I agree with DualJoe here... wings is pretty damn efficient with low-poly meshes. I always start in wings, and if I need powerful manipulation tools or high-quality renders I then bring it into blender.DualJoe wrote:Blender is the most feature rich tool of all the legal free options, but I see absolutely no reason to limit yourself to one app. Following the Linux philosophy, you can work very modular. Create the toolchain you like best and work from that.
Lots of people find that simple modelling and sketching your shapes, is very intuitive and fast in Wings. You can then import what you've done in Blender and continue from there...
Chuck, you claim that by getting wings, you will be discouraged because your results won't look professional. I argue the reverse: a complete newbie trying blender is more likely to get discouraged because he needs to read through fifteen tutorial pages just to see some results! Wings is a far better sandbox than blender- the interface is highly intuitive and you see results immediately. Wings is also a useful tool for teaching people the basic concepts of 3d modelling. A production quality modeller it is not.
I think that's the rut- when people try to use wings to model from start to finish. It just isn't powerful enough. As a sandbox, you can build sand castles, but you need better tools to construct a real fortress. Okay, bad analogy, but you get the idea.