so whats the most popular 3d modeling software now?

[lozina]

is it 3d studio?

are there any free ones that are really good?

 

[Lord Banshee]

it depends on what you want to do

free:
blender is probably the best. It is a studio (modeling, rendering, and animation)

For animation and games:
In the market place i would says 3dsmax, Maya are about equal. Then Softimage and lightwave. Then they are a ton of others that are really good. Such as: Modo looks very interesting and Zbrush have some great abilities for HQ models. Check out http://forums.cgsociety.org/

If you talking about product development:
There is a lot, solidsworks, solidedge, unigraphics, autocad, rhino3d, pro/engineering... the list goes on


It really depends on what you want to do

 

[Modelworks]

Free there is blender and wings3d.
http://wings3d.com/
Blender has lots of potential but its interface is a pain.


Another option for about 100.00 is nevercenter silo.
http://www.nevercenter.com/
Its coming along nicely.



I use 3dstudio max and lately mudbox.
Mudbox is really a nice app for the price and helps to fill in the lack of organic tools in max.

Maya is a good choice, especially for the price.
XSI is another option that has a fairly low entry price.

 

[fierydemise]

Blender is pretty good, I never liked the interface but its a powerful program

 

[BladeVenom]

There's Autocad. Google has Sketchup that probably gets tried out a lot.

 

[lozina]

Yeah I'm looking to learn how ot make models for animations in games. Particularly vehicles and humanoid figures.

Is the only good way to make realistic humanoid animations to use one of those fancy motion sensor setups?

 

[demenion]

Modeling

3D Studio Max
Maya
XSI Softimage


Concept Sculpting/Bump/displacement maps

ZBrush
Mudbox

 

[wwswimming]

on the animation side -
Autodesk 3D Studio Max
Autodesk Maya
Avid Softimage XSI

on the engineering side (3D solid modelling programs) -
Dassault (bought) Solidworks
Pro-E
Catia
Cocreate/Hewlett Packard One Space Designer

+ Autodesk AutoCAD. (more for drawing)

those are most of the industrial strength "bigs"

+ Rhino3D (very useful for file scrubbing)

by file scrubbing i mean, for example if you were
assigned to make coffee cups with a sculpture of
Bush. you might start by importing a bitmap into
3D max and then using bitmap displacement to
turn the grayscale bitmap into a surface. but how
to get the surface into a solid, so it can be used to
make tooling ?

- - -

Free Full Function Downloads that expire after 30 days -
Autodesk used to give away FFD30's of Max.
Cocreate does this with OneSpace.
Autodesk does this with AutoCAD 2006.

+ the policies are always changing. Autodesk gave away
fantastic tutorials with their FFD in 2005, now i don't see
tutorials given away with Max 9.

 

[Modelworks]

Originally posted by: lozina
Yeah I'm looking to learn how ot make models for animations in games. Particularly vehicles and humanoid figures.

Is the only good way to make realistic humanoid animations to use one of those fancy motion sensor setups?

I would check out wings3d. It should be able to do models for games quite well and its free.

Humanoid animations done with motion capture can produce great results but its far from a requirement.
There was just recently released for free the software package http://www.crypticar.com/
It does require max, unfortunately, but is pretty good software for animation rigging.