lol. good rant. Alias is strange. I've tried it. If I had Maya or 3DS Max, I could recreate the characters and make exact copies instead of trying to clean scans. I've tried all of the products and I find them to be easy to use for simple tasks but the core of the program requires much time to learn. Lightwave is okay and a few others. I would love to move into the 3d realm and recreate all of the characters that I like. Twisted Metal is where I would start. I am too busy to get involved with 3d modelling but it is better than 2d editing which is flat and predictable. Much like television, 2d art is made 3d via lighting. I went to school for videography and sound engineering. Ended up teaching myself how to program and repair computers. I am an award winning artist, but I do not have the time to draw for covers. Maybe one day I will draw for a cover, scan it and use PI to add color and effects.
I might have gone a tad overboard. Been a rough few weeks
Alias is so busted because it builds surfaces, not solid parts, which lets you cheat the SHIT out of your forms, hence why it takes a ton of work to clean up Alais models to be of any value to an engineer. The interface has a huge learning curve and its rendering capabilities, though amazing, are incredibly dense and VERY tough make the most of unless it's like the only thing you ever do (see Daniel Simon for some AMAZING renderings).
It does a have a really cool built-in sketch program that works almost exactly like Photoshop and has a FAR superior set of drawing tools. If I did more digital drawings, then I'd use it exclusively for the line work that it allows. It responds to tablet use perfectly, allowing for beautifully feathered lines and none of the jittering that you get when drawing with Photoshop. The interface is a tad clunky though. Organizing layers is a headache.
I'm really only so bitter about Alias because it's what I was taught in college as if it were industry standard for Industrial Designers, and it's NOT. Only a handful of really large companies use it like the auto industry, Nike, etc. And even then, the designers themselves don't always use it. The auto industry has "sketch monkeys" and Alias modellers. The two don't really overlap. So annoying. Meanwhile all of the rest of us that don't work for these select companies are stuck with knowledge of a program that a) is largely useless for most every other purpose, and b) has almost no similarities to a solid builder like Solidworks which makes learning a "real" 3D modeling program that much more difficult. I had to teach myself Solidworks in order to be at all competitive in my field, which really pissed me off after spending 5 years in a program intended to teach me all I should have needed to go out and be competitive. Ugh.
Man, I can't imagine spending the time to re-build 3D models for covers :/ I've done original 2D art for a bunch, and even that's sorta crazy IMO (luckily I'm sort of crazy).
I hear ya on the time thing. I find myself with just about zero at this point. I killed myself getting the artwork done for the Zelda sets I made. I'd love to take on more 2D artwork projects, but that crap is so time consuming.
