I use Blender. Its free, pretty powerful, but a steep learning curve. I have been using it for several years and really enjoy it. It recently went open source, so hopefully that will allow the addition of some nice new features.

Hi,

I use NEWTEK's INSPIRE. INSPIRE is the little brother of lightwave (much less $$$!)and is very powerfull. You can create objects, texturise them, animate objects, camera and lighting, export in .avi or image sequence with alpha channel ...

Gilles Vero

trueSpace 6.0 (soon will be 6.5) and Cool3D Studio (less and less recently). trueSpace has unusual interface but it's fun. And it was a good deal when I bought it. I would be on Blender perhaps if I new about it before I found trueSpace.

BTW IMPRESSION from Newtek is discontinued. A pity. Anyone knows if there is information about it and whether you can find a copy for sale somewhere?

Alexei

I fool around with a several 3D apps:

Poser 4, for figures and animation (Poser 5 is out, but the consensus seems to be its a dog. I haven't upgraded)

Bryce 4, for landscapes (don't use it much, but its pretty cool. Espirit's Vue seems to be coming on strong as a competitor)

Simply 3D 3 (later version of what Chien mentioned above). Don't know if this available anymore. Micrografix died several years ago, but its a great little program, perhaps comparable to Ulead's Cool 3D. Includes tons of 3D objects and animations. Plus, you can animate a texture on an object with a moving avi. Eg, you could have a 3D cube spinning on its axis and moving around 3D space, with any avi as the animated texture. Over the top for most projects, but it has its uses.

G

If you're into making characters and far out 3D objects take a look at Amorphium. Was originally just a Mac application. I only got the orignal Windows version and liked it but didn't use it too much. It has a huge amount of controls to adjust everything and a good but odd interface similar to Poser's. I just looked at their web site, boy, they're up to version #3 already.

http://www.electricimage.com/products/amorphium/overview/amorphoverview.htm

Back in college we used Maya 1.0. Back then (in '99) it costs about $30,000, but dropped to the amazing low price of about $3-4000. Maya comes with more then just a 3d model/animator though. If has a 3d pait program (for paintingyour objects) and a 3d compositer program (to place your 3d chars in video footage. Does your shadows too). Some other utils too (such as video game export), but I forget if they are included anymore.
That's a little priccy for me (and probely you) though. There is also Rhino, which is much less expensive, and does curnves and such, but doesn't do animation (last I used it anyway).
Of course, I've been using since college for the metaballs. those are just so cooooooooool. :)

Another thing to consider is using a game like Quake 3 or Unreal Tourtmant 2003 for your 3d. The editors are getting so good for those games, and the graphics are starting to look as good as anything in an expensive program (take a look at pictures from Doom 3), you could always go that route. of course the same rules apply that do in normal 3d programs: you must use your own textures or have permission to use them.

I use the underrated Carrara Studio 2. It's a sleeper 3D app for everything. It's very easy, yet powerful to animate and add cool 3D effects. Highly recommended. I've tried TrueSpace 5.2 (interface is to crowded, hard to grasp), Lightwave 7 (steep learning curve, but very powerful) and 3DS Max 5 (very nice, just couldn't get into it). I use Amapi V6 for modeling- best modeler out their bar none!

I'm new to video editing and awaiting my Vegas 4 DVD+. I can't wait!!

You can also try this link to freeware 3d apps and further links to the commercial programs


http://www.computerarts.co.uk/downloads/3d/apps.asp

I use Cool-3D Studio. Works rather well and is loaded with plenty of samples, examples and special effects. You can create video with alpha channel and overlay it in Vegas or other video software. Extremely cheap for all it does.

go to www.ulead.com

Ulead's Cool 3D Studio and Caligari's TrueSpace 5.1 (soon to be 6.5).

Gilles,

"I use NEWTEK's INSPIRE. INSPIRE is the little brother of lightwave (much less $$$!)and is very powerfull."

I also use Inspire 3D, but I found it to be very limited. I guess the biggest initial annoyance to me was that you couldn't bring a bitmap into Modeler as a reference to sort of "trace" your model building onto. For example, I wanted to scan the picture of a butterfly and import that bitmap into Modeler and then build a wing skeleton over the picture. But Inspire 3D has other limitations that reduce its value for Vegas users. The following is quoted from an old post, with a few insertions relative to Vegas:

In a general sense, Inspire has been dedicated to still-image and web-graphics creation, so things pertaining to full-resolution animation and video have been removed:

Inspire vs. LW 5.6 (what's been removed)

General:
· Layers have been reduced to 4 (from 10).
· Undo levels have been reduced to 8 (from 15).
· MetaNURBS patch division can not be user defined. They are always patched to level 3.

Display:
· The magnify tool has been removed allowing only Zoom.
· The Measure and Angle tools have been removed.
· The BackDrop button has been removed. Images can no longer be used as templates for modeling and the OGL/D3D/QD3D background color can be set on the Options panel.
· The View orientation options have been removed.
· The Grid untis option has been removed.
· The Grid Snap options have been removed.

Rendering:
Inspire 3D will be limited to rendering less than 640 by 480 pixels when creating an animation, or image sequence. [This limitation hurts Inspire's use with Vegas.] However, Inspire 3D will allow images to be rendered up to 8,000 by 8,000 pixels one image at a time. This will prevent users from creating television or film animations,

· Field rendering is removed as it is only useful for users creating animation for video.
· Adaptive sampling has been removed.
· Camera lens control has been reduced.
· NTSC widescreen option has been removed (this function is useful for television) [More bad news for Vegas users].
· Film Size has been removed. (This function is very useful for matching the LightWave camera to live footage that will be composited with LightWave animation.)[More bad news for Vegas users]
· Depth of Field has been removed.

· Device control has been removed. (This allowed users to control video recording devices to output animations to video).[More bad news for Vegas users]
· Render GL has been removed. This is a rendering engine created by Intergraph that allows very fast images to be created by using OpenGL acceleration to assist in the rendering process.
· Fader Alpha mode has been removed. This was a function useful for video production.

Objects Panel
· Bones have had muscle flexing removed.
· Distance Dissolve has been removed. This allows an object to disappear as it moves towards a user defined distance.
· Edge Z Scale has been removed. This feature allows greater control over the cartoon style edges.
· Self, Cast, and Receive Shadow have all been removed. These were advanced options for determining how an object reacted to shadows.
· MetaMation has been removed (Plug In).
· Morph Gizmo has been removed.
· Deformer has been removed (PlugIn allowing Bend, Twist, Shear, Pole, Taper, and Vortex tool s in Layout).
· LazyGUI has been removed, LazyPoints has been left in (This is a simpler version of LazyGUI).
· LScript has been removed.

Lights Panel
· Global Lens Flare Intensity has been removed (This allows the user to control the intensity of all lens flares in a scene with one controller).
· Enable Shadow Maps and Lens flares buttons have been removed (This allowed users to turn flares and shadow mapping off for test rendering purposes).
· Lens Flare control for Streak Density and Sharpness has been removed.
· No Diffuse option has bee removed. (This allowed lights to be added to a scene without effect the brightness of the objects in the scene. This is useful for adding lights that will only create a shiny highlight on an object, but won’t effect general lighting of the scene.)
· No Specular option has been removed. (This allowed lights to be added to a scene without creating any shiny highlights on objects. This is important for complex lighting scenarios that requires very specialized control over ambient lighting, such as creating the illusion of light bouncing of walls, etc.)
· Area Lights have been removed.
· Linear Lights have been removed.
· Shadow Map area control has been removed. Shadow maps will always be calculated inside the SpotLight cone angle, rather than allowing custom user entries.\

Effects Panel
· Foreground Fader Alpha has been removed. (This was a video function.)
· Steamer has been removed.
· Sky Tracer has been removed.
Options Panel
· Show Field Chart has been removed.
· Show Safe Areas has been removed.
NetWork Panel
· ScreamerNet has been removed.
· Motion Graph Panel
· Jitter Plug-in has been removed.
· Parent Plug-ins have been removed.
Animation
· Inverse Kinematics has been removed.
Modeler:
Objects Tab:
· Numeric control has been removed for all primitives. This reduces the accuracy at which a model can be created. However, Modeler has excellent grid snap capabilities to remove much of the error of freehand modeling.
· Create Point has been moved to the Objects panel.
· The Options panel has changed to add Radial Segments. This allows users to set how smooth spheres and other round items will be without numeric control of these items.
· The Surface button has been moved to the Obects tab to be more readily available.
· A new Fonts button has been added to the Objects tab to allow users to load fonts. In LightWave the Numeric option for Text was used for this. This removes the ability to numerically place and size text as well as control over the text smoothness.
Modify:
· Numeric control has been removed from the modify tab.
· The Center plug-in has been given it’s own button on the Modify tab.
Multiply:
· Knife has been removed.
· Patch, Skin and Morph have been removed.
· Lathe, Extrude, and Mirror are instant action items. No confirmation is required.
· Drill, Solid, Drill and Boolean have been moved to the Multiply tab.
· Subdivide (Faceted, Smooth, and Metaform) has been moved to the Multiply tab.
· The Polygon Tab has been removed. Moany of the functions have been relocated on other tabs.
· Set Value has been removed.

As you can see from the above, Inspire 3D had a considerably reduced feature set, several of which severely reduced its value to Vegas users, as compared to LightWave. It is too bad NewTek didn't provide any patches and upgrades to Inspire 3D. There was talk of an Inspire Version 2, but it never came to fruition. Several of Inspire's "anti-video" limitations do hurt its use with Vegas. There was an attractive limited-time offer (nearly two years ago) to upgrade from Inspire to LightWave, and I took advantage of it. LightWave is much more capable than Inspire for providing material, such as NTSC AVIs, that you can use in Vegas. And Vegas can provide sound tracks for LightWave's silent 3D videos, so the two programs complement each other very well.

-- Seeker --

I can't believe nobody has suggested Cinema 4D R8 (www.maxon.de) ...if you can afford the base package then it has the best performance/price/quality ratio out there! It is used on lots of film/tv work now as it is very ez to learn, stable as Vegas( ans thats saying something for a 3d app!) , and renders fast and like a dream.
Think of the title intro of Spiderman the movie and you will know its potential quality.

Animation Master is good if you want nice, cheap character animation, but buyer beware of many hidden gotchas!

Steer clear of Amorphium as the timeline/interface sucks bigtime and no motion curves on timeline for realistic motion...even moving titles-but the Flash exporter is nice.

Blender is free and fantastic but some gotchas that should be fixed in upcoming revisions, such as no proper undo and limited import/export options unless you want to use scripts.Will be killer down the track, especially with the free renderers such as Yafray and Virtualight.

Wings3D is a fantastic, ez to use and free polygonal box modeller..get it now (www.wings3d)

If you just want to do titles...try the stuff at www.reallusion.com ...more for the non 3d person, but very nice results. Ulead products stink in my opinion, as I have bought most of them in the past..the new 3D studio is just way too slow and has no shadows option- from memory.

I could go on...but this is the cream of the crop for the budget user.