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Original post by methinks These things all depend on the art style you are looking for. If you are looking to do 8-bit sprites, paintbrush and a mouse will be more than sufficient. Anything more complicated, and you need a better program, such as photoshop (Or GIMP, which is free). At this point a tablet is HIGHLY recomended. Not absolutely neccessary mind you, you can do it with a mouse, but the tablet makes it so much easier. You don't even need a big one - the basic Wacom 5x4 is a great way to start, and it's cheap, especially if you get it off of ebay.

M8, I think you're a bit lost...

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to get into the 3d side of the industry

So he won't be doing 8-bit art nor any other kind of "more complicated" 2D art.

The only use he can do to the tablet is for making "paint-like" textures (like the ones at Neverwinter Nights), in which case using the mouse skillfully will be more then enough.

And that only if he'll be making the textures himself (btw, I am supposing hyp007 is a he, if not, change all the he/his by she/her), but if he gets into a team and he's only the modeller, the (lets face it, they're quite expensive, at least mine has a mouse too ^^) tablet would only be at any use for him to carry the breakfast into the bed :/
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I found the 3DMAX tutorials really useful, I highly recommend to do the UVW mapping ship one, you'll both learn how to model from boxes and how to apply textures on them (I did than one when I started with 3D MAX 6, don't really know if it's still there on version 7)

And a personal appreciation if you're not doing Low-Poly modelling, it's better to have a lot (and i mean A LOT) of simply details than a single ultra-complicate model. But that's IMHO.