How to Choose the Best 3D Software for You
polygon
Hey everyone. So I've been doing a lot of stuff lately in the education space IRL, and I see this all the time online as well - people want to know what software they should use to make a 3D printable model, or prototype, or game model - whatever.
Usually the answer they get is "use X or Y package", because the actual answer is really in depth and requires the user to have a larger understanding of the mechanisms behind creating 3D geometry than just what tools to use.
To address this, I wrote this article as something to help both newbies getting into the world of 3d modeling, and for professionals looking to learn more about other modeling techniques that they might not encounter in their day to day.
I hope people find it at least as informative and interesting to read as I found it to write!
Here's the link!
Usually the answer they get is "use X or Y package", because the actual answer is really in depth and requires the user to have a larger understanding of the mechanisms behind creating 3D geometry than just what tools to use.
To address this, I wrote this article as something to help both newbies getting into the world of 3d modeling, and for professionals looking to learn more about other modeling techniques that they might not encounter in their day to day.
I hope people find it at least as informative and interesting to read as I found it to write!
Here's the link!
Replies
It's the most used 3d package used in video games, kinda silly to brush it off so quickly. I don't even use 3DS Max and I could write up a more helpful description of the software. Your recommendations are too short and opinionated for me to want to share your write up as advice to a novice.
way to go on your "in-depth" answer.
please enough of those mindless software wars. :poly122:
just sit down take a tool which you can afford and test it while creating stuff, case solved.
I wouldn't suggest a student learning Max only because the future of the package is uncertain. While it won't meet the fate of Softimage, but still... Just compare 2015 releases of Max and Maya and you will see how ridiculous Max's update is. It also seems to be moving away from games and movies towards archviz. Oh, and don't get me speaking of Maya LT
Unfortunately as someone who's only used Max and then Maya a handful of times, I'm hesitant to move to anything right away for my main modeling program. Currently if I do it needs to be as easy to navigate as Max and cheaper. My school is currently trying to get the students to use Blender, and while I'm all for decent FREE 3d modeling packages, every time I open it up I find the UI itself such a nightmare to work in. Obviously I could learn it if I really need to, but whats the point if you already are extremely fluent in another industry standard program?
Does maya have anything to rival the stacking non destructive workflow?
I personally feel most confident in Maya but hate its destructiveness. Maybe someone can point me to info i'm not aware off
"TinkerCAD - I’ve never used this, but a friend was curious to hear my thoughts. "
Wow excellent research there. 10/10 thread!
The software list isn't meant to be a blow-by-blow of what you should use or a series of totally objective reviews. As I said in the beginning;
"I will share some of my experiences and recommendations at the end of this article"
So stuff like Alias, which I've never used, I still mention, because I also say (in that same sentence);
"but you should feel free to explore and experiment with whatever you find, whether or not its on my list. "
All of these programs I wrote about from my experience with them. By the way, the very next sentence in the TinkerCAD paragraph; "I signed up for an account and watched a couple tutorial videos."
Also, this isn't written just for game artists, but anybody looking to get into 3D in general.
Also yes, I think 3DS Max is kind of pointless to learn at this point, for reasons others have mentioned in this thread.
The goal of the article is to avoid the "use this for this" approach, and try to develop in people an understanding that all 3d packages are just working with polygons in their own way, and you can use anything for anything - it's about what you have access to and what you enjoy using (as well as what it is you're trying to make).
@mclay; I agree! #2 really jives with what you're saying.
in my opinion theres not much to say regarding software choice other than:
1. What software options does your chosen career path afford you? Games is mostly maya,max and modo from what Ive heard.
2. Try out those 3D packages and see for yourself which one you like and then get awesome at it. The skills are usually fairly transferable between apps in the end anyway.
Pretty fair criticism, thank you. #1 is really dependent on someone wanting to do this professionally or wanting to work for someone else (where their software use will be dictated by the requirements of the studio). If either is not the case then there is a lot more choice, IMO.
#2 is almost exactly what I said in the article. I agree.
I feel like I made it pretty apparent that the recommendations section was just my personal opinions. I don't think anyone reading it should mistake it for a series of objective reviews. I'll be posting another article soon with my backstory, so people can get a better idea of where I'm coming from.
It looks like you even made that promo image in Modo in full-on Modo style.
I have something to say to that.
Modo does at least have the ugliest, most un-customizable color scheme of them all! Ha!
If it's important to have control over your program's color scheme, then I don't know what to recommend to you. Most professional software has a fixed overall color scheme.
- I agree. Unit187 - I don't about Maya LT, but what differences are there between the 2015 of Max and Maya?
Hi Higuy! I'd recommend you reference WarrenM's post. In it he says "Yes, having said what I said, I wouldn't recommend anyone start with Max. I don't think it has an active future. More of a limping existence.".
At this point, modo is pretty industry standard. I suggest you give it a try. Don't commit to a main modeling program before you try enough of them to where you feel comfortable making that decision.
I thought Maya had at least some sort of non-destructive workflow? Modifiers are similar to features in a parametric modeler, which leads me to believe that if 3DS Max were to explore that concept, they might have a chance of revitalizing the product.
I've read through this whole thread and I still don't feel as though I've come away with a convincing reason as to why I should choose to learn 3DS Max over all the other software out there.
Modo is awesome.
I think the only reason 3DS Max is still around is because it's legacy software and at least a few major companies still use it, so Autodesk has to support it. From my point of view, it competes internally against Maya without offering much of an advantage to it.
It's main advantage at this point is that it's so old that it has a very large amount of tutorials and content created to learn it and use it. That is sort of a competitive edge, except like I said in the article, most if not all of its features are available elsewhere in newer, easier to use software packages.
Grimwolf oh ok, I wasn't sure, sorry! I'm just trying to be as helpful as I can either way!
Now that's not saying that this page is not useful, as there is some interesting information in there.
I also changed the title of that section to make it more obvious that it is my opinion and not a list of objective reviews.
pior; That's true, I've never used 3DS Max in a studio environment. The only game projects I've been involved in were online projects, like BSG: Beyond the Red Line, and Angels Fall First: Planetstorm - non professional indie games, and other freelance opportunities where there was not a strong emphasis on an established studio workflow.
That being said, I have worked in design studios (I'm mostly an industrial designer now), so I suppose as a designer I would not want to recommend that new users learn Max, because everything it can do, other programs can do better (imo).
However, looking at the industry from my perspective, I don't see Max bringing many new things to the table when compared with the updates and other stuff coming out of other packages. So why should someone learn it? The only reasons I've seen so far are "because everyone else is using it" and "there's a lot of stuff out there for it". reasons I would recommend software would include "it's easy/fun to use", "It's fast", "it has some exciting new workflows", "it's uniquely powerful" etc. I don't feel like any of those can apply to 3DS Max at this point.
You folks here and on Reddit have been making some good points though, so I've changed the text to be less dismissive.
"I wouldn't bother unless you're planning to work for a studio in the future that may use it - this program is being depreciated throughout the industry. I think the only reason it's still around is because some large companies haven't made the switch to something else. At one point it was the only game in town, but even within Autodesk (Maya/Max's parent company) it's been supplanted by Maya. Now all of it's tools are available in other, more well-designed packages. Hard to learn on your own as well, but since it's a legacy product, there's a lot of tutorials and plugins out there for it."
This comes in when complete newbieness is fully activated.
It's the same thing as always, and regardless of revisions, things never quite changed over the last decade(s) : Maya is a super powerful and fluid tool for animation, while Max is a more solid modeler. Now of course, in order to confirm or negate any of these points, it does require extensive experience with both.
It's also true that some artists have more tolerance for convoluted workflows than others, which in turn affects the perception of a given environment. I personally feel like recent releases of both Max (buggy and increasingly badly designed UI) and Maya (features added in by committee/vote, incompatibility between the toolset paradigms of the legacy features and the newly integrated Nex/Modeling toolset, and a rather unstable Viewport 2.0 that they keep pushing forward) are both quite bad and lack of a strong development vision.
Might not be safe for work though; that interface is so sexy it's practically pornographic.
Sometimes I open it up just to look at it.
The one encounter I've had with Max in a studio setting was at an exhibit design firm that was still using it, since they were using Inventor as well.
I used modo at the firm and didn't encounter any issues when it came to integrating with the rest of the team. I think that at this point, 3d is becoming so standard and commonplace that it really doesn't matter what you use, because there's always a converter or something out there. Also, as I tried to bring attention to in the article; everything breaks down to triangles in the end. So everything, to me, is fundamentally the same.
But given the responses I've received on this thread and elsewhere, I've learned that Max is widely ingrained in the CG industry and will be for some time. In the industrial design/CAD world, I do know that it's being used, but I think it's much rarer.
The thing that's important is, like has been said elsewhere and in the article, is that you find a software within your means that is comfortable for you to use.
Grimwolf that is goddamn sexy. It's a good thing my lady friend and I are on such good terms, or we would have had problems when I opened that up on her computer.
For models and textures, sure, for a lot of other stuff - not so much. And it's the other stuff beyond base modeling tools that mean Maya and co are still the de facto standard.
One thing to consider in all this is that production is so, so much more than just modeling. If anything, modeling's the least critical part of the whole production pipeline, from a purely 'data integration and management' view. It's the other parts of the job, especially animation and rendering/data exporting, which are the volatile, data-critical tasks. For a few-person team, pipeline management isn't that big a deal, but once you get up to even reasonably sized productions, you can enter a whole world of pain, even just using one package. It's at this point that a smooth, well-run, efficient, stable pipeline is key, and it's at this point that you often need to start introducing TD's, programmers, and experienced staff into the mix.
To use Maya's spot as the industry animation package of choice as an example; when the vast bulk of the animation workforce already know Maya and the vast bulk of companies that do character animation use Maya, what's the incentive for either party to move away from using it? What's the logic in making it more difficult to hire good staff for your production? What benefits do other packages offer when the industry standard already does most things you'd reasonably need it to? And with production levels getting higher and higher there's more and more talent to draw from that comparatively huge pool of film animators and TD's (who all used Maya too) coming into the games industry; why cut yourself off from that?
Animation data may be easier to shift around these days, but it still causes issues in a lot of mixed package pipelines. And rigging, controllers, morphs, camera data, lighting, particle data, are all far, far more complicated to get between programs. You can see why people setting up productions can look at modeling as the easy bit and say, "so why don't we just model in Maya, if we're already animating in it?"
It almost doesn't even matter how bad Maya is perceived to be at some things compared to other packages - until another program can demonstrably outdo every aspect of Maya's animation toolset and performance, whilst also offering a flexible enough API that TD's can manage the entire data exchange, and customise access to whatever they wish to, as well as still being at least vaguely decent at all the day-to-day modeling, rigging and rendering tasks, I don't think it'll be toppled from its perch for a while yet.
You have to consider that a package can offer advantages in workforce access, extensibility, data management, and customisation that many packages with better modeling tools, or glossier features, fail to address. And you can probably repeat all of this with Max re: arch-vis (modeling toolset, cad interop, large dataset management, I/O of common architecture files, VRay, huge array of plug-ins, scripting access, etc).
Modo is overrated, Max is not deprecated. No mention about Softimage?
Maya, modeling wise, is still 1999 inhouse tool with Qt interface and NEX plugin bundled.
Many of the team-data-management challenges that you talk about (simulation data, animations, exporting to a 3D printer or CNC machine) are reflected in the design and engineering worlds, and relate to Product Data Management, or PDM
You make a good point; at the production studio level, there is not much incentive to shift from Maya or Max to a newer package, even if it individually offers much greater workflow benefits. Especially if cross-compatability between software within the same family (i.e. Autodesk) offers major workflow improvements.
If there were workflow benefits (such as faster modeling or better resurfacing interpretations) that drastically speed up production time and thus reduced costs, then the industry might be more willing to adopt those new packages But like you said, in the video game and movie industries, the model is the least critical and (I'm inferring) one of the shortest parts of the pipeline.
It sounds to me like the key to succeeding in both the design and engineering worlds would be a package that is designed to be very fas at modeling, rendering, and animating - and also has a tightly integrated PDM solution for multiple designers working on a single project. This program would also have to minimize the amount of time it took designers to learn it, as a company can't afford to have too many of its designers "offline" to learn new software.
Nox, I think that modo is the closest application on the market to solving that issue, because in my experience, it is/has the best subdiv modeling toolset on the market today. I infer from that that it's other tools must also be similarly well designed, as I also enjoy using them and understand them easily, making the software quick to learn. However I do not know what it's PDM solution is like.
Softimage is no longer being developed (last I heard), which is why it's not on the list. I didn't include Milkshape 3D for the same reason.
I'm getting a feeling that I need to learn a new software soon. I might give 3D Coat a try, since it seems to be less well known, I could at least offer a decent opinion on it.
Is it regional? The reason I started using Max was because every studio I've applied or worked at uses Max, this is the US east coast to the southwest. It seems like most gaming hubs grow out of 1 or 2 large studios, either by their collapse or employees leaving and starting their own studios and they just naturally bring over the pipelines and practices they are used to.
I'd like to learn Max but it doesn't agree with my brain-didn't back in college when I was exposed to it and Maya first and still doesn't. I think any upcoming sofware switch I make is going Modo-I took it for a short test drive and it felt good to me, all be it a bit strange. Hopefully in the winter I'll be able to dive in.
Same with me but I chalk that up to a bad teacher, Max was taught without keyboard shortcut use or the stack while Maya was all hotbox and shortcuts. When I came to max I was wary of the stack because I equated that with Maya's history, I still sort of collapse it a lot.
United Front games , Black Tusk , Capcom ,EA etc.
Plus, all 18 VFX houses -Maya
Relic may be the only studio in BC that I'm aware of that still uses 3dsmax- Unless someone knows of a few others I'm not aware of.
Out East, 3dsmax seems a bit more prevalent with a couple big studios such as
Ubisoft & Gameloft
Jumping back to the original Title topic::
For me to make that decision, it boils down to a quick observation.
Looking into the company I'm wanting to work, I'd begin prepping with whatever software they're currently using. -Which enables me to fit into their pipeline on Day 1. That becomes the Best software for me.
I would hazard to guess it's around 50/50 Maya and Max. I believe California is about 45% to 50% of the US game industry so if you're in a densely packed area of Maya studios it might feel more dominant than the more spread out studios across the rest of the country.
I think this represents Max more fairly, as an industry standard package, but also reflects my view that if you're going to learn 3d software, there's other, better options out there, and the main reason you want to learn Max is because of industry requirements.
I don't actually have a bone to pick with Max, so I'm surprised at how much the overall post has been sidetracked by my off-handed and hasty dismissal of the product. I don't actually care whether or not Max goes away, since I have so little interaction with it.
The point of the article is not to get a review of different software packages, it is to understand the strengths and weaknesses of different modeling techniques, and to connect those techniques with your original design intent, so that 3d users, old and new, can explore new ways of creating content using the right tool for the job.
I'm trying to teach 3d as a more generalized concept, instead of a set of actions inherent to a specific software platform.
In this way I hope to introduce more people into the world of digital modeling, as well as make those who are already involved aware of what lies beyond the borders of their industries.
It's a learning process for myself as well - for instance, I didn't know that 3DS Max was used so much in the oil and gas industry. That's really interesting, because I would imagine that industry would use mostly parametric B-Rep modeling. What do you guys do with 3DS Max?
Justin Meisse you replied as I was typing, but ok, good to know.
And yea XSI should have been mentioned as well. It is pretty popular over in some Japanese studios as well as Ubisoft and Kojima Studios and Valve and Capcom and so on. It's very programmer friendly and flexible to adhere to just about any pipeline out there.
Solidworks is used by the engineers, but we get those models in either step files or assembly files that are converted in Max to usable models for animation, simulation, etc.
Like I said before; I didn't mention Softimage for the same reason I didn't mention Milkshape 3D - it's a program that is no longer being developed.
Unless it has some extraordinarily unique modeling feature or amazing price-to-ease-of-use ratio, I don't know why people should learn it when there are other options available.
I could mention it to just say it's out there still, but if I do that I'd like to have a quote from an actual current user; if you have a good reason I would definitely like to quote you and link to your portfolio in the article.
The Mad Artist; when you say simulation, is it like fluid dynamics where you're simulating water pressure, loads, velocities, etc, or is it all animation and CG stuff?
I've heard stories about how studios will have to rebuild an entire model from scratch, even when the CAD data has already been made. Why is that?
Now I asked a question in my last post about why CG artists have to rebuild CAD models before rendering them - do any of you have experience with this phenomenon?
ZacD - I did read your post, I just modified my previous post to reflect the reason why Softimage/XSI is not listed in the article.