Uhh this makes me feel old. These were like university age for me. I played with Dr. Genius painting software when I was child.

Gah this makes me feel old! Blender was uni (but was too bloated to run on my PCs back then) and sketch up is new!

Boy, this makes me feel old. When I was a kid the only way to learn 3d software was to pirate one of the commercial offerings like 3D Studio Max or SoftImage

I remember being obsessed with being able to 3D model as a preteen and devoured dozens of tutorials for Maya and 3dsmax but they were so complex that I never actually build anything myself until I used a much simpler program named MilkShape where you drag vertices into position manually. And now over 20 years later I’ve made more textured 3D models in picoCAD, the ultimate simple software, in a month than I did in a couple years of the above tools.

sounds like me, lol, before I realized modeling 3d things required artistic/visualization skills of which I had none.

I used to use one called Milkshape3D, I even bought it. I vaguely remember there was some controversy about it after a certain version though, like it was doing something dodgy to your computer if it detected that it wasn't registered or something.

Milkshape was such crap, i loved it haha. I learned modeling using it too, i think it had two tools extrude and merge vertices, so i had to learn some dumb topological tricks to do anything. Still by the time i moved to 3ds Max i did pretty well.

My favorite early learning app was wings 3d, really fantastic modeling flow and creates clean messages by default

Yes haha I agree it was pretty crappy!

Golly, when I were but a lad the only way to learn 3D software was to sit in front of easel for hours on end, learning depth perception by painting naked form after naked form.

You had eyes? Back in my dat6, we hadn't differentiated into multi cellular organisms yet, and had to model 2D worlds as an amoeba because that's all the dimensions we had at the time. An Amoeba! You tell kids these days, they don't believe you. It is the most annoying thing.

At least you had a nucleus. Back in my Archea years we had to metabolise 2D chains of sulphur and ammonia to grasp some level of spatial composition.

or suffer with Povray

since we're talking about old 3D software, Cyber Studio CAD-3D on Atari ST was also interesting: https://doudoroff.com/atari/cad3d.html

Moray for POV-ray on MS DOS (1) Good times on a 386 in beginning of the 90th.

(1) http://www.povray.org/news/moray-announcement.phphttp://www....

Povray running overnight every night. Wake up for school, check the overnight render, set another one going :D

As a kid I once made the perfect Lego head render, with only a ruler to measure things. I'm still proud of it and mention it whenever POV comes up.

I was going to model a lot of pieces and make a game or something, but I spent so much time on the head that I gave up after that.

It was Wings3D for me. It's like Vim bindings for 3D modeling software. It's written in Erlang too, which is completely unexpected.

Hell yeah, now can I get a shoutout for Moray 3.5?

https://web.archive.org/web/20180322042858/http://www.stmuc....

I spent so much time with moray. First in dos, then in windows. The material editor was pretty good.

wings3d is amazing. I loved repeatedly using the interesting vertex transformations to sculpt really crazy looking stuff.

https://github.com/dgud/wings is still alive!

Why are the dorks on this site downvoting you? Don't tell me b/c of "irrelevancy" - half of the comments are typically irrelevant.

oh man. lightwave and 3ds max for me

Loved Lightwave 3D back in it's Commodore Amiga / Babylon 5 heyday. Also Cinema4D, and Imagine3D. Switched to Windows for a while (for gaming purposes), and the 3D software landscape oddly enough just wasn't great for "hobbyist" level folks, so I kinda put that on the "back-burner" for a while. By the time I got back into 3D again, I was heavily hooked on Linux (the most "Amiga-like" OS I'd yet found on PC), so skipped 3DS Max entirely and went straight for the (at that time) recently open-sourced Blender 3D. The learning curve on it was horrific but once actually over that bit, the software itself is crazy powerful and easier to actually use than one might at first imagine it could be. For me, the last little push over that initial learning curve was Blender Guru (Andrew Price) on YouTube. His beginner tutorials are pretty much the best (at least they were for me). Nowadays Blender is pretty much my first and only "go-to" tool for everything 3D that I find myself in need of (except Godot, for "game-enginey" realtime related bits, but Blender's involved there also, for modeling, ofc).

TLDR; Wall of Text: Blender 3D is awesome! (Godot + Blender = Even Better.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Construction_Kit was my favorite.