I have found surface modeling in Fusion difficult to work with. But this could be due to the fact that I haven’t spent enough time to learn and work with it.
What’s your experience or opinion? Should I spend more time to master it, or forget it and go for Blender instead. Any other apps that are better and not too time-consuming to model organic shapes?
I think Fusion is difficult for things like that. The UI just isn’t free-flowing enough, especially with how you interact with objects in the viewport. I learned surface modeling like that in Rhino 3D and Maya, and it’s just a much more comfortable experience.
It’s things like curves, and Fusions way of wanting to do curves in 2d. In general, to me, Fusion is kind of like a 2.5d program. It can do 3D, but in a lot of ways you’re constructing things up with 2d curves. You can do 3d curves, but it’s awkward.
In something like Rhino, it’s just free flowing with how you interact with things. You can grab and move curves and their points in all 3 axis, construct things up. It’s just… the structure of Fusion makes it difficult to get that same kind of flow going when working on things and starts to bog you down with it’s tedious approach.
Yes, Fusion surface modeling is tedious, and difficult to be precise, particularly for delicate features.
Maya is great. But it will take a lot of time to be good at it. For my occasinoal use, I can’t justify the time investment.
How easy is Rhino? Does it take less time to learn and less time to model than Blender?
How organic do you want to go? I use sculptris, and it’s a3 Sculpting software. I believe there are other newer alternatives, but I really like the simple and intuitive workflow. Just push, pull, draw and gauge, but you can create amazing models. It is free and works well if you only need to sculpt. I use it in conjunction with solidworks and tinkercad but that can be somewhat challenging because it only eats obj’s with nice meshes
Have messed around with various modelers for a while now. Actually started with Aspire from Vectric. Not a true 3D modeler by any means. Moved away from it very quickly, quite tedious and sort of weird compared to other modelers. Gave Fusion a go. Spent a lot of time with it, watched and performed an excellent series of YouTube videos. My impression is that it is not very good for organic shapes, and is very rigid in terms of constructing models. Settled on Rhino. A lot to digest there, not a fast learning curve for me. My breakthrough in learning came when I learned how to customize to UI to my needs. That reduced the incredible clutter of commands. Also, a lot of the videos on Rhino are made by “command line” proponents. I like clicking icons. I have been using Rhino for 3 years now and am still learning things that are not always apparent. For instance, just realized that if I want to move a 3D hole, like a countersunk screw hole, I can just press Ctrl-Shft, select the hole and move it around to where I want with the gizmo. Suhhwweeeeet. Organic modeling is actually fun in Rhino, it has a history function so things can be changed after being drawn. What Rhino has some issues with is chamfering and radiusing on surface models. That can get tricky and frustrating at times. My learning curve was about 6 weeks, 6-7 hours a day, every day. I was productive during that time, but nowhere near what I can do today.
Hope that helps.
Edit: Tried Blender too. YIKES!!! Incredibly powerful and incredibly confusing for me. Also use 3D Coat at times to work with detailing surfaces. 3D Coat is similar to things like Sculptris and Z Brush. I am not real crazy about 3D Coat. Not real crazy about any of those actually, I don’t think I have enough artist in me to use them effectively, too much engineer.
They’re different types of programs really so it’s not easy to compare. Rhino is more focused towards engineering, while Blender is more media arts and animation. Rhino is nurbs based while blender is polygon based.
Rhino is like if you took Fusion and removed all the safety rails, and threw a few buckets of extra tools at you. Fusion holds your hand, Rhino throws you in and says have at it. There’s a learning curve to it all. I think learning to use Blender and modeling with polygons is far easier, but it’s also very loose and organic. You can do pinpoint accuracy in Blender, but it’s not the same as in a traditional cad application.
It’s something you need to explore on your own, in my opinion. Most people on here would lean towards cad, but there’s a lot of fun to be had with applications like Blender, and you might find it’s easier to do your style of work within blender, depending on what you’re doing.
I lean towards Fusion, but it’s not lost on me that there’s a bunch of stuff I do in Fusion that can be tedious, but would be just a hand full of clicks in a media arts and animation program like Blender. Like adding a brick pattern to a wall, and not have it bog things down. I can scatter bricks, or use displacement maps. Get a really nice organic look; super easy, barely an inconvenience.
Yeah this. Haha. This can be nice, but also annoying at times. A well setup Fusion model can be awesome, especially with how easy you can tweak sizes/clearances, and stuff. Or how easy it can be to make variations from fully constrained models. It takes a lot of tedious work to setup perfectly though.
Like human figure, animals, etc. I will take a look at Sculptris. Thanks.
That’s about 300 hours, not bad. Command lines are not a problem, but the thing about command-line app is that one has to use it regularly or one can forget.
Yes. I will get some feedback here before deciding which one or two to give it a try. If I dedicate a certain amount of time, such as 500 hours, to learn something, I want that to be a wise investment.
All the 3D designs I do are for 3D printing. Fusion meets the majority of the needs. Occasionally though, I would like to add some organic shapes into the mix, such as animals, human figures, etc. The surface modeling in Fusion isn’t an easy tool for it. Hence the search for an alternative app for organic modeling.
Forward looking, I want AI to save me the time to learn the hard skills that are involved. Imagine we can just tell AI to make a cat model, then look at it and tell AI to tweak it exaxtly to our liking. Our imaginations, our ideas, our designs, carried out by AI as a modeling assistant. We don’t even need to know what CAD features or functions are involved, how to use it, or what function we may be unaware of that could have been a better choice, or what new features are coming. In short, let AI handle the tedious work and free us to focus on creative aspects of the design.
I am thinking that this AI thing is being way oversold at this time. I have played around with it a bit. To me it is very much like telling a 4 year old how you would like him to do a moderately complex task. Eventually you just have to do it yourself.