I wish someone had told me that way back!

[Nyro]

Where's the point in gaining experience, you might ask, when all you do is copy the experience of others? :)

[Dibbz]

The connect tool in Editable Poly in 3DS Max is amazing. Learn to use it and the edge selection tools.

[Yaroshenko]

Sorry i dont got the point of you, but if you want to start you must learn the essential first.

[SanguineJackal]

I will say the only thing I know for sure, simply to save you the time and pain and frustration:

If you are modeling a head in NURBS, lofting it is NOT the way to go unless you know what you are doing! :(

[suzvan]

hi guys
thanks for the posts.
hopefully I could explain what I'm refering to by example.
having been drawing for an odd 6mnths - if someone were to start drawing, my advice would be:
be patient and get triangulation under your belt,
cause if your proportions are wrong - your drawing will be wrong.
I was wondering whether there are such parallels in modelling?

[Sbowling]

if someone were to start drawing, my advice would be:
be patient and get triangulation under your belt,
cause if your proportions are wrong - your drawing will be wrong.
I was wondering whether there are such parallels in modelling?

Many of these things apply to 3D modeling. While it's easier to fix these problems in 3d than when drawing, it's best to avoid them in the first place. I would really recommend taking some kind of traditional art courses, or at least reading some books on it. This is especially important if you want to do characters.

If I had to give advice, I would say start simple and get to know your program. If you try to model a human head the first time you sit down at a 3d program, you are probably going to get very frustrated. While building a simple house won't be as spectacular as a human head, it will help you get the basics of navigating the programs and modifying geometry.

Once you have the basics of your program, the best advice I could give it to look around and see how other people are doing things. This is really a great time to get started in 3D because you can find tons of tutorials online for just about any program you can think of doing just about anything you would want to do.

Of course, just because someone makes a tutorial about something, doesn't mean they really know what they are doing. I've seen many, many tutorials where the person who made the video didn't really know what they were doing, so if something you see in a tutorial just doesn't seem right, or the results in the tutorial just don't look good, find a different tutorial.

Sometimes it's even helpful to watch people using different programs than what you are using. More than once I've found a useful feature I didn't even know was in my program, after asking about something I had seen someone do in a different program.

One thing you will also want to do is to make sure the program you are using is suitable for what you are trying to do. For example, I wouldn't recommend buying Zbrush for architectural modeling, or LightWave for character animation if that is what you want to specialize in. While you can do these things in these programs, they are both very weak in these departments compared to other programs and you will get frustrated and end up wasting a lot of time.

All the different programs out there have their own different strengths and weaknesses. If you are serious and want to get into a specific line of work, you should look into what people are using in that area. Some programs are more suited for games while others are more geared towards movies or FX work. When looking for a job, it's very handy to know the program(s) that the studio uses. Unless you show an extreme amount of talent, it's very unlikely that a studio will hire you and retrain you to use their software package.

Since you didn't ask any specific questions I tried to be as general as possible with my answers (some obviously not specific to modeling). If you have more specific questions, feel free to ask.

[sqrlcub]

When I first started modeling, I wish I had learned to reset Maya's interface back to the default you could simply delete it by going to the my documents folder and deleting the folder named Maya. It would have saved me multiple redos of beginner based modeling. Or rebooting the school's computer to bring it back to the automatic default.

[schizofrantic]

To use RoadKill for UVs. That has been quite a help, especially since no import/export is needed for maya or max.

[suzvan]

thnx guys for participating and dispensing great advice
...just the kind of advice a beginner needs ;D

[ace63]

- Intersecting Geometry is ok as long as it looks fine
- Ngons are fine as long as they render ok (Especially on hard surface objects that do not deform)
- Do not use booleans unless you know what you are doing (95% of the time you can get around them)
- Model pieces that are seperate in the real world as seperate pieces in 3D aswell

[Psyk0]

-Setup kboard shortcuts for the tools you use the most.
-Study anatomy if you plan on creating humanoids.
-Always gather as much reference as you need, guessing how something is constructed wont help.
-Sculpting is fun, but mastering the technical side of modeling in a 3D app is mandatory.

[SanguineJackal]

... If you try to model a human head the first time you sit down at a 3d program, you are probably going to get very frustrated.

I made this very mistake and, yes, it is extremely frustrating! Especially if you try to use a method you are unfamiliar with (for me it was NURBS).

[pauljs75]

If you're a newb interested in polygon modeling, I'd recommend my ol' fav - Wings3D. Doesn't require too much hardware power or RAM or drive space, and likewise the load time is fast. Not to mention that it's free, and only costs the bandwidth to download it. Look it up.

What it covers:

Catmull-Clarke: Pretty much the same smoothing alogrithm used in 99% of polygon modelers on the market. If you understand what's going on here, you'll know what to expect elsewhere.


Box method modeling: Instead of building up a surface, you learn to define volume first and work into refined shapes. (But this may handicap you when going to some other software.)
Vector operations: Any movement of geometry can not only be done freely or on standard axes, but you can define movements via vectors determined from other geometry. Not all modelers have this, but it's a really nice feature.
UV-mapping: It's powerful enough and does unfolding, pinning, projection, etc. You can definitely grasp the basics and do a nice job with the tools provided.
The good:

Free and relatively lightweight app that's only focused on modeling and rudimentary mapping.
Catmull-Clarke is Catmull-Clarke, you understand this - you're somewhat ahead in the game.
Not too complicated to begin with so the approach is straight forward, but still powerful enough to try some interesting things as you gain experience.
Has hotkeys and most are user-definable. Means you can develop some technique/workflow practices for fast modeling.
Contextual based: no crap to get in the way or distract from modeling process itself.
Nice range of selection operations and selection transitions that are quite convienient.
Very nice and user-friendly development team. Although it is comparatively small compared to other software and some things do take time.
Gets results and exports to a variety of common formats.
The bad:

May spoil you with ease of use. Makes you wonder why some $$$ apps don't do things its way or require more $$$ plugins to do so. You may be sneaking work in using this to start out, and then only using the company apps to finish.
Only does modeling. If you want to learn rigging, animation, or texturing, etc. you're going to have to get something else anyhow.
Some operations are slow compared to other apps.
No heirarchys or much in the way of asset organization. Can be a real PITA in this regard.
Becomes more hardware intensive after a certain polygon limit, so you may be limited in some aspects. (But in a way this forces you to learn some degree of mesh efficiency.)
Has some bugs: It's open source and under constant development. So occasional bugs are expected as a tradeoff for new features or software optimizations that make it run faster. But under most "normal" conditions it's close in stability if not better than commercial software in that regard.
Business aspects: Not exactly touted or promoted heavily in a B2B sense, so potential employers may not take it as seriously as other software.
Doesn't support all file formats, and some formats that it can import/export may not be fully supported or buggy in implementation.


Other than the software recommendation, I'd suggest learning good edge-flow and learning what you can in regards to quad based topography. Things like edge loops, edge rings, where you can get away with things, and how to handle surface transitions. Then of course, understanding when top-down (start big and break down) or bottom-up (keep adding small bits) modeling works best and where to split the difference. Also when modeling some things using reference drawings or blueprints, you'll want good orthographic projections - perspective error can be a b****. The problem is not all prints/drawings are good orthos so you may face a lot of tweak time using other references, so be prepared with photos from different angles and whatnot if that's the case. Also if you get more into texturing than meshing, you're going to want an app or plugin that does the painting in 3D - removing seams or positioning some decals "the old way" in 2D apps can be a royal PITA. Oh, and when making UVs they should still be "human readable" since not everyone doing adjustments has the 3D painting apps that automatically covers the stray pieces and don't forget to leave a few pixels room around templates for bleed or your renderer may suck in unwanted pixels when anti-aliasing and make your seams very obvious.

[Zickar]

Discovering Boole object in Cinema 4D ....

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