Just curious...

I swear by it and it's free!

I've tried it, but couldn't get "into" it.

I've tried several packages for modelling, but always prefer Maya. I guess it's just what I'm confortable and quickest with.

I do. Wings3D is fantastic.

Yes.

But not for my current game or the two others in my pipeline. Right now it's just Povray, Anim8or, Photoshop (cleanup/rearanging), several font generation tools and a hexeditor (don't ask) :>

But then... maybe. After my workflow is a bit more streamlined, some additional libs appeared and if I'm about to do a game, wich is "real" 3d (won't happen this year).

Wayward: Are you still a fan of Form-Z?

Well.. Wings 3D is a little weak for UV mapping and has no support for animation. In fact, I use separate tools for that sort of thing.

However, for modelling it's a dream! It's really intuitive to use and once you learn some keyboard shortcuts it becomes a very efficient tool.

Sausage: I still have a soft spot for Form-Z. Nothing can beat it for modelling architectural forms (levels).

Wings is fantastic. I made all the models in Best Friends with it. However, I used milkshape to do the uv mapping, and characterfx to do the animation.

There is a new program called "Silo3D" that works *very* similar to wings/nendo/mirai that costs 100$. It's much more full-featured than wings though- and faster too. So if I do modeling again, I will probably make the switch. I know Grandmaster Danny Mac uses Silo now, so maybe he can speak to how he likes it :)

I tried early versions of Silo (http://www.nevercenter.com/) and was put off by the programs poor stability, though Nevercenter appear to be addressing that problem with the latest releases.

Very tempting.. I'll give it a try someday!

I'm in too much of a comfort zone with my Maya to use owt else.

Sad init?!

Yes and I love it. Even auto-uv is nice once you get the hang of it.

Silo looks interesting, but it doesn't seem to offer any more than Wings 3D does right now (no plugin SDK, no bones\animation support yet, etc.) What tools do you guys use for animation? I'm looking for something lightweight and easy to use with nice export capabilities.

Silo is great

You can see what the developers have to say about comparisons with other modelers.

http://www.nevercenter.com/index.php/Compare

I really like it, it has an arbitrary split tool, and the extrude tools are really nice. Something that's missing from Wings...

I like to use silo for modeling, Ultimate Unwrap3d for uv mapping, and i'm starting to use CharacterFx for boneing and animating...

Milkshape is a great generic tool, but it doesn't seem to do anything extreamly well. Silo does modeling really well, it has manipulator based modeling like maya so it should feel pretty familiar to maya users...

I gave Silo another try. It's rather good.

I just tried out Silo. It looked quite promising.

Only a small install too.

I think it could use some more import\export options though.

Further playing with Silo has revealed it to be just as flaky as previous versions. I had undo corrupt my model, and now whenever I run Silo it doesn't draw anything in the viewport. I'll wait for version 5.0. It's a shame because the user-interface is great.

when you subdevide a shape, it doesn't actually get applied until you refine the control mesh, the "subdevide" is actually just a filter that get's applied. So if you subdevide and then perform an undo, it will undo the last action you performed, moving a vertex, extruding an edge etc. but the subdevide operation will appear to still be in place. This is a little weird at first, I admit, but I think it's intentional.

Yes, the subdivide did catch me out until I understood what it was doing. It can look like the undo has messed up when it hasn't, because you're looking at a different subdiv level, but I was pretty sure it messed up properly. The undo in Maya isn't terribly reliable either. Unfortunately, when Silo stopped drawing the viewports I couldn't fix it. I might have to reinstall it.

I'm complaining that Silo isn't robust, but then neither is any other 3D modeller I've used, so it shouldn't be an issue.

I had that problem once too, I re-installed it and it went away. My only gripe is that the thing leaks memory a bit... :)

I've reinstalled Silo and now it's working again. I probably stick with Silo for a while because it does have some very nice features. I've really only tried box-modelling up till now, but I'm looking forward to trying other modelling styles.

I've gained some experience on Wings now so I'm disinclined to switch to another package, and it's free anyway! :)

Almost everything in our game Starscape was created using wings (some of the character models I had worked on in other packages years before, and were imported into wings and heavily modified).

UV mapping wasn't a major issue though, since the game is 2D top down perspective, so almost everything is flat mapped from above.

With our second game we have moved to 3D and I've really come up against the slow UV mapping workflow wings currently has. This seems to be the current area of focus though for wings development so things should be improving.

At some point, wings' lack of animation support will mean we will have to ditch it. Currently we are using framed models (like the way Quake used to do things) and interpolating between them, which works fine for the type of animation we need right now, and is just about possible using wings3D (but not fun:( )

Fost,

Nothing keeps you from using Wings for the geometry and other tools for UV mapping and animation. For instance there are dedicated UV mapping tools and Character FX is a very powerful animation (boning, IK) tool at a reasonable price (last I checked) of about $35.

P.S. Incidentally I just quoted your game as an example of an indie game with higher-than-usual production values and the feasibility of such projects (effort vs price) - check out Indie Business section.
P.P.S. Congrats for the quality of your games btw! :)

The only thing keeping me from doing that is laziness. I've been through just about every 3D package going (I even used to have a job where I spent a large amount of time evaluating modelling packages for a games company), and now the thought of learning yet another package breaks me out in a sweat.

To be honest, as nice as all these packages are, I don't think they come anywhere close to some of the bigger packages used in commercial development. We are putting away a bit of money each month towards buying something. In the meantime I feel profficient enough in wings to not want to spend time learning something else, and the game we are working on right now doesn't have any animation requirements that I can't fulfill using framed meshes, output from Wings.

If I need something in the meantime, I may look into Hash, as I used to use that many years ago.

Re:P.S.: Thanks, although I'm not sure the production values are higher compared to any of the great titles I see knocking around on this forum, we are just lucky to be three people working full time on it. I notice there are a lot more single person developers out there, and the thought of finishing a game singlehandedly just makes my jaw drop.:eek: