There have been many programs in the 3D world which has been inspired by other applications/competition, none such more than Wings3d. This package heavily inspired by Nendo and Mirai is a pure Sub Divison modeller brought to you by Björn Gustavsson and a very small team of dedicated developers.
This package automatically breaks itself off from the mainstream straight away simply because of one thing, it’s free. Because of this many people assume that “free” equals good, but not as good as a commercial application. This simply could not be further from the truth.

Ooooo PRETTY!

Modelling as a process devoid of any particular medium should be an intuitive one. In the digital world one of the most direct ways to be intuitive is to have a well designed interface, one where you can get your tools without having to look high and low for them. Well… Wings3d certainly has taken this theory and ran with it. Very much like its inspired packages, its interface is minimal to say the least (that is on first glance). There are a few regular looking menu pulldown’s and a viewport but apart from that, you’re looking at Wings3D in its entirety.
This is what initially scares off half the users, but a package which isn’t cluttered down by various editors and shelfs stacked with icons and buttons forces you to concentrate solely on the viewport……your work.

GO WITH THE FLOW

Wings3d is a selection operation modeling paradigm, which some may find a hindrance at first, but because the selection process is fast, intuitive and secure, it becomes very natural, very quickly. Pre-Highlighting is now becoming a standard in other modelling packages and Wings3D has almost had it since its first release.
One favourable feature within Wings is the ability to change hotkeys at the flash of a button, you may think that this not need talked about, but when you hand off a model to someone else or for some reason you are working on a different workstation with a fresh install and need to setup quickly, this is an invaluable time asset.
Wings3d was made purely as a modelling application, in its concept and execution, so thankfully there are various formats that it can write and take in, .obj, .fbx, .3ds, .ndo, .ai and more to help it fit into that personal pipeline you have at home or the intricate one you have at your studio, even if its based on Linux or OSX machines.

Though one thing that Wings forces upon its users is its no tolerance of models with holes, it will automatically cover them up, this proves difficult when you just want a flat plane or are working with interior parts, nevertheless this is one aspect you will need to get used to, especially if you are importing/exporting models.

The only Workflow front which is below par is rendering, Wings3d does have an inbuilt renderer, which tweaked can output some nice OpenGL images but on the whole it’s not really an adequate service. Plugins and other renderers are available such as Yafray, Toxic and POV-ray, and while these external renderers are able to produce some outstanding results with features that are more common in today’s world of rendering such as HDRI and Global Illumination, there is a lot of work needed to integrate them more closely with the Wings GUI. Though what Rendering issues Wings may have it certainly makes up for with it’s powerful UV tools.
Hopefully in the future these areas will work with Wings more seamlessly but if you look for another free alternative Blender has a great rendering solution with Yafray.

GIMMIE THAT KNIFE TOOL

People may say tools in Wings3d are awesome, or that they are nothing new, from an objective standpoint they simply “just work”. They do what they are intended to do and with a simplicity that can rival some apps. Until a recent version there wasn’t a cut tool in Wings3d, the main way of creating new custom edges was the connect tool (select 2 or more edges or vertices and connect between them). There are other various ways but this was the main method.
I must say with the current version of wings I still use this methodology and I’m sure many others do.

Wings has an array of tools that I cant go into for space and boredom issues, suffice to say they are competent and you will waste no time using them. The only thing that Wings3d suffers ultimately from is it’s no frills approach to modelling. It’s something that I actually like; there is nothing to distract you from your model and finding the necessary tools for a specific job.

Wings3D in my eyes is a high-end modeller that’s free and is very competent in the world of Sub Division modelling, it has its flaws but the benefits outweigh them and I encourage you to at least try it and if you give it the time of day, it might just surprise you.

RELATED LINKS

www.wings3d.com
www.yafray.com
www.povray.org
www.toxic.com

http://p212.ezboard.com/bnendowingsmirai
http://forums.cgsociety.org/forumdisplay.php?f=83

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wings/wings3d_manual1.6.1.pdf?download - Manual