Wire Whizz - ‘A History’ Part 3 (3D Editors)
The Puuuuurfect 3D Editor
At this time, Cheetah 3D became my friend. Cheetah 3D is an excellent little 3D package for the Mac that punches massively above it’s weight. There are a few areas in the scripting language that need work, but the lone developer (at least I believe he is a lone developer!), is working very hard to update all areas of the application.
Here’s a couple of very early screen grabs (I’ll hunt around and see if I have more!)
I have to say, that for $149, it is the very best editor I have seen for the mac that doesn’t cost ten times that amount. If you are doing iPhone 3D dev on a budget, then you should seriously consider this piece of kit.
In the early stages I used C3D to export whatever models I could acquire from the interweb and to test performance, but as the demands of the engine grew, so did the demands of the 3D models and here C3D helped a great deal.
I should add a note of caution: Cheetah 3D allows a quick and dirty .h export so that geometry can be embedded into your application via a header. This is very useful for quick and dirty tests, but is not terribly practical for all but the smallest of commercial games - what, you’re going to embed all your geometry into the executable, for all your levels? Do yourself a favour and write an export script. Also, the header is in the format the Martin (C3D’s creator) has gone for, which is absolutely fine, but you may want a different format, i.e. shorts instead of floats - do you really want to do post processing at load time?
I should also say that there are some free, very powerful editors such as Blender, but I was always somewhat frustrated with the user interface. I know that this is a powerful bit of kit and free too, but I loaded C3D and was up and running with very little need to wade through the documentation. If you can invest the time, Blender will be a very rewarding 3D editor for you as well. I should add, that while I did not find Blender easy to get going with, that this is simply my reaction and that other people might dive straight in and think it the most intuitive program ever.