New here. Looking for program recommendations

[davful]

Hi,
I am new to the whole concept of 3d animation and creating 3d environments and just have a few questions that I hope some of you good folk out there can help me with.

To begin with I suppose what I am looking to produce would be the best place to start. What I am after producing is a 3 dimensional race track (as in a horse racing track) which I intend to have animated horses running on. What I would like to do is create a number of different tracks, each with their own backgrounds and distinctive layouts.

I have scoured the web and there seems to be an enormous amount of products out there. Just wondering what would be the best ones to apply to such a project.

Can you give recommendations for the animations and also creating the racetracks.

Finally just a little about my background. I work as a developer mainly creating VB applications and databases for business use. I have strong programming skills so using some of the more complex programs out there might not be beyond me. Been toying with the idea of game development for a while now and are ready to give it a whirl.

Cheers,
Dave

[Bjoernke]

Hmm... VB eh?

So what exactly is it about Macintosh 3d game programming that intrigues you the most?

Or the other way around: What caused you to switch to an Apple machine?

[Nick]

To Bjoernke: Just because he does VB for his work doesn't mean he doesn't have a Mac at home for programming. Lay off people a little bit.

To davful: If you want high-end, go with either Maya or 3ds Max (the latter only runs on Windows, though). Either will cost in the thousands of dollars. Then there are all sorts of in between ones with Blender and Wings3D being free. Blender is very powerful once you get past the UI. I like Wings a lot, but it doesn't support animations as far as I know. There's also Cheetah3D which was designed specifically for Macs and costs around $80 which isn't too bad.

Edit: Here are links to those programs:
Blender (http://www.blender.org)
Cheetah3D (http://www.cheetah3d.com)
Wings3D (http://www.wings3d.com)
Maya (http://www.autodesk.com/maya)
3ds Max (http://www.autodesk.com/3dsmax)

[bronxbomber92]

As Nick has pointed out which programs are best for 3D graphics, I would suggest Unity for a programming environment/IDE. It works very well with most major graphic programs (as stated above), and has a tremendously easy and smooth work-flow. The Indie versio for $249 dollars supports Boo, C#, and Javascript for scripting, and the Pro version support all that, plus you can write plug-ins using C++. Acourse there are more advantages to Pro (and Indie for that matter) that I have not mentioned.

Here is the Unity website: http://www.unity3d.com

[Bjoernke]

I'm just a curious guy that's all :)

[ccccc]

if you want a game engine try www.klinksoftware.com (its alot better than its reputation)
free

if you want a modler, try www.wings3d.com (someone already posted)
free

if you want a image editor, and don't want to pay for photoshop, you might wanna try www.gimp.org