Cheap 3d model applications

[Lilwolf]

Anyone know any good cheap 3d modeling applications.  

I've tried every free one I can find.  And still having trouble finding any small ones that handle images (well).  I'm almost ready to write a simple one... (but thats taking on more then I want right now).

I see TurboCAD v8 deluxe (not perfessional) on ebay for about 10 - 20 bucks. and v9.2 (latest) for about 40.  I don't know the difference or if they handle what I want.  The perfessional really does, but not spending that amound of cash.

Mainly I want to build small models.  Small meshes with a few images.  

Any comments?

[lokki]

Hi,
have you tried Blender?

http://www.blender.org/

MilkShape
http://www.swissquake.ch/chumbalum-soft/

What type of Modeler are you looking for?

[JoyMonkey]

ooh! never heard of Blender before, but there's a nice little Frogger style demo for it available for download here.
Very nice. I might give it a try, I've completely forgotten how to use 3D Studio.

[Jakobud]

Yup Blender and Milkshape are the two most well known free ones. Blender is definately a nice piece of work.  Professional results can be achieved with it (with a lot of work...)

[Lilwolf]

Milkshape used to be shareware.  I downloaded it once... couldnt look at it for a few weeks... and passed the free trial date by a week...  So I gave up...

I hate time based trials..  I would prefer a limited feature set or maybe for something like this... a limited model size (only 5 or 10 items or something... enought to tests parts... not enought to do anything that useful)

I'll retry milkshape.

I tried blender a while ago I thought... Don't remember what problem I had with it... I'll look again.

[ErikRuud]

Try POVRay and Moray

POVRay is a free Raytracing program that can give very professional results.  But it is script based and can be a rel pain to create models in by hand.

Moray is an interactive wireframe modeler for POVRay.  It is sharware, but it is fully functional with out time limits.  It has a nag screen at startup, and after a while it will start to popup additional nags when you start a render.

I still have the models I created for buttons and Happ Super Joysticks.




There are ways to import objects from other packages into Moray as well.

[Cameronj]

Last time I was into the 3d animation stuff. Hash Animation Master was a nice inexpensive set.
http://www.animationmaster.com/
I liked the modeling engine a lot. We did more character based stuff though.

Cameron

[lokki]

I had forgotten abou Moray...I  Used POV a while ago, but back then it Notepad was the prefered GUI :-).

Blender is a very powerful modeler, but it does not have the friendliest GUIs. But the stuff that people have done with it is very impressive.

[ErikRuud]

Loki,

POVRay still works off of text files, but Moray is a wonderful GUI front end for it that does everything for you.

[lokki]

Loki,

POVRay still works off of text files, but Moray is a wonderful GUI front end for it that does everything for you.

Hi,
I know what I meant was that I used POV way back when there was no Moray. And the only way of doing things was to use a text editor.
I have not used POV in a  long time, But I am aware of what Moray does.

[SirPoonga]

woohoo, povray.  I beowulfed povray.

[ErikRuud]

SirPoonga,

You lost me on that one.

Beowulfed??

I know about the old english saga, but I don't quite get what you are saying.

[SirPoonga]

beowulf is one implementation of parallel processing over several computers.  POVray has a beowulf build.  
Basically you have a queen computer that you execute a task on, say rendering an image.  It then splits up the rendering process to several drone computers.  Those drone computers will render a part of the pic then send the results back to the queen computer.  It definately sped up render time versus one computer.

At IBM I built a beowulf cluster and used POVray to make sure it was working.   I had like 5 computers clustered together.  It was pretty cool.

[grafixmonkey]

You can actually download Maya for free from their site,  Basically it's not licensed for commercial production, and watermarks images it renders to make them unusable.  But for modeling, animation, texturing, it's unbelievable.  I think their goal in releasing a free version was to increase their installed base of users.  They've also lowered the price of their commercial software quite a bit.  You can get Maya for Games which contains features that are nice for making polygon models and animations for games, but does not contain features that you would need to make animated movie effects.

All the graphics on my web page were done in Maya, if you want to see some of the basic bottom end of what it can do.

[ErikRuud]

Ah Ha! Now I get it, a do it yourself Render Farm!

[Spaced Invader]

woohoo, povray.  I beowulfed povray.

You built a beowulf cluster? Now, that's cool!  

I've thought of doing that with some spare systems at home...I just can't think of a good enough reason. I guess the cool factor alone may be enough...when I'm done building cabs.

Hey, does anyone know if SETI@Home has a boewulf build? Just a thought...

I am not a nerd...I know you were thinkin' it.

[SirPoonga]

woohoo, povray.  I beowulfed povray.

You built a beowulf cluster? Now, that's cool!  

Correction, I was PAID to build a beowulf cluster  

I've thought of doing that with some spare systems at home...I just can't think of a good enough reason. I guess the cool factor alone may be enough...when I'm done building cabs.

No, there isn't a good enough reason.  A program has to beowulf ready which usually means custom software

[allroy1975]

isn't there something that will just let a stupid person (like me) create a bunch of pieces of wood and then manipulate them to see roughly what I'm going to build will look like?

ugh...I hate being dumb.

[grafixmonkey]

actually the free version of Maya can do this pretty easily if you just want to play with moving squished cubes around.  

1:  create polygon cube
2:  squish it with the Scale tool
3:  move it around with the Move tool
4:  hold ALT and drag the mouse with combos of the left and/or middle button to rotate and zoom around your work.
5:  repeat as necessary

But, the rest of Maya is not very easy to use...  powerful, but not easy.  You should have no problem moving some cubes around though.  And it's still free.

http://www.alias.com/eng/index.shtml