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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 :-)."
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 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.
...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.
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.
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.
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
Quite possibly its because he/they were looking for Mac OS X rendering packages. 3DS Max is Windows-only. I would think running it in Virual PC would be wasteful, slow and painful.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
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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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.
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.
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.
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.