I''m writing to see if anyone has any insight. I''m a Hash AM user who loves the extremely simple interface, and I''ve gotten quite comfortable modeling with splines/Patches. The only reason I''m even considering switching is the cost (duh!), and the fact that Hash doesn''t play well with other programs (I''ve had to write my own custom exporters - not fun). So my question is what do people think about the power and usability of Blender 3D for someone coming from a Hash background. Regards, Jeff

First off, I have never used Hash.

As for power and usability of Blender3D, its great!

Power is great for my purposes which is recreation programmer/modeler. I believe that some large games have actually used Blender3D.

However, it has a steep learning curve. Coming from a simple interface, it will probally be more difficult to adjust. Fortunately, when you learn the interface you will love it! It really is quite thoughtful!

Hope that helped.

Having played around with earlier version of Animation Master, I can tell you that it beats the tar out of Blender''s current animation features. There is just no comparison.

Animation Master''s feature sets were designed from the ground for character animation and their tools make working in that realm much faster. Blender can do just about everything that Animation Master can do, but just not as fast.

With that being said, all of the other features of Blender are better, IMHO. Modeling with splines whomps. In Blender you have your choice of splines, surfaces, polygons, metaballs, and now displacement maps.

Blender has a huge user community that produces all kinds of plugins etc. For instance visit, www.elysiun.com and check out the Python forums. Search for "Crowd". Its a great little crowd/flock simulator.

I hope that helps.

Try to make the best use of every program at your disposal. I personally use Animation Master to model my characters, and export them to 3D Studio for boning and texturing. Yes, Animation Master would be my first choice for animating as well if possible. But 3D Studio offers better tools for assigning vertex weights and such.

I''ve tried blender... several times... I personally don''t like it. I can grab a program and figure it out just by working with it and reading help for a few hours. I did this with trueSpace, Animation Master, 3D Studio, Lightwave, Maya, Photoshop... even music trackers - and those never use a standard UI. I''ve spent days in blender, and like a previous poster said.. the learning curve is very steep.

If you can get used to blender, though, you can probably still use AM to model your characters. Just export them as a DXF with the number of subdivisions you desire. If blender isn''t your cup of tea, you can try milkshape for boning/texturing, but be aware that the DXF files AM exports are not compatable with Milkshape. Use the .3ds or .x exporter instead.

Oh, and if you do model in AM, avoid 5-point patches and hooks, they won''t export correctly. Just use triangle patches instead. They shade goofy in AM, but when a spline-unaware shading algorithm is applied in 3D Studio/Blender/Milkshape... it looks fine.

Thanks for the input.

I really love Hash for animation, especially since I bought "The Setup Machine" for automatic rigging(The program is worth it''s cost the first time you use it ).

From the sound of it, I guess I should definately learn blender for possibly atleast modeling and texturing (I hate texturing in hash).

Just gotta figure out a work flow between the two tools.