Wings 3D

Quick and Fast: A funny little 3D modeling program. Wings cannot animate. I’d say it’s for graphic designers who want 3D. I’m sure it makes pretty cool 3D photos.

Where to get it: http://www.wings3d.com/ Windows, Mac and various Linux platforms.

When you open the program, you may be a little surprised as I was and wonder where everything is. There are a total of 13 buttons in the interface (Open, Save, Undo, Redo, Four buttons that switch between Object, Point Edit, Edge Edit and Face Edit modes, Preferences, Smooth View, Orthogonal View, and visibility toggles for the Ground Grid and Axes).

I was so lost, that I closed the program and didn’t open it again for a few weeks. After learning Maya, I came back to discover the truth: in Maya, you push the spacebar for some things; In Wings, you right mouse-click for everything! Also, your right click menu changes depending which mode your are in: Object, Point, Edge or Face. Wings also utilizes keyboard shortcuts for everything. Perhaps because of this, it takes many steps to do something simple like make a box the correct size for your project. One other thing, Wings only has up to 32 levels of undo. Be Careful!

As mentioned above, Wings is only a modeling program; you cannot animate. Anim8or, Blender and Art of Illusion are linked to the site and seem to be recommended to make your models come to life. What you’d do is create your models in Wings, save them as OBJ files and then import into one of those programs. For that matter, you could even import into the Animation module in Jahshaka! Wings can also texture, light and render, so if you are simply interested in making 3D logos/graphics, you will want to look into this program.

Altogether, I don’t like Wings much. The workflow isn’t my style, with right click only modeling, etc. My opinion is what’s the point of a 3D program that can’t do animations?

Tutorials: There are some good ones linked to the homepage and here: http://nendowingsmirai.yuku.com/forum/viewtopic/id/871 There is also a PDF User’s Manual you can download from the website. 

License: That’s a good question. The website doesn’t say. Wikipedia says it’s under BSD license. You may use for commercial purposes. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_license for more info.