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Blender or Gmax?

Thralni

Thralni

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netherlands
Hello all,

I've been a longtime user of MSFS, and now Prepar3D, and want to take the next step: develop my own scenery. I've already started my firts project, taking baby steps while following some of the truly excellent tutorials, here and on Youtube, available to us. I
m currently messing with the photoscenery, making water and blend masks, annotating autogen... I'm steadily getting a feeling for the work involved.

But, soon I'll have to move on to the the 3D modeling and making of ground polygons, etc. My question to you, as I'm starting with an entirely clean slate here, what 3D modeling software would be recommended? (I guess 3DSMax might be an option as well, as I might be able to get a student license. But, it seems like that might be total overkill for me?)

I have both Gmax and Blender installed right now. I used Blender several years ago for an unrelated project, and while I surely forgot everything, I remember it as being a powerful piece of software. Further it seems to me that it may have more updated support for the likes of P3Dv4, for example, whereas Gmax appears to not go much further than FSX. Though I understand many of basic building blocks of 3D objects are the same across all these platforms. My concern is more with animations and such... I know absolutely nothing (yet) about all these things though, so maybe my concern is wholly unfounded? The pro I see for Gmax is that it appears to be more widely adopted by the FSDev community due to its long legacy and support by Microsoft back in the day, resulting ina wealth of specific tutorials available for Gmax that I'm not sure are available for Blender.

What would you all recommend for me to use? Once I get familiar with one piece of software I'd probably rather not switch, so whatever I choose, I'd probably end up using for a while to come...

Thanks,
Benjamin
 
If you’ve already used Blender for some time, stick with it: you’ll find Gmax weird. I learned Gmax and years later looked at Blender: it seemed weird to me. I hope you’re getting the picture, stick with what you know!
 
Thanks for your I input! At the moment I would consider myself a clean slate as I haven’t used blender in years, and really don’t remember much of its use. So, with an eye on the future and the respective support for new features coming up in Prepar3D, would Gmax or Blender be a better fit, or does it all just come down to personal preference? That’s kind of the question I’m trying to figure out :) I’m leaning towards Gmax somewhat because of the wealth of tutorials available for FS development in Gmax...
 
I've only dabbled a bit with Blender but I'd say it's the way to go. Gmax doesn't support P3D and it's a bit dodgy on Win10 with the FSX gamepack.
Blender has built-in support for rendering including generating baked shadows (ie. Ambient Occlusion), has much better and more modern/automated texture mapping support and can work with modern texturing tools like Quixel or Substance Painter. It also has much better support for import/export of different model formats. In contrast Gmax has no rendering support, texture mapping is good but the methods are less automated and more primitive, and import/export support is intentionally limited (but there is an OBJ import script that's quite useful).

Gmax is a good program and great for FS9 or FSX development, and I would also say not a bad tool for beginners in that you can learn good 3D modeling principles without too much complexity or automation in the way. Its support for animation is excellent. That said if I was starting out today I'd just go with Blender. The 2 programs have enough differences in user interface and workflow to make it difficult to move from one to the other, though all the basic 3D principles are the same.

There are other modeling programs that have affordable home or indie licensing such as AC3D. I don't know why sim developers like P3D and FSW only support 3DSmax which is ultra-expensive instead of supporting something affordable (or free like Blender). I was glad to see that Aerofly FS2 added support for AC3D.
 
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So far I've only build up experience with Blender and i'm loving it. since it is
- free, (for always)
- highly customisable to one's own needs
- supported by a active global community
- 100% open through the usage of the Python-Blender API

My advice, just go ahead, try both on a little scenery project, feel the one that is right for you, and keep the about facts in mind.

If you want to get started with Blender, take a look over here.
My "starter kit" contains a lot of categorized LINKS to tutorials in the Blender field
-https://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/resources/blender2fsx-toolkit-getting-started-guide.191/
 
Thanks for the input Barry and Ronald! Sounds like Blender is ultimately the way to go in this day and age. I appreciate the detail in your response, Barry! I had no idea the differences were that big, though I shouldnt be too surpised, as it seems like Gmax hasn't been in active development for years now... Ronald, those links sound exceptionally useful. I'll make sure to look at it!
 
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