This may be a little bit stupid question, but anyways.. I rally have (almost) no experience in 3d modeling and I just started reading/following some tutorials on Blender. How long did it take for you to be able to program a somewhat realistic human model? I''m (possibly) going to make an isometric oldstyle 2d game and a character has 8 possible looking directions \|/ -o- /|\ so that with walking animations, shooting animations and "ducking" animations with several different units. So you can imagine the work I''d have to go trough if I used a normal 2d drawing program (Deluxe Paint 2 rules btw ). But as I have no modeling experience and it might take me months to learn it properly(??), I have doupts if I really should go with the Blender idea.

well, first, you will wish to go learn how to spell a big but In my limited experience, I might be able to help you.
Start simple and work up. to this end, I recommend Milkshape 3d or Gmax. I have no experience with Gmax but thats ok. I do not however recomend blender for newbies. that is a very bad idea and will frustrate you down the road.
3dcafe has some good tutorials that will work well for you and the program you choose but if you choose ms3d as a starter, the tutorials that rule the most are linked right off the main page.

As for learning something as complicated as max or lightwave, cant help you. im quite inexperienced in that field im afraid. but heh, that is what school is for. something you might try is to come up with basic animation perameters in a paint program and make all your sprites follow that. this way all you need to do is fill in the missing bits to make characters frame by frame. Ala final fantasy 6.

Actually I tend to disagree with Fantasy Edge about putting Blender off. I started off with blender and its actually a nice program to use. I did a search on Google for tuts for Blender and found a bunch on many different areas including modeling people(low and high poly counts). In fact if you really practiced and experimented with each new option you learn as you go you''ll learn a decent amount in about a month I feel.

Either way I think your doing the right thing using 3D program to do your frames and anims. Youll just have to reposition the camera for each direction so you can reuse the same model. I havent tried Milkshape yet though so I cant say if it would be easier. All I know is that Blender isnt as bad as many say.

I dont question blender and its abilities. but for the new user, i would advise against it. it is a lot easier to learn some other programs but i guess it depends what you will be doing. Ms3d is setup to do low poly, i could not figure out how to do much of anything in blender but in only 2 weeks, i can pretty much do whatever in ms3d. yes, it has its limits,but its a good place to start. I should go back and try blender again.

Blender is free.

Create.

I went to a 3D school in Montreal and I can say that to make a decent 3D Studio Max model, you need at least 4 months on courses and then 4 months of application. And of course, practise makes perfect.

quote: Original post by Pixle
I went to a 3D school in Montreal and I can say that to make a decent 3D Studio Max model, you need at least 4 months on courses and then 4 months of application. And of course, practise makes perfect.

It depends on how good the model really needs to be. For game quality it shouldn''t take 4 months to learn to create a good character. 3ds max is complicated because it has so many features. There are many ways to do the same thing. I messed around with max for a while until I tried surface tools. After doing the Rhino head tutorial from the book I knew how to create characters. Texturing the character, now that''s the hard part.

No matter what package you use try to sketch out side views of your model and use these as a guide. 3ds max lets you import these guide images into the application and I''m sure some other programs do as well.


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http://www.3dcgi.com/

Thanks guys. I'm already well on my way with Blender. There are a lot of tutorials for it and a "learning path" tutorial collection in the home page. The reason I picked Blender was that it's free and yet seems quite "hardcore" enough . Seems that learning the program itself is going to take more time than the actual 3d drawing skill. And here's my first render :

Probably shows an angelfire image until the site is visited..

Edited by - Afterlife on October 26, 2001 8:54:59 AM

well, its great that we were able to direct you well. heh. Personally, im going in for lightwave and max training but i need to get some experience with softimage for film.
School is infinatly better than books too i think and both digipen and cdis mailed me in regards to my application. heh. now all i need is da cash.

incidently, im making a low poly final fantasy style character for practice. i started by rifleing through my old drawing to find a decent character that wouldnt be too hard. so next is to do a prelim.

please, continue to show your progress with blender.

Afterlife: Nice render, btw a site that has a bunch of links is http://green.dyndns.org dont know if you''ve found it yet but it has LOTS of links on many different features.

Fantasy Edge: Have you checked out FullSail as a school to go to? They''re down in Florida and will also send you free info on their programs. Http://www.fullsail.com is their addy if youre interested.