Godot and modeling softwares.

Hi,

If you are new to 3D and don't want to spend lot of time with basic 3D modeling and a soft like Blender, take a look at SketchUp. But taking some time to learn this amazing soft that is Blender will never be a lose of time ;)

Wings3D is very good and fast, but it's only for modelling, not animation. Wings3D can export OBJ files from it that can be imported in Blender or Godot. OpenFX tried to be a FOSS 3DSMAX but Blender has already beaten it. It's also very inactive. K-3D is... different, not really worth the time learning it IMHO.

Right now Blender is the only FOSS choice if you want the full package. The official docs suck a lot beyond the basics, also I'avoid tutorials discussing Blender below 2.6. Personally I learned to (somewhat) use Blender with the help of Chapters 1-4 of a book called "Building a Game with Unity and Blender".

Take Blender,there's nothing better(for free)...and Blender don't get lost between paid dogs :)

It is almost impossible to avoid blender (except paid alternatives). The other way is to use many tools, one for each purpose (uv mapping, animation, rigging...) to the point that it will be much much more work to learn each of them and to handle the hassle to make them work together than simply dive in blender for a few weeks, learn its uniformized philosophy and see each of its modules one by one.

In fact, it's not blender that takes a lot of time. It's making a 3d scene that takes a heckalot of time. You can search for whatever tool you want, you'll still end up spending months if you want to make good scenes. There's no shortcut.

Blender and equivalents are really much simpler than you may think. Don't look at it as a massive pile of tools and options, if you only need to do a couple things in specific you can cut out 80-90% of what the tools have to offer. You don't even need to look at the extras. Of course, if you stick with you eventually will learn the other stuff because its awesome.

Polygonal modeling is easy, learn to do loop cuts (L), extrusions(E), merge(Alt+M) and face/vert/edge selection (Shift+Tab), knife cut(K), grab(G+x/y/z/xx/yy/zz) and that's good enough for most things a beginner would need to do. Sculpting is even simpler. Add a primitive(Shift+A), go to sculpt mode, enable dyntopo and brush away. And there are a lot of tutorials available to expand to better things.

Honestly, something Like Wings is pretty pointless to learn when learning it in Blender would not be any harder and would provide a far larger array of options later on when you want to accomplish more. You need to have a pretty good reason to choose to learn smaller packages and the truth is 99% new users don't have a good reason other than subjective opinion.

@The Environment Guy said: Honestly, something Like Wings is pretty pointless to learn when learning it in Blender would not be any harder and would provide a far larger array of options later on when you want to accomplish more. You need to have a pretty good reason to choose to learn smaller packages and the truth is 99% new users don't have a good reason other than subjective opinion. It's not totally true. Some specific tools can make life much easier. For instance buildings are so much easier to do with Sketchup. Sculpting is still 10x easier with ZBrush than the integrated sculpt tool in Blender. And to make a game level for Doom-like games, you'd lose less time with build32 or GtkRadiant than with Blender. But since Godot understands only a format that only Blender among those named tools can produce, all the spared time will be wasted in the conversion process anyway.

Maybe it is useless, but beeing a beginner myself in 3D, and not a modeller nor a drawer, I would only confirm what the other members said here:

It's true that understanding how works such software like Blender appears impossible for the beginners we both are. The first time I launched it, I gave up 5 minutes later, afraid by the numerous tools and options included. Few weeks later, I re-opened it and learned the basics. It took me about 1 month to learn the main manipulations and shortcuts (about 1 hour each evening), since then... I can't stop :D Furthermore, there is a very large community dedicated to this fantastic tool all over the world, and you could find help when you are stucked (there is always "noob" sections on forums).

Trust me , it worth it !

@Gokudomatic

I agree, the implication there is that learning multiple tools at once as a beginner far outweighs the befits. Its easy to let a couple years go by basking in the glory of technology and meanwhile not produce much of any portfolio level content. Personally I quite like 3DCoat, ZBrush I love and hate. Such great tools, odd UX design, no Linux runtime, random crashes... but the tools... wonderful magic sauce.

@keltwookie

Your doing better than I did. Be glad your not joining in prior to 2.5x, I'm sure the Blender community lost many potential users for not having Python bundled (disregarding the various other issues of the time). You couldn’t even start the program before giving up, literally, it wouldn’t start at all. People have it so easy now to be able to go online and in a couple minutes have dozens of ready to use production level tools all FOSS and with extensive free training available.

Good job with the car, your half way to Lightning McQueen :)

Haven't tried animating bones in Godot before. Godot is still pretty early in life and it is missing quite a few tools when it comes to assembling sets, doing terrain, and other more asset building type stuff. For the time being its best at least for the 3D to build and arrange everything before import but hopefully that will change. Especially with 3x Godot will have some pretty compelling reasons a dev may want to choose it over the myriad of other engines available.

If I might suggest: open the object in Blender, and use the auto unwrap in Blender instead. It produces pretty good results, and for simple objects like yours it easily keeps the relative scale. Also, it allows you to create uv map islands that make much better use of the available texture space - you are wasting a lot of space, which is unnecessary.

Blender's UV unwrapping tools are great and easy to use (if you are accustomed to Blender's overall navigation and selection tools, of course).

I understand you are concerned about keeping a light GUI that does not distract while modeling - it is easy to set up a full-screen viewport with merely the essentials for modeling, and a nice pie menu. The modeling tools in Blender are top-notch - and for hard surface modeling the hard ops add-on is unbeatable. https://gumroad.com/l/hardops#

All full-scope 3d applications are quite intimidating to learn - but I really think it is preferable to learn to work in one, rather than many small tools that are lacking in some way or other. Alternatively, "Sensei Format" is an add-on that simplifies the GUI considerably.

Be careful when comparing Wings to Blender (or Maya, Max, Cinema4d) - the breadth and scope of functionality/features of the latter is on a vastly different scale. You would probably have a similar experience in other 3d suites. Wings is very, very limited in scope compared to Blender, Maya, Max, Modo, C4d, Lightwave, etc.

Which means Wings can put everything right at hand, while trying to find UV unwrapping in other 3d software (with far more features) may be much harder, and requires guidance.

It's like comparing a swiss knife with a CNC router. The swiss knife is easy to use and it has all its features at hand, but you can do only so much with it. With a CNC router, you can do much more, but more features brings more complexity. If you add as much features in Wings 3D as in Blender, you'll have a monster of complexity too.