Blender or Mikshape

[Muffinmix]

I say have them both.

[Ad Bot]

[Tofu Plx (Rine)]

MS3D if you want to model, or blender if you want a program that tries to do too much, and ends up tripping over itself constantly.

[Headcrab Zombie]

ends up tripping over itself constantly.

What exactly do you mean?

[Muffinmix]

or blender if you want a program that tries to do too much, and ends up tripping over itself constantly.

MS3D does nothing BUT trip over itself. You can use Blener to clean up the stuff MS3D left behind while you were modeling, like forgeted up shadows and broken shading.

[Packer]

If you manually shade in MS3D you shouldn't get any problems, the auto shading system is pretty bad on most programs.

[Spiderobot]

I personally think blender is better and that is only because of a miracle worker named super3boy on youtube. His tutorials rock! He goes over them nice and slowly and it just rocks. He has his own website www.nystic.com and there are some videos not on youtube there but you learn a lot from him. He has over 30 blender tutorials. to request a tutorial he always has the link in the decription but its forum.nystic.com His yotube account is the following link.
http://www.youtube.com/user/super3boy

Agreed

[Smartie87]

Isnt Google Sketchup for making building/house designs virtually?

[A GUY]

what about maya? i've never modled before

[Headcrab Zombie]

I think there's a dts exporter for Maya.
But it costs a couple thousand dollars.

[jetfire]

blender, or sketchup

Btw, does sketchup have a "trial" period?

[adc90]

The professional version of SketchUp has a trial version.

[Antallion]

Blender ftw, just look up for tutorials. We did a small course on it in IPT as well as the teaching giving us a 42-something page .pdf on it.

[Zeebie]

can sketchup really export in .dts? I love that program!

[E_net4]

can sketchup really export in .dts? I love that program!

I don't think so. You can still export it to another format and import it into MS3D/Blender/Whatev.

I say, if you get Blender to work, then you're done. I'm still trying to make the material work. I get a white flat-shaded model. 

[Space Guy]

Blender has many useful functions, its only problem may be the interface which is confusing for beginners.

It's open source - designed by programmers, not graphics artists - so the program is probably easy to use for anyone who actually codes it.