3D apps even have full DX9 shader materials in viewports. Like Max for example. You can use the standard max material editor, more or les the way you would for pre rendered stuff, and max will create shaders for you that simulate this material. You can also save out the material as a .FX of HLSL file. on top of that you can load in these files and apply them to your models in max, giving you a WYSIWYG environment to work in.
I usualy end up doing environments and level building more than I do charcter stuff, more and more games are using regular 3D meshes instead of Legacy BSP stuff in modern engines since GPU's have come a long way and can throw pretty complex geometry around.
This isn't quite the case with blitz which uses a 5 year old API to render graphics with, but it still allows for a lot of flexibility, particularly if you have something like the excellent B3D pipeline exporter that Pudding created for 3dsmax-Blitz.
It's actually better than a lot of commercial engine pipelines, allowing you to create in game cut scenes and only requiring about 10 lined of code in blitz3D in order to play it back in its entirety with fully animated lights, cameras, fog, brushFX, UV's (you name it)
In this case you can use max to its full advantage, and set up or play back pretty sophisticated scenes and environments.
You can't expect the cheaper shareware tools to compete directly with the high end apps in all fronts, but some do prove to be exceptionaly good at key areas that they target specificly. like Wings for organic modeling, unwrap3d for UV mapping and translation between formats.
And then you have tools like sswifts new seamless texture tool which does an amazing job of preparing your digital images for working within realtime environments.
I usualy end up doing environments and level building more than I do charcter stuff, more and more games are using regular 3D meshes instead of Legacy BSP stuff in modern engines since GPU's have come a long way and can throw pretty complex geometry around.
This isn't quite the case with blitz which uses a 5 year old API to render graphics with, but it still allows for a lot of flexibility, particularly if you have something like the excellent B3D pipeline exporter that Pudding created for 3dsmax-Blitz.
It's actually better than a lot of commercial engine pipelines, allowing you to create in game cut scenes and only requiring about 10 lined of code in blitz3D in order to play it back in its entirety with fully animated lights, cameras, fog, brushFX, UV's (you name it)
In this case you can use max to its full advantage, and set up or play back pretty sophisticated scenes and environments.
You can't expect the cheaper shareware tools to compete directly with the high end apps in all fronts, but some do prove to be exceptionaly good at key areas that they target specificly. like Wings for organic modeling, unwrap3d for UV mapping and translation between formats.
And then you have tools like sswifts new seamless texture tool which does an amazing job of preparing your digital images for working within realtime environments.