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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 :-)."
Microsoft Excel. When your 3D rendering needs require an absolutely positively... something something.
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
I tried Blender, and at least the Mac version is just too buggy and slow at this point. In addition the renderer doesn't seem quite as good as some of the commercial ones out there. There are other free apps but I have to wonder if like Blender, they won't quite stack up to the big boys in terms of UI, features, and render quality.
Read the fucking summary.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
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.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
to do with the software, but most high end 3d stuff costs an arm and a leg.
One reasonably priced well spoken of modeller you didn't mention is Rhino.
Maya is nice, but if you aren't animating you're only using a very small portion of its abilities.
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I have taken a look at a few 3D Applications and found Carrara Studio 2 to be very nicely usable. It doesn't comply with Aqua but that's not a problem: it uses kind of a fullscreen UI which is extremely nice to use and doesn't interfere with your screen resolution.
If you can't get far enough with Carrara, give Cinema 4D a try.
Links:
http://www.eovia.com (Carrara)
http://www.maxon.de (Cinema 4D)
We are all individualists!
Or, you could just buy a commercial rendering package
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I have 3D studio max and it is very powerful. However, it is also very expensive and very very difficult to learn. I don't recommend it for the weak of heart.
I also have Poser to do human and animal posing, and this program is great. It is easy to use and intuitive. For doing animation of 3d human models it is perfect.
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!
Sweet, so in addition to having to learn how to use the program, he has to learn to fix it too.
the greatest emphasis should probably be on rendering quality, and modeling capability (as well as usability and speed).
Having to learn the source code, etc, kind of limits it's usability and speed. Sure he may tweak it so it does render faster, and is easier to use, but that could take much longer than might be worth it.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
From a pure rendering standpoint, I would suggest renderman or Mental Ray. Maya has a good renderer that has gotten a bad reputation, but it does a good job.
If you are looking for a package that does more than just render, using Maya plus plugins would be good. The downside to this is that with most of the plugins you have to redo the shaders for the renderer. This can take some work.
I would suggest looking at Maya's Personal Learning Edition to see if it can provide your needed quality. PLE is a nice, free learning edition of Maya, but it is not compatible with Maya's for purchase software. If the renderer doesn't do all that you need, look at using Weta's Liquid or Pixar's MTOR to go to renderman OR look at the MentalRay plugin.
-Tim
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
...Softimage XSI, Discreet (or whatever they call themselves this month) 3DSMax, Hash Animation Master. I always start out people new to 3D on Hash, it's cheap, full-featured, and has everything you need to learn the 3D animation trade (of which rendering is the least part), basically it kicks butt.
I've used 'em all, and personally I like the way Maya and SoftImage renderings look best, but far more important than the renderer is how good you are at lighting and texturing. If you take the time to build the material correctly and light it well, any of these tools will give you good results. Most of them are coming on, what, ten years old now?
IMO, the rendering engine comes into play when you really want photorealistic effects like global illumination or radiosity (and then only subtly), or special effects, like a plugin toon renderer...stuff you will no doubt have fun playing with, but aren't likely to impact your UI work much. Choose an interface and modeling tools you like, or spare your wallet, would be the criteria I'd recommend.
http://saveie6.com/
you can just spend a few months trying to understand the source code so you can fix the bugs yourself and speed up performance, add new features, etc.
he hehe he he he HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... right...
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
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.
Realsoft 3D
Which has always seemed to be pretty advanced to me.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
I'm pretty much a complete novice and I've been using Cinema 4D for about five months on and off - mainly because I got it free from the front of a magasine ; )
.
It is pretty simple (of course, I only have the simple version) and is easy to get to grips with. And it's a helluva lot cheaper than most of your other options. But . .
No particle stuff or NURBS, which kinda sucks, and the lighting can be a little soggy, but I'm entirely self taught so that may just be me. And you're right about the renderer - I haven't got photorealistic out of it yet. Then again, I do abstracts, so I'm not likely to either . . .
"If being a geek means being passionate about something, then I pity those who aren't geeks." - Pike65
Go with the POV-Ray raytracer and do what I do -- TYPE your graphics. I swear, you young punks today don't know what 3D graphics are... mutter, grumble...
Besides, it's free.
"No matter where you go, there you probably are." -- Buckaroo Heisenberg
First thing, you should be careful with your terminology.
A modeller lets you create models and scenes. A renderer turns these scenes into 2D images. A compositor lets you turn these 2D images into other 2D images, and usually also lets you assemble them into single-file animation formats. Don't expect to do any "real" 3D work without at least one of each.
It's confusing because many modellers have renderers built in. They are usually inadequate for complex jobs. (Though, in fairness, one blockbuster 100% computer animated feature film has been made using Maya's built-in renderer, so it's not exactly useless.) However, thanks to the wonders of Open Source, the modeller is now the only part you have to buy.
Here's what I suggest:
If you find yourself making money with these, you can replace and augment bits if you find them not doing what you want. (For example, replace Aqsis with RDC or PRMan and replace Cinelerra with Shake or After Effects. You can even augment Maya with Houdini or SoftImage if you feel like spending money.)
The key here is to stick with standards so you can drop in replacements into your production line.
Good luck.
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If you're interested in good looking stills, broke, and understand very high level scripting languages, you might want to look at POV-Ray. Additionally, if you're working on a Windows platform, an outstanding modeller called Moray that works with POV-Ray. The author is very responsive and makes one of the finer modellers I've worked with. POV-Ray has a deathly slow renderer though.
I've been using Strata 3D for years. It's no Maya, but it's got a fairly decent modeler and a decent ray-tracer. I like it because it's pretty straightforward to use (as opposed to, say, Blender). New versions have IK and all that junk, and the animation support is almost good. (Note that these are compared to some theoretical package that's easy to use and powerful. AFAIK, such a thing doesn't exist.) Anyway, there's a demo in their online store, try it out. (The MacOSX version doesn't have a demo yet, but 3.7 runs fine under Classic.)
Zaon has a thread dedicated to answering this question.
There's a permanant thread to the above link from CGTalk's discussion forum to keep this subject from coming up again and again. I highly recommend visititing CGTalk to view some of the discussions and images. They have forums for the major packages, threads for posting work in progress and finished images, and it's and all around great site with many professionals.
The best one i found is 3dsMAX its powerful yet easy to use. Not to metion a standard in the industry.
Um, which industry? The only industry that uses 3dsmax is the game industry. The television and film industry has standarized on Lightwave and Maya.
Lightwave is used primary for television. It's very heavily used for sci-fi shows (like SG1 and B5), made for TV movies like Beowulf, and commercials (The M&M commercials and Coca-cola polar bears for example).
Maya is used more in the film industry. For example, LotR used Maya exclusively.
So unless your goal is to make 3d models for video games, stay away from 3dsmax.
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
I'd be using it in Mac OS X
So, um, did any of you guys recommending 3DSMax read this part of his initial query? Um... anyway, if OS X is to be your platform, the only software you need to bother with is Cinema 4D. Get r8 and a nice openGL card (whatever the newest nVidia card Apple will sell you), and you will not be disappointed.
I've been using C4D since version 5, and have been using it in OS X since it has been possible to do so. Cinema is a wonderful piece of software: the modelling workflow puts 3DSMax to absolute shame, the animation system (while still lacking in some areas) is rapidly, and I mean rapidly catching up to the big dogs (check out this site (Mash is a C4D developer) for some really beautiful examples of the leaps and bounds r8 has made in the soft-IK department), and you simply will not find a faster renderer (as far as single workstation rendering goes--I'm sure Pixar's n-cpu PrMan farm offers serious competition).
The biggest downfalls for C4D are a lack of n-sided polys and a lackluster implementation of boolean modelling. These weaknesses, when weighed against the outrageous strengths displayed in nearly every other area, make C4D the obvious choice for Mac users. Shit, I've found the environment to be even more work-condusive than Maya's sometimes... now if only Maxon could figure a way to incorporate something like A|W's marking-menus without legally stepping on some toes...
The modeler and render components are *not* exclusive.
You can use 2 different programs.
Example, blender or ayam to model, and then export to something such as BMRT or POV-RAY.
Even 'high end' pacakges, such as Rhino3D, support this sort of thing, each pushes its strong suit.
Judge each component on its own level....
You also mention it will be on MAC OS.. that
limits your options greatly.
PS: done properly, Blender's internal render engine can do amazing things.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
The Art of Illusion 3D modeller is written in Java and runs on the Linux, Mac, and Windows platforms. (It does not currently use the Java3D interface, because that has not yet been licenced for the Mac platform.) Here's a URL:
http://www.artofillusion.org/It is under a GPL license and seems to be pretty easy to use (i.e. not nearly as confusing as Blender is to initial users.)
Your milage may vary.
-Wayne
Just because one can, doesn't mean one should. And really, how long would it take? It could take much longer than is worth his time to figure it out, when he could get a stable, useable product for a price. If you're too lazy to learn the code then go back to point-and-click windows.
Okay, so those who can't code or don't know what a particular piece of code means in an OS app (or don't have the time to figure it out), shouldn't use it at all?
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
In terms of final output these days, a good artist can use any of the Major packages out there and get similar results (a renderer does not a good artist make). Maya has a rep as a high-end package, and if you are good with it you're not going to have any problems finding work. Given that you are on a Mac I'd lean towards Lightwave, it's got a great renderer built in and it's a LOT easier to learn than Maya. And for what you need it for; rendering occasional design elements and fooling around it's perfect. Lightwave is a great package that easily competes with Maya for the quality of work produced with it.
If you were on the PC I'd reccomend 3DS Max with Brazil for rendering, I've been using it since 3DS DOS v2 and although I often freelance for a shop that's mostly Softimage and Maya I've never felt the need to learn anything else. We used it for over a thousand shots a year for three years on Farscape and it's been fantastic. I'll never switch packages as long as Discreet still develop it.
Dont forget about ayam, its a free modeler that exports RIB. ( unsure about the mac-connection though )
Also there are python scripts to export Blender to RIB.
ALso, if you can find it, BMRT was a great quality RIB complient render engine. Such a same to see it gone.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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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And I don't just mean with the modelling programs themselves. From your questions about things like NURBS, it sounds like you don't have much experience with the process of 3D modelling itself yet. (If I'm wrong, excuse my presumptuousness.)
In my experience, it's really almost impossible to judge 3D modellers until you have some experience with them and know what kinds of features you want and how you like to model. The modellers you are looking at buying are expensive enough that I would recommend you make sure you know enough about rendering that you can make your own informed decisions about what suits you.
Try starting off with something like Moonlight 3D or Blender, or using a friend's copy of 3D Studio Max or something like that, and get yourself extremely comfortable with 3D modelling, including animation-related stuff. Learn basic modelling, learn how to use NURBS, and learn how to use stuff like inverse kinematics, and make sure you are comfortable with all of them. Then, take a look at the demos you have and you will be able to tell whether one modeller's way of doing things feels more comfortable to you than another.
Otherwise, you might just find out that you've spent great heaping piles of money on a 3D modelling package that everyone on Slashdot just recommended to you based primarily on the knowledge that it's used by ILM or Pixar or what have you.
I would focus your attention on Lightwave or Maya.
Lightwave is very easy to learn, has a very good modeler (for polygons and subdivision surfaces; no NURBS though), and a good rendering engine. Lightwave works really well out of the box, you won't need any additional software at the beginning.
Maya is the most flexible of commercial 3D packages; the modeler is good for NURBS and can handle polygons and subdivision surfaces too (though not as easily as Lightwave). Maya's animation features are unparalleled. However, the renderer isn't so great. Many professional Maya users export their scenes to a RenderMan-based renderer instead of using the bundled one.
If you had to get just one package, or you don't think you'd be able to set up a renderer for Maya, I would get Lightwave. If you are mostly concerned with animation and can expect some help in the lighting and rendering departments, get Maya.
Both Lightwave and Maya skills are valuable for getting 3D animation jobs. Lightwave is slightly more concentrated in game development and TV work, while Maya is more concentrated in film and TV.
Finally, don't put too much weight in the sample images you find for each package. The Lightwave website has a huge gallery of excellent work, but you have to keep in mind it's been around for many many years, and so its users have had plenty of time to figure out how to get good results from it. A newer package might not have that many impressive sample images, simply because there isn't a large community of experienced users yet.
Sure, Maya and Softimage are/were standards for film production, but 3D Studio has been used in a number of major motion pictures as well. There's no denying that it has found more of a home in the games industry, but that's not for want of capability. Here is a list of application fot 3dsmax which includes cinematic works.
Of course if you're talking about it from a career perspective, then yeah, for sure, Maya would be the way to go for the film industry.
If you are just modeling for games, high-end stuff isn't for you.
Me, I'm very accustomed to QME. Alas, they're not making it anymore.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Well, since you are limiting yourself to Mac, then 3D Studio Max/Viz is out.
Maya is incredibly powerfull, but equally difficult to master - great for 'organic' forms.
Blender is free...but difficult to use, and lacks support.
FormZ is very easy to use, very easy to master, and much much cheaper than Maya. It is also both Mac and Win. However, it lends itself more towards architectural work, and is useless for animation (currently only the camera path can be animated).
I would recommend 3DStudio in your shoes...but you've eliminated that option. If you aren't going to do animation, and if you are unfamiliar with working in 3D - check out FormZ (it has a free demo). But, if you are ready to jump to the big time and deal with a lot of up-front learning - go with Maya.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
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
If you are using MacOSX, and just getting into 3d, there is only one choice.
3dToolkit $199
goto www.dvgarage.com and check out 3dToolkit. Its Electic Image 2.9 and it includes over 2 gigs of tutorials on DVD.
Once you master that, they look at the either Universe 5.0 (newest version of Electric Image) or Cinema4d or Maya.
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.
...know that the renderer does not a quality scene make. It doesn't matter whether you use a best of breed render or a cheasy, not-so-great render. If you're a good artist who knows how to make good use of lighting, color, layout, textures, and so forth, you will produce photorealistic work. If you're a sucky artist (as most 3D artists are) and you have this misconception that a great rendering and tool kit is going to save you... well, your work will blow.
The shittiest 3D art I've ever seen (stepping away from the whole "it's art!" idealogy) was done with Lightwave3D. Some of the best I've seen was done with Blender and Caligari trueSpace (an off the shelf package for $100 in some places).
It all comes back to the artists. The software is just a tool. If you don't know how to hammer a nail in straight, a $15,000 hammer won't help.
Why bother.
You can get the 'personal learning edition' of Maya for free from the Alias|Wavefront web site. I can't direct-link it, because Slashcode is being a jerk about the ultra long link. But it's there under "Free Downloads" on the left side.
It watermarks your renderings, if I recall correctly, but as far as I know it's otherwise fully featured. This should be enough to give you an idea of whether or not it suits the work you need to do.
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
i just posted about what would probably be best for you... FormZ
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
BMRT is a free (as in beer) renderer that complies with Pixar's Renderman format. Thus, if you use a modeler that can export in Renderman format, you can use BMRT for rendering. I haven't used it much, but it has been used in several major film productions.
Binaries are available for several platforms, including windows, linux and solaris.
Originally created by former Pixar employee Larry Gritz, BMRT was then integrated into a startup called Exluna that was recently bought by Nvidia. They stopped distributing BMRT, but some online resources are still available.
Now, if you're still interested in trying out the software, it is still available on the web (try searching for "BMRT2.6" using your favorite search engine)
Larry Gritz also wrote a nice book, called "Advanced Renderman", which explains quite a lot about shaders, Renderman and uses BMRT for examples.
If you're interested in finding out more about Renderman, check it out !
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
http://www.pixels3d.com You might want to give these guys a look. Outside of that, I'd suggest looking at Lightwave and Cinema3D r8 in that order. Good luck with your decision(s)...
Noli nothis permittere te terere.
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.
First, note that this tool does NOT produce the kind of photorealistic images you get in lightwave, BUT what it has going for it is market-leading modeling tools and bar none the absolute most intuitive user interface on the market (this is not to say that the renderer is bad, the latest version now comes with a real nice third-party renderer which produces very nice renders).
I recommend you give it a try so it becomes your modeling program, and then export your work to render in Lightwave or whatever else.
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.
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 the controls are simply awe-inspiring in easy of use and downright common sense (I have NEVER read the manual, and this something hard to say about any other 3D program out there). Oh yeah, everything is in real time as well, even in solid render mode!
This has to be the most-copied tool in the 3D world, and ironically the one that gets the least amount of credit. Check it out, I think they have an older version you can download as trialware for free.
On a side note, since you design GUIs, and come from a Photoshop background, I think you'll find this tool to be very intuitive. I myself use it for creating pseudo-3D GUI elements all the time, and then bringing it in into Photoshop for further refining.
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.
...trying out the packages, but mostly trying to figure out what 3D tasks you specifically need. Various programs have various strengths. Some programs have amazing modeling tools (Maya) some have great texturing tools (C4D is pretty good), some are good all around with a top notch renderer (Lightwave). Your needs define what package you should use, not the other way around..so the biggest question to ask yourself is what you know you need. Saying "everything" will cause you grief :)
I've been doing 3D on a mac for many years, and I can honestly tell you that I've had to use different tools at different times. Lately I've been staying pretty much in Maya. The built-in renderer has it's flaws but it is by no means poor...Your lighting, shading, texturing skills will play a larger role than the renderer, plus that are plug-ins to export to a Renderman compatible renderer.
There are some other cheap options that are pretty decent programs..they aren't mainstream, but if you're only using 3D as a secondary tool to add to your illustration/presentation arsenal, it might be cheaper and better in the long run. I can safely recommend things like Pixels3D (http://www.pixels.net) and Hash Animation Master (http://www.hash.com). Pixels just came out with Mac OS X version too which is looking pretty decent, and their Tempest renderer is pretty nice too.
The short and the skinny...if 3D is your primary focus, decide on your needs. Maya is an amazing all around tool and the renderer simply stands out because everything else about the program is so great, that the renderer simple seems like the sore thumb out. If your needs with 3D are secondary, a cheaper package would suit you better and will provide the tools you'd need for reasonably advanced 3D.
Last but not least..everyone's got their favorite and it all means fuzz-all to you...you need to decide what suits you best by trying out as much as you can.
But the open source version isn't quite buildable yet. The developers are trying to straighten out the sources and clean up the build process. The project is still being set up.
Meanwhile, you can download the old NaN version, EULA and all (you're agreeing to the EULA of a defunct company!), and a keyfile that makes the licensing system happy, from blender.org. Works fine.
All 3D packages have wierd user interfaces. Editing in 3D is so complicated that there's no agreement on how to do it. Blender, though, is unusually wierd; it has a few menus, many buttons, too many control keys, and a little gesture recognition. It has its fanatics, but not enough of them, which is why NaN went bust.
Incidentally, one implication of the wierd user interface problem is that just downloading a 3D app and playing it doesn't get you much of anywhere. These things take a while to learn, typically months.
If you're going to do serious work, and the output is video or film (not games), Maya is probably the way to go. It's the de facto standard in film work right now. 3DS Max leads in games, and Lightwave in TV. Softimage used to be #1 in film, but they blew it, much to my annoyance as a Softimage user. Blender remains a toy, although if the free software community gets behind it and cleans it up, it could be more of a contender.
Every behind-the-scenes show I've seen on a movie with a lot of FX (like Jurassic Park) always seems to show the animators working in Softimage. Of course, it's not available for OSX (unless I'm mistaken). I'd guess that Maya is its closest equivalent. Lightwave is used a lot in TV, but it always seems to look crappy. But that could be due to budget and scheduling rather than the quality of the program. The impression I get from Softimage is it's real strength is in its animation and physics. But to me, the still images also look better than any other program.
c-hack.com |
the first major high-end 3D package to be comercially ported to LINUX was HOUDINI from sidefx. alias' maya and sidefx Houdini are like the pepsi-coke of high-end 3D.
they've also got a free 'Houdini Apprentice' programme, so you can try it - works on Linux!
they used Houdini to animate gandalf's fireworks, and animate the rushing river horses in lord of the rings. they've used it in the star trek movies, Terminator 3D, and just about every sci-fi effects flick out there - check it out:
www.sidefx.com
a lot of the most interesting highend 3D technologies started with HOUDINI - Procedural Motion and Graphics OP networks were invented by
the Programmers at Side Effects.
some of the things you can do with their 3D animation
software (Houdini 5.5) are:
- In-Viewport editing generates procedural 'memory' of construction history.
- Support of multiple geometry types: 3D NURBS, Bezier, Mesh, Poly, L-systems (itterative geometry), and Metaballs.
- Procedural 3D Surface Modelling (SOPs > "Noun").
- Procedural Waveform/Motion, Audio, and Channel Editing (CHOPs > "Verb").
- Procedural Particle Systems (POPs) for simulating Smoke, Fire, and Gases.
- Procedural Shader generation (SHOPs).
- Procedural 2D Compositing (COPs).
- Softbody Inverse Kinematics & Character / Facial Animation capabilities.
- Organic modelling of plant growth over time via L-systems algorithms.
- Integrated Metabolic, NURBS, and Polygonal Sub-Division Surface modelling.
- Integrated VEX RenderMan-like shading language for mantra Renderer.
- Integrated Scripting and Expression Languages.
- Integrated RenderFarm capabilities.
- Extensive Scripting support in: hscript, tcl, etc.
they've also got an offshoot for doing cool realtime 3D graphics ('TOUCH' - used on the RUSH tour this summer) at:
www.derivativeinc.com
cheers!
john.
btw - Houdini's renderer app ('mantra') was used for rendering the 'senator kelly' scene in x-men (where he turns to water) -- to give you some idea of the renderer that comes with the package. apparently, writing your own shaders (like RenderMan), and it supports a hybrid of scanline rendering and raytracing.
mantra is a bit better than mental ray (features/quality/speed), and on par with renderman - industrial strength.
Aqsis is a GPL implementation of the Renderman spec. It probably isn't as full featured as BMRT was, but it does have the benefits of being really free and under active development.
Is Microsoft Paint. Not only does it start quickly and have low overhead (unlike some other graphics programs *cough*Maya*cough* *cough*Lightwave*cough*), but just look at all the features! With MSPaint, you can draw straight lines, curvy lines, make them different colors, or even add text! It's even got something that lets you fill in big areas in seconds with a single color, and it allows you to zoom up to like 8x!
I mean, holy shit; with all that, how can you go wrong?
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
I've looked into tons of 3D packages and worked with a lot of them.
:-) (SCNR)
Maya, Softimage, Houdini, 3DSMax and even Lightwave would be somewhat of an overkill for what you're looking for.
Most of these Programms have an extensive (and expensive) plugin architecture that usually attribute to the needs of film and video studios, with tons of stuff for movematching, compositing and NLE integration and all that kind of stuff.
What you want is a package that gets the 3D looking good and the job done hassle free, with a rock-solid renderer integrated. Free packages like Blender can be very good (Blender is), but they pack to much of a steep learning curve and to much fiddling to get the actual pic looking good.
Cinema 4D (http://www.maxon.de/) quite possibly could be your ticket to ride. It's easy as 123 for n00bs, has one of the fastest and best internal renderers and has a top-notch mac version. And - a very important must-have for grafic designers - it's, afaik, the only package that comes with a set of standard 2D vector format import filters. Read: 2D drawing in Freehand (or whatever), import to Cinema, extrude to 3D model, profit.
This funcionality costs a fortune with other packages like Realsoft3D or Maya.
The alternative that could be interessting for you is the new kid on the block "Carrara". Its very easy to use, feature rich, cheap and has a mac version aswell (http://www.eovia.com/). It could very much be the upcoming cinema-killer. I don't no about that must-have 2d vector import though. Check that out before buying.
Once again: The often recommended Maya, Softimage, Houdini and co. are cool, but actually only for people who do nothing but living on 3D day-in and day-out. Or do you give a shit if you've got HDTV format compatability? Thought so.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Download the uhhhh Kazaa unlimited demo versions. Lightwave is the smallest, Maya is a few hundred Meg. To download these you'll need Cable, which isn't protected by FCC regulations, so download while you can ;-)
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
Lightwave is very easy to learn, has a very good modeler (for polygons and subdivision surfaces; no NURBS though)
sorry, but Lightwave has had NURBS since 5.0 (maybe earlier, I forget). To use it, go into Modeler, make a box, hit TAB.
Unless you're implying that they removed it in later versions?
So what am I not getting (or getting correct) about RenderMan?
Schnapple
As a UI designer, I would advise staying well away from LightWave. It has a very non-standard and unintuitive interface that would probably drive you nuts!
Yes, but once you get used to it, it's quite powerful and easy-to-use. (Note, I haven't tried the latest version - I use 5.6 regularly.)
I've used a LOT of 3D apps, and they all have different approaches to UI - but once I got familiar with LW, I found it to be the easiest to navigate.
Can't help you much on packages, but can on a definition.
:)
NURBS - Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline
Essentially, a NURBS surface is a mesh of B-Splines, and B-Splines are a way to represent a curve using knots and points (sometimes called control points or de Boor points). A B-Spline is similar to a Bezier curve (try it in Photoshop). The only difference is you add "knots" which force the curve to go through some fixed points. The first point and first knot are always the same, as are the last point and last knot (these are the "edges" of the mesh), so you need at least 3 points and two knots to make a B-Spline curve and 4 knots and 5 points to represent a mesh (if the B-splines share point between their curves, which not normal - 6 is normal - you end up with an hourglass shape).
The mesh itself is called non-uniform because the knots don't need to be equally spaced from one another. Rational means simply using real numbers not Imaginary.
here's a picture of a B-spline
There are numerous problems with NURBS surfaces, most of which you'll never worry about (us developer types do). There's a pretty good article on this by Intel
On the other hand, NURBS have the advantage of being able to remove knots and control points and scale performance for processors (sacrificing quality).
Interestingly (to me, at least), the points aren't called weighted control points anywhere (at least not from most google results I looked at), as they were in most texts when I took computer graphics in college. All weighted control points means is describing the points of the NURBS curve as a unit vector (vhat, v with the carat symbol on top) and a multiple (weight) of that vector, rather than the actual x,y,z of the point. The point formula was thus w*vhat, where vhat=v/Norm(v). That's probably technobabble to most people, so I'll shut up now
Maya is nice, but if you aren't animating you're only using a very small portion of its abilities.
Rather than learn an inferior program (I use that adjective lightly), learn the one that does the most, so you don't have to re-learn the basics in a different suite later.
One of the reasons I use Maya (recently switching from 3D Studio Max) is because it does everything, without the need for extra plugins. Truthfully, I don't use most of the features, but it's nice to know I can. After all, I don't use 90% of the features in Word, but that doesn't mean I'll switch to Works.
As for cost, most 3D programs, including Maya, have demo versions and significantly reduced cost for students. A reduced-price Maya plus the cost of a community college course to qualify is dirt-cheap. Beyond that, the free versions are usually stripped-down, but contain enough features to learn the suite (which is, of course, the point).