That was a bit unexpected, I got some serious optimisation to do!
While trying to learn blender, I almost bar a few small things before it goes to the next stage, completed my tank wagon.
It was an interesting project and the modelling took a week longer than I wanted, most of it is because I am trying to undo the way Max works as this is now muscle memory (GMAX which got me into modelling works way differently than Blender) and the unique ways that blender works. For example, the way you start an object in Blender requires working from primitives, I work mostly with splines in *max these days which is massively different. When I completed a spline, I can add a surface modifier or an extrude modifier. Blender so far, from what I noticed unless someone wants to leave a comment, you have to convert the spline to a mesh (curve in Blender) which means you can’t edit the spline once its a mesh without undoing everything, whereas in max, you have a modifier stack and you can go back several iterations to make a minor change
Blender has more advantages though, it works on anything, I have it on my tablet, phone (as I am avoiding the iPhone at the moment), in fact, anything that includes OpenGL – that isn’t my remote desktop annoyingly. Plus Blender 5.0 completely changes the file format, making it incompatible with earlier versions apart from 4.5 LTS. Which means the version on my tablets is Version 3.6.22. Yeah, annoying. The version on Ubuntu ARM from what I tried is 3.0.1 from memory, which is even older!
Getting it to work on my Windows On ARM laptop – the Lenovo Thinkbook X13s is a royal pain in the arse and requires some hackery and I’ve not tried the Mac yet.
Max? If it runs Windows, it works. If it runs Wine, it doesn’t, even more frustrating as I have had 3D Studio Max 5 working for a demo in Wine – once. That’s it. Otherwise, Virtual Machine time for Windows. More space needed, more overheads for limited resources and more hopes and dreams needed. It does work without Open GL on the 2 old versions I’ve tried – and they work in a virtual machine.
If you want to play with the source files, download below.
(Download here – Google Drive)
3 file formats included, blend (original), glb (used on this site) and FBX (if you fancy a different program as well as the blender iterations I went through. (3 of them)
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