Very pertinent!

I work for a company (mobile games) that is really open about the tool used in production (according you don't ask for a solid work license to draw 4 cubes).
I'm more a tech artist there days, but I use Moi all the time when I need to quickly block out something, or for quick prototyping ... it's my best companion.

I have meet a good amount of concept artist, and from what I can see, for them it's all about speed ... I have seen many of them using sketchup, blender, zbrush.
They don't care that much about topology, normals, uvs, polycount ... and most of the time, after a little demo, they embrace MoI, for non organic work of course.

The fact Moi produce crisp poly model is also an advantage, at least you can provide some useful model later on. Even if "they" probably will be rebuild from scratch to fit in the pipeline, it's not a nasty triangulated mess to start with :)

I work in the Entertainment Industry and use Moi3d all of the time in it.


In our business, everything needs to be in polygons, regardless of where the data comes from.

The closest in similarity to Moi3d is Fusion 360, and some artists have been creating quality work with it. Its really popular with hard surface designs and concept work.

The other CAD apps out there are focused for Product / Industrial / Automotive Industries so the workflows will be to convoluted for Entertainment needs.

I'm currently a Concept Artist at Marvel in the film Art Dept., having moved from Architecture / set design and film drafting. Rhino is used quite a bit in the drafting world in set design (I was a big SkUp user because of Architecture) and MoI is a fantastic tool to integrate nurbs into your workflow. If you are looking at Set Design or Props, MoI will be a great way to learn the nurbs/profile mentality and incredibly useful to communicate to scale with Props especially (as they love a nice clean .3dm usually.) I'd then move into a package like Rhino if that was your bag. I would say if you would like to - build - things (to be a film Art Director, say) stick with CAD packages they can take you pretty far. Something's real-world scale is very important...Edon and artists in a similar vein generally have little contact with Construction or Props directly as Concept-ers usually hand off models to the drafting team or Art Directors who rationalise it. Game design, obviously this isn't a concern.

If you are looking to purely concept or illustrate...I'd highly recommend ZBrush for its ability to act across most object topologies and high poly counts. The key factor is being able to work across both organic and inorganic very quickly (ZModeler is an incredible hard surface tool.) I've been through quite a long process trying to marry everything together and have come to MoI and SketchUp for most CAD based solutions (set design, props) ZBrush for illustration/concept. 3DCoat is discussed a lot but ultimately falls short for a few reasons (was a user for several years), one being the slightly buggy tools (just have a browse on the 2021 bug release forums) and the lack of good help/tutorials for new users. I agree the ZBrush UI is very confusing at first, but there are so many great tutorials out there you pick it up quite quickly so it becomes a non-issue.

BTW relax on the age - I got this gig at 37 eep, it's nothing to do with age it's your ability to hang in there (also you'll never be 'good enough' even when you get there!)

- Rich

Good points Rich, I totally agree.

I love MoI's efficient UX and clean UI. MoI keeps amazing me when it comes to how few actions are needed to establish a relatively complex shape.

ZBrush is indeed a fantastic tool for high-polygon sculpting. MoI, ZBrush and Keyshot form my holy 3D creation trinity. I set up my scenes in MoI, blend everything together and add details in ZBrush, then render the result in Keyshot.

I also own 3D-Coat, and have worked with it for a while. Despite featuring lots of great tools, 3D-Coat's brushes just don't feel as fluid as the ZBrush brushes. A lot of 3D-Coat tools are just a little less competent than the ZBrush equivalent. For example, ZRemesher is just a bit better than Autopo.

─ Metin

visualizer • illustrator • 3D designer — metinseven.nl

I can't speak for all avenues of the entertainment industry, but I can speak for the practical effects side of it. The company I work for has made 3d printing pretty much the backbone of its business, so almost 90% of what we do first goes through some form of DCC app before its becomes a tangible asset. What I have learned over the years is that each software has its place and are better suited for certain tasks. Moi3d has taken over the lion's share of my hard surface modeling due to the fact that I have to interact with the mechanical engineers that are building the animatronic substructures of what ever it is we are making. Being that Moi is a surface modeler its much easier on them to give them step files that they can directly work off of as opposed to an OBJ file that not many CAD programs can work with. That said I still use programs like Maya, Modo, Blender, Max to do certain jobs that just seem a little tricky to do in Moi in a timely manner. Like organic hard surface models that have a lot of compound surfaces that are just faster to do with SubD surfaces and don't require the cad like precision. For full Organics models like characters and creatures, Zbrush is used pretty much exclusively. So for me its more about what the job is and what is the best tool to get the job done in a timely manner. Pretty much every day I use a combination of Moi, Modo, and Zbrush to achieve my daily tasks. But again my duties are 3d print orientated.
For concept art, if your focusing on creature or character, Zbrush will probably get you 90% of what you need. If your looking into hard surface having some knowledge of a poly modeler will be useful, be it z modeler inside z brush or a traditional 3d animation packages like modo/maya/blender. Moi is also useful but probably more for a supplementary tool. Concepting need to be quick, and plenty of variations happen, so using Moi as a primary tool may not be the right choice unless your design very mech orientated designs. That said, Moi is still a hell of a lot faster than traditional cad programs like Fusion or Solidworks for getting an Idea out. Plus there are occasions where It can be definitely faster than traditional poly modeling when it comes to building clean hard surface shapes.

I guess where I am getting at is don't try to shoe horn everything into one program, leverage each program's strengths and mitigate their weakness. Knowing that you'll be able to maximize your productivity.

Cheers,
Greg