Good 3D modeling program with good renders?

[Zakat]

Hello fellow HL2 fans, I'm pretty new to 3D modeling and have merely made some simple things such as a table etc, but, I'd like it if you can recommend me a good 3D modeling software, that has water render/plugin(preferarly as realistic as HL2 or better ), shadow render/plugin realistic one preferarly, and reflection render/plugin and lightning!^^;

Thanks for the help guys!

 

[crabcakes66]

no clue.....


i realise it says hardware and "software"

but it might be better to ask in the modeling section.

 

[The Dark Elf]

Hello fellow HL2 fans, I'm pretty new to 3D modeling and have merely made some simple things such as a table etc, but, I'd like it if you can recommend me a good 3D modeling software, that has water render/plugin(preferarly as realistic as HL2 or better ), shadow render/plugin realistic one preferarly, and reflection render/plugin and lightning!^^;

Thanks for the help guys!

I'm not sure you understand the concept of a 3D app. You'd create the water yourself, you could use preset surfaces but its always better to do your own. They've all got shadows and reflection and lighting, but its upto the guy doing the work how their used. There's no magic button that will give you amazing artwork, it all depends on your abilities. So depending on your skill you could even create amazing work on a very low end application. A 3D app is simply a bag of tools, depending on how good it is you either get a lot of tools or very few, but like with everything, if you don't have the tool you need, its quite possible to mimic everything with a bit of work.

Since your new at it, I would first suggest getting hold of a free demo version of some app. If you haven't already got a preference to one particular program, try the demo's from the following sites

www.softimage.com
Softimage|XSI EXP v3.5.1

www.sidefx.com
Houdini Apprentice

www.newtek.com
Lightwave 3D 7.5 Discovery Edition

www.alias.com
Maya PLE

www.discreet.com
3DS Max has a time limited demo I hear, and of course there's GMax its baby brother

Go through those, and what I would suggest is deciding on a semi-complex model to build and texture, the same one between all demo's. Which will give you a fair idea of which program you prefer.

When you've made your choice. Save up and buy all the books on using that program that you can find. For XSI and Lightwave, anything by Dan Ablan is money very well spent. If you prefer spline modeling then SplineGod (Larry Shultz) is a good bet. Also look into getting other books, those that don't really deal with a particular app but more the terminology and techniques that apply across the board. Surfaces and Textures, Rendering and Lighting, both from NewRiders are good books. There's quite a few for Max and Maya. Ed Harris has some great tutorial videos for Softimage, but since some of these are professional applications, expect to be spending a few hundred dollars a time. But if your serious about learning then that shouldn't be a problem, since your proper courses that I would also recommended, aswell as the software itself is going to cost you thousands of dollars. Also hunt down as many tutorials on the web that you can find, start from the bottom (learning the Interface backwards) then what all the tools do, and move up from there. Read the manuals again and again until you know them backwards, this is very important as almost every tutorial out there be it web or book form will assume you have knowledge of the software gained from the manuals. Keep at it and don't give up, and don't expect to be able to produce amazing works of art in a few weeks, most pro's take years to learn, and none of us have learnt everything, even after more than a decade for some heh.

So really, you gotta be sure this is something you want to do before you do it, it can be very expensive, but if you consider the kind of money you can make from it, its not expensive atall . Don't head down the warez route, it leads nowhere and if you get caught you will get in a lot of trouble, aswell as a few other nasty surprises down the line. It's not worth it. It's a great deal of hard work, but if you keep at it its very rewarding, especially when you start getting paid for it. How many jobs pay so much for basically having fun?

Good luck!

 

[Zakat]

Well... I already got Maya Unlimited >.>;

And I KNOW you model the water yourself, the waves etc etc and such, then you can put on 'schemes' on it.

What Maya Unlimited helps with is that they have Maya Fluids, which does INCREDIBLY realistic water/clouds/fog etc.

But I'm bad at modeling :\ Know where I can get books for Maya Unlimited?

 

[The Dark Elf]

Well... I already got Maya Unlimited >.>;

And I KNOW you model the water yourself, the waves etc etc and such, then you can put on 'schemes' on it.

What Maya Unlimited helps with is that they have Maya Fluids, which does INCREDIBLY realistic water/clouds/fog etc.

But I'm bad at modeling :\ Know where I can get books for Maya Unlimited?

amazon, waterstones, in the manuals

 

[RABIES]

Well... I already got Maya Unlimited >.>;

And I KNOW you model the water yourself, the waves etc etc and such, then you can put on 'schemes' on it.

What Maya Unlimited helps with is that they have Maya Fluids, which does INCREDIBLY realistic water/clouds/fog etc.

But I'm bad at modeling :\ Know where I can get books for Maya Unlimited?

Maya :thumbs:

I saw that at the Siggraph 2002 convention, very nice program....a bit pricey though, but well, well worth the money! Nice choice...

I personally enjoy the company of Mechanical Modelers/Renderers such as Rhino. Working my way up to a pretty heafty student discount on it too... must get rhino 3

Another I enjoy some of my free time with is Bryce 5, very nice program for skies and backgrounds, not too good with editing meshes though. I usually import those from Rhino and then use Bryce to render :E

 

[mrchimp]

I like the look of XSI as it supports linux and the free version has a very large feature set and valve uses it. But you have to run it at a very high resolution which will only work at 60hz on my monitor... hhhmm wonder if I could try stealing my parents monitor.

 

[The Dark Elf]

I like the look of XSI as it supports linux and the free version has a very large feature set and valve uses it. But you have to run it at a very high resolution which will only work at 60hz on my monitor... hhhmm wonder if I could try stealing my parents monitor.

All the good ones support Linux.. but its only of any real use if you have a few hundred render nodes. There's certainly no use for those when modeling game stuff, since most wont/don't know how. To model high poly stuff and grab the textures, GI and normal maps from it for baking and using on the low poly stuff.. What you need to be asking is Will Valve add support for Hammer to use windows or linux nodes for compiling the very big maps, along with batch support. Really speed things up will that.. I think Gabe mentioned something about support for that, which will be great news.

 

[mrchimp]

I couldn't find the Linux version of Maya and I'm not a big fan of it either ...

I don't want linux support so i can use render nodes or whatever I just want it so I can model in Linux as that is my preffered OS, I doubt that I would want to use Hammer in Linux though as HL2 is for windows only.

As for that thing about normal maps it could be made simpler by useing polybump http://www.crytek.com/polybump/index.php?sx=polybump
I'v never actually given much thought to that though...

 

[The Dark Elf]

I couldn't find the Linux version of Maya and I'm not a big fan of it either ...

I don't want linux support so i can use render nodes or whatever I just want it so I can model in Linux as that is my preffered OS, I doubt that I would want to use Hammer in Linux though as HL2 is for windows only.

As for that thing about normal maps it could be made simpler by useing polybump http://www.crytek.com/polybump/index.php?sx=polybump
I'v never actually given much thought to that though...

heh polybumps is just their fancy name for normal maps. Honestly, I've tried the "polybump" plugin for Maya, its normal maps, pure and simple. They just want to pretend they thought of it first which is a load of rubbish.
-
you don't understand about the linux thing.. if you have a bunch of nodes setup, they all need operating systems on, so they can all connect together, now consider a decent sized setup is gonna get pretty expensive with all the windows licences, you use linux on the nodes as thats free. Nobody in their right mind actually does any _work_ on linux, god forbid, its an awful unreliable incompatible pile of even more rubbish that the word polybump. It simply saves a bit of money. Doesn't matter if HL doesn't run on linux, you'd simply be using the processing power of many many machines on a network to compile a map. Just like we do for rendering pre-rendered animations, we can do as many frames as there are nodes in the time it takes to do one frame. Put them all together you've got quite a few gig of cpu power, compile a very large complex map, across lots of machines will take only a few minutes compared to much longer for the big highly complicated maps on a single machine.

 

[mrchimp]

How dare you insult Linux! just becuase it's a little difficult to use it doesn't mean it's rubbish. Although XSI won't run with the new version of glibc and downgradeing isn't a option, so I geuss I'll have to wait for a patch. Apparantly the HL2 SDK will come with the windows version so there's not much point downloadeing the windows version now.

Oh and I don't think you understand Linux users, we'r stuborn and slightly insane. You use Linux for security, spiteing microsoft, the satisfaction of getting something to work and the knowledge that is gained in doing so, or you might just want to call yourself 1337 and attempt a DOS attack on the Pentagon but that's more BSD territtory.