I'm putting together a demo that involves several 3D scenes, but before I try and get an artist to make something that doesn't suck, I want to get all the code in place.
However, my past experience with 3D modelling tools inspired hatred and gnashing of teeth. I don't want to spend weeks learning an interface just to put together some shitty scene I can use to test my effects.
What do people use here to put together a 3D scene?
Free would be better. Bonus points for running on Linux.
I won't get any bonus points here, but I prefer working with 3D Studio MAX. It's a solid package with good development tools. And artists are usually familiar with it.
Another possibility would be Maya, which does run under Linux.
A third would be not to bother about the modelling package, but rather using Collada or FBX - file formats designed for assets-interchange. Most modelling packages has Collada-exporters now, and you'll be able to pull out most data using a standard XML-parser. This way, the artist is free to choose the modelling package he desire.
im working with collada exporters directly (for the ps3 sdk). there's a good library and exporters freely available with source to load+save+parse the files from feeling software.
there are a a few little bugs with it but at least you know there's major companies working to fix them - you dont have to do it by yourself. much easier than pissing around making your own exporter from scratch.
Yeah, Collada would most likely be the way I'd choose to go if all I wanted was to export a set of scenes.
The main advantage about choosing one modelling-package and making custom plugins for it, is that you can have it do a lot more than just exporting scenes. We're doing that a lot in our gba-demos, but I must admit that's spookysys' effort and not mine ;)
we want to add more support to collada for some good 3dsmax/maya plugins and stuff, so it gradually becomes more and more powerful.
actually for demos we have our own max+maya exporters (would do collada if we did it all again tho) and a lightwave loader as well - the latter is currently getting the most use. lightwave's rather nice because the fileformat is very readable so it's very easy to add support for more things - you dont have to edit the exporter, you can just add something to read another chunk/line of ascii. :) and you know everything lightwave knows about is in the file.. somewhere. i dont believe there is a collada export path for lightwave yet.. have to see if there is some developer demand for it. :)
