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Question for the digirati and other geeks – Words' End
Posted on by vika

Question for the digirati and other geeks

I’ve never done any 3D modelling, and would like to play with it. Is there a cheap or free program for OS X that is quickly learned? My time is stretched thin right now, so I’d rather stay away from Photoshop-like complexity. My requirements are easy, really: I’d like to manually create a bunch of nodes (doesn’t matter what they look like as long as I can name them), define connections between them, and then see a 3D representation of the resulting structure. Preferably, a representation that I can turn about and see from different angles.

Later on, I’m gonna want something that will take an XML-encoded text, process it according to the rules I give it, and spew out a 3D representation of that text. But that’s sort of a pipe dream; for now, I’m more interested in a very basic DYI. Does such a beast exist?

4 Replies to “Question for the digirati and other geeks”

  1. to you I say perhaps Blender, or you could try Quartz composer which comes with the 10.4 dev tools…

    Also sketchup which is a commercial, architecture type program, but I think it might work, esp if you find some models for the nodes.

    Has a wonderful interface and the demo works fully for 8 hours and saves and everything from what I remember.

  2. something to note is that “3d modeling” and “easily learned” don’t really go hand in hand. So, if such a beast did exist, it wouldn’t be cheap. Blender’s user interface is a bit of a beast. I’ll ask my industrial design friend if he has any opinions.

  3. Ok, my Industrial Designer friend said this:

    —

    http://www.lukelab.com/lab/noder/

    http://www.3d-node.com/cmsimple-en/?Home

    http://surf3d.com/

    http://www.soft.com/eValid/Products/Documentation.5/Mapping/3Dsitemap.html

    http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/software/weboogl/about.html

    http://www.wilmascope.org/

    http://bioinformatics.icmb.utexas.edu/lgl/

    http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/projects/graphs/

    http://www.caida.org/tools/visualization/walrus/

    http://www.redfish.com/research/graphLayout.htm

    http://www.cs.usyd.edu.au/~aquigley/3dfade/

    http://tgrip.cs.arizona.edu/

    http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/~mccrory/bioandgraph.html

    there are so many apps that do this… your friend needs to google it.

    —

    He is one of those vague kind of geniuses, so he didn’t specify what he google for. He may not understand precisely what you want to do, but there’s some stuff to look at.

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