3D Apps for X

[stoid]

Are there any good/simple 3D modeling/animation for Mac OS X?? I don't need something like Maya. I does more than I need and costs 10 times more than I willing to spend. Are there any good low-end 3D apps out there, or planned to be released in the next few months?

[King Cobra]

I do know of one that very few people (other than myself) bring up.

That is Adobe Atmosphere (http://www.adobe.com/products/atmosphere/main.html). I am not exactly sure when Adobe will release version 1.0 of their software, but I am sure that with any Adobe application it will be of high quality.
__________________

Fear the King.

[AlphaTech]

Cinema 4D has versions out for OS X (Cinema 4D XL 7.3 for one). You can look at http://www.maxon.de/index_e.html

[mmanfrey]

you can get Maya for free for 1 yr...or you can get the base version for $2k. Even for $2k, Maya is well worth the money.

http://www.aliaswavefront.com/en/Tmpl/Maya/html/index.jhtml?page=/en/Community/Special/maya_ple/index.jhtml&style=normal

http://www.aliaswavefront.com/en/Community/Discover/product_news/maya_announce/new_announce.shtml

Of course, there's also Lightwave which is a very capable 3d app as well. That's around $1500.

[AlphaTech]

Maxon offers different levels of their app... the Go version is cheap (under $300 I believe) but you can upgrade to the higher versions if you find you need to. You only pay the difference, not the full price of the higher version. I will be checking to see if the version I have runs under OS X, I think it might, but am not 100% on that. I DO know that the XL version DOES run native under OS X, but I don't recall what it sells for.

[stoid]

Originally posted by King Cobra
I do know of one that very few people (other than myself) bring up.

That is Adobe Atmosphere (http://www.adobe.com/products/atmosphere/main.html). I am not exactly sure when Adobe will release version 1.0 of their software, but I am sure that with any Adobe application it will be of high quality.

Looks pretty sweet! Will it be avail for mac as well, the beta download is WinBlows only??

[King Cobra]

Unfortunately, a Mac version is not yet done.

According to this article (http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0103/26.atmosphere.shtml) and this article (http://www.creativepro.com/story/news/12652.html), which by the way are dated 2001, a version of Atmosphere was due out by the summer. And I assume they meant summer of 2001, since 2002 was not really mentioned anywhere.

According to this 2001 article (http://webbuilder.netscape.com/webbuilding/0-7255-8-5950797-1.html) the Mac version is not done yet. Well, it's been over a year and still no Mac version.

And, quite honestly, I did not see that Atmosphere was Winbloze only. So I am now thinking that we may not see Atmosphere for a long while.

How depressing. :(
__________________

Fear the King.

[awrc]

The new version of Carrara Studio (2), due out in early June, appears to support OS X and is reasonably cheap ($399). Upgrade prices are good for those who had Carrara Studio 1 ($149), decent for those who had the original Metacreations Carrara or Ray Dream or Infini-D ($199).

Looks pretty much like an incremental improvement on the previous release, although it appears to now support NURBS (not entirely clear if it's native or if they're throwing in a copy of Amapi 3D with it)

Al

[menoinjun]

How about Bryce 5? It's not exactly what you are looking for, but you can create some really cool 3d landscapes and a few organic objects. Check out DigitalBlasphemy.com for some cool bryce samples.

Plus, if you have more than one mac, you can network render!

I do believe that it's OS X compatable.

-Pete

[awrc]

Well, if we're talking landscape renderers, there's also Vue D'Esprit. I personally prefer it to Bryce (although Bryce 4 is the highest I've used, maybe Bryce 5 closed the gap between the two). Runs under OS X, is (supposedly) AltiVec optimized, supports multi-processor, is cheap ($199) and can produce some very nice results. Lots of the usual import formats, plus it imports Poser data (although since Poser isn't OS X compatible yet...)

On the downside it uses a "fake Aqua" interface that's common to both the Mac and Windows versions, and it's quite good at crashing.

It's the only renderer I've had a chance to do a direct, head-to-head comparison between the Windows and Mac versions of (since I did a crossgrade from the Windows version to the Mac one). Put my dual 1GHz G4 with 1GB up against my AthlonXP 1800+ with 1GB (under Windows XP) and rendered a bunch of the more complex sample scenes on high quality. The results were pretty consistent - the Athlon generally rendering the scenes in roughly 90% of the time it took the G4 to do them (i.e. the Athlon was faster). Slightly disappointing, but not an earth-shattering difference.

Al

[King Cobra]

If I am not mistaken, doesn't Cinema 4D XL use the Velocity Engine of the G4? I thought I heard this someplace...

If this is true, awrc, you might benefit over your Crapthlon by quite a bit.

I have heard quite a bit of positive things about Cinema. If you check out the reviews under the Mac section Cnet rates it pretty well and the consumer reviews are fairly decent.
__________________

Fear the King.

[awrc]

Well, I did mention that the Mac version of Vue D'Esprit *is* AltiVec enhanced - in other words, it makes use of the Velocity Engine too, so the comparison with the Athlon is probably a fair one in that respect. I'm also pretty sure the PC version makes use of whatever AMD's current SSE equivalent is.

However, I don't see the performance disparity as necessarily meaning anything much in the "processor X is faster than processor Y" sense. The scenes I was testing were big, showpiece scenes used by Vue D'Esprit's publisher to show off the application. So the polygon counts were high, which suggests the scenes were also pretty memory hungry. In those circumstances, DDR has an advantage over PC133, esp if the data access patterns are cache unfriendly. I've no idea what the data locality of the dataset was like, either - a complex raytraciing scene with volumetrics, depth of field, motion blur, lots of transparency and reflections, blurred transparency, etc could potentially have lousy data locality, which would take away any benefits from that big L3 cache.

Then there's the dual processor aspect. I'm not too clear about how Vue splits up a scene for rendering, but if there's rays bouncing everywhere, there's potential for data contention, cache invalidation, all sorts of fun stuff like that.

So, basically, while comparing a notionally 2GHz-ish Athlon with two 1GHz G4s might *seem* a reasonable thing to compare, I think comparing a 1GHz Athlon with a single processor 1GHz G4 (esp if it's a new one with DDR :)) might produce more interesting results, although there's enough differences in processor architecture that even those would be dodgy.

Sorry, spent too much time studying processor architecture and performance in my youth, which has resulted in a strong belief that system X being faster than system Y on application Z means only that system X is faster than system Y on application Z :D

[stoid]

Originally posted by awrc
The new version of Carrara Studio (2), due out in early June, appears to support OS X and is reasonably cheap ($399). Upgrade prices are good for those who had Carrara Studio 1 ($149), decent for those who had the original Metacreations Carrara or Ray Dream or Infini-D ($199).

I've got Ray Dream Studio. I love the interface, but complex projects get tons of bugs (escpecially when the Physics Sim was introduced. Looking forward to seeing a similar product for X and at $200 its in my price range. I know Metacreations sold its appls quite a while ago, what's the website for the new software?

[crassusad44]

Have we all forgotten Lightwave 3D 7.5???

[Choppaface]

Originally posted by stoid


Looks pretty sweet! Will it be avail for mac as well, the beta download is WinBlows only??

it can't be...I have a trial of atmosphere...at least i think i do....and I'm pretty sure i downloaded it off of adobe's site....maybe they pulled it?

[gambit]

I use Electric Image™ but I got it through the 3D Toolkit available at http://www.dvGarage.com/ and its only $200 and comes with lots of very high quality tutorials that come on the 3D Toolkit (you can get it on a DVD or on a few CD's.) I kinda like it and it's great because I'm kinda a newbie to 3D.

[AlphaTech]

Macmall is selling Cinema 4D Go for $150... I have yet to install my copy again, but for $150, you almost cannot go wrong. I am pretty sure that you can import other formats into it and use them. Such as models from Poser, Bryce... For the price tag, it is very powerful. Check it out at... http://www.macmall.com/macmall/shop/detail.asp?dpno=42868

[gambit]

You can use it for free for 30 days; full save, no watermarks etc.

[awrc]

For those who've asked:

Website for Carrara 2 is: http://www.eovia.com.
Website for Vue D'Esprit is http://www.e-onsoftware.com

[gambit]

A pic from the dvGarage site!