This month my 3DS Max subscription is due, and I had saved to cover it, but then I thought hey, why spend money on it if I don't have to. The indie version already saves me a lot of money, only $450 a year compared to the normal $3000, but while it used to be easy to justify the cost as part of the business, now it's just a very expensive tool for mostly model railway stuff:)
The answer, apparently, is Blender. This is free, and everybody uses it these days, plus Asobo now support it for MSFS development. I've tried it before, and couldn't make it do anything, but last month I tried again, and after a lot of false starts, I'm starting to make progress. Youtube is great, as always, and I've been following the donut tutorial by Blender Guru, hours and hours of video just to model a donut. I didn't really have any use for a donut in my scenery, but I persevered.
Here's the result, just to prove how far I've come:
Anyone can make their own donut, you just need to download Blender for free, and spend hours and hours frustratingly trying to follow the tutorial. All good clean fun, and non-fattening, apart from all that sitting.
Of course you can't even pop your finished donut into MSFS, as the sim doesn't support the required geometry nodes (something you'll learn about). The first screenshot is using Blender's 'quality' renderer, which doesn't like MSFS textures, although it does handle the normals -- again, you'd learn all this if you had a go.... The second shot is the quick and dirty Eevee renderer, which doesn't look as good but has all the textures.
If you exported this for the sim, you'll lose the sprinkles, though, so I won't be releasing Rob's Flying Donuts any time soon.
I use Blender 3.3, which is the officially supported version for MSFS, plus the latest 4.2. You can install whatever and however many versions you like. When I did a search for version 3.3 the first result was the Microsoft Windows store, which is weird, but it's great to have it installed as a Windows app.
Get Blender here.
And here's the donut bloke on youtube.
At the moment I'm trying to finish NZPP using Blender, but still in that awkward phase where everything is difficult, and I keep forgetting how I just did something. Some weird happenings, with tools just disappearing, and it isn't as 'polished' as the expensive 3DS Max. At one point I was zoomed in on a cabinet to tidy up the mapping and one of the office chairs just cruised through the view. It is either haunted or somehow I accidentally added an animation keyframe, probably the former.
A huge benefit of moving to Blender is that I get to exercise my brain, and get to recall a lot of swear words from the old GMAX days.
