I was just wondering what 3D animation software you people use, and why? I've been hopping around from 3dsMax to maya, then to lightwave, I messed around with bryce3d for a while. A few years back I learned about blender3D, and evern since the interface overhaul I've been using it ever since. It covers everything I need it to. So what do you guys use and why? Any specific thing you like about that package? I know with blender, I love how the keyboard is the main user interface. Not the mouse using graphical menus. The interface and its size. It's not bloated and bogged down like most other applications. And best of all, blender is free. I know maya and 3dsmax have a hefty price tag. I know most professionals look at software and think, "free? Then it can't be that good."

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I run blenderxgrid and blendergalactica.com so I like blender. That being said, professionally I still use Lightwave 9 for all my broadcast work. While Blender has come a long way and I use it for personal projects and previs work because the fast internal rendering engine, lighting over all in Blender needs work. There is no volumetric lighting and the shear number of models available for purchase for commerical usage without licensing issues make Lightwave a better choice.

The downside to Lightwave is that rendering time is a complete well...it starts with b and rhymes with itch. That being said, I usually hire out a renderfarm for LW work and bill the client or include the estimate in the bid. Now LW's rendering engine is starting to show its age, but it's widely supported with 3rd party renderers, but still it is one of the few that can do broadcast work out of the box.

One of the big hurdles Blender has to gain acceptance, especially in smaller shops like mine where we'd like the price point, is the Blender 3D's community. There are a core of Zealots that think everything should be free and open and somehow charging money for a model is a crime. The hoops I had to jump through just to get blendergalactica on blendernation was rediculous. Like I wanted people to register to gain access to the models for security and BW issues. Eventually we bowed and the resulting story ended up bleeding our 35GB/month BW alotment in less than 3 days. And that is with very few of our 20 - 40 MB high detailed models uploaded.

Now I'm trying to get some stories posted about the blenderxgrid project especially since we have some customized submitting tools for OSX users and I'm getting the same "Well we have this or that concern". Personally I don't like being dictated to especially on projects that I'm spending $3000 out of my own pocket to fund. (That's how much the Xserve unit was for the controller, add another $1200/year for a dedicated 1MB/s business cable connection). And this is to help build an open access controller.

Now I also use Terragen .9x for Mac for landscape renders. Great tool, other than the render times, but I'm not overly impressed yet with Terragen 2. Mainly since I have a license for Terragen and so many features diabled.

 

 

 

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I only use animation stuff for making things for games. Models and vehicles etc.
In the past i've used gmax, 3d studio max and a few others i can't remember. Even though gmax is outdated it does what i need it to do and it also has the plugins needed to get the job done.
On the other hand, 3ds max is pretty damn useful. If you've used gmax you will get used to 3ds max easily, because after all gmax is a stripped down version of 3ds max.
Anyways yeah 3ds max is pretty damn pricey, tried the demo and i can definately say it's worth it if you are going into professional modeling etc.

-HellFire

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3D Studio has long been a favorite of game makers. Blender is ideal for that (since it was orginally designed to create NeoGeo games on IRIX and still has an intergrated game engine) but the two major issues I've had with 3D Max in the past have been price point and the fact that it only runs on Windows. Hence why I use Lightwave. And I just finished a 30 day demo of LW9 on Mac Intel and extremely impressed. A new MacBook Pro is in my budget for this year along with upgrades to FC Studio 5 so LW 9 won't be too far behind.

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For the gaming community blender3d has become a big option now. In the blender chat, we get a lot of people coming in using it to make games. Actually, that's a large percentage of blender users. They use it strictly for game graphics. Blender has a wide range of output formats, so no matter what the game engine uses for it's main model format, most likely blender supports it.

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Very true, but there are a lot of features that blender is still lacking in the 3D animation world, like volumetric lighting. That's been available in LW and MAX for at least a decade either intergrated into the software or via plug in. Yet it has failed to make it into Blender.

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I've been experimenting with Blender a bit. I did up a logo that came out well enough. Animating it took a bit longer than I'd hope for, but that's probably due to using the external renderer YAFRAY, which looks very nice in rendering on sites I've seen, but I have yet to fully unlock what it can do.

Before Blender, the only real experience I had with 3D software was Poser 4, which really was nice, if you knew how to use it, but had little capabilities in terms of creating new models. The later versions of Poser I tried were rather buggy, and I lost my copy of Poser 4, so I decided to try Blender.

The biggest feature of all the 3D modeling programs I've tried, that I really like since I'm a noob at it, is the ability to load a background image that I can "trace" over with polygons to make my models. I think Milkshape could do that too... but that was only available in trial versions. Now Blender can do it so my logo came out Waaaaay better than it would have had I not been able to load up the logo in the background.

Shortcuts, from what I've tried so far, are pretty easy to figure out on my own... Learning keyboard shortcuts is the biggest time saver for efficiency when working with programs, so I have been looking up Blender tutorials online, which thankfully are plentiful on their site.

Hmmmm, I think that's about all I can think of. Nothing really negative to say about Blender. For anyone starting out, I recommend it highly for it's capabilities (and the fact that it's freeware )

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Another 3D software that I used for some time is Caligari GameSpace. It is, as the name implies, specific for 3D games.
It comes with all the 3D features of its big brother, TrueSpace, for modelling, texturing and surfacing, rendering and bone animation, and with scripting support. But GameSpace has some game-related import-export formats already included without using external plugins, that come really handy with lots of common game engines.
For example, Conitec A6,Blitz3D ,Torque and DirectX (.X) for DarkBASIC.
Then you can directly modify Quake 2 & 3 (md2 and md3) models, Half Life, unreal, and export through included Milkshape - Genesis 3D BDV, Genesis 3D MOT, Unreal / UT 3D, The Sims SKN, GenEdit 3dt exporter, No-one Lives Forever ABC, Vampire : The Masquerade NOD, RAW, etc, plus the major import/exports 3ds (max), obj, lwo, dxf.
Another thing is that is very light in terms of memory and disk space, compared to Maya/LW/3dSmax that take up 2GB, Gamespace only takes 50MB. Also the price is around $300, so another good point for Gamespace.
It has many advantages, but I still don't know if it comes to be a professional tool for 3D development on its own.
IF you want, you can try a free unlimited version, GamespaceLight, with only limitation in exporting (only .X).

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I've been using Macromedia Flash 8 for two years now. I find its scripting easy and its framework is fine. The problem with Macromedia Flash 8, is that it isn't measured in pixels, so its hard to make measured images in it. I suggest making/editing the images in photoshop, and importing them to macromedia flash.

Actionscript is very easy to learn. It is the very first scripting language aside from HTML that I learned. It was able to teach me about for loops, while loops, functions, if statements, equality signs, and more. I think having flash as a second language that I learned after HTML really helped me.

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I've been using Macromedia Flash 8 for 1 month. At now I do flash skins for my site. And i need crack forMacromedia Flash 8, please help me.

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