Blender or Wings?

I'd like to begin making sculpties, and Blender and Wings seem to be the two popular free programs out there. I'm pretty much clueless about most of the features and how they signify for me. What I do know:

*I'd like to be able to make complex sculpts,
*I'd like to be able to texture and shade them in the 3D program (I hate the way textures stretch and distort if they're not specifically made to the shape),
*I'm running a Mac.

An additional question: I'd like to play around with the full-perm sculpt maps I have in my inventory to learn and to texture. Do I save as a tga file in order to play with it in a 3D program?

I'd be grateful for any pros/cons, advice, or tips you might have for me.

A complex dilemma. New to modeling but keen to go.
Hmmm. A lot of people will say to go with wings and I probably agree. It would be good to get a grounding in simpler software to become familiar. Then move to more advanced techniques.
Theres plenty of tutorials around now, unlike a year ago, and by very experienced and dedicated people.

Not sure about the texturing capabilities of wings but there isn't much Blender cannot do. Find Domino Marama's Blender scripts, you can then import the sculpt map into blender to play with.

My advice: Jump in head first, try both applications following some simple examples. Take your time. Don't panic. Try again. Research the function you want to use. Try again.

Nobody can tell you and make you a modeler, it takes much perseverance and time, lot's of time. BUT, in the end you will have rewards.
And good luck.

Since texturing within the 3D app is one of your requirements, go with Blender. Wings has no texture-baking tools built into it. It's pretty much just a modeling program, meant to be used in conjunction with third party rendering programs. Blender is much more of a full-featured 3D platform.

That said, Blender's learning curve is pretty steep, so don't expect overnight success. I'd highly recommend you watch Gaia Clary's training videos. They're excellent. Start with this one: /8/84/278431/1.html . Then take a look at the others on her site.

As for working with existing sculpt maps, some programs have sculpty importers for them, and some don't. Wings does. I'm not sure about Blender. If Blender can't import the sculpt map directly, you can still use it, though. Simply import the map into Wings, and then export the resulting geometry in a format that most other programs will understand, such as OBJ. You'll then be able to import the OBJ into just about any 3D app you want.


Note, you'll find the scripts you need for both Blender and Wings on the sculpty wiki. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpted_Prims

http://dominodesigns.info/second_life/blender_scripts_git.html

I'd recommend the release candidate version of my Blender scripts. There's been a lot of improvements to the workflow over the year or so since the first release of the import script.

The latest version has smart mesh size calculation which allows for the new oblong ratios. It automatically adds multires levels for LOD preview as far as possible in subdivision steps.

So for a normal 64 x 64 tga map you get 3 levels ( 32 x 32 faces, 16 x 16 & 8 x 8 ), for a 128 x 64 you get 2 levels ( 46 x 22, 23 x 11 ).

When creating sculpties you can choose between using multires (best for blender's Sculpt mode) or subsurf (best for normal vertex modeling) to represent the LOD levels.

http://blenderunderground.com has a series of beginner tutorials on Blender which cover more than the sculptie specific tutorials.

I may be wrong questioning an expert but is that the right way around?

And yeah, BlenderUnderground does great tuts. Quick, hit Save Changes, "The "Man" is coming.

Yep, it's just badly described

Multires works well when you model in high detail and let it calculate the lower LODs.

Subsurf adds detail to a low polygon mesh so is suited to modeling at the lower LODs and letting the modifier handle the higher ones.

You can of course use both together, I generally reimport and add a subsurf modifier when baking textures for smoothing. If you want to model extra detail to bake into the texture, then adding more multires levels is a good option.

So it's more accurate to say multires is better for working in the highest detail level, subsurf is better for working at lowest detail level. So that's how I got to the sculpt mode and vertex editing preferences, as the high = sculpt, low = vertex makes sense with the tools you'd generally be using.

Wow, thank you. A lot of that is foreign language to me right now, but now I have a sure place to start and some things to look into. Thanks so much for the resources. I'm really excited to get started.

/me bows down to Domino The Great.

Wow, thank you. A lot of that is foreign language to me right now, but now I have a sure place to start and some things to look into. Thanks so much for the resources. I'm really excited to get started.

/me bows down to Domino The Great.