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Re: artists

Jan Ekholm wrote:


AC3D is quite fun yes, but it has its limitations, and those limitations
come up pretty fast even for "coder models".

Yes - that's certainly true.

> I can't do good graphics nor

good models, but I can model a house or simple stuff if I can find
suitable textures. However the texture handling in AC3D is pretty limited
and I couldn't even find a way to use only parts of a texture for a
surface or specify some kind of tiling etc. It was always "one texture
fits one surface", at least in the version I used.

That limitation is also one in most realtime rendering environments too -
what AC3D presents you with is essentially raw OpenGL.  That's a good thing
in some situations - and a bad thing in others.

AC3D lets you scale and translate textures after they have been applied
and you can use that mechanism to use just a piece of a texture on a
polygon.


Yes, I did get the
registered version, it was cheap enough not to dent any holes in my
economy. :)

Yep - it's still $40 - right?


Blender on the other hand... Well, you need to try to learn to use it for
a few months before you can even get a single box plotted out without
getting lost. It may be capable, but boy does the UI suck.

I've tried to learn blender several times - I've done all of the tutorials
AND bought and read the book.  I still couldn't model a textured cube in
it if my life depended on it.

However, a significant fraction of people who try blender find it somehow
'snaps' into their brains and they find it the most wonderful, natural and
efficient GUI on the planet.

I think it's genetic because maybe 70% of people are in my position.

It's rare to find someone who merely 'gets by' in blender - you either
love it or find it literally unusable.


The UI may be
good once you know it, but boy does it suck for the occasional little
house or tank model. I remember not even finding out how to save my model
(there was of course no menus, no normal keybindings, nothing that was
sane with respect to modern usability), and ended up quitting using
KILL...

It doesn't help that it insists on running full-screen.


So flame me.

Nope - you are 100% right for 70% of the people out there and
100% wrong for the remaining 30%.

The big problem is that the blender developers are in the 30% and
they can't be made to believe that the remaining 70% of us have
really made an effort to learn it before giving up on it.  They
always say "If you persevere, you'll learn to like it." - or - "If
only people would run the tutorials - they'd understand it."

That's certainly not true.

If I could possibly learn blender, I wouldn't be contemplating
spending $2,000 on Maya-for-Linux.

---------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------
HomeEmail: <sjbaker1@airmail.net>    WorkEmail: <sjbaker@link.com>
HomePage : http://www.sjbaker.org
Projects : http://plib.sf.net    http://tuxaqfh.sf.net
           http://tuxkart.sf.net http://prettypoly.sf.net
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