Since I know of at least one other individual on here that is interested in 3d art and there has been discussion of art in this area...I figured why not?
I stumbled across Daz Studio about six years quite by accident and have been enthralled by it ever since. These days I am using Carrara 8 Pro with the vast majority of the post work beign done in Photoshop.
While there is a lot of talk about how powerful Maya, Vue, and Lightwave are, I have seen some awesome results with programs like Carrara, Daz Studio and even Poser. After banging my head against the monitor for years trying to get anything resembling decent results I stumbled onto a tutorial about step rendering (i.e. rendering seperate channels) and the light bulb went on. My belief is that how the light interacts with the models in a scene is numero uno in getting great results (or at least results that don't look flat and cartoonish). What I think we have seen is that professional artists went for the higher end products to begin with. They are ahead of guys like me in that they understand the importance of light and shadow from the start, all they needed to do was to figure out how to apply that understanding to the tools at hand.
The other thing that I see with a lot of 3d art (and a lot of wargaming terrain to) is that everything is so clean and neat in a scene (layout). The world just isn't that way! Thankfully, between programs like photoshop (CS-CS5) and programs like Carrara 8 and Daz Studio 3 you can apply grunge/graffiti/junk/rust and a lot more to your 3d art without bogging down your system with high polygon counts.
If this sounds preachy...just imagine a guy talking a mile a minute with a huge grin on his face!
