I've been building a wooden ship model kit that I got many years ago, and have utterly enjoyed the process of trying to create something that is both historically accurate, as well as aesthetically pleasing. The selection, preparation, and treatment of the materials used is a huge factor in creating something desirable.
Let's just say I find more value over taking a few weeks to experiment with various wood aging and staining techniques to get just the right look for the weathered decks than I would tweaking a shader.
In my opinion beyond a certain level this is also happening with plastic models - the kit gluing is a small part, reshaping the odd parts, adding historical accurate details and finish are the main parts. And funnily, most people doing this also build parts of the detail on the computer nowadays.
https://www.trebuchet-magazine.com/biggest-ever-tractor-beam...
> trebuchet-magazine.com.
hehehe.
Edit: the link above is about laser tractor beam but the Australian National University also built a water tractor beam, and this is what I wanter to show you:
There's much more uniformity than there used to be. Creation tools now import and export glTF. That's a neutral format and is becoming the industry standard. Until recently, people were trying to move content around in proprietary formats such as .obj and .fbx.
There's NVidia Omniverse, which is a way to link together multiple tools on the same model in real time.
Portable behavior is tougher, although the USD people are working on that. The coming thing there is Unreal Engine's "verse", but it's too soon to see how that will work out.
A big problem now is importing some high-detail model and getting terrible performance. Level of detail generation needs more automation.
3D creation tools are hard to use. It's a really hard user interface problem.
https://sites.google.com/site/modelitproject/learner-centere...
https://web.stanford.edu/~roypea/HTML1%20Folder/Covis.html
