market, so hopefully things will only get better on that front. For guys like me - programmers with little graphics experience, looking to use as much pre-made content as possible, that is good news. Right now actually, Daz Studio is further along with their game support than Carrara, but hopefully it will catch up in the future.
Carrara is still a useful tool for scene building, animating, landscapes, etc. And of course if you want to make animated sequences for cut scenes and stuff, it’s great for that. I also use Daz Studio for character development, although I’m still not convinced if their decimator will work well enough for serious game use, or if I may need to pass it through something like Topogun as well. Still need to research that some more.
I also use a lot of other tools depending on what I’m trying to do. Blender, Ultimate Unwrap, Genetica, and Silo/Hexagon (still haven’t settled on which) all have a place in the workflow I am slowly developing, along with the Daz stuff.
Okay, let me catch up.
I tried MilkShape and the other one, I think it was called FragMotion? Didn’t like either of them. Now, was that a fair and justified judgment? No. I don’t have experience, and I didn’t do any tutorials, the interface and all aspects of it just looked not appealing to me, so I tried Wings. Now Wings, I think is very simple after just messing around with it for a few hours. You get to like the interface and it’s simplicity, the fact that it doesn’t do animation, right now will not affect me, but in the future I’m sure it will.
Now, can someone explain to me how animation and modeling play a role in the development of the video game? And can my objects still rotate and shift while in game even if animation is not a part of that?
Thanks so much for all the feedback and help! I would buy a really good, well known and talked about modeling software if I had the money, but unfortunately I’m a broke high school student whose trying to find a job, so maybe some day in the future I will finally get some moola!
Again guys, thanks for the help. Any more feedback and opinions on what engines you like (payware or freeware, information might be helpful in the future) is wonderful and greatly appreciated!
Grant Williams
txmikester
I definitely agree with you about Carrara new trend
If you go through the post , here in Unity ,you will see that I have been the first one to sponsor DIGIMI which can become really a gem for game programmers
Obviously I am talking about developers who are more interested in the gameplay rather than in creating artworks
For the rest I just repeat what I said many times in other threads
You said that Carrara can be used to develop landscape etc
Fine, but the terrain creation, lights, shadows , rendering ,particle emiters , shaders etc are the responsability of the game engine
Unity itself provide also excellent graphic tools
Why should I double the functions ?
For my specific use Carrara is a bloated product