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The best UI ever designed for 3D modelling was Mirai. They also made a junior version called Nendo. There is an open-source clone http://www.wings3d.com/ which is sort of a combination of the ideas in Mirai and Nendo.

It's too bad AFAIK there isn't a NURBS/CAD modeller that has such a good UI design.

I have nothing against Sketchup, though I suspect it would be easier to create something like this in Wings rather than Sketchup. I could be wrong but most of what I see on Google Images created with sketchup tend to be things like houses. Nothing very complex. Does Sketchup create closed / print ready meshes?

No kidding. Blender's UI sucks ass. It's not an evolutionary thing, it has always sucked from the beginning. It's an idiotic design.

Use Wings 3D or similar (Mirai, Nendo) for a usable interface.

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.

I'm quite happy with wings3d http://www.wings3d.com/ for my 3d modelling needs. It's quite easy to pick up and is cross-platform. If there were no wings3d i'd most surely have written my own by now.

If you want free accessible 3D software then Wings 3D is what you want. It's based on similar design and ideas of the commercial Mirai/Nendo products, which quite simply are some of the best, powerful, easiest to use poly/subdivision modeling software ever made.

Wings 3D lacks animation but for modeling it can't be beat.

Wings 3D (http://www.wings3d.com/), a popular subdivision modeler, was written in Ehrlang as well. That's were I first heard of the language some years ago...

I'm not sure if I'm getting it... But now these ideas are making me wonder what would happen if the manifold dynamic qualities of SodaPlay and manifold spatial qualities of Wings3D could be combined... Maybe throw in some other node type stuff ala Nero and you could have a really interesting chaotic and emergent behavior toy. (Spore? Who needs spore?)

It'll probably never happen, but that's my crazy imagination for ya!

Strange that I didn't see Wings3D mentioned yet. ( http://www.wings3d.com/ )
It's an open-source subdivision surface modeler held to great esteem in the modeling scene

It is also an Erlang application....

If you want a nice natural intuitive modeler, look no further than Wings 3d:

Wings3D

It has some strange dependencies, but you might be able to find a precompiled version for your platform. (It's in Gentoo's portage for example).

Wings3d is written in Erlang, I believe:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/wings
http://www.wings3d.com/index.php

If you have a grasp of the basic concepts (which should come first), but can't do some nifty stuff like making 3D like drawings by hand without serious difficulty (not everyone has drawing skills), then perhaps having some 3D software would be useful. Of course these are an entirely different beast than PhotoShop or Illustrator. Once learned, you may find that they can be quite valuable for making various graphic elements from scratch. However, this doesn't mean you shouldn't learn GIMP or PhotoShop, as 2D graphics software is quite necessary for doing any postwork manipulation of rendered output.

I'll post some that I know of, since they might be handy:
Wings3D, a fairly straight forward polygon 3D modeler.
Blender, an all around 3D modeler, rendering, and animation program.
Arbaro, a Java based tree generator. (Might be handy. Who knows?)
Makehuman, so you can have 3d people if you need 'em.

Why not use Wings3D?

I haven't had a chance to use SketchUp yet, but from the screenshot it looks slightly similar to Wings 3d
http://www.wings3d.com/

I may be completely off comparing the two, but it's definitely a fun program to play with anyways. Open source and more intuitive than other alternatives such as blender IMHO.

I have a radeon 9700 pro in my laptop, using the free dri r300 drivers which perform very well.

Other apps that use windowed GL:
Max
VNS
Blender
Wings 3D
Solidworks
And those are just off the top of my head. ALL of them will take a massive performance hit from this maneuver by MicroShaft. Direct3D will still suck as an API, DirectX will still suck, and even worse, even though OpenGL will be supported, it'll be frozen at 1.4. There go all your shaders and anything nice you might want to use in OpenGL 2.0 except in a full-screen app (read: games. MS ain't dumb enough to alienate their gamers, but they may just force the professionals to *nix).
But hey, they're MS. Now be a good little consumer and bend over.

If it's free 3d software (that doesn't suck) you're after, there's a fair bit around these days:

• Wings - Utterly wicked sub-d edgeloop modeler, offering better poly tools than the majority of commercial packages (Maya's poly tools are cack, and need to be extended with scipts).
• Blender - The UI was designed by mutant space robots on peyote, but other than that minor deficiency, it is a pretty capable package.
• Pixie - Free renderman renderer. It isn't prman, but pretty nifty all the same.

Regarding piracy of 3d software.. I think most vendors probably accept that this is going to happen amongst home users / students. Otherwise, no one would be able to learn their products, the price is simply prohibitive. That being said however, both Alias and SideFx are offering free uncrippled (featurewise.. they create watermarks) learning versions of Maya and Houdini respectively. Discreet don't appear to be doing the same.. but honestly I can't understand anything Discreet does these days.

Wings3D

TAD Designer

3D CAD Models

Design Workshop Lite

Furniture Models

Screw all that crappy, hard to use stuff.

Wings 3D and Yafray are what you want.

On the other hand, the question is about windows. Here's the best freeware list I've found, taken off of the neowin.net forums. These are not guaranteed Clean, but most of them are. Also, you might want to check tinyapps.org, which specializes in SMALL apps (usually not enough space for ad/spyware).
Category 3D Graphics: ----JunkCharactersToDefeatLameness/CharacterCountF ilterForAValidList----
3Delight Free - http://www.3delight.com/index.htm
Anim8or - http://www.anim8or.com/
Aqsis - http://www.aqsis.com/
Blender - http://www.blender3d.org/
gmax - http://www.discreet.com/products/gmax/
Houdini (Free Edition) - http://www.sidefx.com/apprentice/index.html
Maya Personal Learning Ed. - http://www.alias.com/eng/products-services...ple/i ndex.shtml
Now3D - http://digilander.libero.it/giulios/Eng/homepage.h tm
OpenFX - http://www.openfx.org
SOFTIMAGE|XSI EXP - http://www.softimage.com/products/exp/v3/
Toxic - http://www.toxicengine.org/
Wings 3D - http://www.wings3d.com/
Category Anti-Virus:----JunkCharactersToDefeatLameness/Char acterCountFilterForAValidList----
AntiVir - http://www.free-av.com/
Avast - http://www.avast.com/i_idt_1018.html
AVG - http://www.grisoft.com/
ClamWin - http://www.clamwin.com/
Category Anti Spyware:----JunkCharactersToDefeatLameness/Charact erCountFilterForAValidList----
Ad-aware - http://www.lavasoft.de/software/adaware/
Bazooka - http://www.kephyr.com/spywarescanner/index.html
Diet K - http://www.dietk.com/
SpyBot Search & Destroy - http://spybot.safer-networking.de/
SpywareBlaster - http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareblaster.htm l
SpywareGuard - http://www.wilderssecurity.net/spywareguard.html
Category IRC Clients:----JunkCharactersToDefeatLameness/Charact erCountFilterForAValidList----
BersIRC - http://www.bersirc.com/
BitchX - http://bitchx.org/download.php
HydraIRC - http://www.hydrairc.com/
TinyIRC - http://www.tinyirc.net/
XChat - http://www.silverex.org/news/
Category Audio Players:----JunkCharactersToDefeatLameness/Charact erCountFilterForAValidList----
1by1 - http://www.rz.uni-frankfurt.de/~pesch
Billy - http://www.sheepfriends.com/?page=billy
CoolPlayer - http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net/
DeliPlayer. http://www.deliplayer.com/
Foobar 2

XnView
InkScape
Blender
Wings3D

I've found Wings 3D to be an easy jump for a programmer to make into 3D modelling, if that's a form of "art" you're after as well. The texturing modes are a breeze also.

Here's a PDF book of 3D fundamentals.

http://sv1.3dbuzz.com/Downloads/3dbook.pdf/

Blender art to inspire.

http://www.centralsource.com/blenderart/index.php/

Wings3D

http://www.wings3d.com/

CGI Filmmaking: The Creation of Ghost Warrior

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1556 222270/ref=pd_sim_books_2/104-8933766-9003967?v=gl ance&s=books/

For 3d modeling (not animating mind you), might i recommend http://www.wings3d.com/. Wings 3d has pretty much the best GUI i've ever had the pleasure of using. It's learning curve is really only about a half hour, and you can do some amazing modeling with it. Also open source.

I ran across it cruising through Freshmeat to see if there were any good 3D animation programs that I had missed.

Really, there's not much out there. Blender is the best and most capable, but (despite many advances) it's UI has a steep learing curve. But if you stick with it, you can do amazing stuff, and to be fair, the UI is way better than it used to be, and promises to only get better.

Anim8or is an Windows program by Steven Glanville. (It works fine under WINE.) It's free, but closed source, because Steve doesn't want to deal with people bugging him about unofficial releases - I understand the sentiment! It's a great modeller, and I think the scanline renderer is underrated, but the animation features are a weak - for example, it doesn't yet have IK. However, the next release promises to include it, so it's definately something worth watching.

Art of Illusion is an open source Java program by Peter Eastman, and I suspect that most people - if they've heard of it at all - know that it's a full-featured raytracer, but don't realize that it supports animation. The bones based animation uses a 'pin and drag' interface based on Animanium, and it's very cool. Unfortunately, you can only do animation via pose morphs in the current release, but the next version promises support bones animation on a seperate IK track. By the time 2.0 comes out, I think it'll be an excellent program for doing character animation.

There have been rumors that some day Björn Gustavsson's Wings3D would support animation, but so far, that's only rumor. Wings3D started out as an open source version of IzWare's Nendo modeller, but has in many ways surpassed Nendo since then, so it's possible...

Finally, there's Sascha Ledinsky's Java based JPatch program, a successor to Mike Clifton's now abandoned sPatch program. Although it's currently only a modeller (the beta should be ready by the end of the month), it has designs to support animation - sort of an open source version of Animation:Master. It may not look like there's much going on at the site, but I've had a chance to play with some of the development versions - it's worth keeping an eye on.

If anyone knows of any open source/non-commercial programs capable of producing character animation, I'd love to know about them!

The problem is that for many critical features in Blender, the UI offers no clue that a particular option might exist, or what hotkey/mouse combination you need to press if you knew it existed, but forgot which hotkey it was. Given Blender's roots - an in-house production tool - this sort of interface isn't unusual. But now that Blender's gone "open source", there's been agreement from Ton and others that the UI is broken and needs to be fixed.

Take a look at Art of Illusion or JPatch for examples of open source applications that are "user friendly" - they support hotkeys, but any important functionality can be reached through the UI. When you are in a particular mode, the status bar at the bottom of the window displays hotkey modifiers and mouse options that are available. (I don't include Wings3D because it's pretty much specialized for modelling).

I'll readily that the example programs are currently less capable than Blender (and Art of Illusion is due for a UI overhaul in a few releases), but they show how these sorts of things can be added to the UI, even for complex processes.

And while Blender's made a lot of progress in making the UI better, but it's stalled in the last couple months - especially in critical areas like RVKs. Hopefully, people will get back on track with overhauling the UI.

Screw the learning curve... Blender sucks.

Wings 3D is the only way as far as modeling is concerned. Animation is another matter though.

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.

UI design is wholy dependant on the programmers abilities and their knowledge of UI design. I don't think 3D manipulation and rendering of objects in realtime has any real "defined" widget set yet.

I disagree. Give Mirai, Nendo, or Wings 3D (free) a try. I've never met anyone who couldn't figure out how to use it right away and they are very powerful modelers. It's all in the UI and the context sensitive nature of the menus makes it simple for anyone.

I've had people who've never done 3D modeling or even used a computer up and working within 5 minutes in Wings.

Mirai was used to create a lot of the stuff in LOTR. Although there isn't much press to that effect. The official modeler is Maya but the best artists are actually using Mirai for the more difficult modeling.

Blender's UI, well, it sucks. It is possible to have an extremely powerful and fast modeler with an easy to use UI (for anyone).

try wings 3d, for a basic 3d modeler. it is released under the BSD License. it has exports for most of the major file types. its fairly easy to pick up form the tutorial they have on the site.

Blender is an OpenGL application, and draws it's own widgets and windows, so it has the same look and feel on all platforms.

Blender has implemented a lot of improvements to the interface from the earlier releases. But (as others have pointed out) 3D animation is hard. Many operations are non-trivial, and require a number of steps. A more clear UI would be helpful, but not under these circumstances.

There are also a lot of 'hidden' functions that people don't know about. For example, there are constant requests for Blender to have more Wings3D sort of modelling features. Blender already supports things like face select and extrude along normal but finding out about them is a different matter. (I doubt I can remember what key combination brings up extrude along normal, and I haven't the foggiest idea how to go about finding it from within Blender.)

Anyhoo, I think what Blender needs is good integrated documentation. The Blender team seems hellbent on keeping the download as small as possible, and don't want to include anything that's not necessary with the core download.

Still, integrated help would solve a number of problems:

• Newbies could discover things like U for Undo.
• Intermediate users could find out the order of buttons to press to get radiosity to work.
• Longtime users would never use it, but they'd never see it, either.

Just a thought.

• If you read any of the numerous tutorials on Blender, you can get the hang of the UI in less than a half hour.

That depends on what you mean by "get the hang of the UI". Sure, you can figure out that buttons can be pushed and that everything in Blender looks like a button. At least form could fit the function, y'know?

The main problem is that the UI doesn't give you any clue how to perform tasks. For example, might know, for example, that you need to add bones to your mesh. But how to do that?

I know that it can be done, but looking through the menus and tabs, I can't see hide nor hare of anything like a Add Bones option. Once the bones are added, how are they supposed to be parented to the mesh? Again, the UI doesn't give any clue.

Just because you (or any other number of users) can figure out how to do great things in Blender - and Blender is an amazingly powerful program - doesn't mean that it's got a good UI. I could just as easily point to the Persistance of Vision Raytracer and claim that it's got a great user interface, because lots of people can use it and produce great work with it.

It's great that you can memorize a zillion different keystrokes, but I can't. That means I can't use Blender without an Internet connection, so I can download the outdated manual, or search for an outdated tutorial, or head over to the friendly folk on #blenderchat for some help.

• Most people that complain about Blender and it's interface haven't read any of the documentation on it and spent 30 minutes trying to figure it out.

There are other Free software programs that support animation, such as Art of Illusion and Anim8or. There are up and coming contenders, such as JPatch and Wings3D that don't yet support animation, but promise to in the near future. As powerful as Blender is, I'm hanging my hopes one one of these less powerful, but more user friendly applications.

(In fairness should note that Ton has recently set up a forum for the improvement of Blender, and one of the main focuses on Blender 2.0 will be an improved user interface.)

Wings3d
Its free, its Free, and its M-Fing E.Z.
[wings3d.com]

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 :).

Remember to pick up a copy of Wings3d from

www.wings3d.com for a great little free subdivision modeller.

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.

I point you to http://www.wings3d.com my friend it seams you have been missing out. Far superior modeller to Blender.

Yeah, I have heard of Wings3D. I haven't tried it yet, though - probably because it was written in some obscure language I had never even heard of and I couldn't find prebuilt binaries. =)

The gallery looks pretty nice, though. Looks like it may have something that's as nice as Blender's s-mesh + proportional editing...

I also heard of Ayam, which seemed nice, but finding the "Requires Some Intimate Knowledge Of Renderman, Your Renderer and Available Shaders" sticker on the manual cover isn't always reassuring. As I mentioned elsewhere, I'm a modeling guy, not someone with very good grasp on stuff behind the scenes - I can understand sliders ("This is a material that looks like plastic, use this widget to control shininess"), but not the raw reality ("Pick this somewhat well named shader called 'plastic' and define values for these n vaguely named parameters that are probably defined in a Book somewhere, go look it up").

However will be the first with decent animation capabilities.

Yeah, something none of the other renderers have: Excellent animation stuff.

Honestly, try Wings 3D. Its interface is modeled along the lines of Nendo and Mirai. Mirai is one of the most underappreciated and powerful 3D modelling and animation applications ever made. The UI of Wings3D, Mirai, and Nendo is one of the very best I have ever seen and I've used nearly every 3D modeller ever made.

Wings 3D is just for modelling right now. Texturing and animation still need to be worked on.

Check out Wings3D - it's a wonderful dedicated low-poly modeler, inspired by Nendo (the little brother of Mirai, which is the tool of choice for many professional game modelers).

Wings3D is Free Software, and it's already surpassed Nendo in many areas. The user experience is unmatched - closer to modeling with clay than I've ever got on a computer before.

There are versions available for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows, and if you want to make a port to your favourite platform or add your favourite feature the source code is available.

Download Wings3D immediately, you'll never look back.

--

If you want an Open Source(BSD style license), multi-platform 3D modeler, check out Wings 3D(http://www.wings3d.com/

\\Uriel

Very small application, and not the most powerful thing in the world, but in 5 minutes you'll be modeling.

application server: here and here

IDE: here, here, here

Oops, you really mean, written in Perl? Sorry, apparently all those tried, failed.

That whole group of modellers is simply the best, fastest, and easiest to use applications ever. Not to be another Blender basher, it could do a lot of stuff, but it was too damn hard to use. 3D application writers rarely seem to put thought into how the application will work as a whole (including the UI).