Hello all, I am interested in creating clothing and models to use with Poser, and I wanted some opinions from the forum. I have Vue 5 Standard right now for rendering, and Poser 5 (hope to upgrade soon). What sort of modelling programs would you recommend for creating clothing, architecture, furniture, etc? I'm eyeing Shade standard right now, but I would love to hear from everyone. FYI- I'm using a Mac, running OS 10.2.8, so no PC-only products please.

shade was made to work with poser although i use blender to do most of my modelling just seems quicker and easier, plus its free not sure if shade comes for mac, think so blender works on everything i think

as best i can tell, as far as importing stuff into poser. all programs are pretty much equal. everything i've ever seen can export to a file type that poser can import...except maybe bryce, but its not really a modeling program. You really need to find an interface and workflow that suit you. Shade (my personal favorite) is very much like technical drawing so if that is how you approach making models it may be the right fit for you. if your more into sculpting models other programs may fit better... or you may still find shade will suit you. Your best bet is to download some free programs and demos and give them a try.

My personal favorite is Silo. I also have Shade Standard but I did not find it as easy for me to learn as Silo. Please download all the demos you can find until you find something that suits your personal style!

I use Hexagon, which Ive been very pleased with. If I were going to choose a modelling program again, Id probably take a closer look at Silo. They have similar features and a similar price. Both have free demos you can try. Silo is a little cheaper and is also supposed to be a bit more powerful. The big advantage these have over programs like 3D Studio Max, Maya, Lightwave etc is that they only do modelling (no rendering, animation, shading etc) so they are much cheaper and have interfaces that are much easier to learn, since they arent cluttered up with tools you dont need to use. The free modelling program, Wings3D, is very popular too.

I would suggest to get ZBrush for organic forms and Shade8 for technical modells. Both are availible for Mac. If you dont care about money, C4DXL bundle is better than Shade.

I like ZBrush and I've played with the demo, but its a little too pricey for me at the moment. Cool program though. Tyger_purr- Forgive my ignorance, but could you please explain the difference between technical drawing and sculpting for me? The only modelling program I am really familiar with is Swift 3D (not very impressive at all...) About demos: I have to find a way to download them, but I definitely agree that it would be the best way to figure out which program to get. We are on a 56k modem and the demos are too big to download. If I had access to a faster connection, I could always store things on my iPod and then transfer them to my computer.

In Zb you can form meshes like forming clay with your hands, select the tool and brush the form with the wacom, very easy to learn. And you can paint textures direkt on the mesh and expost as texture and displacementmaps for rendering in other 3D programms. In typical 3D Modelling programs Meshes are build with mathematical tools like nurbs and splines, input is more in form of typing in numbers after selecting the polygones you want to form. It is more accurate, but not so easy and creative. Hope this answers your question..;-)) Since i have ZB i will never bye an character again, making custom morphs for Poser is a breeze. So it is worth the money...

I have tried out several programs including Truespace and Shade. But now, my personal one and only is Wings3D. But this very much depends on your own preferences. As for Wings3D: it seems not to have many features but it is very easy to learn and much more powerful than it seems in the beginning. (I have two items in the marketplace and they both were made entirely with Wings3D. Just search for "Kyraia's villa" and "Thobex", if you want to see what this program is capable of).

Carrara 4 (Basic or Pro) is also a good all-around modeler, plus it can open .pz3 files directly using the Transposer plug-in (included with Pro version) Great render engine too.
I use Carrara 4 Pro in OS X.3.9. Hexagon and Shade are also available for the Mac as well.

Message edited on: 09/28/2005 01:41

Try as many Demos as you can. It is much more important that the workflow suits your personal preferences than any one feature. I personaly like Wings3d, I do all my Poser models with it.

Try Free Download Manager from freedownloadmanager.org (or any download manager you might prefer) for downloading demos on your dial up. It's open source and easy to use. I just finished a 243m download of Animation Master stuff on dial up with no probs.

I agree with anxcon about Blender. Great program at the perfect price.

I use both Silo and Shade, I recommend both. The difference IMO on the approach to modelling is that in Silo, you work as a stone sculpture would. You start from a rough block, chopping away parts, gradually refining until you get the finished model. It is an analogy of course. In shade it is more like mmm you model the contours, and the program fills the voids. Sort of. Another analogy of course. With a little practice you can achieve virtually the same result with both programs. The approach you take to arrive there is what differs. Shade8 now comes with polygon editing tools that while not as exhaustive as Silo's, are quite capable. Silo is just a modeller. Which means, it does not render, and it's material and mapping abilities are very basic. Silo2 will have more ample uvmapping and grouping capabilities, but no internal rendering. I use both so I can benefit from the best of both programs. The outstanding feature of Silo is the topology brush, which basically is being able to trace in 3d on top of an existing model to generate a new 3d model. So for making some type of props, it is a real time saver. (masks, bracelets, etc) The outstanding feature in Shade is its curved surfaces. They work as some sort of nurbs surfaces, but they have been compared with gradient curves in illustrator, just in 3d. When you get the hang of them, they can be quite powerful.

Ok, I've found a Mac compatible download manager (thanks for the tip Tunesy) and I'm going to check out some of the demos. Manoloz- Since Silo doesn't do renders, how does it handle texturing? After reading everything here, thans for pointing out programs that don't handle things like animation, lighting, etc. That's very helpful. Sounds like I should check out Silo, Shade, Blender, and Hexagon. I already have a demo for ZBrush, so that's handled:)

Silo does assign uvmap information to the mesh, but not in a way you could use to draw a texture on photoshop to apply on the model. This will change in Silo2, which is announced to be available at the end of the year, which will also support painting displacement maps on the surface in realtime. There is a basic material editor that handles diffuse, highlights and so, and a possibility to export it to povray, as well as other render engines. Lots of people use silo as a modeller and do "microdetailing" in zbrush.

My only (technical) problem with Silo is that it creates horribly ineficient .obj files. In particular, the .obj file format has a notion of 'lookup tables' so that polygons can 'reference' a table of commonly used values for things like texture coordinates. Silo's output .obj files do not use these properly and (depending on the model) can create files that are bloated in size by 50% or more. The files still load properly, but they waste a ton of disk space. I've posted about this in thier forums in the past, but as far as I know, they hadn't fixed that yet.

Back to the subject at hand... I also recommend trying different modeller demos if you can, but can strongly recommend Cinema 4D, primarly for it's ease-of-use interface. Of course it depends a lot on your budget... there are several free modellers out there that might fit the bill (Wings3D, Blender, Anim8or, etc.) and modellers like Silo and Hexagon in the low price range ($100ish?). Then you move up into the > $1000 modellers, which is where C4D is.

I do not import the obj file directly from silo, as you say, it creates "different" obj files, and anyway, I first uvmap the model in ultimate unwrap. This seems to fix some of the problems, and those that do not can be eliminated with the freebie stomper utility available here in renderosity. I recommend using stomper anyway, somehow it shrinks most obj by half in size.

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