Greetings again all, My brother and his wife are both artists and fairly decent with a computer but nowhere near programmer-calibre. They have both expressed interest in working with me on some OpenGL stuff. I would love to get them started on that but just don''t have the thousand bucks to shell out for Rhino. Anyone have any suggestions for alternatives? I don''t even care about animation to be honest with you - I''d just like them to be able to draw me a scene, and either photograph or draw and scan the textures and apply them, then send it to me as a 3ds file. I''d love to hear any suggestions. Thanks Joe

I found two good, 3DS modelers. The first is OpenFX, I think it's at openfx.org. The only problem with it is that when you export 3ds models, it doesn't include the textures, which is a pretty serious problem. The other is Anim8or, at, I think, www.anim8or.com. It works pretty good, better than OpenFX, but it doesn't do Boolean operations, at least not that I've discovered. So there are two choices.

[edited by - variant on February 24, 2003 2:49:16 PM]