Quote:
Originally Posted by john855
Since you have so much experience with OpenGL and 3d in general, can you tell us what tools you use on the mac to develop your models? Or can you do most of it by hand?
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With my limited artistic talents I prefer to let others create models
To answer your question directly though, on the Mac I've mostly used LightWave. I'm no expert with this app but I know it
well enough. I do maintain an active licence for it for work purposes mostly. However I think it's probably out of the reach of most of you. Not only for the $1000 price tag but also resources for learning it are limited to more "professional" delivery.
There is no panacea for model creation for 3D programmers. If you're doing the A-Z of 3D graphics, then when it comes to choosing a tool for editing models, then the best advice I can offer is to choose something there are lots of resources for learning. You're going to spend a lot of time learning so make it easy on yourself.
Here's a quick run down to what I've got on my Mac at the moment. I am looking for an alternative to LightWave as I do want to refer to something in this tutorial which everyone can access:
Blender - I find Blender's interface a bit "quirky" but the amount of documentation available for it makes learning it not so hard. Learning fast is like anything in graphics programming: fast is good.
BRL-CAD - I used this some years ago. It's far different to what used then but looks quite robust. Not as "showy" as others but don't let that turn you off. Has good documentation as well and, personally, I like the way it works.
Misfit Model 3D - Nice and simple. Outputs Quake II MD2 models only (I think). Needs more experimentation so I have little experience on this.
Wings3D - I've downloaded. Ran it once. Nothing against it, just haven't learnt how to use it yet. Didn't seem immediately intuitive.
Just remember that as long as you can learn it well enough to do the models you want and can export from software to a format you can load, then you've chosen the right app. If in doubt, go with Blender.
