Unit 66: 3D Software

Autodesk

Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational software corporation that makes software services for the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media, education, and entertainment industries. Autodesk is headquartered in San Rafael, California, and features a gallery of its customers' work in its San Francisco building. The company has offices worldwide. Its U.S. locations are California, Oregon, Colorado, Texas, Michigan, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Its Canada offices are located in Ontario, Quebec, and Alberta.

The company was founded in 1982 by John Walker, who was a coauthor of the first versions of AutoCAD. AutoCAD, which is the company's flagship computer-aided design (CAD) software and Revit software are primarily used by architects, engineers, and structural designers to design, draft, and model buildings and other structures. Autodesk software has been used in many fields, and on projects from the One World Trade Center to Tesla electric cars.

Autodesk is used by making various sized polygons that can be edited in several different ways. In Autodesk the user is able to make very small but intricate designs that can be joined together to make one larger design. the benefit of this is that each individual part can be edited and tweaked to fit the users desires and needs, also they can edit the part to fit the design so that it is flush rahter than having to completely remake something in one piece.

ZBrush

ZBrush is a digital sculpting tool that combines 3D/2.5D modeling, texturing and painting. It uses a proprietary "pixol" technology (see below) which stores lighting, colour, material, orientation, and depth information for the points making up all objects on the screen. The main difference between ZBrush and more traditional modeling packages is that it is more akin to traditional sculpting.

ZBrush is used for creating "high-resolution" models (able to reach 40+ million polygons) for use in movies, games, and animations, by companies ranging from ILM and Weta Digital, to Epic Games and Electronic Arts. ZBrush uses dynamic levels of resolution to allow sculptors to make global or local changes to their models. ZBrush is most known for being able to sculpt medium- to high-frequency details that were traditionally painted in bump maps. The resulting mesh details can then be exported as normal maps to be used on a low poly version of that same model. They can also be exported as a displacement map, although, in that case, the lower poly version generally requires more resolution. Or, once completed, the 3D model can be projected onto the background, becoming a 2.5D image (upon which further effects can be applied). Work can then begin on another 3D model which can be used in the same scene. This feature lets users work within complicated scenes without a heavy processor overhead.

Game Engine/ Epic

The Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games, first showcased in the 1998 first-person shooter game Unreal. Although initially developed for first-person shooters, it has been successfully used in a variety of other genres, including platformers, fighting games, MMORPGs, and other RPGs. With its code written in C++, the Unreal Engine features a high degree of portability and is a tool used by many game developers today, with it being source-available. The most recent version is Unreal Engine 4, which was released in 2014.