Quote: Original post by Skeezix
where did you find those video tutorials for blender...is that videos like the ones from truespace? i like that because they just dont go to basic animation of moving square but they even show how to make a south park matrix movie...hope you know where i can find these kind of video tutorial in blender,or if possible a video tutorial from beginners to pros...thanks

We've got a thread going here, come check it out.

You need to learn how to animate a square before you can learn how to animate a 'south park matrix movie'. You build up to that stuff.

I vote blender on the grounds that its getting new features and occasionally better usability at a incredible speed.

You can search youtube for demos of the new Blender 2.5 interface. They are actually doing a lot of work in that area now.

i'm a blender fan boy sad to say it but i really do enjoy blender and its odd user interface, i picked up blender because i found it lost in AOL's free software thing back in the late 90's on dial up *shudders*. blender has always met my needs for modeling and animating and is starting to surpass some of the mainstream commercial programs in features. i know of several people that will model the objects in lightwave and uv them in blender. and for those on a low budget blender has almost every thing you need for a full 3d animation production line with its built in sequence editor and node compositor you can create some amazing effects

wow so many dont want TS...but why do you think most of the 3d game asset making books use ts(like the one on course ptr,the one on andre lamothe)...therehas to be somethng with TS that makes them use it

I don't know the answer to your questions, but I have my personal story which is: back in mid nineties I wanted to get a simple modeler so I could make simple models (think tiny RTS tanks and spaceships, etc). I didn't have any need for bones, kinematics, animations, etc. I just needed something cheap to purchase, with good vertex editing and file exporting - to some format I could load and render with hand-written code. I tried some free stuff, all useless at the time. And then I tried trueSpace. I made cute little models the first few weeks, just fine. Then I tried to figure out how to export them to something useful, then adjust their tiny details ... and I failed. I have reinstalled trueSpace (upgraded version) 3 times since then. I still find it to be very easy to play in, very easy to make cool little objects in, but I still have no clue how to do anything useful in it. I have yet to make a single model in trueSpace and then have it show up in a program I've written. Now partially that's cause I'm still not a 3D person. My interests are almost 100% 2D games and graphics, with only a very rare interest in 3D technology for rendering (think the idea of Civ4, 3D rendering over 2D game logic). I don't know or want to know the depths of Direct3D except, I want it to be like a Sound API ... load this, put it here, in this state ... render. But its not. Hell I even have a hand coded XML scenegraph format that I can render OpenGL scenes from in ruby (using OpenGL primatives) - but I can't figure out how to use 3D modelers file formats.

And, in my years of messing with it, trueSpace seems great for making "pictures" (think art school majors) but seems like no-one in the game industry uses it to make assets. I can't tell you why, but it definitely seems true.

Quote: Original post by Skeezix
wow so many dont want TS...but why do you think most of the 3d game asset making books use ts(like the one on course ptr,the one on andre lamothe)...therehas to be somethng with TS that makes them use it

Its interface is easy to get into
But it lacks in so many areas especially for making games - stability especially
I use it for logos and texturing and simpler objects and other quick jobs but for the game production pipeline, it's not productive(as of version 6.6)
For games there was a gameSpace version that's fizzled
EDIT: And the bones sucked though I've taken a good look at truebones to fight my way past that mess

It has been bought out by Microsoft and the latest version(7.6) is free.
It got a major refit with version 7 so I can't speak of the increase in stability EDIT: or of the bone system


[Edited by - ZoomBoy on October 11, 2008 10:01:27 AM]

I've never seen a 3d asset making book use it. They use blender, Max, or Maya, maybe XSI. To say all the asset books use it is a bit of a stretch. In fact, I'm interested to see what books actually do use tS.

I was able to get more done with Blender this week than I was all summer with tS. And Blender has proven that it can do things I couldn't do in tS, like give me precision scaling and positioning. When I tried this in tS the values kept eroding.

I had lots of problems in tS with their bone and joint system. It's too hard just to make a basic skeleton and there are a ton of pitfalls depending on the order you create your skeleton. It's too much of a hassle. Not to mention that the 3d viewports get extra 'display' bones added into the skeleton. You never know what the hell is going on. I'd often try to delete bad skeletons, and the whole scene would disappear with it!

Not many people can actually work with it. The userbase's work mostly consists of little novelty videos where people take pre-made skeletons and figures and render them out with physics on, so they can push crates around like Max Payne 2.

Every time I needed help, I often couldn't get good answers. Or I'd get different answers from people who should know better. With Blender I've been finding help all over the place, even on very specific things which aren't of general interest, like modeling small parts accurately and to scale.

Quote: Original post by Skeezix
wow so many dont want TS...but why do you think most of the 3d game asset making books use ts(like the one on course ptr,the one on andre lamothe)...therehas to be somethng with TS that makes them use it

Blender, believe it or not is JUST taking off, I really expect to begin seeing quality books on it such as Paul Steed's Modeling a Character in 3DS Max or Antony Ward's Game Character Development with Maya.

Yes, I know the Blender foundation has released at least 3 books on blender, But they are not focused on Game Development, I own one, Introducing Character Animation with Blender, its good, but is not on par with the ones I mentioned in the last paragraph.

The 2 books I own that make some use of tS are Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus which is 10+ years old and focused on 2d games and 2D Artwork and 3D Modeling for Game Artists from 2002, 10 years ago there was no Blender and in 2002 Blender was a stillborn there was no guarantee it would be further developed.

TPTWGPG barely mentioned tS as a 2d (IE: render and use the rendered pictures) asset creation.

How is that character animation book? I was curious about it.