[Melkor]

Could some helpful person give me a suggestion for modelling software? and (if you think it may be helpful) give some basic instructions on how to use this software efficiently,
I have found modelling to be extremely difficult in the past and as there seem to be many more understanding people than me for this topic, I hope that people will give only useful advice

[Hellstryker]

Sketchup, Blender, and 3ds max are all very good. Sketchup is good for beginers, but limits you more than blender or 3ds max. Blender has an extremely confusing GUI but is controlled using mainly keyboard shortcuts. 3ds Max is probably out of the question unless you want to pirate it, since it costs obscene amounts of money.

[Melkor]

Thanks for the info, but where would I obtain any of these programmes?

3ds Max is probably out of the question unless you want to pirate it, since it costs obscene amounts of money.

How much do you mean by "obscene"?

[pecenipicek]

as in $1000 at the cheapest non-student, extremely function deprived version.


cinema4D is one of the best apps to start with. easy to get to grips with, powerfull when you need it.

[Melkor]

owwwwww!
thats a little out of my price range,
where could i get "cinema4D" from?

[Vertigo 7]

I'm an amature modeler myself and from my experiences it just takes some playing with it to learn it. I started on truespace... From my prospective, true space is a good place to start if nothing else than to learn how to play connect the dots in 3D where you can make your own dots 

It takes a bit of getting used to, esp with the controls hiding in menus the way it does, but the program itself is fairly comprehensive. There's of newbie modeling guides available on line but in my experience, nothing beats jumping in and getting your hands dirty.

Personally what I would do is learn how to create primitives first and see how you can modify them. (by primitives, basic shapes, boxes, spheres, cylinders etc). You'll begin to see how you can take a simple 6 sided cube and turn it into a 50 bajillion faced polygon that vaguely resembles a ship or some such thing.

I haven't messed with blender so I couldn't tell ya much about it. TS, however, is a good program for the cost (its free btw lol) I will for warn ya tho that TS has a tendency to crash if it doesn't like a particular piece of geometry. Just make sure you save often and it'll save you of head ache

If you decide to use TS, you'll need to find the True View plugin for it... atleast if you're going to make FS models.

oh and here, this is a good guide to understanding with TS... its written for version 3.2 but 7.6 is essentially the same and does all of what the guide says... http://underworld.fortunecity.com/pacman/106/fs2mods/shipcreationguide/

That got me started. It may leave you asking a few questions but thats ok. Once you get started playing around with TS, it will make more sense and one day it'll all just click and there ya go =)

[Galemp]

where could i get "cinema4D" from?

Probably from here.

Can you figure out where to get Blender?

[Melkor]

where could i get "cinema4D" from?

Probably from here.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY???

[General Battuta]

 

(as much as I hate single-emoticon posts)

[Vertigo 7]

omg lol... i've never seen that before =D I'm sorry, im not trying to be mean, but thats pretty damn funny lol

[Droid803]

Dang, that's awesome.

[Jeff Vader]

where could i get "cinema4D" from?

Probably from here.

Can you figure out where to get Blender?

Have to remember that one.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY???

Of course he is not. HLP is dead serious business. There is no humour. Never has been and never will be.

[Melkor]

where could i get "cinema4D" from?

Probably from here.

Can you figure out where to get Blender?

Have to remember that one.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY???

Of course he is not. HLP is dead serious business. There is no humour. Never has been and never will be.

???
He, for some reason, instead of helping me by giving a direct link to a relatively useful site, has decided to try and be smart!

[pecenipicek]

he does have a point tho, google is your friend for stuff you dont know about.


[edit]in any case, here's a link to the demo
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Graphic/Graphic-Editors/CINEMA-4D.shtml

[Melkor]

thanks for the help

[dragonsniper]

Another one is Maya, but it's beyond ridiculously expensive. There is a 30 day demo or something like that, but your luck may be better to get a free program instead of a $5000 dollar program...

[pecenipicek]

or just sing the pirate song

[Topgun]

Blender3d is DA BESTSS.
http://www.blender.org/

[pecenipicek]

or da worrrrssstssss, if you're used to a button heavy, intuitive interface. truespace has a better interface than blender. hell, i started in truespace 3.2 and switched over to cinema 4d more or less seamlessly.

[Topgun]

 
Truespaces' interface is terrible!
Truespace Dev:"I got an idea, why don't we hide ALL the useful buttons behind other buttons!"
Truespace Dev2:"Yeah! and then we can make the mouse useless so that users are forced to use our buttons just to move around!"
Dev1:"I got another idea! we should make it impossible to align the view to vertices or axis, that way they have to keep moving the view around (again using our buttons) to align things right!"