Looking for a good Mac 3D tool with good tutorials

Hi there,

I'm looking to try again at getting into making sculpties. I have tried a number of 3D applications and found them to be disappointingly complex and/or devoid of any good tutorials.

I have done 3D design before but only really using a simple mesh-creation tool (for buildings) and Bryce 3D. These were however nice and straightforward, but unsuited to what I want.

What I am hoping to do is create a living thing (like a person), or more specifically, parts of them. I am producing a full-prim avatar but would like to use sculpties for the body parts to achieve a better effect.

I have a very good idea of what I need, including concept sketches, just no idea of what to do it in.

So what I am looking for are recommendations on good 3D tools, available for Mac, that I could use to produce organic shapes, along with links to good tutorials on how to get started, and then on how to move to organic shapes.

I recently tried Maya but was annoyed to find that the only tutorials it seems to come with are very basic ones (create a primitive, move a primitive) and there was a huge gap from beginner to moderate tutorials (I never found a moderate one that didn't refer to features I'd not seen, and failed to explain them).

Cost of the program itself is not an issue, as I will shamelessly download it illegally first. I do this to demo products without stupid (and often ridiculous) demo restrictions such as can't save, or an X day trial (I might use it once in that time, ridiculous! Why not a few tutorials followed by 8 hours of actual usage? That would make sense!).
I do however buy programs if after this time I find that I liked it, otherwise I delete it as a waste of time.

I would however rather have free tutorials, or if they have to be paid, at least ones I can download. I have two monitors, I _don't_ need a book or DVD =)

Since I only really want it for sculpties at the moment I wouldn't worry about anything else, though I would like later (once I'm fairly good at the program) to be able to use it to create more advanced scenes, preferably with bone/joint support.

Thanks for any help people can offer.

If you go through all the Help tutorials in order, they contain everything you need to know. Maya's got the best and most complete included documentation of any program I've ever seen. I'll bet any amount of money you can name that the reason you got confused is because you tried to skip around. Patiently go in order, let every lesson build on the last like it's supposed to, and you'll do just fine.

Also, beyond the tutorials, every single tool has its own "tool help". If there's a tool you don't understand how to use, simply click on Tool Help at the top of the tool's dialog, and it will explain what everything does. I must emphasize though, don't rely on Tool Help alone to get you through. If you haven't been through the lessons yet, much of the terminology in the Tool Help might not make sense to you. Again, go through all the Help tutorials in order before you do anything else.

If that's not enough, head over to Borders or Barnes N' Nobles (or whatever the equivalent might be in your area), and invest in a good book on Maya. There are hundreds. If you're looking for a cut & dry, feature by feature, explanatory reference, I'd recommend The Visual Quickstart Guide To Maya from Peachpit Press. It's fast paced and really easy to follow, even if not incredibly exciting. If you're looking for something a little bit more entertainingly written, Introducing Maya from Maya Press is a great one. You might want to go ahead and get both, to see two different perspectives on how the program is taught.

Whatever you do, don't go out of order. Let the lessons unfold in the way their authors intended. Maya has far too many bells & whistles in its repertoire for you to expect to be able to learn them by skipping around. And don't expect ANY lesson ever to say anything like "here's all you need to know to make sculpties". That's just not how it works. Master the basic foundation of the program, and you'll pick up the peripherals through simple osmosis. Do NOT try to focus first on peripherals, or your own foundation will be non-existent so of course you'll falter and come crashing down, just as you've already experienced.

Learning Maya is a lot like learning a musical instrument. You wouldn't pick up a beginning violin book and expect to find a section entitled "How To Play a Concerto". It simply wouldn't make sense to include anything so categorized. Trying to be so narrowly focused in the beginning would be nothing but an exercise in frustration. The learner would probably throw away the violin in disgust, and miss out on a potential lifetime of musical enjoyment, just as you threw away Maya.

Whether the subject is Maya or the violin or what have you, the learning process is the same. It has to be as broadly focused as possible in the beginning or it will fail. If you want to learn effectively, you MUST start on page 1, you HAVE TO follow through the lessons in order, and you ABSOLUTELY NEED TO keep practicing ALL you learn along the way. As you progress, the knowledge and skills you gain through the process will then be just as naturally applicable to any one project as to everything. This as true true for sculpties and for concertos as it is for anything.

To put all this another way, "Wax on, wax off, Daniel-San." Heed the scholarly advice of those who know how to teach what you need to learn, and you'll do just fine. No NOT follow the assumption-based advice of someone who has no idea how to teach it (you), or you'll have problems. Make sense?



You have not done yourself any favors by writing this part down. All you're gonna do is inflame some people, turn some off from helping you, and possibly get yourself into trouble. We don't discuss such things on these forums. Edit your post and delete that paragraph ASAP.

So you know, the Maya Personal Learning Edition has none of the restrictions you mentioned. What it does is it puts a water mark on all renderings, identifying them as having been made by the non-commercial version. Sculpt maps it generates will have the watermark as well, so they won't actually be usable in SL. However, absolutely everything else will work; just the final step of rendering is handicapped. So, you can learn everything you need to learn from PLE as far as the actual use of Maya goes. Then later, when you've got a good enough handle on the program that you want to start porting your creations to SL, then you can buy a licensed copy.

And if you think about it, that makes perfect sense. It's pretty much exactly what you just said you wanted. Full tutorials are included, unlimited time to learn them is allowed, you can save all your work indefinitely. The only thing denied is the capability to output your stuff to a public platform. PLE is for personal learning use only.

If the last part of your paragraph is true, the part about your motivations and your intentions, then you should have little if any problem with this. If, however, it was just a veiled justification for the actions described in the first part, then I'm probably not gonna convince you. Do what you feel is right. Just don't go broadcasting illegal activities on this forum.

If your Mac is PowerPC, get Wings3D, right now. You'll thank me later

High end professional tools can do incredibly complex things. They are therefore somewhat harder to learn to control.

Toy tools such as Plopp can barely do anything, and are often very, very easy to use. (Not always

When an experienced full time pro like Chosen tells us that every thing one needs to know is there, he is almost certainly correct, except possibly that we, not being experienced pro, cannot understand it.

Take your time, learn the tools...