Price has little to do with features. Basically most packages that do 3D text rely on exporting as some "movie" file typically AVI which is what really does the animation.

You can get a lot of "juice" just playing around with the 3D plug-in offered free from Satish. If you want to get more fancy and control the edge of the text like changing the bevel, depth, shadow bump maps, shine, lighting that kind of thing there are many 3D text applications out there. Most aren't really expensive. If you're going to use the text in Vegas, much simpler to make the background color in the 3D program some color you won't use in your project then chroma key it out.



If you can wait Boris Red soon to offer a super powerful plug-in for Vegas that will do lots of things is one item at the top of the scale both feature wise and with a price to match. Corel Draw an old standby is excellent also. I frequenly use Xara 3D.

http://www.xara.com/products/xara3d/demomovies.asp

It has many of the bells and whistles and easy to export and inport into Vegas and is dirt cheap besides. The latest version can even export as Flash vectors.

The difference with programs that are capable of doing vectors is you can blow up or shrink the text to any size and not pick up a case of staircase pixelation.