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Which 3D Rendering Package Do You Recommend?
"The packages that have been recommended to me for having really good quality rendering (I'm looking for something that can generate photorealistic images) and good modeling tools are Lightwave 7.5, Maya Complete 4.5, ElectricImage Universe 5, and Cinema 4D. There are lots of other apps out there but these are the ones that have been suggested. There's a pretty wide range of prices among those 4 apps, but at least for now I'm mostly setting price aside in my comparison, especially since the cost of learning an app is so astronomical that I'd rather just do it once.
So far what I've determined is as follows:
I haven't tried Lightwave yet (there's a demo in the mail), but lots of people seem to think it's good. I've been told -- and images I've seen on the Web bear this out -- that it's got a really good rendering engine, and sounds like it might be able to keep up with Maya on everything except animation, and it less expensive. It got Macworld's Editor's Choice award last year for version 7b. (The latest is 7.5.)
Some say that Maya is the top of the line. I'm not sure, and I don't think everyone agrees on it. With the inclusion of a rendering plug-in called Mental Ray with the latest version, its rendering engine is supposedly now as good as Lightwave's (it wasn't before). It was a runner-up in the Editor's Choice awards last year for v3.5. However, a number of the problems people had (both Macworld and others) with earlier versions have been addressed in the current v4.5. I played around with the demo version of Maya and liked its UI: it uses OS X standard widgets, which I appreciate, and its tutorials were well-designed and got me going quickly.
A lot of people seem to like ElectricImage Universe, and there is a version from a place called DVGarage that's stripped down and only $200, though I don't know what's missing. Fans say it's really intuitive, though that wasn't my experience downloading the demo. It's made up of several programs for the different pieces of the process (Lightwave is apparently the same way), and I wasn't really sure where to start. I also didn't like the modeling environment as much, though Universe users tell me that some of my problems (such as objects turning into boxes while you rotate the scene) can be solved by changing preferences. But I was unimpressed with the included tutorials: The task of creating a simple scene and rendering it is not something I've been able to figure out how to do, either through the tutorials or through experimentation. That said, it's worth noting that initial ease of use for such advanced tools is less important than ease and speed of use for experienced users. Even so, Maya, which is clearly no slouch in terms of being for advanced users, just seemed easier to figure out. The images I see on the Web (and there are fewer than I find for some of the other apps) seem less photorealistic overall than for some of the other apps, but again that's hardly a scientific method of evaluation.
Maxon Cinema 4D was also a 2001 Editor's Choice runner-up (v7.1; the current version is 8). It uses OS X-standard widgets for its UI. Beyond that I know little about it and have received the least amount of info from forums and Web searches. I've just downloaded the demo and will see what I can learn from that. The Web galleries I've looked at have contained some fairly photorealistic images, though Lightwave's still seem a bit more impressive to me, for what it's worth. I'm hoping someone can shed some light on this app especially. There are two levels: A cheaper version with some features missing, and a more expensive one (and actually an even higher-end option than that that I probably don't need to consider). It looks from Maxon's site like for photorealistic rendering the more expensive (XL) version is necessary, but I wouldn't swear to it.
And that's what I know so far. Beyond the big "Which is best?" question, a lot of questions remain. What's the best renderer? How different is the best app from the worst? What are the differences in modeling tools? Some of these apps have curved surfaces called NURBS, which seems to be a standard technology. Others have their own variants or substitutes. I don't really know what difference that makes. Maya has a neat tool that lets you sculpt a surface like clay, smoothly pushing and pulling at it to make organic objects like faces; I don't know what equivalents exist in the other apps. Ultimately, I'm definitely interested in animation but more interested in a wide array of modeling tools and top-notch rendering. Decent speed, ease of use, good docs, and ideally some OS X UI compliance would be good too.
Anyway, I'm going to continue investigating. I'm posting this partly to share what information I do have, and mostly to get discussion going that might shed some more light on this subject for people who, like me, want to get into this but can't afford the time and money required to do a personal, extensive comparison of all the major apps. I apologize if any of my information is inaccurate, and hope someone will correct it. Beyond that, any and all help is greatly appreciated :-)."
It depends on what you are using it for. I mean if you are doing 3d modeling of a house, then AutoCAD is probably your best bet. If you are doing a model of an internal combustion engine, mechanical desktop is a good choice. If you are making characters for say a video game, character studio or 3d studio max (the newest version) is excellent. It's also good for making short scenes and animating things. Bryce, while it's interface is really crummy is amazing at texturing and terrain. If you want to draw a giant landscape bryce is where it's at. Maya is a very high quality all around awesome program. It's what they teach the film + animation majors at my school.
I don't have much experience with some of the other tools available, but they all have their uses. Pretty much depending on what type of project you are looking to do, what level of detail you are trying to achieve, whether you need to animate or not, and your personal preferences all determine which which one will be best for you.
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Or, you could just buy a commercial rendering package
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
You're question, unfortunately, will spawn a bunch of personal opinions and elitist responses.
I've been using Discreet's 3dstudio max since it was a DOS app (then autodesk's 3ds studio made by the Yost group). I've been teaching it since Max r1 came around. I find it interesting that your question doesn't mention it.
Obviously I'm a big fan of it. I highly recommend it - it is very easy to use, has plently of free pluggins as well as commercial ones, open architecture for programming and scripting and its default scanline rendering engine is very fast. Some people will argue that its rendering quality is inferior to, say, Maya, but I beg to differ.
Look into it.
The only real way to choose a 3D program to use is by actually trying them out to see which you're the most comfortable with.
If you go anywhere and ask this question you'll get many different answers... some will say LightWave's interface is the easiest there is while others can't make heads or tails of it. Some won't like the modeler functions in Maya some will. Etc, etc and so forth.
What it comes down to is eash program has its own approch to 3D. What is important is finding which approch suits you the best and using that one. You can get great results out of any of these programs if you know what you're doing, but if you can't work with the interface, with the methodology behind each program, you won't be able to get that far without struggling.
So my suggest is, wait for those demo CDs and play around with everything you can. Find which one you like the best and go for that one. You won't be dissapointed!
Also, stay away from the marketing hype and common misconceptions that one renderer is better than another...Every commercial render out there is capable of doing a good job. Each renderer has it's own personality that you must learn to work with. Some like Mental Ray or Lightwave have some easy default provided by some company like Newtech, Alias Wavefront, Avid, or even Discreet. (BTW don't be fooled by renders like Mental ray or Renderman, the true power of these renders come out when you write your own shaders - a non trivial not for novice task- and not using the defaults) Others like the Maya default render require you become more personal with how the render works to achieve the same results. It all depends on what you need to achieve your goals. There's no need to spend more money if you'll never use some of the more advanced features like micro-polygon displacement, or multi million polygon scenes.
My suggestion is it not to listen to too many people, download the demo's and see which one fit your bill. All the advice that we as a community can offer can't tell you which one will agree with your artistic/technical side most and your situation. Its all comes down to a personal choice once you've weeded out your requirements.
but that's just my 2 cents.
POV-Ray.
It's one of few that can actually do mathematically perfect surfaces at arbitrary resolutions without having to decompose the scene into polygons. Of course, this is because it is a raytracer and not a zbuffer-based renderer, so it isn't the fastest out there.
It doesn't have a native modeller, but many third-party modellers can export as POV scene format.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
It's a ray tracer and that'll cost you. You may find you can render a cube or sphere without trouble but it's hard to efficiently ray trace something like a human figure with clothing etc. that has a few million polygons - all of which may be required at any point in the render. Mental Ray doesn't make use of some really quite cool advances in ray tracing that have been made in the last few years. For example it doesn't use Matt Pharr et al's caching techniques. It also has trouble displacement mapping - again because that requires massive tesselation which is difficult in a ray tracer. It's a trade off between realism (which is easy in a ray tracer) and efficiency (which a 'streaming' renderer like Renderman is good at).
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
We need some new moderation options
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Ummm.. if it takes someone with no experience of 3d graphics 'a week, two at the most' to learn enough to be able to notable improve on the stability and speed then the original coders must have been severely lacking in ability.
Also I think saying someone should learn the intricacies of the code behind all the applications they use to be more than a little ridiculous, there's a reason so many people are trying to make open source programs more usable- it's so people will use them. This kind of attitude just doesn't help.
Oh, and the fact something is 'Point and click' is a good thing for most people. Just thought you'd like to know.
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Maya. A post above mentioned Rhino as well. I would say that if you get heavy into nurbs and get up against a wall with maya, then get Rhino as well. People like to go on and aon about how bad the maya renderer is. Well, the point in now moot, because you get Mental Ray for free with maya 4.5. And mental ray is just stunning.
The best part of maya is the interface. It is not esy to learn, but once you get going you really start to wish more apps were designed for speed and efficiency rather than speed. There are some other packages that are good. But you will not be dissappoint with maya. You will love it. And for $2k its priced well for what you get, especially now it includes mental ray. Also, 4.5 rocks on os x, (3.5 really did suck) so its really the only way to, considering max and XSI (the only real competitors in my mind) aren't available on the mac. Of course, I've been doing 3d with alias software since 1994, so I'm biased. But justifiably so, I've never heard of anyone who actually prefered another package to maya (except maybe XSI, but a lot of that was mental ray). Rambling now, but I can't tell you how much I love maya. A geekier slashdotter than me can reply and tell you all about MEL and the API as well.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
I used to spend a lot of time on bicycles. Not racing or anything, just having fun, commuting, exploring and the like.
:
..." [insert info about bike fit here ] "...then ride it for a month or two - find out what kind of riding you like, get a feel for how you ride and then come back and we'll talk more."
Got known for it.
People would say "I want to buy a bike, whats the best one?"
I'd ask them what kind of bike they had now and how often they rode it. The answer was frequently that they did not have a bike and didn't ride. Since none of these people had millions in the bank, my answer was always about the same
"Go to a thrift store, yard sale, whatever and find a bike that fits
Why? Without knowing how someone rode or what kind of riding they might like, there is no way to tell them what kind of bike to buy. Further, even sending them to good bike shops to try bikes was a waste of time because they wouldn't be able to tell how the bike felt to them.
Of course, they could just go out to a good bike shop and spend way more than they could afford on a bike they'd never use. But that didn't feel like a good suggestion to me somehow.
Same thing here. "Renderer" and "modeller" seem to be mixed up. I get no feel that the poster knows what he's looking for.
So my advice:
Get Blender, POV (or similar free or very cheap packages) and work with them seriously for a while. Do a couple good sized projects. Figure out what you're good at and what you want to do. Get a feel for how you want the application to react and what you really want it to do.
Then, if you still need advice, you'll be able to ask for it more precisely.
And the answers will mean more.
I talked to the Discreet representative at the Ottawa Animation festival. He said there's no way 3D Studio Max will be coming to Mac anytime soon because the core programming is tied to x86 architecture. He said when they do a complete rewrite they will make a Mac version.
Tea and kung-fu. Life is good. Rising Phoenix
Oh for god's sake. He's interested in learning to use a 3D package, NOT learning how to PROGRAM one. There's a huge difference between those two. Most people could care less about how to program their software packages, so long as they work. That sort of attitude is in no small part the type of mentality that keeps the open source concept from breaking out into the mainstream.
Yes, you're probably a troll, but I just think that was too silly to to leave alone.
Wow ! What ignorant tripe.
"Although not mentioned often in the media, one of the most-kept secrets in the 3D industry is a relatively inexpensive tool called TrueSpace by Caligari"
That's to save them some embarrasment.
"Note that all the tools you mention Maya has (as well as Lightwave and the others) actually appeared first in many cases in TrueSpace (like the clay deformation tool, as well as many other "free form organic" tools."
Here we go again. Ever heard of SoftImage 3D Extreme with metaballs et al. from late 80s ??
"The cool thing about it is that you actually create your objects and scenes in true 3D (but you can also bring top/bottom/left/right/front/back views if you wish),"
and HOW is this different from say Lightwave OR Max OR XSI OR Maya !!!!!!! Ever heard of the Camera or perspective viewport ???
"Oh yeah, everything is in real time as well, even in solid render mode!"
Which means, it can't do much. it would slow down a LOT if you loaded a huge scene (say a fully modelled and textured church)
For the record, I have tried Truespace 1.0 and 2.0. Some of the tools ARE nifty, but your tone makes it sound like the low-profile granddaddy of 3D modelling. Which it ISN'T
For a newbie who is probably not looking for a job in the film industry, the real no-brainer is Animation Master ( www.hash.com ). Its about $300 and for a few extra bucks, you get an unlimited rendering license. (load the free client on every networked box you can lay your hands on and run a render farm)
AM is a modeler/animator/compositor/renderer that does fur, springs, decals, rotoscoping, and just about everything else the 'multi-$K' packages can do, including re-useable and exportable objects, materials, shaders, and actions. It's currently Wintel and Mac-OS9x but an OSX version is in the works.
Like any 3d package, the learning curve is steep, but once you get the hang of it, A.M. is quick and fun.