Blender? Can we use a modeling program that doesn't cost hundreds or thousands of dollars?

dwinblood

I know off and on there were plugins made for Blender back in the day. I went and looked at the cost of 3DSMax today and it is still ridiculously expensive. Is there a possibility for getting something like NWMAX to work with something like Blender? Blender has come a long way and a lot of people use it.

Right now having to use something as expensive as 3DSMax can be a large barrier to entry for a lot of the community.

ShadowM

Plugin has already been made for blender and mdl and still worked on.
BLENDER PLUGIN LINK:
https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn1/other/tool/neverblender-blender-269-27x

TheGmork

Sweet. Lost my copy of 3ds Max and have just started learning blender. This will be fantastic. Thank you

Phenomen

Also use this https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn1/other/cleanmodels3

Zwerkules

If you learned how to use 3dsMax and don't want to learn how to use Blender, you can use Gmax. It is free, it is still available (though unsupported) and it works with NWmax and Veltools.
https://www.turbosquid.com/gmax

TheGmork

I find Gmax so frustrating -because- it is just like 3dsMax but vastly different at the same time.

dwinblood

3dsMax is also VERY expensive. Considering changes in the market I actually believe it is over priced. Now if you are already in the industry making a good paycheck using it then that may not seem the case, and if that is the limited audience one wants to aim at then ok. Blender has come a long way and is the lowest barrier of entry. So thanks to those of you that pointed out where we could get plugins for it.

IndyWendieGo

I've always preferred Blender mainly because of how much documentation there is for it for other games as well (revamed Azura's Star/the Black Star in Skyrim because they were ugly). I'm waiting to dig in though, until EE's officially released just in case something changes by some unknown circumstance.

T0R0

I'm pretty sure you can get 3dsmax for free for 3 years as a student (even middle school).
You can create alot of stuff in 3 years.... lol.. probably take a year just to learn it

voidofopinion

TheGmork said:

I find Gmax so frustrating -because- it is just like 3dsMax but vastly different at the same time.

Like jumping windows versions. You know what it is supposed to be doing but there are 5 additional and completely unnecessary steps that have been added between you and the simple goal you are trying to do.

*Gives Win 10 the evil eye*

dwinblood

T0R0 said:

I'm pretty sure you can get 3dsmax for free for 3 years as a student (even middle school).
You can create alot of stuff in 3 years.... lol.. probably take a year just to learn it

I suspect many of us are LONG beyond the "student" years. I also have no interest in being a student and getting something allegedly FREE for 3 years that after those 3 years I have to pay thousands of dollars for the product once I've spent all this time learning it.

Zero interest in 3dsmax. Thus, why I posted in my original question asking about Blender.

I would pay for products like 3dsmax if the price were vastly lower than it is, or if it was required by a JOB that what I was making from that job made it worth doing.

Game engines have caught on as far as expense and leaning towards democratization of game design. Many 3d tool developers still have not caught onto this. Which means they are tools of the "elite". Great tools, but not feasible for the bulk of people.

InflatableFriend

I wish they'd do a Max Lite/Indie. I use MayaLT and it's great - All the comfortable familiarity of Maya without the painful cost. But no plugins, so not much good for anything but more modern engines.

Anyway, personally I'd much rather see the need for specific pieces of software to be removed, be they expensive, moderate or free. Having .fbx and .obj import capabilities within the toolset would mean that content creators could use whatever software they wanted to make stuff without the need for jumping through hoops to use whatever program has official support.

fetito666

So what's Beamdog's position on Blender and NVN:EE?

InflatableFriend

From what they've said in the streams the current work/toolflow is in flux. That said Trent has mentioned working on the Max scripts in a couple of the last streams so maybe we'll see 3ds Max tools too. Unity also got mentioned as a functioning exporter route, though that may just have been experimentation.

@symmetric is still doing amazing things with NeverBlender and all the EE changes keeping that as the optimal community tool for those who don't work with 3ds Max.

---Caution, wild guesswork and supposition follows---

If I were a betting man I'd say that the likely outcome is an official Max based scripts/exporter because that's likely the tool their in-house and contractor artists use (and those that don't can send .fbx), plus a couple of experimental tools. Blender would remain a community project, with Neverblender/Symmetric working with Beamdog (but probably hampered by the fact that the .mdl format isn't Beamdogs to completely give away) to keep the development of that roughly on par with the in-house tools.

Or it'll all be machine learning based model and texture making and Unity, who knows.