Software for the Realtime 3D Modeler?

Milo_Mindbender asks: "I've been involved in doing a number of games and other realtime 3d apps and I always run into the same problem: the 3d modelers that most artists use (MAX, Maya, Softimage, Lightwave...etc) are all heavily biased towards doing non-realtime rendering using raytracing or some other technique. While they can be used to make models for realtime 3D hardware, a very large number of their features don't map well onto realtime 3D hardware. For example many of the procedural shaders used by these packages map very poorly to a hardware shader's abilities, and similarly, if you want to use a hardware shader on some polygons, most modelers give you no way to see the effect while modeling."

"There are other problems too: modelers that have no concept of polygon strips/fans or that make it very hard to avoid generating polygons that will never be seen (the inside surface of a pipe for example). Even if you have the target 3D hardware on the modeling machine, it's rare to have the modeling windows look anything like the finished product. I'm wondering if anyone has run across a good solution to this. Possiblly a modeling package more geared to hardware capabilities, or some way of adapting an existing modeler to make it more hardware friendly by blocking or modifying features that 3d hardware can't handle. It would seem such a package could be cheaper too, since it wouldn't have to support as many fancy features."

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What the pros are using..

[JPriest]

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