Want a professional 3D application for only $10

[Guest Gump]

for 10 bucks a gob I'm sure ya mum can accommodate.

as for the million bucks, you might have moved on before she makes that kind of cash

Ask nicely anyway.

 

wrong answers

[Guest happycase]

I want to animate my dreams or whatever. I know a five minute 3-d movie can take up to five months to make though. Any alternatives?

 

these two maniacs use daz studio and (i think) free models http://www.youtube.com/user/silicious http://www.youtube.com/user/wendyvainity

 

you might even be interested in 2d though http://anime.smithmicro.com/ http://www.toonboom.com/main/

 

Thank you. This 2-D software is amazing.

[Guest tonfarben]

Thanks to Rumbo for digging that out, already bought the pro version.

A little bit bout me: I am motiondesigner and character animator and I HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTTTEEEEEEEEEEE Maya. Why? It´s a buggy old dinosaur which can give you very bad headaches when the deadline comes nearer and you have to script workarounds for everything. Pretty lame. They should throw that bloatet shit called sourcecode to the trashbin and completely rewrite the core program.

 

I did some short films with maya, xsi and c4d. C4D won and I use it everyday in my work since 9 years now.

So if anybody has questions, feel free to ask!

 

Here is an awesome Mayatutorial:

[chaosmachine]

3D is really hard. I spent a few weeks in 2005 learning basic modeling in 3ds Max (via video tutorials). I managed to learn enough to create a half-decent face, but it was really time consuming. The hardest part is you have to constantly be moving the model around, because things will look right from one angle, but move it a little bit and you'll see it's totally wrong...

 

It seems like it should be a lot easier than it was. Maybe things have improved since then.

 

Ideally, I wanted to be able to do stuff like this:

 

 

Unfortunately, it's not as easy as it looks.

[Ego]

Seems Cinema4D is getting really popular these days. Our artist at work swears by it as well.

 

Doing buildings and "easy to define" structures is imo much much easier than organic things like characters. Animation as well, is a completely seperate skill that I never really mastered. But if you get a good grasp on the poly modelling tools (which aren't that hard.) You can create the image above without a problem. I've always been more into stills, doing some modelling, texturing and getting a good grasp on how lightning algorithms work. I loved tweaking the vray parameters.

 

Some of my work: (this is years ago, haven't really done anything since)

(3DS fluked when I tried to unwrap this, so the plane is untextured)

 

But I tried to do human faces numerous times and failed miserably every time. You need the eye of an artist to model faces.

[chaosmachine]

it's funny because i found the imprecise stuff easier. trying to get edges to line up, etc was where i kept running into frustrating problems (lack of experience, really).

 

ps: nice work.

[blackdust]

My dabble with 3d consists of stuff like this.

 

 

 

Both done in 3D Max

 

I should get back into the swing of things really, its just finding a few hours after going work to get motivated to do it.

[Guest rumbo]

When modelling human head/feace for animation, its important to maintain proper "edgeloops" around the object so that it deforms properly during animation. imagine an edgeloop being a ring of connected quads (or square polygons) that run in a loop right around the shape of the characters head and end where they began. The head should be made completely of these edgeloops. In the past, this was a real skill that you had to do inside the 3D program yourself, but now there are a few Re-topologising tools which let you sculpt a head in the program like ZBrush without worring about the technical design of the object so you can concentrate on the form and the artist decisions, without worrying about the polygon count. Then after you are done, you can begin tracing the actual mesh structure over the top of the head you have already created, so that you know exactly where you will place the edgeloops and see the finished structure underneath while you work.

 

Here is a video:

 

[mcbpete]

it's funny because i found the imprecise stuff easier. trying to get edges to line up, etc was where i kept running into frustrating problems (lack of experience, really).

 

ps: nice work.

I'm completely the opposite, I can (well could, I haven't touched Maya since my uni days) model inorganic models pretty easily but my organic stuff looked shite. I think it was because I always approached it like a CAD tool more than a modelling tool and would always type in the dimensions and coordinates of objects rather than using the normal scaling and placement tools.

[Guest rumbo]

Dare to Share challenge is over.

http://www.projectmessiah.com/x6/shop.html

 

To all those who took up the offer, enjoy.

 

Cheers.

[Guest Billov]

Sweet, the offer is still up for another 13 hours by the way.