Maybe it is because working on a 3-dimensional form is largely incompatible with the interface of flat display, keyboard, and mouse? Like doing orchestral synthesis; even with keyboard, breath controller, and CC knobs you just can't put the same nuances in you can with an orchestral instrument in your own hands?
It seems that every 3d application I have worked with re-invents the wheel. Usually badly.
They are largely unintuitive and often have clunky workflow -- the kind of design where something you do once an hour has a hotkey sequence but something you have to do several times a minute requires selecting from a drop-down menu.
And they lack useful manuals.
It took three days of searching to find anything resembling a manual for Cheetah3D. It is a third-party, fan-written, but fortunately free manual. Still, every resource I've seen seems to jump over those early basic steps that become so rote everyone forgets they have to be explained to the beginner.
"Adjust UV's by applying the Scale tool to your Selection..." Okay, great, but how do I select UVs in the first place? The regular selection tools don't seem to do anything. That's the sort of thing that gets skipped over.
Two things annoy me very much from both a workflow and a "why are we doing this" angle; first is that selection and manipulation are separate. So if you want to operate on more than one polygon, you click the Select tool from the menu bar, possibly go into Area or another Select Mode (which does NOT toggle, but only acts for the duration of one selection), then go back and click the Manipulate tool also in the menu bar, go back and pick up your selection (don't accidentally click outside!) and then you can move it.
Oh, except you didn't "Make editable" so nothing happens. That's the other thing. Like Fusion's weird way of splitting editable objects into different types, I don't understand the underlying philosophy behind "make editable" and what it functionally does.
There is one fix which should be easy to make and I hope will happen soon; grey out menu items that don't apply to the kind of object you are working with. As it is now, all the menus open up; even contextual menu pops up with every operation that could be done on any object. Carrara, for all that I have and would say (It is dead ware -- Don't buy it), gathered the applicable tools to the contextual menus.
Actually, I lied a little above. Although it too has unintuitive aspects to it, and lacks any and all useful documentation, Fusion360 is hyper-fast and efficient at navigation and basic operations. The hotkey camera and selection controls and the multi-purpose contextual handles meant I could model pretty much as fast as I could think.
I had a lifetime subscription at a locked-in rate that was quite affordable. So of course they broke the contract, jacked the price, offered me another "lifetime" subscription at about ten times as much, and from what I can tell from their official pages, broke that contract for the people who were foolish enough to sign for it and is now at something approaching what I pay for rent.
Carrara, meanwhile, no longer works under the last four or five upgrades to the MacOS and there is no support and no plans to ever make it work properly. Although they will still sell you an "upgrade" to 8.5 (yes -- throughout its history, Carrara almost never released patches. Instead they'd sell you the point upgrade for full price, promising that it would include the bug fixes for the last version. Which it never did.)
So, yeah, I'm pretty much waiting for Cheetah to get over the early teething problems, to get popular and powerful, at which point they will stab the user base in the back, sell out to Autocad, and jack the price out of range of the ordinary user. But for now, I think I can get it to do what I want.
At least it is easier to navigate than Blender.
No comments:
Post a Comment