[geeks] adventures in air conditioning

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Mon, Jun 17, 2002 at 12:10:49PM -0400, Kurt Huhn wrote:
> > The hardest part is finding time on an appropriate machine for
> > modelling and animating.  Blender never felt right.  I have a little
> > work done already in 3DS Max, and a little done in SoftImage, but
> > unless I suddenly come up with $1500 that work will have to be trashed
> > since I no longer have access to softimage.
> 
> Same problem here.  I just spoke to my brother-in-law who's been
> threatening to give up on 10 years of preconcieved notions and buy a G4
> to run LightWave.  Apple, it seems, is gaining a following in the 3D
> modeling/animation/special effects market.

Well, a G4 and Lightwave costs more than an O2 and SoftImage, and
while I love Lightwave, I'm not sure how easy it is to export the
rigging and animation.
 
> Blender has the potential to kick some serious booty, but the interface
> is messed up (IMO), and the way it handles CSG objects is (IMO)
> completly broken.  I suppose that patch and surface modeling is pretty
> good with it, but they left out CSG and solid modeling - and that was a
> huge mistake.

For my purposes I don't care about CSG.  For patchs and polygon
modelling, everything seems to be there.  For Subdiv surfaces, there
is also quite a bit there (but not everything).  But it is the little
things that drive me crazy, like trying to select a face and finding
when I do an extrusion that instead of the face being extruded, two
segments and a vertex were extruded (so in the case of a 4 sided face,
instead of 4 new faces I got 2 new faces and a segment).  

Perhaps I'm just doing something wrong, but what it could be that I'm
doing wrong is severely non-obvious.

Perhaps once I got the models done I'd feel happier about Blender for
doing animation.  At this point I haven't done anything more than
basic keyframing of solids (I.E., I've never gotten around to playing
with the bones, constraints or IK).
 
> Gotta give the Maya Personal Learning Edition a try soon...

Can one do exports from it?  But alas, I don't have any machines to
run it.  I'd have to buy a new mac to do so.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd