A while ago, I posted about wanting to make Operation: Star Hammer more 3D. By modern game standards, the 3D art requirements for O: SH are quite small. It’s mostly ships, aliens, weapons, etc, and that’s just fine, because that’s the game I want to make. As a programmer by trade, I don’t have 3D tools at my disposal, and for that matter, haven’t really spent a lot of time using them. Until now.

I needed to get some tools to allow me to develop 3D art – and there are dozen of them! Like choosing a programming language, there are several tools for ever job – and a wide variety of prices ranges, from free to thousands of dollars.

In the games industry, the most common packages are 3DS Max and Maya. Whilst I considered getting one of these, I decided that I probably don’t need the functionality they provide, so much of the money spent would be wasted. I don’t need a renderer, or character animation. The most important things are being able to create a good low-poly model, and then texture it.

Some of the packages I evaluated to get down to a short list to build the pipeline : Modo, Zbrush, Mudbox, Maya, Cinema4D, Blacksmith 3D, Headus UVLayout, Lith Unwrap, XSI Mod Tool, Wings 3D (and maybe some others). Note two absences from the list : 3DS Max, and Blender. In the case of Max, it’s way too pricing for my needs. Most of it’s features would be wasted. I’ve tried to learn to use Blender in the past several times – and failed. I have to wonder how many people decide to learn 3D art, find Blender is free and download it, only to be put off 3D all together. I’ve heard that Blender is good once you get know it, but I prefer software to be, well, accessible, easy-to-learn and intuitive.

Anyway, my needs for this project are simple : modelling, UV unwrapping and texturing. And I wanted ease-of-use (who can be bothered with difficult to use software?). In the end, I’ve chosen to go with Silo3D for modelling, and 3D Coat for texturing.

Silo3D is a great sub-division modeller – nothing more, nothing less. The strength of Silo is that it doesn’t try to be all things to all people, it’s focused on making 3d models, and nothing else. Its UI is clean and free of clutter, and I like the camera controls. One downside in the first few days I used it was an occasional crash, but as I’ve learnt to use the package the crashes have stopped, so I suspect the problem was just as much me making malformed horrid models as anything else. Still, a little more robustness would be nice. There are also plenty of video tutorials that help new users get the hang of using the program (and teach modelling skills as the same time), and a helpful community.

3D Coat is a model painting program. It paints color, specular and displacement maps at the same time. Forget about using a 2D program like Gimp or Photoshop to color your texture map. As with the likes of  Zbrush, Bodypaint and Mudbox, 3D Coat allows modeling painting in 3D directly onto the model. The good thing about 3D Coat is that it’s about 20% of the cost of the other similar packages. 3D Coats UV unwrapping tools seem pretty cool so far too. If I decide to use bump or normal mapping in O: SH, I’ll be able to paint them directly onto the model. Cool!