3rd party software

[jpaluck]

Aokweld,

LOL..yeah none of them are exactly easy when you are starting. My question for you would be what are looking to create? If you want to just do cnc carvewright stuff why not just master what CW has? I have Aspire and use it for my other machine and for a lot of things it it's awesome and very fast - ex - Vcarves and pocketing. But like you said there is a learning curve. It is not like you going to buy the software and start cranking out killer models/designs.

Artcam ,Aspire and CW are fairly close to each other in the way they model. Draw a shape and extrude it from either an extrude or a sweep basically. This initially seems easier for a beginner to wrap their head around. Draw the shape type thing. Then it can be tweaked via sculpting. I personally do not like modeling this way. I like quads over this method because with quads it can be done a lot faster and it WAY easier to correct and tweak on the fly with zero sculpting at the end. That being said I will say quads are as hard to learn as CW. The issue I had and think most have when you initially start with them is they look bizzare. The user interface is very intimidating etc. They are NOTHING like a graphics program like AI or Corel. Very little will correlate to quads.

When you open say Blender you need to remember there are 3 main parts of the program - Modeling, rendering and animation. If you only looking to model you will just ignore the rest, however it becomes hard if you never opened it. It will look like the cockpit of a jet plane with controls and buttons you never heard of prior. My suggestion would be to learn the UI (user interface) first. Don't worry about making a model learn where things are and learn the concepts of quads and 3d. Then begin to make simple full 3d models for practice. I find modeling most things in full 3d are way easier than to model things for carving..2.5d - because you have less space to work in. Things like faces,portraits, human figures are some of the hardest to produce. beside getting good with the program your modeling in you need to be very artistic also. Some of the guys I am friends with in Zbrush are well versed in human anatomy. When I ask them for help with a head or something they tell me go study anatomy.

Moi is an awesome program and is Nurbs based like Rhino. Nurbs are great for mechanical type things and organic stuff like say cars. But for say a human portrait or leaf scrolls or such - that is not a good choice. Quads are the best choice for those types of things. If you like Moi let me know if you want to buy it and I can get you 10% off.

If I had it to learn all over again I would have listened to HT (carvenow). he told me learn quads and you will need nothing else. If I could only have 2 programs for modeling it would be a quad based modelor and Zbrush. Other key if you pick a quad modelor - STICK to that one. The UI's of the different programs are not the same and get the same results by going about things differently - meaning there is no true uniformity in the UI's. Blender is an awesome program to start with and stay with. It can do anything model wise all the big guns can IE 3ds max , Maya , Modo etc.

I learned a TON on Digital Tutors - http://www.digitaltutors.com/11/index.php lol..the digital college thing you mentioned for me. They have some good blender stuff to learn the UI. After you know the UI you can watch modeling videos from other softwares, even though the UI is not the same, the modeling concepts will be. Modeling is a lot fun and a great hobby but it will take a lot of practice.

Good Luck with it and if you get rolling with it, show your models.

[aokweld101]

Jpaluck, there is nothing that I would like better than to show the patterns that I work on or learn on one of the 3rd party software, my thing that I want to do is making like bowls thicker than .75 thick and Head bust of pictures of people I know I would like to make things that people would use and not just make simple signs I would like to make my own patterns and work more under the 3-d sliceing but from what I have heard from Dan & Eddie you need to learn the 3-d software I want to be on the level that... you, Eddie and Dan are at ...