mindlord
Notices Two Things
Once upon a time, oh about 10 years ago, I was heavy into 3D modelling using VRML. I was pretty good at it, too. The tools of choice back then were Cosmo Worlds, Spazz3D, and Milkshape. They weren't heavy, and they did the job.
I abused the free trial of Cosmo Worlds pretty heavily, and grew quite fond of it's interface. It did something that really set it apart from other modellers. It made editing vertexes painless, easy, and dead-simple intuitive.
It had spot on camera control, grid snap, and vertex alignment indication.
But the best feature was it's vertex editor. Click/shift-click/control-click on vertexes to select them, as you selected them a bounding box with handles in the corners would appear. Centered in the bounding box would be 6 green arrows.
* If you clicked and dragged on a face of the bounding box it would transform the selected vertexes locked to the plane of the face that you clicked on. This made it easy to manipulate the vertexes along a specific axis.
* If you clicked and dragged on one of the corner handles it would scale the vertexes centered on the green arrows. You could also hold shift to constrain the scaling to the plane you clicked the handle on. Perfect of manipulating extrusions.
* If you clicked and dragged a green arrow it would rotate the selected vertexes about the center of the arrows. You could move the arrows anywhere you wanted to change the center of rotation.
It also had easy to understand tools for adding/removing/chipping polys of the selected object. Tools for slicing and merging faces and seams. Tools for extruding selected faces, merging vertexes, and for removing co-linear points. It had tools for doing UV mapping and simple texturing as well, but lacked per-vertex color, so I usually pulled finished models into something else for finishing. In short it was a perfect low-poly 3D editor.
I can't get it to run under Wine, the licensing algorithm can't seem to read the registry and it won't activate the trial. Being a 3D app it won't virtualize very well, and I sure as hell am not going to install windows into a partition again.
Does anyone know of a 3D editor that behaves anything like this? I have tried and failed to understand Blender. I'm sorry, but it chodes at being a low poly editor, unless I'm missing something obvious, I can't even seem to get it to snap vertexes to a grid. I didn't like milkshape, even when it was new, and Wings 3d doesn't seem to have as fine tuned control over the vertexes either.
If you can point me to some tutorials that will help me use Blender or Wings in a way similar to Cosmo Worlds, I'd be happy. But finding specific tutorials to Blender is like giving a hamster a lobotomy.
I abused the free trial of Cosmo Worlds pretty heavily, and grew quite fond of it's interface. It did something that really set it apart from other modellers. It made editing vertexes painless, easy, and dead-simple intuitive.
It had spot on camera control, grid snap, and vertex alignment indication.
But the best feature was it's vertex editor. Click/shift-click/control-click on vertexes to select them, as you selected them a bounding box with handles in the corners would appear. Centered in the bounding box would be 6 green arrows.
* If you clicked and dragged on a face of the bounding box it would transform the selected vertexes locked to the plane of the face that you clicked on. This made it easy to manipulate the vertexes along a specific axis.
* If you clicked and dragged on one of the corner handles it would scale the vertexes centered on the green arrows. You could also hold shift to constrain the scaling to the plane you clicked the handle on. Perfect of manipulating extrusions.
* If you clicked and dragged a green arrow it would rotate the selected vertexes about the center of the arrows. You could move the arrows anywhere you wanted to change the center of rotation.
It also had easy to understand tools for adding/removing/chipping polys of the selected object. Tools for slicing and merging faces and seams. Tools for extruding selected faces, merging vertexes, and for removing co-linear points. It had tools for doing UV mapping and simple texturing as well, but lacked per-vertex color, so I usually pulled finished models into something else for finishing. In short it was a perfect low-poly 3D editor.
I can't get it to run under Wine, the licensing algorithm can't seem to read the registry and it won't activate the trial. Being a 3D app it won't virtualize very well, and I sure as hell am not going to install windows into a partition again.
Does anyone know of a 3D editor that behaves anything like this? I have tried and failed to understand Blender. I'm sorry, but it chodes at being a low poly editor, unless I'm missing something obvious, I can't even seem to get it to snap vertexes to a grid. I didn't like milkshape, even when it was new, and Wings 3d doesn't seem to have as fine tuned control over the vertexes either.
If you can point me to some tutorials that will help me use Blender or Wings in a way similar to Cosmo Worlds, I'd be happy. But finding specific tutorials to Blender is like giving a hamster a lobotomy.
