3D Software Survey
Hey guys! Back again with another survey for my dissertation, you guys were a tremendous help last time and I promise to stop posting annoying surveys and get on with posting some of my work as soon as the theoretical side of things are over with.
Below is the link to the survey, and the topic is about what makes 3D software, that is any software that can be used for modelling, texturing, sculpting etc.
Again sorry for being a nuisance, you're helping me out massively!
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/99RTSFR
Below is the link to the survey, and the topic is about what makes 3D software, that is any software that can be used for modelling, texturing, sculpting etc.
Again sorry for being a nuisance, you're helping me out massively!
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/99RTSFR
Replies
i feel like you are missing the really important things
this, this and thousand times this. We use Unreal, Unity, 3ds Max from 9.0 - 2015, Maya from 2009 - 2015, Mari, Mudbox, ZBrush, xNormal, Keyshot, Marmoset, Marvelous Designer, and tons of client supplied tools, and the biggest pain in the butt is still file exchange and getting stuff as easily, quickly and losslessly from one app into the other.
It's the white elephant in the room nobody wants to see or tackle with. And meanwhile AD is happy to push their proprietary FBX format onto which not everyone else wants to sign up to.
Having a universally accepted and open interchange format with support for metadata would resolve many current pipeline and production issues.
Otherwise, an important criteria for my studio is how well we can include software into a technical pipeline - i.e. what sort of API, scripting it offers, so we can integrate it with our pipeline tools for asset management, automated QA, etc. Also, does it allow us to automate workflows artists find repetitive?
while this is true, all this doesn't make the app viable if the "single user?" experience is just bad
the first thing thats interesting to me is the toolset and the gui (and stability)
obviously you have to balance and weigh all features against each other. And depending on your studio, the weighting you give may be different (maybe that's why all the companies offering "indie" packages strip scripting and useful file formats?). Politics may also play a role: are the tech people in charge or the artists/end users when making buying decisions?
But in a big shop, with many projects, just making sure your entire pipeline runs smooth can be a big task, and much automation happens just for managing file formats, metadata and dependencies.
Ideally you do a risk analysis and a return of investment calculation. What's gonna cost you more? Annoyed artists because the UX isn't ideal? Or the fact you waste lots of man hours because you just can't make everything work together easily? There's no perfect product, so you have to balance. But just thinking of all the issues we get from converting files, tracking files, tracking dependencies, making apps play "nice" with each other, the amount of time spent (e.g. troubleshooting, fixing, manually converting, pipeline dev) ain't small.