silo is by far the best 3d modelling app I have ever used. I am not sure if its geared towards beginners but you will get moving with it very quickly and has a really good community.

I also think Wings3D is an easy and powerful modeller, and it's free. It only does modelling though, no animation or rendering, and not much UVmapping.

Blender is (allegedly) powerful, but after trying to use it for 6 years, I've given up. It's not for me.

XSI Softimage is very nice, but fairly expensive. Much cheaper than 3dsMax and Maya though.

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Original post by Anonymous Poster That's funny. In about any post anywhere online concerning the use of Blender, a good 80% will agree it is "not intuitive", "hard to use", "not for beginners". Even you said this about 5 posts ago. If we basically agree there's a problem with the interface, why not fix it? Why is there no "fork" of the sources? There are 10,0000 versions of Linux. How many versions of Blender, our flagship OSS 3D modeller? Or is it so bloated and poorly written that we programmers cannot do it? I'd like to see it happen...someday.

Unforunately, the Blender community, like many open source projects, is full of zealots, who will defend it to the death and get rabidly angry at anyone talking badly about their product. Not all of them of course; there are some nice and open-minded folk there. But generally, any talk of "Why can't blender be easy to use like all these other apps?" is met with "STFU NOOB! All commercial apps suck and you've just been brainwashed by corporate america and micro$uck!! Blender's actually really easy to use and you're just too dumb to know it!" Ah well. I'm a little bitter about blender.

Luckily, they have FINALLY started to give into some of the requests that were so long dismissed as "for noobs", like transform widgets, and a standard view rotation. It might get better in time; we'll see.

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Original post by makeshiftwings Quote: Original post by Anonymous Poster That's funny. In about any post anywhere online concerning the use of Blender, a good 80% will agree it is "not intuitive", "hard to use", "not for beginners". Even you said this about 5 posts ago. If we basically agree there's a problem with the interface, why not fix it? Why is there no "fork" of the sources? There are 10,0000 versions of Linux. How many versions of Blender, our flagship OSS 3D modeller? Or is it so bloated and poorly written that we programmers cannot do it? I'd like to see it happen...someday. Unforunately, the Blender community, like many open source projects, is full of zealots, who will defend it to the death and get rabidly angry at anyone talking badly about their product. Not all of them of course; there are some nice and open-minded folk there. But generally, any talk of "Why can't blender be easy to use like all these other apps?" is met with "STFU NOOB! All commercial apps suck and you've just been brainwashed by corporate america and micro$uck!! Blender's actually really easy to use and you're just too dumb to know it!" Ah well. I'm a little bitter about blender. Luckily, they have FINALLY started to give into some of the requests that were so long dismissed as "for noobs", like transform widgets, and a standard view rotation. It might get better in time; we'll see.

I know people like that in real life. [grin]

They are suprisingly close to what you described!

Anim8or is the easiest one

Don't just go for the 'easiest' package....

You should look at a program's features and get it for them rather than its ease of use. Although the user-friendly trait is desirable, it shouldn't act as the deciding factor.

Probably is for me - if I can quickly create simple shapes and set texture coords, material properties then I'm happy. I don't want to do modelling - just on a par with knocking up a logo in paint!

Blender is the sort of program in which you have to dedicate about an hour to NOT just screwing around, but reading tutorials and learning your way around by having something that actually tells you what to do. Simply screwing around in Blender before you know your way around is fantastically unproductive. I tried it, and got nowhere. So take Blender, read the tutorials out there, get yourself acquainted, and then you'll be all right. The interface is highly unintuitive, but it is for the most part highly consistent.

And highly efficient.

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Original post by videodragon20032003 And highly efficient.

More like it has capasity to be efficient. If you don't know about certain feature (hot key) then you are unlikely to use the feature because the you don't have any means to use it. On the other hand once you learn how to get access to certain features then it becames efficient.

Of course this is true with all the modeling applications. But what makes Blender different is that you need to discover all functions, while more intuitive software will show you what functionality is available for use at the moment. Hotkeys are not meant to replace graphical user interfaces, but to support them. In my opinion Blender community (developers at the very least) should read and learn more about user friendly user interface designing. At the very moment, nobody can really claim Blender's user interface to be intuitive since it relies purely on user knowledge. If you don't know some feature exist, you can't take advantage of it.

I am not to bashing Blender but expressing my own opinion about Blender's current state, as I see it... Power users might disagree and if they do, maybe they should enlarger their perspective and ask "who is Blender made for?" [smile]