Silo or Blender for box modeling?

[wburton]

I feel that Blender's power resides in its ability to animate, 3d paint, bake, simulate and render but not modeling. It seems that the essential modeling tools are spread between 3 pannels, in the spacebar search menu, and the rest are assigned to various hotkeys. That really makes modeling frustrating so I've been looking at Silo to fill that hole.

[sprt]

To me, personally, silo feels a lot faster to do things in. And it's practically the app that made me like box modeling, lol. Additionally, you might want to try daz3ds hexagon 2.5, as it's similar in vein (or voidworld, which is a copy of silo).

But yeah, I'd say Silo hits more closer to home for some. Go to nevercenters site, they have a 30 day trial and see if it's something for you or not. http://www.nevercenter.com/silo/

It's really more of a comfort issue, imho.

[Patrick Griffiths | Indieworx]

I totally understand where you're coming from, I have years of modelling experience now and I still struggle to use Blender as is out of the box, I always have to configure things and change a multitude of hotkeys and options for me to be able to work efficiently within it.

Silo you won't have an issue, it's build for modelling... It's not trying to be an everything in one tool, and it definitely excels at what it was created to be used for. It does have a sculpting like feature although it's not the type of sculpting you will see in Zbrush, Mudbox, 3D Coat or Blender, i uses displacement scrulpting, which is very handy at times, and you will also be capable of unwrapping your models in Silo too. (it also has some good retopology tools too)

Its very easy to just jump in and use Silo, if you understand the basics of modelling then you'll have a little jump start already but if not, it's so easy to use that you will definitely be able to follo wany Maya / Blender modelling tutorial with Silo, because the interface is so intuitive and simple. Anything you can't find on the GUI you will find in a menu or options panel, which is very well documented within the manual.

I always recommend Silo to people who come to me saying that they struggle to get to grips with Blender, and yeah Silo isn't free but its a minimal cost and the power of the tool is just amazing. The modelling woorkflow is spot on and you're not disrupted by having to remember a butt ton of hotkeys and you don't have to continuously switch modes and such like with Blender, although that being said, there are hotkeys, and you can change any and all of them at will too, but there are no strings of hotkeys like with Blender, so it's much easier to remember them, and then you don't even have to, because of the on screen GUI that will have everything you need for those times when you do forget the hotkeys...

I've mostly used Maya for years because it's my go to software, but after using that and jumping into Silo the firs ttime that I used it, I can honestly say that it felt so smooth and I had no trouble adapting, where I had so much trouble trying to get used to Blender.

Do with this information what you will, but I highly recommend trying to demo from the homepage like 'sprt' suggested!

They also have some decent tutorials on the home page too, some things to look into aside from box modelling would be 'path' modelling and also Sub-D modelling workflows.



Kind Regards,
Patrick Griffiths.

[wburton]

Thank you. I'm going to play around with the trial version of Silo and probably end up buying.