My first 3D program was Real3d V1.4 off Amiga Format. I ran it on A500 with 1 MB RAM floppy only. I left it on overnight to render the demo teapot and fruit bowl scene. I was amazed in the morning by the resulting ham-6 PAL interlaced image on the 1084. I found the interface easy to use and dabbled with mainly shiny ball renders, as i wasn't a very good modeller and I had no manual. The render speed of the 7 mhz 68000 was all the justification I needed to buy an A1200 with 40 meg hard drive and 40 mhz 68030 and FPU and 16 MB ram.
I wanted to upgrade to real 3D v2 but the price was just ridiculous and never did. Eventually it was on one of the cover cd's, but the interface was too complicated. Real 3d Amiga stopped at version 3 and then became Realsoft 3D for Win, MaOS, Linux and SGI (
http://www.realsoft.com/). The interface is still complicated but the program is extremely powerful. I ended up getting Realsoft 3D v4 for Win off a cover disc, but don't use it much at all.
I eventually tired of Real 3d v 1.4, but ended up buying Cinema 4D V 4. The Amiga-style guide compliant interface is just a joy to use. Within half an hour I had set up a textured rolling beach ball animation, complete with shadows! Being able to model, stage and animate with key frames in the one window is so much more intuitive. The materials editor with preview render is such a time saver. Render quality is great and render speed is unsurpasssed. I ran this on an A1200 with an Apollo 68040 and 32 mb ram.
The bottleneck was AGA running in 128-256 color Dbl-scan modes, which is necessary to make use of the material manager in decent color depth and res. Ofcourse that meant I HAD to get an A4000 with a graphics card. When one came up-68060, 128 Mb RAM, CV64 for $800 Aus- I was in heaven. With that hardware, PAL renders/animations all happened in reasonable time.
One of the really annoying oversights of this software was its inability to cubic map a texture. It sounds like a minor thing but its a HUGE handicap when you render and the material mapping just looks wrong if you have cuboid objects, And lets face it a lot of objects are cuboids. And as there was no v5 for Amiga, this has never been fixed. You can work around this, by applying the texture to each face, but its not fun!
So when I spied v5 for Win on a cover disc I grabbed it!! Proper cubic mapping, built in .avi, quicktime and mpeg animations and the interface is near-enough to the Amiga v4 it was no problem moving across. The render speed of my P3 was phenomenal in comparison to the 68060. Cinema 4D is now available on PC (
http://www.maxon.com) and its up to version 11, and whilst I've played with the demo, its just too complicated for an amateur like me. Not to mention the price. Version 5.5 is all I need to have fun.
I have also used Imagine and Lightwave but IMO the most intuitive package is Cinema 4D.
