I have a few questions for you 3D users in two different programs.

Wings 3D:
How do you cut a bigger shape in to smaller, different shapes without losing the appearance?
Note: I want a different answer from "Separate", because that doesn't work for me (just takes out 5-6 vertices and makes a tiny shape out of them when the original shape includes something like 3000 vertices).

Photoshop/Blender:

a) textures
What do you use to texture ships? Because I'm having problems with materials and textures in Blender, and I don't quite know how people use Photoshop with Blender (though I am familiar with Photoshop and managed to texture my ship in Wings with Photoshop, but then comes the problem of rendering). A little advice or help?
I have tried the "UV Mapping" program, but that just screws my ship up by deforming it completely, and so it's pretty annoying. I have also tried to find other 3D programs (thanks to matrix's list, and, no, I don't want the list as an answer either), but the only free ones are Blender, Wings and Mechanisto (which doesn't work on Mac OS X). Any other ideas?
Note: I have read the Blender manual, but it doesn't help me in the least. At least, I haven't found what I'm looking for at any rate.

rendering and animations
First of all, do you render before texturing or texture before rendering? And afterwards, how do you do the animations (I've tried pressing "Next Frame" and changing the view, but that just changed the first frame aswell )? And do you have to texture every single view (the 36 frames) or can you make a textured animation?

Thank you for any kind of help.
Note: I have searched for these answers but they were never what I wanted

------------------
Pace
(haldora)
-- Cartman: I hate hippies! I mean, the way they always talk about "protectin' the earth" and then drive around in cars that get poor gas mileage and wear those stupid bracelets - I hate 'em! I wanna kick 'em in the nuts!

I don't use Blender, so I can't really help you with Blender specifics.

I use photoshop to make my textures. Here's a tutorial I found about texturing for Blender: (url="http://"http://www.elysiun.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11889&highlight;=landis+airman")http://www.elysiun.c...t=landis+airman(/url)
For some programs you have to save your texture as flattened image format like .jpg or something. Some programs accept .psd.

You texture before rendering. Rendering is what takes your object and the scene it's in and makes a 2D image out of it. The rendered image can't be altered by what you do in the program (i.e. texturing). If you change something, you have to render again.

When you texture an object, the texture stays when you animate.

For the animations, you will have to make keyframes. You'll probably want 36 frames total (1-36, or 0-35 depending on if you start at frame 1 or 0). Hm, I don't really have time to finish this now, I'll be back later if no one else has answered your question by then.

btw: animation tutorials: (url="http://"http://www.blender3d.com/cms/Animation.252.0.html")http://www.blender3d...tion.252.0.html(/url)

------------------
(url="http://"http://www.adventuredog.net")Adventure Dog(/url): Everyone's favorite little black and white dog.
(url="http://"http://www.ambrosiasw.com/webboard/Forum9/HTML/005135.html#")Walkthroughs for 3D space scenes and objects(/url) - please feel free to add your own methods to the thread.
(url="http://"http://www.evula.org/aftermath") Aftermath (/url): It rocks. Trust me.

I'm not exactly sure what you're problem is with regard to wings... you're saying you can't render in wings, right?

What you have to do then, is export your file out of wings, and into blender, or strata, or whatever you're going to use (I assume blender), and then render it in that. Wings, I'm sure, won't render for you, you need to use another program.

Sorry I can't be of more help.

------------------
"How can I make it go faster?" -Me-

I got stuck rendering my graphic on blender and gave up. I figure that if I really need a graphic artist, I could get one from these boards.

------------------