What's a good program to experiment with object modeling?

[Vettish]

I have 5 kids... 3 are tech heads (like their fathers) the other two are "artists". Unfair description. they are all musicians, or at the very least musical. I digress. We want to customize and or expand our selection of objects in our world. I know it's not for the faint hearted, but we want to try. Where do we start?

Thanks

Patrick & co.

[DrJim]

Unfortunately, I don't think there are any really great programs for 3D modeling for beginners - too much mixed skill required to combine the model development tasks - which are very techie - and the actual artistic skill to develop a model.

For the skills, I would recommend Google SketchUp - which is free, has a great user base and is quite intuitive. The main disadvantage is exporting the models from Sketchup is fairly difficult. (The main path is via Blender, which is free and very powerful, but which I personally find very difficult to use though lots of people disagree with me on that.) A simple search of the forum or the web will find either program.

For the artistic part, I would recommend using a 2D program first and develop new skins (textures) for the existing models in Alice - then play with lighting, position, etc. If you have Photoshop (or even Elements), I would recommend that - not so much that I like the program but that it is the defacto standard.

The simplest program to do both that I've found is Object Creator from Gravimetricstudios, but unfortunately the URL I have for it is no longer active. Other freeware favorates are Anim8or (stay with .3ds file format) and Wings 3D - if you eventually want to get into games, Milkshape (not free, but inexpensive) is more difficult but gives you a more finished product. Again there are links to these in the forum.

You still have to go through Biturn or some other convertor to get to .ase format, but that usually :o isn't too much of a problem with simple objects.

Good luck.

[Aaron M]

But the lighting, polygons, and textures always get messed up.

[DrJim]

Textures have to be imported separately into Alice from any tool and only the bitmap information actually comes in. Any lighting information has to be set in Alice and, as far as I know, applies to the total object (i.e., you can't use any lighting masks). Again - Alice really wasn't designed as a modeling tool but as a tool for learning programming.

The only actual mesh problems I've had are with scaling and normals - but these can get pretty messy. Usually (but certainly not always) these are actual errors in the models - not conversion problems - and in that case there isn't much anything any program can do. My only suggestion there is to try the import path with something very simple first - if a cube or sphere isn't coming in correctly, a very complex figure won't.