The easiest 3D app to use is Cinema4D, but it's pretty expensive. I've played with Silo a bit and its quite nice and pretty cheap too. It doesn't have animation capabilities though.

wings3d is another option. Its great for beginners. Good Luck.

I found Deled to be very easy and it just has simple 3d manipulation tools so you can get hold of the concepts of 3d modelling easier.

I've heard a lot of good things about blender. I started off with 3d studio's when it was still in the dos days so I've stuck with that all the way through it's max incarnations and find it the easiest to pick up and use. Though it's not free but I think they have a free version called game studio or something along those lines.

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Original post by Anonymous Poster I wonder why nobody has taken the Blender sources and redesigned it's UI so it can be powerful and easy to use.. Maybe because they make $ from selling books and tutorials? It's baffling how there honestly is no "easy to use" 3D modeller around.

Probably because everyone has a different idea of what is "easy to use".

i do not understand what everyone is talking about with blender being hard to use. i just started messing around with in on monday, and today i made this www.cjwr.com/images/sword.jpeg i know it is hardly professional quailty, but i didn't put a lot of work into it, and blender is easy to use imo.

Dude, you just stuck 3 blocks together and resized...that would be simple in any program...try creating a more complex sword and you will see how much a pain blender is(though it does pay off once you get the use of it).

It seems that everyone is in agreement that Blender is a pretty powerful modeller, but also most people seems to agree it's a bit tricky.

Given that I'm expecting to put very little time into learning a new app (I just want some extremely crude place-holder models), which free modellers best fit me? I'd like to be able to drag vertices around, apply textures and set material properties, and auto-generate basic geometry (boxes, spheres etc).

I'm really looking for something I can install and immediately start using, rather than having to print out 100 hot-keys and follow detailed tutorials to get anything done... does such a product exist?

Its been said before, but wings3d is really an easy modeller to get ahold of (took me 15 min before I could use it well). It also has an unwrapper, .3ds and .x exporter and raytracer (yafray) plug in. Its really easy to learn, powefull enough for any model you want to do and has some great features. Plus its free w/ tons of support and tutorials. Good luck.

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Original post by d2king10 Dude, you just stuck 3 blocks together and resized...that would be simple in any program...try creating a more complex sword and you will see how much a pain blender is(though it does pay off once you get the use of it).

actually no, i created that completely by hand. no precreated shapes were used in it's creation.