3D design packages

[SteveC]

Hi all,

Do you know of an easy to use 3D design program? I could use something like lightwave but I wouldn't know where to start.

What is is, is that we're doing some decorating at home and before I do some work, I want to draw it up first, and I though it might be cool to do it on the PC. It'd be cool if I could import my own textures too.

[omegaRED]

Well it depends ... i cant think of an easy to learn 3D App OTOH, but i know that i had a hard time starting w/ LightWave 6, but i picked it up with MAX3 right off ...

So i guess it depends. I "connected" with MAX right away, because most objects are made by primitives of some sort, or by extrunig a custom shape, and editing it afterwards ...

All good 3D programs can use custom textures, MAX has a separate folder for them, called maps (which is ~600Mb in my case), and all you need is a pciture, most types will do (.gif, .jpg, .tga, .tif etc)

Also, MAX has a good way of applying the textures on an object, and you can tweak the position, tiling, size etc of the texture map ...

As you`ve noticed, i use MAX4 So i`d reccomend that, though i dont know how long it`ll take you to start with it ... From what i can gather, you arent really interested in some serious work w/ some complicated 3D program ... maybe someone else can recomend a simpler program with limited capabilities that suit your needs ...

[Indiana]

I found Cinema4D quite intuitive - but all I know is the old Amiga version, dunno how the prog has changed in the meantime

[dsp]

I personally learned Truespace, and found it pretty easy to learn (at least the basics). And it definitely has a fair bit of power in it for the better 3D user.

I'm not creative and I found myself able to do some pretty interesting stuff with it.

dsp