Although my main interest is in programming, I do enjoy playing about with simple ideas for artwork and general visual themes for the projects I work on. I feel that the look of a game is important and that a great looking game with poor game-play will probably succeed more than an ugly game with fantastic game-play. I don’t approve of this obviously but it does seem to be a rather unfortunate truth.
This can be a problem for smaller development groups as it would be financially unwise to hire a full-time dedicated artist, and freelancers aren’t cheep either, but for their products to compete they have to look good. I however am still a student and although art assets are still important and will help with first impressions I still have to spend the majority of my time coding as that is what I am predominately assessed on. This means that when I do have to create art assets of any kind I don’t want to spend hours and days learning some new software package but rather I want to be able to throw something together fairly quickly.
As a student any professional 3d modelling software package is well outside my price range, although many of them do offer student discount, however any student editions of software do have restrictions on what you can do with content created using them and I generally don’t want to spend ages learning something that if I ever want to utilise for a commercial project will cost me too much.
One of the most popular alternatives to commercial modelling software is blender. I’m well aware that blender is a very powerful bit of kit and apparently even surpasses its commercial rivals at certain things. It is however mind-bendingly terrible to use and completely counter-intuitive in its controls. This is my personal opinion and I know all the arguments against me, arguments which seem to revolve around people that don’t understand it being thick, or not investing enough time in it. Personally I don’t have the time to invest in it as at any one time I am generally working on two or three fairly large coding projects for my classes at uni and also several smaller ones for my own amusement. As for the claim that anyone that doesn’t understand it is thick, that’s just crap from folk that don’t want to admit that not everything they do is perfect.