hi, i would like to make a model of a car from scratch. i know its hard to model cars as many people hav informed me of this. however im not sure what program to use, someone i know sugested 3d studio but where can i get it, is it downloadable for free or is there a better programm to model projects??
Any replyies are welcome and appreciated.
is it downloadable for free
Not legally. 3D Studio MAX is a commercial (and pretty expensive) bit of software.
Autodesk does have a free modeler: GMAX, but you’d still need to convert from one of the supported file formats.
There’s Blender, which is free, but I find it impossible to get into.
One cheap editor is Milkshape3D, which I find easy to use, even though it is a very primitive way of modeling (vertices and triangles instead of solid modeling).
Milkshape is nice but not free (30 day trial).
You may want to take a look at http://www.wings3d.com/
which is free and really easy to use.
gmax! Same thing as 3dsmax, basically.
You can have 30 days free trial for 3D Studio MAX. After that, you may change your computer time to continue using that 
Originally posted by p55dom:
hi, i would like to make a model of a car from scratch. i know its hard to model cars as many people hav informed me of this. however im not sure what program to use, someone i know sugested 3d studio but where can i get it, is it downloadable for free or is there a better programm to model projects??
Any replyies are welcome and appreciated.
DONT! Change the Computer Clock… if you change it, the 30 day trial will turn into a 7 day trial.
Maybe you should start with Maya. There should be a free Personal Edition 
Btw, I wanna program my own game engine soon
A pretty large project, but I wanna do it
Maybe you send a link to a good tutorial ?
(Start with GMAX or Maya and not modellers like milkshape…)
thanks for the reply’s fellas, but will gmax or maya work with my code, im using c++ builder 6 opengl format.
Originally posted by p55dom:
thanks for the reply’s fellas, but will gmax or maya work with my code, im using c++ builder 6 opengl format.
The question actually is reverse - will your c++ code compiled with builder 6 be able to use gmax or maya format for opengl rendering. Can’t answer for sure in your case, but many people answer this question for himself as “yes”.
maya ple and gmax have closed file formats, they are not meant to be for content creation, but learning.
the purpose is that licensees (such as id, epic…) pay them money to get access to export their data out of gmax in a gameformat.
gmax e.g supports .md3 export. ie you can build models in gmax and export to q3’s modelformat, then add support for .md3s in your game engine.
anyway export from ple and gmax aint trivial and to my knowledge always linked to a special game. so if you can import that game’s format, then you are fine.
but you cannot import gmax/mayaple own format, nor write your own exporters for them.
Well said, CrazyButcher!
Every so often, someone asks about importing models into OpenGL. Almost invariably, the answer is “use Maya”, gmax, blender or other closed/unworkable file format tools.
As CB so lucidly explained above, this won’t help you!
I suggest using the free-beer Anim8or modelling tool to create 3D Studio MAX type meshes (.3ds files), and any of the free-speech model loading kits like lib3ds, Display3DS, view3ds, etc. to load the mesh into your OpenGL code.
Geez.
*.3ds or *.obj are soooooo common file formats that 99.99% of graphic editors (commercial or free) can import/export them. So you can use ANY editor you like to create your models and export them in a readable format.
3dsmax can export, for example, *.3ds and *.obj files; Maya can export *.obj files and there is a free *.3ds import/export plugin on Alias website.
For 3dsmax you can also use EaseImport/Export
for *.3ds files: lib3ds
for *.obj files: obj loader
from 3dsmax you can also export *.ase files - easy to parse because (like *.obj) they are ASCII.
I hope that helps.
P.S.
As Peter Keating said:
Originally posted by <Peter Keating>:
Every so often, someone asks about importing models into OpenGL.
Maybe there should be a sticky on this topic…