Anonymous at Sat, 6 May 2023 14:27:06 UTC No. 945217

>>945213
>subdivision modeling in general look so unbelievably shit for hard surface
To do mechanical and architectural modeling you need support for n-gons with holes. Preferably NURBS. Those are needed for clean CSG operations.
Blender supports n-gons but not holes because those are not part of the subdivision modeling specification.

Don't do CAD in Blender and don't do Blender in CAD. Consider: https://www.freecad.org/
It's still rough but it's slowly getting better.

Anonymous at Sat, 6 May 2023 15:00:58 UTC No. 945224

>>945217
I'm not talking about doing CAD in Blender, I'm talking about doing hard surface in Blender. Say I'm making a game and need a model of a gas pump, or a gun, or a computer. That is far, far easier to do in CAD software, because such software are designed around it. Blender is designed around organics, and lacks a ton of features CAD has that would make hard surface far quicker, simpler, and more intuitive. Seems like such a no-brainer to either add CAD-style workflow to Blender or release some sort of CAD-style poly modeling tool specifically for hard surface work. Doesn't need to function like CAD at its core, just superficially adopt CAD tools and workflows to support hard surface.
Also, FreeCAD is pretty lacking as a CAD software compared to something like Fusion 360, which is free for hobbyist use

Anonymous at Sat, 6 May 2023 17:23:15 UTC No. 945233

>>945224
>doing CAD in Blender,
In my mind "hard surface" in Blender is "pretend CAD". What Blender people do is make parts that to some extent resemble mechanical parts. Because of the aesthetic.

>CAD-style workflow to Blender
CAD-style workflow is to a large extent sketching, extruding CSG and beveling. You need support for n-gons with holes for that or the CSG operations will continue to fracture your model in ways that will make beveling impossible. If you look around, that's the complaint you hear the most.

>FreeCAD is pretty lacking
Sure but the alternatives tend to be monthly subscription software. If you look around and you're ok with Windows only, there's better for sure.

Anonymous at Sat, 6 May 2023 17:32:45 UTC No. 945235

>tangent/parallel/etc.constraints
Those kind of constraints are well defined in 2D, but not so well defined in 3D. For example you may know the normal to a surface and in 2D that also defines the tangent. In 3D it doesn't because the tangent vector is still free to rotate around the normal. But that's why even 3D CAD software makes you begin you model as a sketch in 2D mode.
Blender has no such thing as a 2D mode and of course you can emulate 2D in 3D, but exactly how to do it is not well defined in Blender.

Anonymous at Sat, 6 May 2023 17:49:26 UTC No. 945237

>All the people making buildings and props for indie games have to be using some other software
Quake level modeling tools sometimes:
https://icculus.org/gtkradiant/
https://github.com/TrenchBroom/TrenchBroom
The various Quake level compilers have had the option to export to .obj for quite some time.
That's an option. Or if you're ok with some limitations you could consider >>943372 >>943236 >>943254 which is:
http://sauerbraten.org/
There are many options actually.

Anonymous at Sat, 6 May 2023 18:08:04 UTC No. 945243

Also in Godot there are CSG nodes that are supposed to emulated the Quake level building process but at the moment you can't export.
Or on market places you can buy sets of pre-fabricated building pieces.
As long as you don't get stuck with the idea that you need to do everything with box modeling in Blender or Ton is going to be disappointed in you, you'll be fine.

Anonymous at Sat, 6 May 2023 19:48:55 UTC No. 945256

>>945213
I tried Fusion 360 but I find it annoying to use. The history is cool until you start generating too much of fit and it turns into a mess. Autistically lining up every boolean is also very annoying. I prefer something more free flow so I'll stick to poly modeling and sculpting

Anonymous at Sun, 7 May 2023 16:07:58 UTC No. 945320

I know a guy who works at Crytek (not 3D related) and he says the artists working on Hunt: Showdown all use Blender these days, because it's apparently a lot faster.

I'm assuming he's referring to the remesh -> corrective smooth -> decimate method the Chamferzone guy uses in his revolver tutorial. I think he used to work for Crytek too, so maybe that's where he got it from.

Anonymous at Sun, 7 May 2023 17:08:18 UTC No. 945322

>>945213
>w
w

Anonymous at Sun, 7 May 2023 17:16:08 UTC No. 945323

>>945320
If they use that workflow, blender is not even close to being optimal. 3ds Max mops the floor with every single modeling tool when it comes to that kind of workflow.

Anonymous at Sun, 7 May 2023 18:13:50 UTC No. 945329

>>945323
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If it's not that, it must be something else. They were using Max before that and I doubt they'd switch for no reason at all.

Or maybe the company is so broke that they can't afford licenses anymore.

Anonymous at Tue, 9 May 2023 04:52:52 UTC No. 945466

>>945329
Not him but they did make a flop and are only now starting to recouperate with showdown this year.

Anonymous at Tue, 9 May 2023 06:45:32 UTC No. 945474

>>945213
Design in CAD, retopo somewhere else.
People who do hard surface in DCC's make the samey samey
>Big cylinder
>Square booleans
>Rectangle Booleans
>Sphere booleans
>bevel
>GG
Type of thing

The same rigid structured looking shit every single time, no nice unique sweeping shapes or anything.

That's why a lot of Hard Surface looks like the same forgettable shit

>Sphere with 100 different primitive shape booleans
Wow, never seen that before

Anonymous at Tue, 9 May 2023 10:31:27 UTC No. 945476

>>945213
You can do it, the base mesh editing is okay. But for details, it's either 3dcoat or Maya.

Anonymous at Tue, 9 May 2023 16:21:27 UTC No. 945498

>>945213
>No one *actually* does hard surface in Blender, right?
correct.

Anonymous at Wed, 10 May 2023 03:20:40 UTC No. 945544

>>945213
1 million blender kiddies are on suicide watch.

Anonymous at Wed, 10 May 2023 04:38:49 UTC No. 945547

>>945544
they... Blender...

Anonymous at Wed, 10 May 2023 09:27:29 UTC No. 945550

>>945474
>Design in CAD, retopo somewhere else.
At that point you might as well just make it the first time in the place you're gonna "retopo" it. Since retopo-ing hard surface is essentially just making it from scratch the same way you'd make it in the first place. The only difference is that you're tracing shitty geometry with "proper" geometry. Why double the work? Seems fucking pointless.
For organics and sculpts retopo makes sense, for hard surface sculpts it makes sense, CAD shit? Nah. There's not any extra detail in a CAD model that's transferring over to a normal model like you would a sculpt.

Your gripes about people making the same shit is a design problem, in that they're shit at designing things in general, not a problem solved by using any specific program. Using CAD won't suddenly give them an imagination to work with.

Anonymous at Wed, 10 May 2023 13:05:13 UTC No. 945557

>>945550
CAD makes the sort of things you need to be doing for hard surface way easier and faster. You're saving a lot of time and getting better results by making in cad and then quickly fixing any egregious topology than you are trying to do hard surface from scratch with blender's terrible organics-oriented modeling system

Anonymous at Wed, 10 May 2023 19:35:23 UTC No. 945577

>>945544
bave of them to assume blender user will get job interview chance

Anonymous at Thu, 11 May 2023 13:02:21 UTC No. 945625

>>945320
I read some interviews of crytek artists and it was obvious that they were forced to use blender to save money on zbrush and max licenses. They even have several pages of shortcut/workflow cheat sheets to have the blender experience as close as possible to the other softwares.

Anonymous at Thu, 11 May 2023 13:27:14 UTC No. 945626

...

Anonymous at Thu, 11 May 2023 14:54:14 UTC No. 945631

>>945213
>ITT: We discuss if we should use CAD software to do game props.
This board is probably the most derranged one on the entire sire.

Anonymous at Thu, 11 May 2023 19:26:14 UTC No. 945652

>>945625
Got any links?

Anonymous at Thu, 11 May 2023 19:31:32 UTC No. 945654

>>945631
Guy's just trolling. He has like 3 other "Why can't Blender do CAD?" threads up right now.

Anonymous at Thu, 11 May 2023 19:45:27 UTC No. 945656

>>945213
Quick question, do you know how to use the 3d cursor?

Anonymous at Thu, 11 May 2023 21:33:00 UTC No. 945659

You can model any hard surface object you can think of with sub-d, it just might take a little longer than CAD. Sub-d is more flexible and you can work in 3d instead of extruding everything from a 2d sketch. Working in 3d is better for establishing form and proportions before going onto detailing. Polygon modeling also has boolean-remesh workflows now, which removes some topological constraints and is faster.

Anonymous at Thu, 11 May 2023 21:54:00 UTC No. 945660

>>945659
>boolean-remesh workflows
Stop.

Anonymous at Thu, 11 May 2023 22:01:39 UTC No. 945661

>>945213
>No one *actually* does hard surface in Blender, right?
I only do soft surfaces in Blender personally. Things like cheese or silk or milk. Skin is soft enough, but only on fat people, else the muscles get in the way. I've made curtains in Blender, that's perfectly okay.

Cements or bricks are just impossible. The value of the hardness is too much. I'm not even talking about steel or diamond, the strongest metal known to man. In my experience, if you can't bend it with your hand, you can't render it in Blender. That's because of the physically based softness rendering tech of Blender, who refuses to render anything in cycle if the material is too damn hard.

I assume that's because the simulated rays can't "enter" into the material, the physically based shaders are too hard for photons to enter it if you can't deform it with your fingers. That's a hard problem with Blender, and I sure hope I could render anything "harder" than foam in the future. Cycle should really be able to ignore how structurally resilient the material is before rendering.

Anonymous at Thu, 11 May 2023 22:10:30 UTC No. 945662

>>945661
Eevee is not suitable to display any kind of surface anyway.

Anonymous at Fri, 12 May 2023 09:14:35 UTC No. 945687

>>945654
Pretty smart way to go about it, actually. If you just bitched about being unable to exclusively use CAD tools for game asset creation you'd get shit on by other posters because it's so obviously retarded.

But since hating Blender is a meme on this board, making it specifically about that program seems to magically make posters ignore how stupid the actual premise of these threads is.

Anonymous at Fri, 12 May 2023 11:32:10 UTC No. 945696

>>945687
It's not "a meme" and it's not "trolling". Blender has had NURBS primitives which have remained in an unusable state for 20 years now.
And what the Blender people choose to focus on? Ton's beard simulator and wannabe Houdini things like Geometry Nodes.

Anonymous at Fri, 12 May 2023 16:33:55 UTC No. 945730

>>945696
The real meme is that at the level 99.9999% of the posters on this board are (and will ever be) at, the choice of program doesn't even matter.

Anonymous at Fri, 12 May 2023 21:11:53 UTC No. 945740

There's a strange mix of incompetence, ignorance, and zealous hatred for Blender in this 3DCG board. You guys clearly have no idea what the fuck you're talking about.
I thought it was a hatred of free software but then you recommend Freecad over Blender for making game assets. Wtf lmao.
No one here has actually learned and used Blender, Max, Maya, and ZBrush. More like most of you have learned none of them to a beginner's skill level at least.

To answer the question, yes actual major game studios are using Blender for hard surface assets. Blender has several advantages over 3ds Max that I guarantee you guys are unaware of.

Circularize and Grid Fill without a plugin.
Spin tool, great for making curved pipes and other things, Max has no equivalent.
Better hotkeys in general. Using F-keys for axis constraints is atrocious in Max.
Interactive Bevel is better than Max's interactive Chamfer.
F2 works for renaming anything that you have selected. No hotkey for remaining things in Max.
Enter formulas into numerical fields. Comes in handy all the time for getting certain values like multiplying a dimension.
Hold Ctrl or Shift to speed up or slow down any action, not just spinners like in 3ds Max. Comes in handy on just about any command that you want to be relatively precise with.
Completely hide the UI, and there's an easy hotkey for it. In Max the red selection lines are always visible when editing mesh/poly. There's literally no way to hide them and remain in edit mode so it's clunky to see exactly what you're doing.
Scale the entire UI interactively or scale individual panels interactively. Also very easy to interactively split panels and open any window you need within it.

Running out of characters just listing examples off the top of my head.

Blender is great for making game assets and the workflow is modern and quick. Max is powerful in many ways but also clunky in many ways and outdated in many ways.

Anonymous at Fri, 12 May 2023 21:45:58 UTC No. 945744

>>945740
>circularize and grid fill
worthless vertexshit
>spin tool
CAD does that
>hotkeys
CAD has an interface that doesn't make you want to kill yourself
>interactive bevel
CAD does that
>F2 to rename
lmao let me guess, you rename layers in photoshop too
>formulas in numerical fields
CAD does that
>ctrl or shift to change action speed
imagine manually dragging shit around instead of just dimensioning
>hide the UI
what kind of retard would ever need or want to do this outside of a video game
>Blender is great for making game assets
If you want to make organicshit then yeah it's great, absolutely terrible for making decent hard-surface work though

Anonymous at Fri, 12 May 2023 22:03:06 UTC No. 945745

>>945740
>actual major game studios are using Blender
They do that sometimes to launder models made in other software.
>Blender has several advantages over 3ds Max
Such as? And the rest of your post is just the same incoherent stuff about hotkeys being "fast" or whatever. I can't answer to that.

Anonymous at Fri, 12 May 2023 22:12:49 UTC No. 945746

I've noticed a strange phenomena. Every time I mention "Ton's beard simulator" some shill pops up within the hour. That tells me at least some people on the inside do share my complaints. That's a good thing.

Anonymous at Sat, 13 May 2023 01:18:26 UTC No. 945752

Proved my point, you guys are still advocating for CAD software to make game assets over Blender. Don't rename objects, that's a nightmare in game dev. How to make all your work irrelevant and useless in one easy step.
Acting like hotkeys and speed doesn't matter. Another way to make yourself useless. Bottom tier modeling ideas, wouldn't make it as an intern.

Anonymous at Sat, 13 May 2023 01:58:14 UTC No. 945754

>>945752
>Acting like hotkeys and speed doesn't matter
Quality is much more important. Bad models made by people like you have no monetary value.

Anonymous at Sat, 13 May 2023 07:45:14 UTC No. 945762

>>945752
Stop taking the damn bait.

Anonymous at Sat, 13 May 2023 09:15:29 UTC No. 945765

>>945625
They even have several pages of shortcut/workflow cheat sheets to have the blender experience as close as possible to the other softwares.
I would use such cheat sheet. I'm slowly transitioning to Blender as I don't want to bother with cracking maya anymore but the controls are pain in the ass

Anonymous at Sat, 13 May 2023 12:09:15 UTC No. 945774

>>945765
My uncle who works at Nintendo doesn't believe your Crytek story.
>I'm slowly transitioning
Stop.

Anonymous at Sat, 13 May 2023 13:36:07 UTC No. 945779

>>945740
ngmi

Anonymous at Sat, 13 May 2023 15:06:34 UTC No. 945790

>>945213
>No one *actually* does hard surface in Blender, right?
You have a couple of addons to do that:
Grid Modeler
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_rAnsOm4R8
BoxCutter & Hardops
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCfBHjEO_ao
Decal Machine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW-dtrHvLgU
Mesh Machine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQAwfsvLFNQ

The main problem is that Blender's performance is shit in edit mode, and no, the modeling team is not working on performance or adding some of these tools, they are working on uv paking or some bullshit.
https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/projects/7

Anonymous at Sat, 13 May 2023 15:16:01 UTC No. 945791

>>945625
this is your brain getting fried on Autodesk subscriptions lmao

Anonymous at Sat, 13 May 2023 15:26:00 UTC No. 945792

>>945744
>just dimensioning
my dude, press G, then X, then 5 and your object will move 5 units along the X axis
yes, it's that easy, and that works with any function that has an interactive mode, they even tell you what to press at the bottom of the window if such a gizmo is currently active

>CAD does that
all CAD softwares I know do it slower because their shortcut system isn't really good

t. I do hard surface modeling in Blender all the time, it's great

pic related is I think 7-8 years old, back then Blender had even less features and it still was faster to use than CAD.

Anonymous at Sat, 13 May 2023 15:34:54 UTC No. 945793

>>945792
>it's that easy
It's not that easy. If you did any CAD work you would know. I'm not going to explain to you further.
>I do hard surface
"hard surface" in not mechanical or architectural part quality. From a CAD perspective, it's jumbled up artistic nonsense.

Anonymous at Sat, 13 May 2023 15:44:15 UTC No. 945795

>>945793
>If you did any CAD work you would know.
I'm the guy who works on >>900209. It is that easy. You can seethe at people using Blender to make hard surface models but it doesn't change that.
>"hard surface" in not mechanical or architectural part quality
And that is not needed for these kinds of models. Hard surface modeling doesn't aspire to adhere to total accuracy, it's a way of modeling convincing looking mechanical parts fast, nothing more.

Anonymous at Sat, 13 May 2023 15:51:29 UTC No. 945796

>>945795
Yes. CAD and "hard surface" are two different things. Nobody said you can't do "hard surface" in Blender. You can't do CAD in Blender.

Anonymous at Sat, 13 May 2023 16:12:01 UTC No. 945798

With >>945796 being said, try to model a small house with box modeling tools. Can you do it? Yes. Is it easy or pleasant to do? No.
Then try to do the same thing in https://www.sketchup.com/ and you'll see the difference. Having support for concave polygons with holes, robust CSG operations, real circle primitives, precise tangent snaps... you name it... you'll appreciate it.

Anonymous at Sat, 13 May 2023 17:04:48 UTC No. 945805

>>945796
>>945798
>You can't do CAD in Blender
Who stated you could? You replied to a post that said "You can do hard surface in Blender" with "but with CAD software you can do better CAD models". No one ITT made a point for hard surface modeling being used in scenarios that require CAD precision or workflows, this entire thread is in the context of game models, CGI and the likes.
The last time I used SketchUp was 15 years ago and back then it was a shit tier modeling software with a feature set so limited you couldn't put proper UVs on anything that wasn't a flat surface.

Anonymous at Sat, 13 May 2023 17:08:24 UTC No. 945806

>>945798
Have you tried this? Yes I know it is not sketchup.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHm0_7XqTJE

Anonymous at Sat, 13 May 2023 19:13:03 UTC No. 945808

>>945806
I'm not going to comment on that because I've already reached my daily limit of hate for Blender. Let me put it another way instead.

Think of Quake level editing. Is it possible to make a Quake level in Blender (or Maya or 3ds) with box modeling? Yes. Is it practical? No. Why? Because of the number of CSG operations you need to perform.

Sometimes it's not a question of "can you" or "can you not". Sometimes you have to consider the effort needed, the result you want and many other details.

Anonymous at Sat, 13 May 2023 19:27:50 UTC No. 945809

And BTW in another thread somebody mentioned a CAD software I didn't know existed: https://solvespace.com/
It's like FreeCAD but much, much simpler. Give it a try. I think it's really cool.

Anonymous at Mon, 15 May 2023 08:56:16 UTC No. 945898

Actually you do CAD in Blender since last year.
https://www.blendernation.com/2022/04/28/cad-sketcher-free-cad-addon-for-blender/
Blender can do everything and it has the best UI and hotkeys by a considerable margin, which I learned first hand after spending a couple years learning all the industry standard software. They have nice bells and whistles, but they're clunky/outdated in the UX department. I'm 100% convince people who think otherwise have not learned Blender properly out learned the industry standard software and tried using it to make stuff.
Blender can do everything well, quickly, and comfortably.
Even the performance complaint is easily debunkable. Blender can handle a few million poly just fine. If you want to go beyond that, you can! Simply hide the parts/objects you're not actively working on. What are you guys doing, trying to model an entire environment as a single object? I mean you could still do that, just hide the parts you're not working on. This is such basic scene optimization for any DCC.
I don't know where the Blender hate comes from honestly.
If you guys learned all the software, you'd be complaining how clunky Maya and Max are compared to free software. It's ridiculous.

Anonymous at Mon, 15 May 2023 09:47:39 UTC No. 945901

>>945898
>it has the best UI and hotkeys by a considerable margin
lol
lmao
also CADsketcher is absolute shit compared to actual CAD, which you'd know if you'd ever used CAD before. It has like 1/10th of the features of even a free hobbyist CAD software, let alone industry standard shit like Solidworks

Anonymous at Mon, 15 May 2023 12:04:03 UTC No. 945905

>>945765
Hmm the cheat sheet they have is to ease zbrush and 3ds max transition, haven't seen anything referencing maya