Comments on: What 3d modeling software is everyone using and why? https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/what-3d-modeling-software-is-everyone-using-and-why/2009/12/18 Researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices Sat, 19 Dec 2009 05:37:43 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.15 By: Mark Whiting https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/what-3d-modeling-software-is-everyone-using-and-why/2009/12/18/comment-page-1#comment-420265 Sat, 19 Dec 2009 05:37:43 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=6395#comment-420265 Hi, I am an industrial designer who also likes to experiment with various software systems for visualisation. I agree that Sketchup is a wonderful tool and I now use it for a substancial amount of my quick mock up work. I have not used several of the other packages you mentioned but I have used Maya extensively and would just like to suggest that it is not too common for designers to use it. Most of its users are from the film, videogame or advertising industries. Other popular tools for designers are, Alias Studio Tools, Solidworks, Inventor, ProE, Rhino (cheap and quite great for organics) CATIA (Imagine and Shape is one toolkit for CATIA which is tremendous for designers), UGS NX, Solid Thinking and FormZ. Of course this list goes on however I would suggest taking a look at Rhino, which is a free beta for mac users as they are still developing the mac version.

Personally, for my rendering and high end visualisation work I use Luxology Modo. Modo is a modern package (unlike Maya and Alias and many other of the big name packages which are about 20 years old) which has many great features to allow users to maximise their creative input. It can be a little new for some users as it is based on a slightly different modelling scheme from most other design packages. It has a tremendous rendering engine and the latest version includes an extensive materials and sample mesh library as well as features to animate and create realistically interactive models. It is designed for the general 3D artist but it seems that Designers and Architects as well as many more digital content oriented disciplines are finding it to be a very useful tool.

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