In all honesty... the true answer is... it depends... what I mean by that is it depends on what your trying to model. Obviously if your here, your trying to model a car or truck... or something vehicular of that nature probably... which in that case... blender is pretty much your best choice seeing as it's free. The learning curve is a little steep... but honestly you can do some amazing things in blender EVEN WITHOUT all its crazy tools it has available. I have been modeling in blender for years and only recently have been taught some of its crazy powerful features. They are there to help, not hinder. If your looking to model other things though... like machine parts and what not... Fusion 360 is a great place to learn how to model... you can build all sorts of crazy stuff in it, granted, the way it creates models is not ideal for games like Beam. Sketchup is another way to get into modeling easily... but it really doesn't give the best results until you REALLY know what your doing... which can take a while. My advice... try blender... load up some "how do I model (pick thing here)" videos on youtube, and give it a shot. I also recommend learning in 2.80 as, in my opinion, it is much better than the previous versions.
I'm agree with you and I've been using SolidWorks for 4 years at work and I used VariCad to learn CAD. Also there is a free option called freecad, with plenty of tutorials available. I have to admit I can't model anymore in freecad due to I'm too used to SolidWorks that I just can't figure out how to do anything in freecad lol! You actually can design a car with fusion 360 and Solidworks, maybe it's easier with blender, I don't know I didn't had the time to learn blender yet
I'm using solidworks in school and competently modeled and textured a car and it is far easier than blender. I may be able to talk my teacher into letting me convert it to a dae file
save as an stl lol. blender can open them with no problem. Im studying in 3d cad/inventor/solidworks. and from the experience ive had with any of the 3d industrial softwares, the models needs a lot of work if you wanna end up putting them in-game. They are a high poly mess since in the cad industry, it has to be the most realistic re-creation of real life parts, for the machinist to be able to make those parts. Yes solidworks has textures, yes it works good. is it something i would recommend? nope. you better know what you are doing and get the high density poly lowered before putting this stuff in beam since these models are gonna be 10x worse as forza models. either solidworks, or blender, none of the modelling softwares are easy. it takes time, and patience to learn them. Ive been using blender years before going in college. i honestly prefer blender just for its creative freedom. solidworks is such a touchy software you need to know what to do to get the results you want. but in blender? select a vertices and move it wherever you want to create a part you want. you might need to learn a few tricks to get some models as straight/nice looking as you would want but thats the challenge of modelling if you ask me. Best thing to do is youtube tutorials, you can learn literally anything about blender on there. ive learned everything i know through a few youtube vids. But with blender the uv maps arent created by default and texturing becomes a problem of its own, cuz not only do you need to learn modelling, but also texturing. Which brings me back to solidworks. i wanna try to make parts in solidworks and port them in beam simply for the texture simplicity. but yet again, ill have to decimate the models just to bring them to the video-games 3d model standard since they are too high poly. ive got substance painter but even after a tutorial it kinda got me nowhere. i probably didnt find the good one yet. if someone could link me to some good substance painter tutorials it would be greaty appreciated, ive been dying to learn how to texture stuff. its one of my current limitation in terms of mod making. alternatives to blender include any of the things you saw in this thread. but everyone will keep recommending blender for its free availability. you can try 3ds max with a student license if you want. theres also autodesk inventor which is the main solidworks competitor. (works better if you ask me lol) autodesk owns both 3ds max and inventor and 360 fusion, with many more. which all of them can be downloaded for free with a student licence if you wanna try them out. but if you go with inventor/solidworks, dont expect it to work like blender, because they are complete opposites in terms of 3d modelling. you will need to learn new techniques of modelling since you cant just move vertex in these cad softwares.
Yep... you pretty much hit the nail on the head. I daily Inventor myself... but no normal individual can afford that, so that is why I suggested Fusion 360... its identical to Inventor except the fact that you can use it for free, and for some odd reason, they moved all the damn buttons to different places. This makes transitioning for me from Inventor to 360 rather difficult because I know what I want to do and what tool I need... but I can never find the buttons without clicking through every menu. Yeah, you can totally model cars in Solidworks, Inventor, Cad, Fusion, so on and so forth... here is one that I have done. And with these programs you can really get into the fine details... I love modeling in them... and I have used and become fluent in them all... same with Blender... and honestly... if I were to model a car... I would still use Blender. Why? You have 100% control over the polygons in blender where as in any of those other programs I mentioned... you do not. It does everything for you automagically and let me tell you... it is not designed to make smooth polly flow for games. It is designed to do its job and get it done whatever the cost. As for effort and time spent... Honestly... when your fluent in both programs... it's really a toss up. The tools and methods are totally different, but at the end of the day, you have spent about the same amount of time in both to get visually similar results... but Blender you laid a lot of pollies by hand and know that it will work in a game while in some other Cad program the computer laid out most of the pollies which ends up looking good, but under the surface is a mess and ends up being far too detailed for most games.
Students, educators, startups, and hobbyists... if you download and licence it as a hobbyist, you can use it for free for a year. After a year, your licence runs out, so you licence it as a hobbyist again and boom... another year. As long as you use it and don't make money with it (according to the fine print... in other words... you can't sell your creations with it) you are good to go and use it for free... Well... unless they changed that wording in the last 2 years... but it is still running on my computer on a hobbyist licence so everyone else should still be able to do the same thing.
I'll check because I just bought a 3d printer and I want to do stuff as a hobby and to do it I have to work from my work computer and use remote desktop but it's a pain in the ass honestly, I have lag and I can't use 3d mouse... So to have vision (even I never used looks kind of easy) it will be perfect for me. Thanks for the heads up.
I'll do you one better https://www.autodesk.com/campaigns/fusion-360-for-hobbyists This is the site that I used to get mine... also I use Fusion for making things for 3D printing all the time. Fantastic software for exactly that.
Oh!, mama!, great!, That was easy! Thanks mate!, I need to learn how draw with that, the controls are not like solidworks I'm so used to the feature tree, but also there is a bunch of video tutorials. You made my day! cheers!
I'm in the opposite boat from you. I've been using programs like AutoCAD and SolidWorks for years in mechanical and architectural applications, and just started using Blender recently for a college 3D printing class. I see what you mean by it allowing more freedom since I struggled to model anything in it with how broad it is compared to the strict rules of engineering CAD applications that I've come to rely on over the years. So are you saying that even if I modelled just a simple prop in something like Fusion 360 and imported it into Blender, I'd have a hell of a time trying to get the poly count down for it to work in the game?
Depends the techniques you use to reduce the poly count. If you go vert by vert and delete them 1 by 1 this might take a while and you might need to redo the uv-maps. Theres a decimate function in blender but ive notice its not perfect. But it somewhat gets the job done. It also depends if its some square piece or something with lots of fillets and rounded edges. Cad softwares makes those fillet edges with a lot of poly, so if you know a certain model is going in a game. Try to keep it as square and as simple as possible. A box in cad is the same in blender, 8 verts that makes the box, but add fillets and you will end up with something along the lines of 256verts lol. (Quick example) Im no expert at this so if someone has better ways to reduce poly count, it would be helpful to know them. Ive been using the 1 by 1 technique and its pretty time consuming. But ey thats mod making in a nutshell aint it?
