Hello there, got my form two setup just this week, impressive stuff !
Can anyone recommend a reasonably easy modelling package that doesn’t cost a fortune. Downloaded blender
which looks very nice but also looks hard to learn. So hopefully some of you knowledgeable people out there can help.
Cheers
john
What kind of stuff are you making?
Fusion360 is really great
1 Like
generally speaking- the cheapest apps are often the hardest to use.
For organic or sculptural modeling- look for a subD app like Mudbox- zBrush- or Modo.
For engineering style modeling- look for parametric apps like Fusion 360.
for pure ease of use and shortest learning curve- look at Sculpt from 3D Systems… not cheap- but but worth it in my opinion if you want to get up to speed fast and suffer no issues with solidity.
PS- some of the best advice I ever got when I first got into 3D modeling 20 years ago, was to download evaluation copies of SEVERAL different modeling apps- and try them all.
Each one will have a different workflow and way of presenting and manipulating 3D space and models.
The reason you want to do this is because- whether you realize it or not, you already HAVE your own way of thinking about shapes in 3D space…
When you try several different apps- you will find that ONE of them simply seems a lot more sensible to you, because it just so happens to treat shapes in space in a manner that jibes well with your own spatial imagination.
That will be the app that you learn the fastest, and that can best enable you to create the things you envision.
2 Likes
Thankyou for your advice, I’m deciding to go with Rhino its quite reasonable priced, I suspect cheap by others standards. lol,
cheers
You should check out MOI3d, written by the same guy that wrote Rhino and has an incredibly short learning curve. For little less money for sculpting you can check out 3dcoat. Though Zbrush has far more features, 3dCoat is pretty easy to use.
For hybrid modelers FormZ Pro is nice and has probably more features and tools than most will never use. It is a robust modeler with a nice ghosting feature for operands as well as isolation, reveal and clipping plane that allows working on complex geometries easily. Learning curve is a little bit more but not too bad.
Form Z is my go to procedural modeler for anything not sculptural… has been for 18 years.
I recommend against Rhino because it has numerous formatting issues that cause all sorts of problems on import into other software- just last week we had it export a simple drawing of a square with a rectangular hole in it that we sent to a waterjet machine to cut in 5/8" plate stainless.
The machine operator opened the file before cutting and saw a square with rectangular hole onscreen.
But the waterjet cut a CIRCLE with a rectangular hole.
I have imported files from Rhino that were missing entire sections of geometry because they had been uploaded to dropbox and downloaded to my system. And a lot of files exported from Rhino will not print unless exported as STL.
I have exported plots for Rhino in Vector format that simply will not import into illustrator nor any other software.
Just saying- its a powerful program in and of itself… but it has serious compatibility issues with industry standard specs.
I found Rhino to be too tedious and unless you call up commands via command line, digging through menus can be cumbersome. For stl output MOI is by far the best I have used for cad model export. The real time preview of your settings can’t be beat. FormZ does handle a wide range of files for import/export but does have it’s issues with Open Nurbs (.3dm) that MOI and Rhino use. The geometry isn’t missing but rather the surface normals are flipped. I brought this issue up with both FZ and MOI to see if they can come to common ground and remedy this, maybe soon it will be fixed.
FZ does have sub division surfaces but not that easy to use and somewhat limited. If people need a clean powerful poly modeler with excellent sub-d then snag Hexagon. I believe it’s free now. Hexagon was originally Amapi Designer and Daz had bought it up and canned the programmers. Hexagon does have nice stl checker as well as nice selection tools to repair geometry. For free it can’t be beat even if it is distributed my DAZ 