To each their own -- I find Wings3D's single-button mode much more intuitive.

If you'll forgive my n00bish ignorance, could you elaborate on Wings3D single button mode?

I've downloaded W3d before but was unable to use it because I thought it required 3 mouse buttons, but after reading your posts it seems that this isn't the case. I did a google search and a text search though the manual to no avail.

I'd like to get started in the 3d realm, but so far haven't been able to.

Download their PDF manual -- it explains usage with 3 and 1 buttons pretty well. I believe, also, that the prefs window for the Mac client has a single-button-mouse checkbox.

this book looks pretty good. has anyone read it?

Maya is probably the best, and you can get the educational edition free.

Cheetah3D is an excellent entry-level 3D package, and Silo is a very fast and fun polygon modeller.

I stepped from seven years of Raydream/Carrara to Blender last week. I really regret wasting those years. Blender is just great.

Fenris Wrote:I stepped from seven years of Raydream/Carrara to Blender last week. I really regret wasting those years. Blender is just great.

Your journey to the dark side is now complete.

Fenris Wrote:I stepped from seven years of Raydream/Carrara to Blender last week. I really regret wasting those years. Blender is just great.

I bought Raydream back in '97... It turned out very useful, you know, to pretend I had more books on my bookshelf... (I can't seem to find a picture on Google - nope I don't have a digital cam. either )

Ray Dream Studio 5 was released two weeks after I bought RDS 4... and it added polygon editing, physics, 5 bundled plugins to render sky/lens fx, etc, and made rendering 2x as fast They sent me a nice letter asking me if I wanted to upgrade for "just $99.99!" a week later

I see now that Blender has finally added a real Undo... (no, pressing U wasn't a good design choice, and it only worked on some places). I'll give it another try.

Edit: BTW, my current favorite is Wings 3D

I learned blender about a year ago and haven't wanted to use anything else since. In my opinion, it is well worth learning. I learned everything from one PDF file that I downloaded off of one of the websites. I think it was http://www.blender.org. Then go to documentation. One of the downloads is a large tutorial that takes you through everything. I thought it was great! Also, .OFF files are great for import to OpenGL, though I haven't figured out how to import texturing. Maybe that's not included in the OFF format.