"Farlo" <hall.j.m@att.net> wrote in message
news:Xns93B1B449E1F55halljmattnet@68.12.19.6...
Depends on what you are trying to render and model.
Are you looking to do mechanical objects, products, static items?
Environment? Indoors, outdoors, level of detail, lighting...
Photorealistic look, or more of a 'rendered' look?
Animation? Simplistic animation or character development?
Different software has different strengths and weaknesses, and it always
depends on what you want to see in the end.
I have beed noing 3D since the early 90's, since autocad was in release 10
and came out wioth a true 3D vector graphics and came out with 3D Studio,
and bu now have used dozens of different applications.
Mos of the places nowdays have demo versions that are locked with a number
of days or number of uses that can be downloaded for free, that will allow
you to test it out before you buy.
Two of my favorites, when you combine the price with performance are Bryce
and Poser. I love Bryce rendering capabilities and ease of use, I love
poser's ease of use for basic animation and characters. I love 3d studio's
flexibility, but find it cumbersome for small projects. I love the look you
get out of lightwave and ray dream rendering engine, Autocad works great for
terrain models and blocky rtectangular geometrics but the rendering end if
it sucks, I like Rhino for nurbs modelling, I like Canoma for extracting 3D
models out of photos... I like the realsam you can get out of Terragen...
many others...
and Maya... ahh *drool*
It will probably thake ytou a few months of playing to just ebvaluate most
of the demo's, which can be fuin and learning experinece.
Flash MX apparently does a lot of 3D now, so I hear. I haven't upgraded to
MX suite yet,
