Learning 3D?

[zoom]

late, but : thanks for your state of the art insight, cows.


http://www.wings3d.com/

no animation support, purely modeling

A guy used that 2 years back to quickly model(select edges then faces etc) with keyboard shortcuts.
thought to mention it here..

[Bit]

Seems to be a nice tool.
To me (for programming purposes) it would be interesting what formats for animation are common now, so that I have still some influence on meshes, textures and their behaviour. Any hint where to start to gather informations on this would be welcome.

[Sphenx]

I might have the same needs as you Bit.
I have read about the Collada format (.dae files).
Maybe this is where to start.

[zoom]

some formats are compatible with each other or you can change one format easily into another(open and save as)
Maybe thats where to look too?

[Bit]

...open and save as...

When programming, this would need prepared libraries. i.e. Sophia could help me with load/save-png-functions for Allegro.
Maybe DirectX or/and OpenGL provide something, I still know much to less about it.
Then - there are a lot of sources of 3d-engines available where one could learn from.
I just was hoping for a quick answer, but it seems that our 'threeds' are busy with other 'threads'
I think Rasmus can help with this. Hope he'll be back soon.

@Sphenx:
I'll try to find some informations.

After all the capabilities of those formats give a hint what you can do with the datas. I.e.: pure meshs are pretty outdated I'd say, today it probably are the 'bones' that should do a lot of stuff automatically.

[cowsmanaut]

yeah, wings is pretty popular, but when learning I'd suggest something more like blender because you don't want learn two programs if you're on your own, and because wings only does modeling, you need to do everything else somewhere else. Get comfortable within one and then branch out later or go to a school that teaches a few softwares, when you're in a class you can ask all the questions you like and get answers quickly.. when you're on your own, you're dependant on research which can lead to frustration which can lead to you giving up. Combine that with trying to get comfortable with different controls, tool names, and hotkeys. it's too much frustration.

for formats, DAE and FBX are the most common transfer formats between the autodesk products right now (Softimage, Maya, 3DMax, Motionbuilder) however, most softwares have a DirectX exporter. There is also a nice cheap conversion tool called Milkshape3D. You can make 3D and animate with it, but it's bigger use is for it's mass amount of importer exporters which cover a LOT of game engines. so you can model, texture, animate in maya, export out fbx, and import to milkshape and it'll export to quake, halflife, etc.. just look at the list
http://chumbalum.swissquake.ch/ms3d/index.html

moo

[Bit]

This looks indeed like an important tool - especially because it produces C++ headers too.

[Chaos-Shaman]

this milkshape3D looks simplified, something that could be easier to explore for a nuwbe, me likes. thanks

[Rasmus]

I was interested in creating a wallset creator before, but as I personally didn't have need for it I got discouraged. Using a 3d program for creating wallsets for dm may be alittle bit hard according to me. When creating CSBWin3D I noticed that DM uses a very unnatural perspective. The perpective as in how many degrees of the viewport should be seen in where very low and the walls should be "uplifted" as they goes farther away from the camera.
I can give you the exact spec for this if there are a interest.

If I where to create a wallset creator I would do something like this:
- First "steal" a tutorial on the web. Like the Direct 3D 9 "Parallax Occlusion Mapping" tutorial that comes with the SDK.
Can't find a website about that specific tutorial, but it is something like this one http://www.dhpoware.com/demos/d3d9Paral ... pping.html (I wouldn't recommend using the tutorial from this page because it is alittle bit hollow.)
So I recomend the one in the directX SDK because it supports shadows and moveable directional lights.
- Then change the code so that the wallbox comes in the right position with the viewport, and edit the viewport spec so that it fits DM viewport. Once one wallbox are correct, create another one for the next wall and so on.
Not much programming skills are needed for the above instruction, just as long as one knows alittle bit 3D coding.
- The viewport can be snapshooted with ctrl+printscreen. Or for one alittle bit more experienced let the program do all the snapshoots and save them into bmpfiles.

I can say that it was like that I learned 3D, just take a 3D tutorial and mess aroud with the code and see what happends. This will give a good overall picture in 3D programming. If you are going to learn programming 3D, it would be a fun start to check out the direct3D SDK and mess around with some of the simpler tutorials, there is still alot of basic stuff that is needed to be learned, but this certainly gets the insperation going

[Babe Bridou]

If you want to do some easy gaming/moving stuff around and composing scenes, really I suggest you check out Unity3d - it's free, powerful and it's compatible with pretty much every standard format for models. When I was working on a remake of DM for Unity I did try Blender but hated the UI (that was a year ago) - ended up programming my own meshes. Which was a bad idea considering the tools I was using and the complexity of things like stairs.

I've started learning OpenGL last week - right now I do my models and textures with notepad - simple textured cubes are hard enough to handle already without help from the abstraction of a rendering middleware. But the good thing is, I'm learning new stuff and that's cool

[Babe Bridou]

Google Sketchup is incredible for architecture, furniture and stuff like that. I had been struggling with blender before (more like yelling at my computer) but after just a couple strokes and a few 5minutes tutorials I'm convinced that this is where it's at (for low-cost anyway): model the scene with sketchup (really really fast), export to google earth model, import google earth model in blender and "finish the job".

I'm going to check out wings3d next - but yeah, so far I've been really impressed by Sketchup.
edit: woah, after exactly one click (on "maximize window"), the last stable version of wings3d freezes my mac. Sketchup it is.