I've never done 3d modelling before, but I always found it pretty cool. I'm thinking I'll try getting my feet wet making some relatively simple models for Shipsets to Space Empires V. These shipsets would be both a 'semi-hard sci-fi' and a 'classic rocket' set. I thought that both types of sets would be both relatively simple to do, and yet be pretty cool for the game. (And a million times better than anything else I've seen, I think). My question is if there's any free programs that have nice, intuitive interfaces or at least Really good toutorials for someone who doesn't have a clue what they're doing to try and do this? An example of what the 'hard sci-fi' set would look like. What the 'classic rocket' set would look like.
Wings3D is extremely easy, because its so well designed, you can just about figure it out yourself. It's also powerful, within its limited domain. It has tutorials. SketchUp is in the same vain, but with built in tutorials. In certain ways it's easier, in others it's not. Blender is extremely complicated, hard to learn, but extremely full featured. There are tutorials for it, and I don't think you'll find anything as close to a professional program as Blender without paying hundreds or thousands of dollars. You want to make simple scale models to act as board pieces, correct? Then Wings3D may be perfect, because it's all about box modelling. However, SketchUp does have built in measuring tools. Try both, since they're all free. http://www.wings3d.com/ http://sketchup.google.com/ http://www.blender.org/ Here's some simple stuff I made in Wings3D and rendered with various renderers. I recommend http://www.kerkythea.net/. http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v334/MajorD/Meshes/ http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v334/MajorD/HypersonicFrigate/
3ds Max is free a well, you just say you are a student and set it to homeschool There's no limitation on it apart from you can't use the creations for commercial use - the system flags them as student version when you save the file so a message pops up in a full version, but it leaves no watermarks or anything. As with the others there's 100000's of tutorials online on how to do things, of course some are really crappy and others are of a high quality so you would have to do some searching for something you can use.
Yeah, I think, but I'm not entirely sure, that the game automatically scales models itself. I'm sure I'll find out once I finish them and find weather or not my epic battleship is oddly the same size as my frigate! If such is the case, is it possible to port and convert models amongst these programs? I know that Wings3D has a plug-in that makes it work with SEV models, and Blender does as well.
Those ships are WAY too close together. Hard sci-fi should also incorporate realistic tactics, one of which is to take advantage of how astronomically huge space is (pun intended) by NOT sticking all your ships so close together that killing one kills others. Sticking a bunch of ships in the same scene is a common "Hollywood" mistake since it looks "cooler" the more ships you have in a scene. Realistically, the most anyone would ever see of another ship is one or two distant blips on the radar. Not very cool watching a blip disappear from the scope.
Heh. "Ensign, Parade Formation, if you will. Let's make it look nice and pretty for the folks back home, hmm?"
