There are about a zillion 3D modeling tools. Most of the less
expensive or free tools that I have tried don't work very well or only
do a part of the job or are difficult to use. Surprise, surprise. As
a branch off my study of Takeo Igarashi's Teddy and TPainter, lately I
have have doing a little research into blobby objects / implicit
surfaces / metaballs and came across what looks like a real gem. I
haven't actually tried it, but it looks more exciting than most. It
is Cosmic Blobs at
http://www.cosmicblobs.com/ and aimed mainly at
kids. The web site is very cool and hopefully the product is too. I
was drooling. This is one time when I would allow myself to be a kid
again.
When I asked them about the ability to export the 3D models they
replied that Cosmic Blobs only exports the 3D models in VRML format.
No animation export.
But, they said, why don't you try our new product at
http://www.cbmodelpro.com/ because it exports other formats.
I did. It's currently in beta and therefore a free download of about
12 MB. It is a blob/metaball-based modeler with painting and
texturing. Cool! No animation (yet?). It is obvious that it is not
completed, but what is there seems to work well. The first playing
around model that I made came to 40 MB when I exported it as VRML.
That's a little large, but it contains all the texture bitmaps in
hexadecimal in the .wrl file. I guess that I need to work on the
Croquet VRML importer again!
A couple of interesting current research projects that I also came
across are at
http://www.unknownroad.com/projects/shapeshop/ and
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/graphics/pubs/thesis_jpa.pdf
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