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| Reviewer |
Matt
Vollman |
| Review
date |
January
2006 |
| Software |
SILO
1.42 |
| Developer |
Nevercenter |
| www. |
www.nevercenter.com |
| Price
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$109
US £64 UK |
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3D
Modeling in general seems to have a very steep learning
curve. Huge packages tend to quickly disorient, frustrate,
and often times discourage people from modeling in the
early stages of their development. I know this because
it happened to me. However, I have been lucky enough
to find a few packages that make modeling fun and easy
to learn even as a beginner. In my opinion, Nevercenter's
Silo 1.4 is definitely one of those.
The
default interface is easy to understand, and it does
not require you to hunt through complex tab or menu
structures for basic operations.
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A row of six buttons at the bottom easily allows you to switch
the left hand controls to fit whatever part of the modeling
process you are in. From creating primitives, to selection tools,
and operators: everything is either in plain sight or contained
within a 'right click' menu. Silo defaults to a single view
port with a grid background. With a little bit of practice the
key combinations become second nature allowing the user easy
navigation. |
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default interface of the current
version 1.42
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While
Silo's default interface is incredibly intuitive, the true
power of its interface lies with its ease of customization.
Every component is customizable: keyboard shortcuts, menu
images, color schemes, and even the positions of elements.
Nevercenter further encourages this personal exploration and
adaptation of their package by devoting a section of their
web forums specifically for user submitted customizations.
here
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The various tools in Silo make it easy
to select and edit your mesh. Selection tools such as
select ring/loop and expand selection have consistently
saved me massive headaches while modeling. Turn edge,
create polygon, split polygon, and the split tool are
surprisingly easy to learn and incorporate.
As a beginner myself, I understand
the importance of community, and Silo has one of the
best communities I've seen. The
Nevercenter forums are always active and it is possible
to learn a great deal about 3D Modeling without even
owning SILO.
Silo tutorials and reasonably priced training dvds are
many, and unhealthy egos are few. Nevercenter also seems
to understand the importance of the community and is
very open to user feedback. They show this with such
things as adding a 'feature request' section to their
website, and updating the site content rather consistently.
As with everything, Silo does have
a downside. While it is an incredible subdivision modeling
package, Silo is not a complete solution. If you are
looking to fully render your meshes or rig and animate
them you'll have to look elsewhere. However, Silo does
help this process by allowing you to easily export your
meshes in a wide variety of file types. There is a facility
to send models to render into Renderman compliant rendering
solutions like Aqsis
but this is not really for someone new to modeling.
Lack of a strong object management system is a little
frustrating when you get a very complex model going
and the absence of a history panel/stack is noticeable.
These things are regularly discussed at the forum and
I assume will be remedied in the soon-to-be-released
Version 2.0
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Image
taken from `Get Into SILO by Glen Southern`
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Things
like a strong understanding of community, an intuitive and
customizable interface, easy to learn tools, and an economical
pricing structure prove to me that Never center is dedicated
to making a package that works for its users as apposed to
making their users work for their package. So, while it's
true that Silo doesn't render it is still an incredible modeling
package.
If you are new to modeling and ready to step up from snowmen
modeled with primitives or a more advanced modeler looking
to streamline your work flow, I highly recommend that you
give Silo a try. They even offer a 30 day non-crippled trial,
so that all you really have to lose are many hours of pulling
vertices. In summary, I would recommend anyone new to modeling
to try this program. It is a cheap and powerful modeling solution
for the first time sub-division modeler.
Matt
Vollman January 2006
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