[2020 EDIT] This post is 4 years old and someone necrobumped the topic. I probably don't need your advice anymore, but feel free to reply if you have any cool suggestions you'd like me to check out.
I more or less only make very retro stuff (and almost exclusively 2D), but I've slowly been sniffing on 3D stuff for years, now having reached a point where I know how to handle 3D collisions efficiently and automatically generate a 3D model for the game world using collision data; in other words, I feel like I've got the 3D world bit covered. But that still leaves a pretty big gap in my understanding: the inhabitants of the game world.
I've dabbled around a bit with Blender since it's the most used tool, but I wouldn't exactly call it user-friendly, in particular I couldn't really find a way to only move stuff along one or two axes (leading to accidentally deforming stuff when I just wanted to move a vertice) and couldn't really grasp working with flat triangles instead of filled bodies - and these problems kinda accentuate each other; for instance, if I needed to cause a hole in a body when building a shape, it was almost impossible to glue it together with other vertices due to the movement bug. I ended up never getting to the stage where I'd import the model into GM, but that's obviously also pretty important for this application as well.
Does anyone know about a good utility for making 3D models for beginners [that you've got personal experience with]? I don't care if it lacks advanced functionality or efficiency, since I'm not aiming past N64/PS1 levels of graphics.
Ideally, I'm looking for an application that has the following traits:
I more or less only make very retro stuff (and almost exclusively 2D), but I've slowly been sniffing on 3D stuff for years, now having reached a point where I know how to handle 3D collisions efficiently and automatically generate a 3D model for the game world using collision data; in other words, I feel like I've got the 3D world bit covered. But that still leaves a pretty big gap in my understanding: the inhabitants of the game world.
I've dabbled around a bit with Blender since it's the most used tool, but I wouldn't exactly call it user-friendly, in particular I couldn't really find a way to only move stuff along one or two axes (leading to accidentally deforming stuff when I just wanted to move a vertice) and couldn't really grasp working with flat triangles instead of filled bodies - and these problems kinda accentuate each other; for instance, if I needed to cause a hole in a body when building a shape, it was almost impossible to glue it together with other vertices due to the movement bug. I ended up never getting to the stage where I'd import the model into GM, but that's obviously also pretty important for this application as well.
Does anyone know about a good utility for making 3D models for beginners [that you've got personal experience with]? I don't care if it lacks advanced functionality or efficiency, since I'm not aiming past N64/PS1 levels of graphics.
Ideally, I'm looking for an application that has the following traits:
- It's easy to sculpt things in it.
- It has a built-in tool to map texture coordinates to the vertices so that you can preview a texture mapping and/or import it together with the model.
- It exports models in a format GM supports, or at least a common format that could be converted to one with some other program on the side.
- If it has built-in support to rig a skeleton and stuff, that's a plus.
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