Unit makers show off your programs

Okay I got this idea from another thread. Those of you that use 3D programs to make units, post a screenshot that best illustrate what you have.

I use Bryce5 from Corel. $80.

This is a very very EXTREMELY easy to use animation and rendering program. It's mostly used for landscape work though. If anyone is familiar with www.DigitalBlasphemy.com that guy's original work was done in Bryce until he moved onto using the much more expensive Lightwave. (The same as Babylon5 and the Star Wars movies)

Bryce has very poor modeling creation built in. It's only primative objects and a type of boolean addition that takes come getting used to. Texture mapping is done with ease, with thousands of built in textures from rocks/mountains/planets/leaves/glasses/metals/clouds/liquids/ and all sorts of other things. But the problem I have come across is that there is no utility that allows me to accurately map a complex shape such as an aircraft body or something like that. For those I can only hope for texture maps that come with models.

I cannot create anything more complex than a mountain range in Bryce, so I must import all the models that I use from the internet. Bryce can important nearly all formats available except .max and milkshape files.

The animation feature is very easy to use, but it's rather like clay animation. You advance the timeline one frame, move an object, advance the timeline again and you move the object again. Repeat until you have the desired motion. It can become quite tedious. Sometimes it takes me 5 hours through trial and error to teach something how to walk. So that's the bad side.

Cons: I have no way of telling an object to act like a desired material, whether cloth, rubber or solid metal. So realistic sails on sailboats are out of the question for me. As stated above, I mush choreograph all movements myself, so there are no handy "skeletons" that are included in Bryce as are other programs.

But I've been using the Bryce family since 1997 and I've gotten very used to it. It's not perfect but it can still compete with higher end software if you are ingeneuous and know a lot of tricks.

This picture below shows my Montana Super Battleship in mid-broadside. The line drawing that you see is what I normally see, but a nice feature is that I can selectively render an area and not wait for the whole screen to render.

Here is an animated gif I made of the broadside using only the line art that I work with. It's very handy to previewthis before I start rendering and waiting 1 hour plus for the finished product.

Animation

Pay close attention to the directory structure.

And when I want to change textures, this window pops up, allowing me great leeway in modification. More textures can be chosen easily and modified to your heart's content. Importing pictures for use as textures is also easy. For this texture I had just asked Bryce to make a random creation.

Haha!
Pov-ray:

I´m a newbie concerning units, but I´m working with Open FX. The program is freeware and good for newbies although it lacks.

Adler

C4D; I love using this program; except for the particle emitter I still am having a problem with. Model is from sifi3d.com

I'm using C4D as well, but an outdated version (v5.3). I think it's a great piece of software.

BTW, what are your problems with the particle emitter? maybe I can help a bit, although my old version may not have all the features of the newer versions.

I use Blender maybe one of the best 3d animating programs you can get for free, IMHO. I havent yet mastered maikng models but can make fairly simple objects. But i ve gotten pretty darn good at the particle functions.

@Aaglo- Nice! From now on im going to say thigh = 15 and The Angle of my left foot is The angle of my left leg + 90 + 0.5*sin360

Oh BTW, Blender has a Game Engine

Edit: Forgot the pic

@Vbraun
If I were you, I wouldn't laugh. Otherwise you might find my Rtoes in the same coordinates as the center point in the line between your Lhip and Rhip

Oh i meant to say "Seriously nice work though" after wards

I should have added that you should also state the strengths and weakenesses of your programs like I did.

can i post a picture from MS Paint i did from middle school?

I'll let muffins show some OpenFX stuff off, as his are better than mine. Not having tries any other programs (apart from rhino, for something completely different). I would say OpenFXs advantages are in it's simplicity in the basics, while it has some quite complicated things, some of which are not at all usefull, and some of which might be, but which need to be experimented with.

I'd say it's lacking a bit in specail effects, and some of the more advanced stuff.

Basically I feel it's a good starting program (and it's FREE - good for skint students), but I might move on to blender in the future, as many have said it is more powerful. I'd prefer to see what more I can get out of OpenFX though (I'm still noticing new things I can do)

nameless53 said:

can i post a picture from MS Paint i did from middle school?

Click to expand...

The very 1st sentence says 3D programs. This is meant for the new guys to go window shopping. If you want to post MS Paint and get laughed off, go ahead. I have a really bad attitude when it comes to trolling. Ask the Mods.

Jeez, Muffins, get over here! I'd just embarras the Open FX community if I posted!

Ok,
Pov-ray.

Strengths:
- It's relatively easy to do modelling yourself. You can create quite magnificent stuff by just using simple forms: sphere, cylinder, cone, box and torus. Just mix them, cut them, scale them, rotate them - you can do a lot with just those basic forms
- It has an in-built animation system. By using trigonometric functions (sin, cos) you can move things quite alot around
- It's free
- It doesn't require much from computer (altough the rendering becomes faster with a good pc)
- It has many wonderful features, if you have the time and patience to look for them
- It develops your 3d-thinking

Weaknesses:
- Text-based interface: you have to type everything (some people use moray for modelling, but I'm not one of those. I've tried it, and I feel more comfortable with the text interface. So this is not necessarily a weakness, but since most 3d-programs have a visual interface, then this may be a bit scary approach on the subject)
- You really can't use any normal 3d-models available in the net. Well, you can use some, but you really can't do much animation with them. The reason for this is, that (AFAIK) the models are in some sort of mesh form. And that's where pov-ray is poor - the mesh is it's downfall. You really can't animate very complex meshes. And making meshes with pov-ray is tedious job, where your 3d-thinking really gets tested.
- And due to the previous clause: humans and most other livelike creatures are complex to animate. Well, simplest things are easy (walking and standing idle ), but adding a sword and swing it like it could do some damage, then you might be strougling a bit. Try these at your own risk.

I like it

The animation feature is very easy to use, but it's rather like clay animation. You advance the timeline one frame, move an object, advance the timeline again and you move the object again. Repeat until you have the desired motion. It can become quite tedious. Sometimes it takes me 5 hours through trial and error to teach something how to walk. So that's the bad side.

Click to expand...

Wyrm, you know you can keyframe, right? Of course, if I were to attempt something as complicated as walking, I'd call my brother and ask him to send me some of his cell animation books that he used for his college classes. Basically these books have diagrams that show what the key frames for walking, running, different letter/word sounds and such are supposed to look like. My brother, BTW went to college for this and will soon be making his debut in Hollywood circles, if all goes well with the production company he's joining.

Anywho, once I figured out how keyframes worked in Bryce, I was able to do the death animation for my airship fairly quickly. I also have been playing around with Poser 5 (slow as it runs on my computer) and figured a few things out, and have been toying around with a leaderhead animation (I'll post a screenshot of that later tonite).

Yes thank you. I know about keyframes, paths,and the Advanced Motion Lab. I was merely explaining what the process is like for those that have not seen the program. Remember, been using Bryce programs since 1997.

Hard to say what the weaknesses of Cinema 4D are - one is certainly the damn high price, but with this exception I can only recommend it. Even my older version is fast, flexible, relatively easy to learn, and has lots of powerful features. OTOH I have no experience at all with other 3d packages, so I'm probably quite biased

I think I wouldn't be able to work with a 3d program without a graphical user interface, like aaglo does it with PovRay. I would be totally helpless with this software (which only makes me respect his units even more)

Well the most problem that I’m running into is trying to find a good explanatory tutorial for the emitter system and how to use the mocha function. The most I can find are tutorials on version 7; I however did find one for the 8.5 version that I’m using.

This program was very costly at around $35,000 only because I’m going to school to learn about graphics programs, sadly they teach about 3Ds MAX and light wave, which I still have yet to attend as this stupid general education, is still lagging on.

As far as the strength and weaknesses of this program… Uhhh… I don’t know yet give me a year and I’ll get back to you on that one.

Allright I use G-Max I got it with my Flight Simulator 2004 and I will try and get it posted of were to go it is Freeware.
Strengths:
+A lot of objects and other crap to choose from.
+Can do complicated animations
+It is FREE
+and other stuff I haven't found
Weaknesses
-Hard to learn if you don't know what you are doing like me

Here is the site to get an Idea
G-Max 3D Modeling tool It's FREE