I’m very new to Unity. In fact, I just started about a week ago, but I’ve gone through quite a number of tutorials and am starting to feel pretty comfortable with it.
Now I’d like to start making my own 3D models. Can someone recommend a free program and tutorials? I’ve looked briefly at Blender. Is it the best choice? It has quite a few tutorials on its site, but after the first few, which covered the interface, the others required you to be a member of something or other (presumably a paying member). Another site had quite a few tutorials as well, but mentioned a Free Trial, implying that it is primarily a paid service as well. Can someone recommend an extensive library of good quality, free tutorials?
I’m quite good with Photoshop so I could always start with sprites and 2d projects, but I’m really interested in 3D models. Modelling, rigging, skinning and animation have always fascinated me, although atm I’d be happy to learn how to create simple 3D static objects like furniture and background objects.
I would suggest using Blender, its a well polished application with all the features you will ever need for any common game design. It’s also very popular and there is support sites everywhere. BlenderArtists.org would definitely be a better forum site to ask this question.
My 2 cents: If you want to model like the pros, then you should observe their workflows, thus I recommend before you even get started creating models from scratch, you should head over to BlendSwap.com and download a few interesting models there. After you have looked them over and you can see how they were constructed try to edit or add to the models - in the process you will have the opportunity to see what a completed model should look like allowing you to “work backwords” so you know how to taylor your techniques to achieve similar results when you start from a blank slate.
I learned everything I know about Blender from Youtube tutorials, BlenderArtists.org and long nights of just trying different things…
I agree with blender, its free and very powerful. when I started out, I learned a lot from “the d-dub show”. he has some great series that teach the hows and whys. he gets into shortcut keys and how to use em as hes doing them. I cant link right now though. sorry.
Youtube alone has a massive collection of blender tutorials and examples you can follow while learning. I suggest keeping a paper and pen, and write down each keyboard shortcut you find yourself using frequently, as this will make life easier as you try and remember what buttons do what.
If you can afford it, many people prefer 3ds, or maya, or many other paid 3d modelling softwares, but for starting out (and even long term) blender is a solid option.
Thanks all for the links and suggestions. Glad to know I was on the right track with Blender. I just hope I can get my head around it.
Once you are familiar enough with Blender that you can make some basic things on your own without having to follow a tutorial, you might want to try a 45 day free trial of Zbrush. If you are doing any organic modeling at all, it’s a very powerful program and seems to be the industry standard.
It is a very difficult program to learn though, so I think getting to grips with the in’s and out’s of 3d with a standard program like Blender will be a good path. In my case, I learned Maya and Mudbox for a little while, just enough to have a vague idea of modern 3d workflows, and that has helped me understand Zbrush a lot. Without that prerequisite knowledge, I don’t think I would have been able to understand a thing in Zbrush.
But Zbrush is worth the effort to learn, because it can save you a ton of time on some of the tedious things and give you a lot of artistic freedom.
BTW, once you have exhausted all the free knowledge you can get ahold of, you might check out websites like Lynda or Pluralsight. They cost about $30 a month and offer thousands of hours of very well planned out instruction in just about every area of the creative professions.