If I had tons of money... I'd fix 3D Modeling for indie games.

#21 What happened to Neill? I wanted him to put his work up. Because I went to school for four years in game design and I can't keep up with the industry in modeling technique. Rigging, mapping, and skinning, blows chunks. A new solution is needed. Z-brush is getting there though as far as mapping and textures.

Programmers can't say that they don't have close to the magic button but I don't see anyone making games in assembler, if your using torque script your not even using the true C#. Once an easy solution is developed anyone would be foolish not use it just because it not hoe real developers do something or whatever the excuse. Quality versus time is the problem. If I can crank out the same or greater quality in less time then I'm sold.

Tools are making a lot of artist so so artists phenomenal now. When I went to art school it was yournever allowed to erase just draw and if you mess up draw it again. Draw it fast, shadow and light, get it wrong do it again. Now that there's digital art, a lot of mediocre artist are get surpassing traditional artists. A mediocre artist can learn the basics of form, light, shadow, negative space and perspective and easily become a master of photoshop or any other digital package in two years. I've witnessed it. With brush creation people can make concept scenes in 5 min with more detail and quality than the happy painter guy with the fro on pbs in the 90's. He painted all his life. Art is becoming more technical and the genre is becoming more respected. Soon you'll see it in a museum or art showcase.

Regardless of the medium, people should embrace new technologies or be left behind, I never want to be the old person that can't use the computer or thinks phones capture your soul. Adapt or Fail.

#22 hehhe, Glenn lol. Great post.

@ Tony
I do share some of your thoughts in your post.

@ John R.
Thank you for the entertaining Post. I read everything I can in every area of the forums as time allows me.
I'm not against having a new Software package to facilitate making characters so long as that software still gives all the power to the user.. ( Linux comes to mind as compared to Windows ).

While at work today I was considering this entire thread.. collectively.
What I decided:
If you form a team of programmers from the Torque community to piece this Software together, Make the teams progress available to the License owners in the Private forums for speculation and wish lists etc.,
Get something rolling thats more concrete then just an Idea.. And I will Donate to the cause so long as there is accountability for where the funds are going.

The more I like how the project comes together, the more frequently I will donate..

#23 @Scott - I have already started working on this several months ago as part of my Zen Studio project and the Indie 2.0 Revolution. It's not limited to making content for Torque, nor is it limited to just character creation as it will eventually encompass terrain generation, world editing, etc.

I would love to make the development more transparent and get a whole lot more feedback from the community, but so far I've only received a little feedback and most of it has been negative. (Naysayers are always the loudest) :P

I'm not interested in donations... most of what I am doing is Open Source using the ZLib license so that it can be freely used in commercial and non-commercial applications. I'm doing this because I believe it will revolutionize the Indie game development industry.

If we could band together and make our own tools specifically for our own needs then we remove one of the advantages the commercial guys have over the Indies. I've been preaching this for months and I even gave a presentation about it at IMGDC.... but so far the only "banding together" I have seen is me and a couple of my apprentices helping me with Zen Engine, and so far no help for Zen Studio.

I have written a fantastic plugin system that would allow for commercial plugins. This makes it so that contributors can still have a way to make a profit.... the plugins should be kept moderately priced so that the entire package costs under $1000 (or at least that's the goal).

I've kinda lost contact with the GG crew... Stephen Zepp had approached me and I dunno, maybe I scared him away with my response because we haven't spoken since our initial e-mail exchange. Ben Garney was my only other GG point of contact, but that was related to some work that I was doing for the Forest Pack... and of course he's no longer a GG employee.

I would love to be able to make an entire IDE with plugins for TorqueScript (Torsion converted to use my plugin system?), something like L3DT for terrain generation algorithms, maybe a conversion of Constructor, a better GUI editor, a character modeler, etc.

I'm willing to lead the project and do a significant amount of the programming for a fair share of the profits, depending on how many people contribute to it.

All it takes is a little support from the community and maybe a blessing from GG... a forum on this website would also make things a bit better so I don't have to host the forums on a different website, thus dividing the community.

Who knows, maybe someone with better connections could make this happen :P

#24 @Tony, nothing against you but your post is ridiculous sounding. You say you want to help and it's about what you believe is the next revolution but it sounds like selfishness. When you break your post down it sounds like this:

Hype, Excuse, not interested in donations, next gaming revolution, discouragement, profit and big numbers outside of most indie budgets, discouragement, your willing to save the industry, you want to be leader and want the most money depending on how much work other people do, a plea for support and a blessing, and you want to piggy back off the community that garage games created.

You interrupted my post that was reaching out to the community to advertise your product that isn't even ready. and then when I talk to you about it you take a cut at me and my business practices. I used to believe we had similar interests and ideals and could come together but you sound irrational and far from any leader that I'd follow. My background, experience, and drive make me a leader and I hope that it sets our products and mission far from each other. I wish you luck though and hope you fulfill the promises you intend on providing. Garage Games is a business and as a business they are often busy. They will not ignore you but you have to give to receive. The reason I believe I had support on the Last Man Standing Behavior Competition is because I wasn't in it for me. I truly wanted to improve the community and raise support in creating behaviors in TGB. They allowed me to pick the winners prize, they didn't give me any free product or service. You have to help others help themselves.

@Scott and everyone, I believe something of this sort should be open source and tracking of all funds should be posted on an outside website along with a post showing where the funds were spent and how much funds are in the pool. A board of developers should be formed to vote on how funds should be spent and the community can vote as well but their collective vote would count as one seat. Money for developers of the product can come from a online advertisements posted on the site and included with each release of the product. The situation would end up being a win win situation for both sides. All advertising funds can go into an account that pays out royalties once a month for workers that contributed that month. It can be based on percentages, scope, priority, and amount. We can use open source tools such as Mambo, Joomla, SMF, project pier, and mantis to set the site up, handle the forums, handle project management, and bug tracking. The domain will be cheap and hosting won't be much either. Godaddy.com offers the services at a reasonable price and they support open source tools. In the beginning, I don't mind allowing the community to piggyback off my hosting account or purchasing the domain as long as funds go to reimburse me my losses. We can post .plans in this community to gather support but core development will be done through an outside site and scheduled chat sessions. It will take more than one project leader on an open source project, so we'd have to create a board and determine a set of rules for being on that board. Something like founders, developers that have contributed for three or more months, and people who have contributed a donation of at least x amount the previous month. We allow people to donate to both accounts but it will be their will to decide where money is going. With this structure there something in it for everyone and no self promoting. I have a company as well but I rather my company be a contributer rather than heading up a project that is community driven.

@John, Sorry for straying off topic there in the beginning. I get a little passionate about my beliefs.

#25 arrgggh done with this nonsense.

#26 Does anyone know if there's any news on the newest iterations of Maya and 3D Studio Max? I'd like to check it out. I want to apologize if I discouraged anyone from posting on this subject.

#27 3ds max just had a really nice new release. version 2009. spline based UV mapping is awesome!

Maya " what I use every day" is at version 2008 and will prolly see a release in late summer or early Q4. The rumors for this comming release are very promising. If you go with either of these applications go on maintenace. The maintenance for Maya complete is down to like $529 a year. Awesome when you consider all of the stuff you get. plus you just stay on that maintenance and you will always have the latest version.

3ds max has the best support by GG though. "by best I mean most feature complete" I wish they would get the maya exporter up to par and internalize it. Suck the community have to do this themselves.

both softwares have trial versions that you can check out.

#28 John, in my opinion its the next frontier in rapid game dev tools for Indies. In fact, I see such tools being used to produce all classes of Game Entities not just Characters (although Characters are the most difficult).

I'm a programming-centric game developer with little to no budget and media creation has been my greatest challenge/barrier with pursuing game development. I've attempted to model (which takes talent I do not possess) and I've purchased Character and Weapon Models Packs. Unfortunately, distintive artstyle and variety is short-lived with the use of model packs.

My frustration with the situation, has forced me to seek or develop a solution for rapid media creation instead of developing games :( What has materialized is a concept of 3D media creation I've dubbed Modular Entity Construction Sets (MECS). The premise is simple: mix-and-match drag-and-drop flexible parts; shape them, and then add a texturing/shading/animation to create a singularly unique customized entity.

The initial MECS concepts were inspired by several Construction Toy Sets (ie Kinex) in which Entities are assembled with Parts and Connectors. Assembling Entities in this fashion would result in a segmented Character and awkward looking mesh overlap during animations. At the time, I had a foggy idea how I could automate merging parts & textures as a singular mesh. Than comes along Spore Creature Creator with its procedural generation.

MECS does not rule out Artist, as high quality Parts require high quality talent. Thus, I've been making my pitch Model Pack Artist to develop Model Part Packs for the concept. I'm now currently developing MECs within Open-Source 3D Game Creation System to solicit more buy in from Model Pack Artists.