We recommend lightweight and easy-to-use 3D modeling software wings3d and sculptris.

I once learned 3D modeling. During this period, I searched for mainstream modeling software on the Internet. Most of them were recommended for 3DS MAX and Maya. These two software are definitely trump card-level software, the functions provided are very powerful and rich, and each of them has its own merits. A professional modeling artist must use them. However, for those who are interested in modeling, but haven't had much time to systematically learn modeling, it is unwise to choose one of the two software, at that time, when I learned 3DS MAX, I found that the learning cycle needed to get started with something decent still seemed too long. At that time, I wanted to find some easy-to-use modeling software to sit on the models. Huang Tianyan was not quite worried, in the Chinese forum of the game "horse riding and hacking", Daniel posted a post recommending wings3d. Let me introduce this software:

This is a very small open-source software. When writing this article, the stable version is 1.4.1. The installation package in Windows is only 8 Mb in size, and about 12 Mb after installation, the software also supports many systems. The following is the official website of the software.

Http://www.wings3d.com/

The wings3d interface is very refreshing. A simple method to familiarize yourself with interface operations is to take a few clicks on the toolbar and basically know what the corresponding function is;

There are four cubes in the middle of the toolbar, which correspond to the vertex selection mode, edge selection mode, face selection mode and body selection mode respectively from the left.

The 3D wings modeling routine is also very simple, that is, right-click the blank area in the space and select the basic ry to be created from the menu. Then, you can combine and edit these basic ry to create the desired model.

You can also change and edit the ry by right-clicking the options in the menu. However, you must note that there are no selected ry objects currently, there are also the number and type of the selected objects. The operation options provided by the right-click menu are different. It is not difficult to understand what I mean by trying a few more times. In addition, wings 3D also provides support for shortcut keys. Some practical shortcut keys can be easily modeled. Below are a few examples:

In space, click the mouse wheel button to enter any Rotation Angle of View Mode. In this mode, you can move the mouse to rotate the angle of view, so that we can easily observe the model; the four arrow keys can be used to move the angle lens at any time. The space key is used to cancel all current selections. When editing a complex model, you will encounter cross-occlusion geometric objects, editing is troublesome. In this case, you can use the hide and lock functions in the right-click menu. hidden objects can be displayed, and locked objects can be unlocked, you can use show all and unlock all in the select expansion in the menu bar to re-display and unlock,

Selecting orthogonal projection is a good choice for precise alignment of audit objects, you can switch between orthogonal projection and Perspective Projection by clicking the button shown in the right of the toolbar:

Wings 3D does not support advanced functions such as animation and bone binding. These functions are well supported by 3DS MAX, but fortunately wings 3D provides the texture expansion of the model, with this function, we can map the created model. The texture process in wings 3D is as follows:

1. In the wings 3D area selection mode or question selection mode, right-click the menu (if there is a selected object) and select UV mapping, for example:

Next, a small split window will pop up. In this window, select all the faces, and right-click the window and select segment by (this is the method of selecting the part)

Select Feature Detection (this is based on the geometric features of the split, this method after the split will be more regular, convenient texture ing) On the right:

After selecting the sharding mode, right-click the sharding window and select continue from the menu. In the displayed list, select unfolding (this step is to expand the model ):

Next, a small window for texture ing will pop up, and the texture work will be completed in this window. Unlike the 3D space modeled in the main window, the creation space of the window is a 2D space,

In this 2D creative space, the square area with a lattice background in the center corresponds to the texture, to facilitate the texture, the most intuitive thing is to load the image we want to paste into this square area as the background, in the menu bar, select Import image to load the texture to wings 3D, and right-click the texture window and select create texture to create the texture:

In the pop-up window, select options on the Right of Backgroud. In the pop-up background window, there is an image drop-down box. Click "select our texture" and click "OK" to return to the previous window, note that there is a draw edges item under backgroud. We recommend that you set this item to none and click OK to create the texture:

If it is not set to none, the loaded texture will be branded with the box of the expanded surface. This is not what we want in many cases. The following figure shows the effect after loading the texture, you can see that the current texture effect of the model can be displayed in real time in the main window, so that we can adjust the texture intuitively:

Wings 3D has a wiki page version user manual, which can be viewed online for convenience. Here is a link to wings 3D wiki User Manual:

Http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wings_3D/User_Manual

Wings 3D is introduced here first. Next we will introduce another small modeling software sculptris. sculptris and zbrush are from the same company, and their modeling methods are very unique, just like a person modeling with sulptris is like holding a paint brush in a 3D space in his hand, playing the desired effect with ease, the following is the official website of sculptris.

Http://www.pixologic.com/sculptris/

The sculptris interface is as follows:

In the creation space, there is a sphere at the beginning. The creation begins with editing the ball. In fact, it is regarded as a mud. sculptris is symmetric by default, in the middle of the ball, there will be a symmetric surface. For editing on any side of the surface, the symmetric part will have the same effect:

The area in the box is the paint brush area. Here, 9 is an alternative for editing in different ways:

The advantages of sculptris's degree of freedom in creation also bring disadvantages, that is, after we have created our desired model, we will find that the model has increased a lot, this will certainly happen. Fortunately, sculptris is aware of this defect. Therefore, it provides the ability to reduce the number of patches. The selected three tools can be used to segment or reduce the number of patches:

Sculptris provides a very useful tool called mask. After selecting the mask tool, you can press and hold the Alt key, and then select the region to be mask in the space, the so-called Mask is to lock the selected region so that the region of the mask cannot be modified, as indicated:

The dark area of the sphere is the area locked by the mask tool (the Green Circle is the mask painting brush ):

Sculptris is symmetric mode by default. We can also disable symmetric mode by canceling the button for selecting symmetric mode, for example:

The buttons shown in the figure can be used to switch between the wiremap mode and the non-wiremap mode:

The sculptris installation folder contains instructions for use. For more information, see sculptris instructions for use.