I was just over at the "Welcome"-section and a new member said to be curious of trying out 3d-art, but because the applications are so horribly expensive, it's a problem.

Oh, and especially the people who think perspective-drawing is difficult, please read on, because this application takes care of that problem.
Infact, you might understand more about perspective-drawing if you actually work with "real" 3d-objects for a while.

Well, there is a complete Free application called "Blender" that is of extremely high quality and you can produce the same kind of results as you would with software costing $1000+

Just look at this gallery:
Blender Gallery

Is 3d-modeling in general difficult?
Actually, not really!
The common method is, like often with drawing, that you start from a primitive shape, like a cube (instead of a square when drawing) and then continue adding rough forms by deforming the cube in various ways and "extruding" "limbs" out of it if necessary and so on..
However, if you download this program and just try to "model" something, you most likely get nowhere at all. It's an absolute must to go through the basic tutorials carefully to understand how things work, otherwise you will just think everything is impossible and get frustrated.

Also, one thing to add about "Blender" is that the User interface might seem "strange" in the beginning. As it has been developed by a certain kind of people, they have decided that the most effective way of working is for the modeler to constantly have one hand on the keyboard ('a', 's', 'd', 'f') to be able to access modifiers quickly, instead of using the mouse to browse menus and clicking on tons of buttons.
Once learning this, modeling should go very rapidly.

Without further ramblings, download the software, go through some tutorials and see if you like the results you are getting.

Blender Homepage


Oh, and I attached a little picture that I did several years ago with another software to learn a bit how to model.
[attachmentid=667]

/Janne

This would be something that I would be interested in but it looks way to computer tech for me to figure out.

If it's interests you, you should surely give it a shot.

This looks like a very interesting program Teaspoon. Thanks for telling us about it. The gallery isi impressive. I'm presuming that there is a steep learning curve to get to that level though.

I'll download it later and play with it. Sounds like fun.

Hey all, I have played with Blender in the past, it is simply an amazing program. Yes the learning curve is steep, however the payoffs are amazing. I cant remember which movie it was, but I think Pixar used Blender at one point to help create their movies, tells you just how powerful it is.

If you are interested in 3D imaging, then a program called Bryce is very well known, learning curve isnt as steep, and the price is about 100 US. Here is the link... http://www.daz3d.com/program/bryce/

Cheers.

Paul

I think everyone interested should take a look at this video "tutorial" of creating the human ear.

Modeling the human ear

It is a stream on Google video and quite big (80mb, I believe), so if you have a slow connection, you will probably have to wait quite a while before you can start watching it.

Anyway, because when you first try Blender, it will just look overwhelming and too difficult to use, I hope this video will show that actually using Blender for even complex modeling is easy if you know which keys to press keys.
But then again, an ear (at least to me) has complex forms, so obviously modelling such a high-detailed ear as the pro does is difficult in itself.

I will try to get hold of the tutorial for the actual head, because I think it is modeled very differently to the ear (which has been created from "patches" rather than from a cube, which is faster).

Okay people, if someone would like to see how to model a face, you can get it from here:

Modeling a face in Blender

login: drawspace
pass: drawspace

I think my upload speed is isn't that good, but it's better than nothing.
(if someone has a server to put them on, then it would be nice, because I cannot have my computer running all the time).

Also, there is a video that introduces people to the blender interface. If you are going to start using it, maybe it would be a nice thing to look at.

i love 3D work i have photoshop and its so hard to use lol i dont have a clue how to use it but i need the basics of drawing before anything else but would love to play with Clay and other Things like colleage and etc.. and i have no clue on perspective-drawing and i find it so difficult i have a 16 kg bag of clay in my flat and i havent touched it in a year lol only cost me £16 sad huh??

I have no clue about any of that stuff .. I love working with Playdough..lol

Just adding my two cents. Newtek Lightwave 3D is a good full package 3D software as well. The reason I use it is that I personally find it more artistic than technical compared to other 3D application out there. Just a link to some of my 3D stuffs done with Lightwave:

http://www.kevinmangaroo.com/3dcharac.html