Modeling tools?

#1 What feature do you want? What do you want it to look/act like? What are you used to using?

I personally use MilkShape - 20 bucks. Not the best, but good for the price.

#2 I am looking for a good interface a animation at the min. milkshape will be my choose if i cant find anything else.

#3 Milkshape or Blender are decent. You can also get educational copies of programs like Maya, Max and XSI for around that price too (only a 1 year educational liscense though for that price). If you can spend a bit more you can get the Caligari Gamespace program.

Logan

#4 Which one of those have dts exporters? is truespace 5.2 better than gamespace with the features?

#5 There are currently exporters available for : Max (full featured), Lightwave (full featured), Milkshape (cannot export DSQs) and Truespace (not sure what it supports, likely the same as Milkshape though).

Developers are currently working on exporters for: Blender (last I heard it was exporting simple shapes), Gamespace (Almost at the full support level, just needs DSQ support) and Maya (Windows platform only and making its way towards full support).

#6 The Blender exporter currently exports animated shapes too. I just need to finish up on other things (such as the GUI), and fix some outstanding bugs before i release a new version =)

#7 @L Foster:

if milkshape it only 20 dollars and gamespce it 300 dollars, do you know what this gamespace has the milkshape does not have?

#8 Ryan just check out the IOTD to see what the developers of this plugin are doing for it. IMHO it is already looking well and above the DTS exporter that is available for Milkshape.

Logan

#9 It that the only thing the gamespace is better in?

#10 Ultimately the usefulness of any software is its capability to do what you need it to do, and the ease of getting it to do it.

In the case of modeling software, its a question of what are you trying to accomplish, and for what game is it intended. Players, vehicles, weapons, and static decorations, all have different requirements in modeling, animation, and texturing. But, the real question is, once you've spent all this time and effort, can you actually import all this 'stuff' into Torque? In other words, the exporter is almost as critical as the program itself.

So, you have to decide what specific features you ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE, find a program that not only supports them, but also has an exporter that supports them also, all in a price range that you can afford.

The simple fact is that the ms2dts exporter (or MilkShape itself) is not as full-featured as other prgrams out there. But, obviously its price tag is very attractive. So, really it's up to you. You have to decide if MilkShape is "good enough" for your needs. If it is, awesome, you lucked out! If not, suck it up and save your pennies for something else.

#11 Well gamespace comes with a version of milkspahe so i can create in gamespace and export in milkshape even tho the gamespace exporter in the dev. shot does look very very nice.

#12 Umm... as far as I know, gamespace comes with a set of milkshape _exporters_. That doesn't necessarily mean that the Torque exporter for milkshape will work with gamespace. In fact I doubt that it does work. Maybe I didn't read everything or misread something.
That said, I think that once the Torque exporter is finished for gameSpace, it will provide better results than milkshape currently does. It only costs over 10 times more, and still 10 times less than Max (interesting logarithmic pricing there...)

#13 Yeah, John's right. A MilkShape _exporter_ does not equal a _version_ of MilkShape.

And really isn't whether or not the fact that GameSpace has MilkShape exporters kinda moot anyways? I mean, if GameSpace has it's own exporter, exporting to MilkShape first is an unnecesary step... at least it would seem.