Giel wrote:
Well, you've got to admit then that GMAX is a bit old then. Unless it's updated, which Autodesk to my opinion rarely does after they've released a new version (that's at least the case with Autocad).
doesn't actually mean it's really old -- many editors support low-quality editing with high-quality output (as in editing only chunks of a mesh at a time), so it may be that gmax is doing this on older notebooks... i don't know -- last time i heavily used gmax was in the 3ds max r7 days.
my apologies as well. i didn't mean to attack you -- was meaning to attack gmax
. anyways, i'm used to "all keyboard all the time", so personally i wouldn't think of anything beyond blender atm (minimum of mouse usage), or it'd be way too slow for me.
as you said, gmax doesn't have a renderer or anything like it, which, while it may be good for modelling and great for game modelling, it automatically by definition keeps it out of the pro realm (and autodesk was doing this intentionally so you'd be interested in buying 3ds max -- somewhat "defective by design").
i personally liked gmax for some game modding, but after a time i found it really is limited in many areas that are not thought to be important for game modelling, such as subsurface rendering, but many of those things are now becoming common in game models. i completely agree with you on your point about blender: the graphical user interface is indeed horrid from a functional standpoint -- in fact, there really isn't one. the window management system is indeed very advanced, but aside from that, the menus are entirely unintuitive -- the thing is, you really can't use blender to any great degree if you aren't very familiar and comfortable with the hotkeys, hotkey combinations, and hotkey sequences. if you are comfortable with them, blender will lag behind maya and 3ds in some areas and surpass them in others, but has all bases covered to at least some extent (ui aside, its feature portfolio in whole matches the whole of maya's or 3ds'), but if you like mouse-only work, forget blender, it won't ever be worth it then.
Giel wrote:
And you'd be surprised how much money some people are prepared to pay for open source software. Plus at some Dutch schools I know of you'll get a student's license for 3DS Max (graphical design courses).
yeah. not only that, but also how much people are willing to pay to provide
others with access to open source software. aladdin 4d is being sold to the open source community for 37,500 usd, with only 3,200 usd to go, and blender itself, despite the bugs you've experienced (older version?) was sold into the open source community for 100,000 euros, so in an indirect sense, i'm using software 3d modelling software worth 100,000 euros for my game design stuff.
Giel wrote:
Can't speak for kage, but I wasn't trying to attack you at all. Just trying to make clear why I thought that OGRE's mesh seems better to me than MD3. So if you felt offended I'm sorry for that.
it's really probably better if you
do speak for me, giel. anyways, beast is taking this in a wholly positive direction, sooner or later we'll have to ditch the pie file if we want to improve graphics signifigantly, and in that area, almost any format is better than pie from a "effort vs features" perspective. my thought on md3 was not meant to be offensive -- i was just figuring that if we're pushing for a new format, we'd might as well push all the way, given that implementing md3 is just as easy/tough as implementing something ultra-modern. if we decide on a format that your editor doesn't immediately support then you're more than welcome to email me in the middle of the night: i'll be happy to convert files for you or anyone else if needed.
btw speeder, .x files are, iirc, directx mesh files -- since we're not, and probably never will be using directx in the engine, it'd be something of a hack to get something to work.
I hope we can make 2.1 a lot more modder friendly so there are some more people joining.