Until Cheetah 3D v4.0 came out, Unity (which I've already opined about on multiple occasions) was a fantastic tool for indie game development, except that there was no 3D animation tool which could feed stuff into it that cost less than around $900. What's more, most 3D tools these days have all-but-identical feature sets; what you pay for is usability. E.g. Blender is free but very hard to use. Lightwave and Softimage are relatively cheap, but kind of hard to use. Maya is pricey but fairly easy to use. Max is very pricey but quite easy to use. There are some outliers -- Strata Studio Pro and Electric Image are fairly cheap and easy to use, but they suck for game development.
Aside: I know that there are religious wars over 3D tools all the time and this isn't going to help. All I'm really saying here is that the \"cheaper\" 3D tools have quirky UIs which are fine once you get used to them, while the more expensive tools can be operated quite successfully by novices. E.g. in 3D Studio Max, selecting and manipulating objects works pretty much the same way as in Illustrator or PowerPoint. Click to select, shift click to add to a selection, etc. etc.
Well Cheetah3D is easier to use and more Mac-like than any other 3D program I've ever used (including Strata3D, which was the previous winner) and has a really nice set of features. And it can export animated figures via FBX to Unity.
So now you can build near state-of-the-art 3d games using a set of tools that costs ~$400.
What Cheetah 3d Doesn't Do
Particles.
Motion-Blur.
Advanced rigging and IK (e.g. muscles). (But it does do morph targets VERY well.)
NURBS. (Basically irrelevant to game dev.)","$updatedAt":"2024-06-05T10:51:18.121+00:00",path:"game-development-for-the-rest-of-us",_created:"2024-07-09T20:33:59.908Z",id:"76",_modified:"2024-07-09T20:33:59.908Z","$id":"76",_path:"post/path=game-development-for-the-rest-of-us"}}