Hey everyone, Ive been programming for a year now, give or take. I have finished with all the games to program that GameDev said I should try first so I would learn by doing. But they werent polished at all, just to learn some things. I am working now on a 2D Zelda type game now. But I plan on doing 3D one day and thought that I should start at least making things now and being able to make 3D objects and maybe make something cool that I could keep till I start with 3D. I am thinking of using Blender to start out with mostly because its free and was wondering what yall thought about it. [Edited by - dbaumgart on October 26, 2009 7:42:37 PM]

It's really good. People who prefer other apps
generally do so because they like the interface
and how to do things better in another app rather
than that Blender is missing functionality.

I agree, blender is absolutely fantastic and can do pretty much anything that you might want it to for games.

I agree with them, just to say some Blender drawback:

It's interface is not as polished as many people would like, and I find Blender harder to learn (but easier to use!) than the "others"...

Just sayin' Blender is not perfect, but is good enought to profesional (yep, profesional) game/movie making.

At first I thought it was a piece of crap, then I left it for about 2 years, then came back to it as I had to do some simple models, and I figured that learning all that interface so I left it again for about one year and chose G-max instead. A few weeks ago I started a small project and needed models, so I grabbed blender again, and suddenly I understood what it's all about, and from there on it's became my 3D modeler of choice, even over 3Ds max itself!
In short: it's difficult at first to do anything because the GUI is so out of this world, but once you <<get it>> it's without doubt THE best free 3D modeling program out there, and even one of the best if you compare it to professional programs.
Edit: a few things bother me though about blender. Bevel faces doesn't work on the selected faces but on ALL of them at once! And there's that stupid polygon which is always looks like it's selected when you work, only to show which polygon you worked on last, and you can't turn that off (even though you never practically need that feature until you get to UV mapping, and SOME plugins need you know which polygon was last selected, so if that will annoy you use a previous version 2.45)

I love it. Yes, get Blender.

Now if only 2.5 would get here with n-gon support...

I personally think Blender seems like it was designed by aliens - it has given me many headaches. But it's undeniably powerful, probably the most powerful free 3D art tool.

Quote: Original post by sunandshadow
I personally think Blender seems like it was designed by aliens - it has given me many headaches.

No, it was designed by programmers. Many of us can't design a GUI to save our lives. ;)

Start learning Python and the Blender Python API if you want to export your meshes and skeletal animations to a format you can work with from within a game.

Another bump for blender. The interface is gawd awful (well ugly at least) but one only needs to look at the quality of the open movie projects to see the potential in blender. Since we're on the topic of 3D, are you a poly-poly or subD kind of guy/gal?

Poly all the way for me.