Thanks to Brian from the CS department at Aalborg University, I now have my original post back. Thanks a lot!

I’ve always wanted to become better at 3D modeling ever since both my senior project as well as after finding out how cool graphics are going to be in desktop applications like Windows DreamScene as well as Beryl, but getting a 3D modeler for less than $300 is pretty tricky. Most of them like Maya or SoftImage|XSI cost a ton of money, and the free ones are usually pretty limited editions of their costly cousins.

The Blender project has just released the newest version of their 3d modeler and while I knew about this project before this, the program has come a long way. However, here are some things I found to ‘fix’ what I originally didn’t like about Blender.

• Originally, once I figured out how to pan the camera around, I thought, “Man, Blender’s rendering is awful!”. That’s because I didn’t realize that Blender draws everything in Orthogonal mode by default. Hit ’5′ on the Numpad and everything looks the way it should. Orthogonal mode is actually quite handy though when you’re trying to line stuff up.
• Blender’s rotation mode is set to trackball by default, which might make sense to professionals, for me it means that I often end up gimbal locked at some funny angle. In preferences, you can change the rotation mode to Turntable, which fixes it.

I’ve been following the Blender n00b to Pro tutorial and it’s pretty decent, I’m hoping to use Blender to make some great 3D animations for my final in ISE 573: Cognitive Interface Design class; we have to design the systems to coordinate a bomb squad and I’m in charge of designing the interface for the robot bomb disarmer. It’s especially tricky because the professor did his master’s thesis on controlling robotics in these kind of situations, so I’m sure he has a lot of opinions on the subject.