Best Program for Mesh Houses?

[KlistiesSeMio Ewinaga]

As the title says, I'm curious to know which program you'd guys recommend I look into if I wanted to try to make some simple mesh houses. I love what people have been doing with mesh and housing lately, and I kinda want to give it a shot. At least learn some things, anyway.

I'm not too worried about a program being too busy or the interface being too difficult, but something more user friendly would be nice. xD

 

Thanks!

[Ciaran Laval]

Blender, by a country mile, it's free for a start, plenty of folk here use it and you'll find hints and tips, for a beginner it's the way to go.

If you have money to burn, Maya is a great product, but honestly, if you're starting out with Mesh, go Blender.

 

[Chosen Few]

There's no such thing as a "best program for mesh houses", just like there's no best program for mesh castles, or for mesh soccer balls, or best program for mesh kazoos, or for mesh bagpipes, or for mesh frying pans, or whatever else you can think of that you might want to make as a mesh model.  It's all the same thing.  If you can model any one of them, you can model all the others.  Modeling is modeling, is modeling.

The question is not what program is best for the making of an arbitrary object, but what program is best for YOU.  The answer to that is the best program to use is the one you know how to use best.

If you're not looking to spend money, then as Ciaran mentioned, and no doubt lots of others will echo, Blender is by far the most full featured free option.  It's really the only freebie that even comes close to professional grade.

If you do have money burning a hole in your pocket, then the industry standards are Maya and 3DS Max.  There are others to choose from as well, but those two are the biggest fish in the pond. (I'm a Maya user, myself.)  They each cost US$3500, so be sure you're serious before you commit.  You can donwload a 30-day trial of each, for free.

Whichever one you choose, be prepared for a steep learning curve.  If you're brand new to this, it isn't something you'll learn over night, no matter how smart or talented you may be.  It takes time, commitment, discipline, and lots and lots and lots of practice, to become a compentent 3D modeler.  If that sounds like you, go for it, and we'll be here to help when you have questions.  But if you're lacking in the commitment and discipline department, and/or if you're not willing to put in the time and practice, don't even bother, because it just doesn't work any other way.

The best advice I can give you right now, is the same advice I give to every person when they're just starting out with this.  Do NOT approach it with "I want to make ______" in mind, no matter what the blank happens to be.  Learn 3D modeling itself, and then apply that same knowledge to anything and everything you want to make.

Whichever program you choose, select a course of study for it, and stick to it, religiously.  Do NOT try to skip around, or cherry pick just the things you think you need to know.  When you start at the beginning, and let each lesson build upon the last, the way it's supposed to, it just works, and you'll develop a solid mastery of the basics in a very reasonable amount of time.  Plus, it will be fun, all along.  However, if you try to go out of order, you'll find yourself wanting to tear your hair out, as you experience frustration after frustration, while more and more stumbling blocks rapidly accumulate.  In other words, a I so often end up saying in these discussions, don't put the cart before the horse.  Commit to doing it right, or just don't do it.

If you choose Maya or Max, they each come with fantastic documentation, including the best series of "getting started" tutorials that can be found anywhere.  If you go with Blender, I recommend following the beginner course from Blender Cookie, and then follow up afterward with the more SL-specific tutorials from Machinimatrix. 

Once again, whatever you do, do NOT attempt to go out of order with any of this.  There is critical, need-to-know information at every step, even if you don't yet realize it at the time.  Skip over any of it, and you'll find yourself regretting it when you spent countless hours flailing around in a later tutorial because you skipped over learning how to do something really foundational in an earlier one.

And once again, I have to stress, do NOT succumb to the temptation of thinking, "I'm smart, so I'll figure it out."  Trust me; that's not how this works.  I've taught this stuff to more people over the years than I'd care to count, and I can promise you, nobody has a more miserable time of it than the ones with high intelligence but low discipline.  In this respect, it's a lot like learning a musical instrument.  You can't just will yourself to be good at it.  You have to be willing to start with the basics, and practice, practice, practice, or mastery simply will never come.

Do it right, and it will be rewarding and fun.  Do it wrong, and will be neither.  So, do it right.

[Morgaine Christensen]

Blender--It's free. 

[Rahkis Andel]

I usually agree with chosen, and I certainly agree with his or her sentiment, but for your circumstance, based on how you worded your question. I would never in a million years recommend expensive industry standard software to someone who just wanted to give modelling a try.

 

Blender by a country mile.

[Porky Gorky]

I build mesh houses and I use 3D Studio max. I tried learning blender 5 years ago and the UI was a complete nightmare, whoever designed it must have been tripping imo. I hear it's more user friendly now. For me I found 3DS max to be intuitive and very easily to learn especially with the knowledge and experience I had gained from building in SL. Although Max was not cheap it has paid for iteself numourous time over since then. You can get a 30 day free trial from the website.

[KlistiesSeMio Ewinaga]

Thanks so much for your answers, guys!

I tried Blender a few years ago, but I admit I didn't have much time to devote to learning how to model as I was busy with classes and didn't really take it seriously.

I'm more interested in actually, y'know, learning properly this time, (especially since I've been wanting to learn how to model for a few years now) so I think what I'll do is give Blender another go, do the tutorials listed, just to get an idea of what all I'm doing.

Then I think I'll go in and grab some trials and see which interface I prefer.

Thanks again everyone! At least now I have some direction.

[Rahkis Andel]

That was my position about a year ago. I don't regret the decision to get serious about learning properly.

A bit of advice: blenderatists.org and cgcookie.com/blender are your best friends.

Watch all the tutorials you can and ask for help immediately on blenderartists if you get stuck. I made the mistake of trying to figure things out myself too often and could have saved myself a lot of trouble.

Once you're ready to try 3ds Max, cgcookie.com/max will be your best friend too.

I wish you the best of luck.

[Chic Aeon]

I'll stick my two cents worth in here since I am NEW and have just been through the learning curve.

I too tried Blender several years ago (back in the sculpty days) and was overwhelmed. Gave it up. Never learned any of that. Happily built with prims.

At the beginning of November I was bored. I had done tons of stuff in SL over the years and needed a new challenge. So I decided to give myself a month to learn mesh (well be able to get around  fairly easily anyway) and that meant Blender as honestly I can think of better things to do that amount of money.

 

It took about two weeks of full time (7 - 10 hours a day) for me to feel like I was enjoying myself rather than working. I have taught myself many programs over the years including Flash where I actually made some very good dinero in real life and a variety of difficult graphics programs. I easily will call this the most difficult to learn. Still, along the way and through the frustration I somehow could tell that when I did "get it" I would really, really like it. And I do.

I am certainly still learning and the physics thing for houses is still sort of mind boggling for me (haven't actually  done anything with that besides reading) but if you are willing to put in the time you may actually enjoy yourself. Plenty of folks do.

My best advice when you start learning is to stay away from the tutorials that use the older blender interface. Trying to understand what they are doing when the interface is SO different is not a pleasant thing. Stick with the newer tutorials. There are plenty to choose from.

[Nacy Nightfire]

What Chosen Few said. AND....

What I see as the highlight of your post is "I want to try to make some simple mesh houses."

Well then Blender is a great choice because unless you are going to go into animation, video with special effects, etc.  you simply do not need an expensive 3d modeling/animation program for your SL mesh building needs.  If you plan to specialize in mesh houses then you do not need anything elaborate then Blender (even that has more features then you'll ever use) and it's a good place to start learning 3d modeling concepts.  It's also used by a large number of SL builders who can come to your rescue here on the forum when you run into problems or have questions.  What you might invest in is a good graphics program since everything here by necessity has to be low poly and that makes good texturing skills is very important.

But my point is you can make  stunning mesh houses in Blender.