As the title sugests: I’m looking for an additional application to complement C4Ds faults - namely multiple UVs which still cannot be exported from C4D. Since Maxon tech support told me that there’s nothing planned as to when muti UVs are supported I’m contemplating another one of the lower budget packages.
Blender does multiple UVs but I don’t like it’s integrated renderer so much. I find it to be a cool program for modeling and animation.
Cheetah 3D seems nice but not necessarily comprehensive enough. I am open to change my mind if proven wrong though.
So … to you artists out there: What programs are you using and how’s your experience with it’s unity integration?
How smooth is Lightwave’s integration … or Modo’s?
What I’m also interested in is - how intuitive and easy are the tools in comparison to C4D, if possible. I can use C4D, Blender and to some extend 3DSMax in an older version the latter is way too expensive, though.
well modos export is working fine with unity and it supports multiple uv (but i don’t have any experience with importing multi uv’s to unity, as i never needed them), although modo still has no bones for animation, but as long as you just want a modeller for your unity stuff, modo is a good choice.
i personally prefer modelling with silo (which does not directly support unity… yet) and animating/exporting with xsi, works great.
edit and don’t forget a look at sidefx houdini… i only own the apprentice hd version, and there is even a free version available if you want to try. this is a great app, but unfortunately i spent too much into 3d apps over the last years, so the commercial houdini is currently too expensive to me (although it is not much more expensive than c4d, if you use it for unity, you won’t need the master version, escape is enough for character animation)
lightwave’s integration is still a pain. much better now but i still go through blender for 2 UVs. you can get one set out though and scale/rotation seems to be correct. so far for me, importing fbx files into lw loses UVs altogether. haven’t done any animation since the new fbx exporter was developed. can’t comment there. it still has one of the best renderers around.
re blender’s rendering, i’ve been getting nice results with approximate occlusion using the built-in renderer. i found the default ao pretty noisy. also, blender doesn’t import fbx afaik. never used cheetah but martin’s unity friendly and a lot of users here use it.
Allright - so I can scratch Lightwave off the list if it’s as complicated as Cinema in regard to texture baking because I’m rather interested for a better integration for lightmapping.
Honestly I find Blender’s material editor and rendering to be a pain in the … you know what I mean.
My problem with Blender’s lighting isn’t so much the AO results it’s rather the GI integration. From what I gathered you need to use
a) only emissive textures to light with Radiosity. Normal lights don’t bounce.
b) subdivide every mesh to get results.
And I still never managed to actually bake Radiosity onto the texture.
So what I’d be looking for is a program that lets me create a secondary UV map, set up lighting, render with GI and AO for the really nice look and then lets me export the model into Unity.
I do have a kind of workflow between Cinema and Blender right now. But you could hardly call it work_flow_ if you ask me … :x
Maybe I’ll get it to a point where it’ll work more easily or faster. Yet as I was saying - I’m contemplationg options, here
my only prob with modo as a tool is no animation (yet). that’s coming and for statics all’s cool. nth uv rocks.
baking in lw right now ain’t happening. there’s an announcement coming out next week but no one really knows what it is. speculation is lw 10 info. so don’t buy until you know upgrade path (just sayin even tho u scratched it). i also don’t know if unity 2.5 brings anything into the mix that better reads the new lw fbx files. lw is a great program tho. the renderer is really good as is modeler. animation side is somewhat clunky but in the realm of “get your head around it” and it’s cool. lw to blender is pretty flawless too.
blender baking is definitely incomplete. i really only used it for ao but normal lights do bounce in standard rendering afaik. so maybe soon for baking. from what i’ve been though you can’t do both in one pass but you should be able to get lightmaps out. combine in pshop etc. i’d lay some odds that it will be in soon tho (ie whenever 2.5/2.5.x comes out).
the material editor is just another goofey blender ui prob. it works ok but yeah, it’s clunky. docs are tough to suss on it too. guessing you know how to use it but feel free to ask.
He was asking for a supplementary 3d app to go together with C4D in their case. So modo having no serious animation tools isn’t a problem. But when it comes to baking, fbx exporting and nth UV maps modo IMHO is king. As I said I use Maya for animation and modo for everything else. I also use to be a LW user and got sick of things not just working properly on the Mac as opposed to Windows (admittedly that’s changed over the years) and it’s below par support for Unity or vice-versa.
I agree though that LW’s renderer is in a league of it’s own.
lol yeah i didn’t meant the animation comment in that context (literally “my prob” with it). my needs not being the same as motionblur’s. just chatting and didn’t mean it to sound like a bash. it’s a great app. anyway…
