Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: 3D Modeling Apps and Poser

Richabri opened this issue on Apr 28, 2006 · 41 posts


obm890 posted Tue, 02 May 2006 at 5:48 PM

Jimdoria

Firstly, I don't think any time spent learning Wings is ever wasted, it'll teach you skills and a way of thinking and approaching modelling which are easily (relatively speaking) transferred to a more advanced set of tools. It has the advantage of having relatively few, very flexible tools, and because you use them all all the time, they become second nature. More complex applications typically have so many specialized and single-use tools that at best you get the hang of them, but as a hobby user you don't get to really master them.

Hobby users of big, full-featured modelling applications typically work within a small subset of the full toolset, but often that subset isn't as polished as Wings.

I like to make low-poly models, as low as possible within reason. So when I model I arrive at the basic form by box modelling and then smoothing once, and then I spend ages tweaking the mesh and tidying up the wires, removing redundant loops, I get a real kick out of it. And Wings is really good at that part (editing at vertex level), so it fitted my needs for a long time.

Just one limitation in Wings frustrated the heck out of me: - once you have chopped your figure into different bodyparts, you can't see the entire figure's UVs on one single UV map (each body part is on a different map). That one thing made me start to look around at other programs, and then I began to wonder if maybe I was wasting time by doing everything using Wings's toolset when more specialized tools would get things done faster.

 You can model almost anything using almost any method if you know your tools, and often it is good to limit yourself to certain tools so you master them. But there's often a method best-suited to modelling a particular type of object and so it's nice to have the option of switching to that different method. For example Hexagon can do box modelling and so includes pretty much everything Wings can do, but it also offers totally different modelling methods such as drawing curved lines in space and then generating surfaces between them using various methods. There are things I can make quickly with that method which would have taken quite a bit of effort in wings.

I really love Wings, but Hexagon is growing on me because of the time and effort savers it offers me. If Hex was the first modeller I used I probably wouldn't have appreciated those features, most of them probably would have got in my way while I had so much to learn.

Wings is very capable and a great way to start, but you could grab Hex at this great price, even if you don't install it for a year.