3d editing

[jseiler]

Now that I have my probe working (thanks guys!) I am looking for a simple, reasonably priced program for cleaning up my scans. I looked into blender and wings, but blender is a bit more than I want to get into and wings just doesn't seem to like to display my scans very well even when converted to .obj or .3ds (I think it might be operator error). Any other suggestions? I'm mostly looking for smoothing functions.

[Brady Watson]

ZBrush may do what you need, but fair warning...I think that aliens wrote the program as the interface is very convoluted. Sculpting/smoothing in 3D does not come cheap.

-B

[jseiler]

I thought the same thing playing with blender. I wish someone would reinvent the user interface from sketchup and put it into a detail oriented 3d package. rapidform looks pretty nice, but hobbyists can't afford that kind of money to just play.

Off to try zbrush.

John

[paco]

I use Blender regularly for such tasks and I think it's well worth the effort to learn it if you need 3D modeling capability. It's actually the same story for about every 3D CAD/modeling applications I've played with. It's always a matter of spending time with the tool; first fooling around to get comfortable.

Check out Apollos's Blender Underground (especially the video tutorials - you want part I, II, and III) and Kernon's Blender Newbies. Those are GREAT resources to learn about Blender.

If you can learn Zbrush, you sure can use Blender!

If Blender doesn't feel comfortable for specific task, I turn to Rhino.

[jseiler]

Thanks paco. I just did a scan of a ceramic tile I bought. It came out pretty nice, but it really needs some smoothing out.

I'm going to start watching the videos next week. I started video 1, very nice. Thanks again.

John