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Until Blender works like Wings3D (ie. Mirai/Nendo) then it won't be easy to use.

Mirai did it long ago and nobody has seemed to catch on. It's by far the best 3D modelling interface ever designed and has been quietly used for the grunt work in many big-budget films like LoTR and such.

Mirai is the step up from Wings 3D (see also Nendo on that same site, although Wings has surpassed Nendo in most areas at this point). I don't know if you can even get Mirai but if you can it's quite fun. It's like Wings 3D on steroids. Animation, etc...

Of course there is Maya and other stuff like 3DSMAX, both of which you can get free versions to play around with. You're still stuck with their ass interfaces though. Although if you're a Blender user then obviously that must not matter to you. 3DS was the worst until Blender came along. Gak ;)

Mirai, Nendo, and Wings 3D have the best, fastest, and easiest to use interfaces. Too often modelers pass them over simply because they are easy to use. It's too bad because they also contain a lot of power, especially in terms of modeling productivity.

Lisp isn't generally an interpreted language. Of the major free Lisps, CMUCL and SBCL are compiled and CLISP compiles to byte code. All of the major commercial implementations compile as well.

Generally Lisp compilers can produce code that runs in the same ballpark, timewise, as C. Here's a perfectly good 3D app written in Lisp: Mirai.

Personally it's a lot more important to me to be able to write software quickly, with as few bugs as possible, and with pretty good performance. But of course with Lisp once you've written your code you can still annotate it with compiler directives and even use compiler macros to speed up critical parts even more.

I appreciate your opinion but I would appreciate it even more if you would take the trouble to learn more about things before you disparage them.

It is what user interface should be, not a thousand menus and "toolbars" but an empty window that you click on and it "does what you want". Too bad there is no sign of such interfaces showing up in real-world applications, either open or closed...

Hmmm... There are several highly useful applications that sport exactly (well, close it it... they are more powerful than Teddy) that type of interface. They are the "secrets" of the 3D modelling world and once you use them you'll wish everything else worked like them.

Mirai and Nendo are two commercial offerings and Wings 3D is a free modeling app that has a similar interface. Dispite all the Maya press, Mirai was used for some critical parts of LOTR.

Izware (aka Winged Edge Technologies; aka Nichimen; aka Symbolics; aka ...) is the company that makes Mirai and Nendo. They have always been a strange company with very poor marketing and management skills so not many people know how great their stuff is. The company is always in a bizarre state of flux. For instance right now their main page says "We'll be right back" with no other links at all (it's been like this for ages; more than a year).

Wings 3D fits between Nendo and Mirai. It's better than Nendo but doesn't offer all that Mirai does. However, it's free and open-source.

The key to the useful UI is the context sensitive menus. All complex applications should work this way because it narrows down the possible actions to what you're working on. Instead of having hundreds or thousands of menus and buttons to push (*cough* 3DSMAX *cough*), you just have simple context menus based on what you have selected. It's a superb interface for managing complexity.

Plus the help system is built right into the interface.

It is what user interface should be, not a thousand menus and "toolbars" but an empty window that you click on and it "does what you want". Too bad there is no sign of such interfaces showing up in real-world applications, either open or closed...

Hmmm... There are several highly useful applications that sport exactly (well, close it it... they are more powerful than Teddy) that type of interface. They are the "secrets" of the 3D modelling world and once you use them you'll wish everything else worked like them.

Mirai and Nendo are two commercial offerings and Wings 3D is a free modeling app that has a similar interface. Dispite all the Maya press, Mirai was used for some critical parts of LOTR.

Izware (aka Winged Edge Technologies; aka Nichimen; aka Symbolics; aka ...) is the company that makes Mirai and Nendo. They have always been a strange company with very poor marketing and management skills so not many people know how great their stuff is. The company is always in a bizarre state of flux. For instance right now their main page says "We'll be right back" with no other links at all (it's been like this for ages; more than a year).

Wings 3D fits between Nendo and Mirai. It's better than Nendo but doesn't offer all that Mirai does. However, it's free and open-source.

The key to the useful UI is the context sensitive menus. All complex applications should work this way because it narrows down the possible actions to what you're working on. Instead of having hundreds or thousands of menus and buttons to push (*cough* 3DSMAX *cough*), you just have simple context menus based on what you have selected. It's a superb interface for managing complexity.

Plus the help system is built right into the interface.

The limitation is talent.

Frankly, I don't think so. I think the limitation is all the crappy software out there. Maya isn't too bad, but the other software you mentioned have horrible interfaces.

The "talent" is learning to use some piece of shit user interface effectively. That seems like a waste of time to me. There is some software out there that is better than the most popular packages but they are not anywhere near perfect. The packages I'm speaking of are Mirai, Nendo, Wings3D, etc. They are much easier to get prefessional results without spending years learning the damn UI. However, Mirai is limited compared Maya and Nendo/Wings are currently only modelers (and they can't handle high poly models well).

It's just a sad state of affairs because there is no complete, powerful, fast, easy to use graphics and animation package (I'm currently working to fix this by the way :).

If you want to build complex systems fast, nobody is going to turn to LISP for a solution. There isn't one. LISP is a beautiful language which I think any programmer would benefit to learn, but its not a language to get things done with.

LISP is a powerful and interesting language and as a language has its merits. I don't mean to pick on LISP.

What irks me is not that Paul Graham is saying this, but that he might get listened to

Nooface also might be a useful resource. If you do change your mind and decide to wade through code, check out Squeak, a Smalltalk VM/environment with a really consistent and fast GUI.

This program never seems to get any publicity, but it's a free, highly functional open source modelling + renderer + animation package. It's got just about all the features you could ask for:

• Excellent documentation and tutorials
• Scanline rendering for quick & dirty previews
• Raytracing for slow and pretty pictures
• Bones and pose-based animation
• Inverse kinematics
• Global illumination
• User-friendly interface
• Actively being developed
• Cool procedural texture editor

It's written in Java so it performs nicely under Windows, Linux and the Mac. That plus Wings3D (a great open source modeller based on Nendo gives you a complete Open Source animation package.

Common Lisp has a lot of benefits for this type of work. Since it is completely dynamic (ie - everything runs in an image with which you can interact, add code/compile and debug, all at run-time), the plug-in/scripting is taken care of from the start, and can have the full syntax of CL and access to any of the main program's features you choose to give it. CL will probably give you the most results per line/minute of code because of this dynamism.

Most CL implementations have pretty good foreign function interfaces for C and C++ libraries (Franz's Allegro CL even provides support for run-time Java objects.)

CL's performance is on par with C++ in general, and lags only in one major area - FP operations require "boxing" overhead when the symbol pointing to the numbers is dynamically typed (most compilers optimize statically typed declarations pretty well - which makes most of the overhead go away.)

Of course, before you go off on your great quest, you should probably read what some of the other posters have suggested. Writing graphics software like the type you describe is an incredible amount of work (I gave up my uber-Scheme system after 100 lines and settled for writing smaller utilities and plugins), and many have tried and miserably failed before.

Common Lisp has a lot of benefits for this type of work. Since it is completely dynamic (ie - everything runs in an image with which you can interact, add code/compile and debug, all at run-time), the plug-in/scripting is taken care of from the start, and can have the full syntax of CL and access to any of the main program's features you choose to give it. CL will probably give you the most results per line/minute of code because of this dynamism.

Most CL implementations have pretty good foreign function interfaces for C and C++ libraries (Franz's Allegro CL even provides support for run-time Java objects.)

CL's performance is on par with C++ in general, and lags only in one major area - FP operations require "boxing" overhead when the symbol pointing to the numbers is dynamically typed (most compilers optimize statically typed declarations pretty well - which makes most of the overhead go away.)

Of course, before you go off on your great quest, you should probably read what some of the other posters have suggested. Writing graphics software like the type you describe is an incredible amount of work (I gave up my uber-Scheme system after 100 lines and settled for writing smaller utilities and plugins), and many have tried and miserably failed before.

If you can get it (there's been trouble in this department, but someone close to the company seems to have recently sorted it), Izware's Mirai is a very good solution for at least your second problem.

This software (in it's previous incarnations as Nichimen's N-World and Symbolics' S-Graphics packages (it's virtually a direct descendant! ain't Lisp great?)), is where most of the current packages are leeching their modelling features from - first Subdivision surfaces modeller on the market, and because of the fact that it uses the Winged-Edge data structure to store geometry, the first with "edge loops."

While these edge loops aren't triangle strips per-se (I actually think it's a horrible idea to force triangle fans and strips at the tools level - leave that for converters and exporters!), they, as an edge control structure, will help form the proper polygon arrangements so you can exploit triangle strips later down the pipeline.

As for shaders, at this time I also thing it's a downright horrible idea - there aren't any implemented standards yet! At least wait for OpenGL 1.4 drivers to come out.

Mirai's next release should be ready for this, since it currently features a versatile materials "domain" editor that lets you painlessly transfer those material and texture properites that you define for the renderer onto OpenGL for previewing (well, everything that the domain permits), and later onto your target console (although the domains are for older systems - Mirai hasn't been updated in a while.), and vice-versa.

Besides that, you get 2d and 3d paint, advanced UV editing tools, rigging controls that will blow your mind (sure, Maya's poweful, until you start watching the time it takes to rig a skeleton fully with IK and FK solvers, and then throw on a couple of more controls to keep the skeleton in place - there's absolutely nothing like Mirai's "pin" joint system out there, and it's the only package where you can use skeletons to actually aid your modelling), the industry's first (despite SoftImage's claims, and IMO still the most useful) non-linear animation system, and a batch of Mo-Cap processing tools from TestaRossa, and a specially designed game-data export framework (Game Exchange). Oh, and did I mention it's all written in Common Lisp? Who needs a plugin interface, when you can run code directly from the Lisp image!

Is it really worth raving so much about? Hell yes.

If you can get it (there's been trouble in this department, but someone close to the company seems to have recently sorted it), Izware's Mirai is a very good solution for at least your second problem.

This software (in it's previous incarnations as Nichimen's N-World and Symbolics' S-Graphics packages (it's virtually a direct descendant! ain't Lisp great?)), is where most of the current packages are leeching their modelling features from - first Subdivision surfaces modeller on the market, and because of the fact that it uses the Winged-Edge data structure to store geometry, the first with "edge loops."

While these edge loops aren't triangle strips per-se (I actually think it's a horrible idea to force triangle fans and strips at the tools level - leave that for converters and exporters!), they, as an edge control structure, will help form the proper polygon arrangements so you can exploit triangle strips later down the pipeline.

As for shaders, at this time I also thing it's a downright horrible idea - there aren't any implemented standards yet! At least wait for OpenGL 1.4 drivers to come out.

Mirai's next release should be ready for this, since it currently features a versatile materials "domain" editor that lets you painlessly transfer those material and texture properites that you define for the renderer onto OpenGL for previewing (well, everything that the domain permits), and later onto your target console (although the domains are for older systems - Mirai hasn't been updated in a while.), and vice-versa.

Besides that, you get 2d and 3d paint, advanced UV editing tools, rigging controls that will blow your mind (sure, Maya's poweful, until you start watching the time it takes to rig a skeleton fully with IK and FK solvers, and then throw on a couple of more controls to keep the skeleton in place - there's absolutely nothing like Mirai's "pin" joint system out there, and it's the only package where you can use skeletons to actually aid your modelling), the industry's first (despite SoftImage's claims, and IMO still the most useful) non-linear animation system, and a batch of Mo-Cap processing tools from TestaRossa, and a specially designed game-data export framework (Game Exchange). Oh, and did I mention it's all written in Common Lisp? Who needs a plugin interface, when you can run code directly from the Lisp image!

Is it really worth raving so much about? Hell yes.

If you can get it (there's been trouble in this department, but someone close to the company seems to have recently sorted it), Izware's Mirai is a very good solution for at least your second problem.

This software (in it's previous incarnations as Nichimen's N-World and Symbolics' S-Graphics packages (it's virtually a direct descendant! ain't Lisp great?)), is where most of the current packages are leeching their modelling features from - first Subdivision surfaces modeller on the market, and because of the fact that it uses the Winged-Edge data structure to store geometry, the first with "edge loops."

While these edge loops aren't triangle strips per-se (I actually think it's a horrible idea to force triangle fans and strips at the tools level - leave that for converters and exporters!), they, as an edge control structure, will help form the proper polygon arrangements so you can exploit triangle strips later down the pipeline.

As for shaders, at this time I also thing it's a downright horrible idea - there aren't any implemented standards yet! At least wait for OpenGL 1.4 drivers to come out.

Mirai's next release should be ready for this, since it currently features a versatile materials "domain" editor that lets you painlessly transfer those material and texture properites that you define for the renderer onto OpenGL for previewing (well, everything that the domain permits), and later onto your target console (although the domains are for older systems - Mirai hasn't been updated in a while.), and vice-versa.

Besides that, you get 2d and 3d paint, advanced UV editing tools, rigging controls that will blow your mind (sure, Maya's poweful, until you start watching the time it takes to rig a skeleton fully with IK and FK solvers, and then throw on a couple of more controls to keep the skeleton in place - there's absolutely nothing like Mirai's "pin" joint system out there, and it's the only package where you can use skeletons to actually aid your modelling), the industry's first (despite SoftImage's claims, and IMO still the most useful) non-linear animation system, and a batch of Mo-Cap processing tools from TestaRossa, and a specially designed game-data export framework (Game Exchange). Oh, and did I mention it's all written in Common Lisp? Who needs a plugin interface, when you can run code directly from the Lisp image!

Is it really worth raving so much about? Hell yes.

Ummmmmm, how about

IZware?????!!!!

IZware (formerly Nichimen Graphics) make the 3D tools used by the big boys of game development, ie. Nintendo, Sony, Square, etc. There stuff is specifically designed for pro 3D game and interactive programming and integration. Everything else is just small time.