Lexii Lungu Posted January 11, 2015 Share Posted January 11, 2015 I would like to ask the community of SL what programs are used for mesh creation of anything from clothes to hair or whatever.. I would like to start trying out various things to see where I can use my virtue of patience. I tend to be rather good at adaptation for programs but.. I have no idea where to look.I am one of those people who has a variety of ideas for creating things so even if i were to be specific about what to make, the list would still be long. But if I have to be specific for the general ease of the public not knowing where to start (incase there was a large variety of programs for various things) I was thinking more along the lines of just clothing maybe, texturing, and hair-creation. If that might be too difficult I would like to get into furniture creation. Any programs used for mesh creation would be helpful, for I would not be picky as to what I made as long as I knew I had a program to make it in, I would make it.Also, a big help would be finding a program that helps with texturing mesh items, as I have tried to make a mesh item in a program but I had difficulties texturing items. Thank you so much for listening to me and my requests.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Amethyst Jetaime Posted January 11, 2015 Share Posted January 11, 2015 Blender is probably the most popular program people use. It's professional level and free. The other ones can cost hundreds of dollars.There are lots of tutorials on the web for it and classes in SL you can take too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arton Rotaru Posted January 11, 2015 Share Posted January 11, 2015 Just for completeness, you can find a list of Mesh Editors on the Wiki. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Creating_a_mesh For texturing a 2D Image editor l,ike Photoshop or Gimp is still pretty much a requirement. A 3D Painting application is a nice and usefull additional tool though. Like Mudbox, Substance Painter, or ZBrush to name a few. Some of the major 3D modeling programs have that abillity as well, to some extent. Even Blender. To do yourself a favour, I would recommend to start with furniture, to get the basics down on lowpoly game ready mesh modelling. UV mapping, texturing etc pp. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lexii Lungu Posted January 12, 2015 Author Share Posted January 12, 2015 I thank you for your replies.. they are very helpful and I look forward to attempting those ideas and suggestions!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Indigo Mertel Posted January 22, 2015 Share Posted January 22, 2015 As Arton suggested, a 3D paint tool is big help for texturing. I recommend Allegorithmic Substance Painter, it's an excellent tool with very good value for money. The indie license is US$149.00 for a program which is on par with similar programs that costs hundreds of dollars. But, before you commit to Painter please take this into consideration: Substance Painter is a professional tool with a steep learning curve, as complex as programs like Photoshop. Not everything Substance Painter can do is supported by the SL rendering engine. Case in point is PBR. Don't expect to get the same results displayed in the product videos. Allegorithmic runs about 3 or 4 special discount offers a year, so if you don't mind waiting you may get the program at a significant discount. I have created a community on Google+ with some sections dedicated to SL users, in case you are interested. Please note that I am not connected with Allegorithmic in any way and don't get any perk in recommending the program. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cathy Foil Posted January 23, 2015 Share Posted January 23, 2015 Hi Lexii, A good place for software is Steam. Some of the program you can rent for a month at a time. Others you can pay a one time fee. I wouldn't bother with Maya LT which is 30 USD a month. It has been stripped down from the full version so much it is pretty worthless from what I been told. Blender is a good choice. YOu can create polygon models and rig in it and some painting from what I understand. Be warned though Blender's user interface is pretty bad making it one of the most difficult programs to learn though the interface has improved a lot over the years. It is probably the most popular program for mesh creators here in SL. ZBrush is an awesome program but it can't do rigging and is around 700 USD. I use 3D Coat I got from Stream quite a bit which is a lot like ZBrush but doesn't have quite as many tools as ZBrush but it is only 100 USD. Silo 2 would be good for a beginner for just polygon modeling. It is also on Steam for 80 UDS. Programs go on sale there twice a year. Once around Christmas and another in late Spring or Summer. I think I picked up Silo for like 50 USD and 3D Coat for 80 USD when they had been on sale. My main program I use is Maya but it is a pretty old version Maya 8.0. Maya is an industry standard for professionals to use. To get a new version is extremely expensive. We are talking thousands of dollars. You could take a Maya class at your local community college and get the student version for free and lean how to use it at the same time. If I was just starting out and didn't or couldn't take a community college class in Maya I would get Silo 2 and 3D Coat from steam and use Blender to rig in. If I had the money I would go for ZBrush instead of 3D Coat though 3D Coat is catching up to ZBrush pretty fast. Hope that helps. Cathy 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gaia Clary Posted January 23, 2015 Share Posted January 23, 2015 Cathy Foil wrote: Blender is a good choice. YOu can create polygon models and rig in it and some painting from what I understand. Be warned though Blender's user interface is pretty bad making it one of the most difficult programs to learn though the interface has improved a lot over the years. It is probably the most popular program for mesh creators here in SL. Blender's user interface has been designed with the complexity of the topic in mind. Blender's developers have taken a long way to master this and i believe that currently Blender has one of the best user interfaces in the world in its category of software. IMHO the main problem is that Blender is not as consistently documented as it is developped. And that is why it is still not so easy to learn its usage. But the documentation is about to be improved, see here (work in progress): http://www.blender.org/manual/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Medhue Simoni Posted January 25, 2015 Share Posted January 25, 2015 Gaia Clary wrote: Cathy Foil wrote: Blender is a good choice. YOu can create polygon models and rig in it and some painting from what I understand. Be warned though Blender's user interface is pretty bad making it one of the most difficult programs to learn though the interface has improved a lot over the years. It is probably the most popular program for mesh creators here in SL. Blender's user interface has been designed with the complexity of the topic in mind. Blender's developers have taken a long way to master this and i believe that currently Blender has one of the best user interfaces in the world in its category of software. IMHO the main problem is that Blender is not as consistently documented as it is developped. And that is why it is still not so easy to learn its usage. But the documentation is about to be improved, see here (work in progress): http://www.blender.org/manual/ Not to pick on Cathy at all, but just to point out my experience with the Blender UI. Of course, I've used many a programs, but probably the most comparable to Blender, would be 3Ds Max. So, I went from Max to Blender, and it was pretty much a breeze. I did complain about the right and left click options in the beginning, even opting to change them. After a few months tho, I abandoned that, as it doesn't work across all layouts. This was the best thing I could have done, as it made me learn Blender better and why their set up is far superior than others. Athough I do have some gripes about the UI, mainly around applying textures and materials, I truly feel that Blender's UI is far superior. I'm just faster, and doing just about everything is easier. For the most part, I do it all in Blender. I use almost every single part of Blender, from rendering video, to liquid simulations, to 3D painting. Probably the only parts that I have not played with all that much is compositing, and 3D sculpting. Lot's of people have complained about Blender's UI, but this is only because they are used to other programs. Once they embrace the Blender UI, they stop complaining about it. Just my thoughts. Oh, and the Blender way really blows everyone else away when it comes to animating, IMHO. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sassy Romano Posted January 25, 2015 Share Posted January 25, 2015 My input, UI aside, price aside... just have a look for the number of tutorials and other methods of support you are likely to get for your chosen application. One particular piece of software stands clear about the rest where SL is concerned and that's Blender. Learn the UI and just get on with creating and of course, there's no cost involved in trying. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Candy Cerveau Posted February 15, 2015 Share Posted February 15, 2015 It is no longer accurate to say that Maya LT is stripped down and useless. Autodesk made substantial changes and additions to LT nearly a year ago that allows it to do pretty much everything one would need for Second Life. They raised the polygon limit to far more than you would ever need in SL, added MEL scripting, and export as .obj and to Mudbox and Unity, plus more - Here's a list of what is in Maya LT 2015 http://www.autodesk.com/products/maya-lt/features/all/list-view Maya LT is what I use and it is well worth the $30 per month in my opinion. Blender made me want to tear my hair out. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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