iMac

hawken · Feb 2006

My agent/boss man has taken pity on me, because my HP's GPU went kaput. He decided to buy a computer that I can use, however it's on his term and I was offered a DELL laptop or one of them spanking new iMac G5's with the whole mess built into the screen. Obviously, I took the iMac option. I'm done with expensive powerhouse laptops, they aren't stable.

AaaaNeeeWay, does anyone know any decent 3d software for the mac? I've heard "shade" is kinda cool. Aparently used by sega no less. I was after something that I can do polygon modelling with, and has export (to director) functions.

I'm keeping my onions peeled!

Marine · Feb 2006

maya runs on macs, dunno if it can work with director though

Jeff Parrott · Feb 2006

Maya is out. I think Zbrush is as well. Not sure about Softimage. Haven't checked in a while.

thomasp · Feb 2006

yep, maya, lightwave, modo come to mind. modelling, eh? say hi to modo.

btw. i think the iMac G5 is an old hat, the intel powered one seems to be their new model. but you are lucky, hardly anything runs on that intel mac at the moment without some form of emulation that apparently drops performance down to G4 levels.

ScoobyDoofus · Feb 2006

Silo, Maya, Zbrush?

hawken · Feb 2006

hmm, we'll have to flip a coin about the intel issue. On one hand its good for the future, on the other - its bad for now.
Either way, G5 is the latest and it's got all the same bits and bobs of a normal graphics hungry PC. Sooner or later the better software will come out. Who knows, maybe the intel one can emulate windows a bit quicker!

I'm gonna check out what the MODO fuss is about, Maya might well be out of my reach. Of course I can now try to sell MAX so I might have *some* cash to buy this software (that unfortunately is hard to find by other means. mums the word on that one.)

Asthane · Feb 2006

Wings3d as well, I doubt any of the new batch of standalone UV editors are cross-platform

The Silo/Maya/Zbrush combination sounds good though, maybe one day we can just cut the Zbrush out, if Silo's displacementm painting matures enough.

CheapAlert · Feb 2006

haha no one mentioned blender so I will

Blender

thomasp · Feb 2006

your choice of software should depend on what you want to do, of course. for modelling/UV-ing, modo will do just fine. it's only a modeler, though. it seems pretty easy to set it up for transititioners from other apps. if you do only or mainly organic (hipoly) models, zbrush is worth the grab. it's also nice for texturing, of course.

maya is very technical and complex. consider it if you are looking for an allround package. if you're coming from max and have never used maya before, it will be quite tough to learn and get up to speed with it.

arshlevon · Feb 2006

if your coming from max your not going to like maya, expecially if you do any amount of modeling. with a bunch of scripts i have managed to get about 60 percent of the modeling tools i used in max in maya but thats about it. it does have a wonderful interface and a fabulous material editor. i would suggest a silo zbrush combo. you will feel close to home with silo as max user. modo is nice but dosent really do much silo cant and its hella more expensive.

Asthane · Feb 2006

Agreed. Only real use I have for Maya, personally, is the animation features, where all the MEL/Driven Keys/Conversion Nodes/etc can shine. Actually, isn't motionbuilder Maya's little-brother standalone animation package? I've never tried it, but might be worth looking into...

Lee3dee · Feb 2006

[ QUOTE ]
if your coming from max your not going to like maya

[/ QUOTE ]

If going to max from Maya, You randomly crash more and have a bad shader system.

sorry, couldn't resist!:D

Silo, Maya, zbrush, Cinema 4D on the Mac.

hawken · Feb 2006

lol I remember cinema 4d on the amiga!

shade really reminds me of "real 3d".

I miss "imagine", are there any like that? (BTW I hate max, sooner I'm shot of it, the better. In the past 6 years of using it I've never once bothered with anything but the polygon tools)

thomasp · Feb 2006

asthane: no, motionbuilder is a very different beast, targeted at motion capture editing. pretty much useless without one of the supported allround packages. has nothing in common with maya, very different look&feel and featureset. alias bought the developer a few years ago, that's all.

for pure keyframe animation, there's also sega animanium, which i found pretty weird tho.

apparently popular in japan (the program, not my taste).

i have very vague memories of imagine (was that the thing that ran in amiga's HAM mode? 4096 shades of flickering interface grey-ness) ).

guess cinema 4d wouldn't be a bad choice either, seems it has grown a lot and is not some left behind retard anymore. also, maxon seems to do a better job in porting software to the mac than others. cinema seems pricey tho.

lightwave on the other hand - if you were able to understand that thing that must have been written for the inhabitants of pluto originally, then you would have one worry less that seems a big concern on apple: bad or even worse hw-accelerated display drivers.

also, LW is cheap and alround, might come in handy, at least i myself am using stuff like animation or dynamics features in modelling all the time. wouldn't want to miss the extra functionality.

iMac

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