well as with most 64 bit applications your not going to notice a difference unless you need more memory, and in most cases 64 bit aplications are even a little slower than the 32 bit counterparts because there is more system overhead. so things like models with millions and billions of polies you will notice a difference,…
Thanks for all the positive feedback. :D Njob is basically a collection of filters I've been playing with for a few years. (Dating back to the ETQW days.) I just recently got the time to wrap them in a simple user interface (no more command lines!). It's also very lightweight (we just run it straight from dropbox :) easy…
Personally nothing beats knowing how to paint/manipulate good maps. Procedural maps have their place and can be a great starting place but I've never seen them be the end all to a material pipeline that actually looked decent. I use them to start maps, concrete, wood and mostly metal. The advantage is that you can set a…
Ahh yea, warp mode, I thought you meant transform mode. I don't know of any other app that has those specific warping handles. The convert to mesh and manipulate is probably the only good option inside of 3dsmax. That would be pretty cool! If you find good work around, definitely post it! But I think you already came up…
It's good that you are thinking ahead about what you are going to need before you start. One suggestion i have for you: Build everything in low quality in your 3D app before yo start your production props. By low quality, i don't mean blockout meshes, i mean build them like you were only trying to figure out the modularity…
I started doing that (Maya at home Max at work) and it gave me a nice refresher coarse on Maya. I started with Maya moved to Max (at the time it was dominant) and stayed there after finding a job that used Max. Of course going back to Maya drove me nuts because I was taking 3x as long to do what I already knew I could do…
The mesh doesn't have to be solid. For example you can make a lot with splines and then extrude the shape. If the shape has to conform to a curve just make sure it has enough segments so it can deform properly. Another thing you can do is model the details with a plane and extrude the edges to follow a spline. Depending on…
4 sided polys or quads work best if you plan on subdividing the mesh like you mentioned. It would be kind of bazaar to take something so inorganic into a sculpting program. Since triangles don't let you control loops as easy I would say work in quads/4 sided ploys when you can. You don't really apply the normal map to your…
c'mon, connect is used to draw an edge between selected vertices, in more advanced implementations it accepts selected faces and edges, too - subdivides and conncets accordingly. it's used to build up geometry, not to reduce it like target weld. btw. maya's bevel - at least in the versions people complain about here -…
I agree with john on this. Big art tests are disrespectful. I've yet to see a company ask a programmer to create an app of their specification "just to see if their folio is legit". Under those circumstances, you're assuming that artists are liars and cheats. The sheer lack of respect for what artists do really bothers me…