Here's the summary of what people recommended so far:
I myself have been using Art Of Illusion <http://artofillusion.org>
lightly in the past but it's made in Java and I find it clumsy to
work with. It's open source and free though.
Two persons recommended Cheetah 3D <http:www.cheetah3D.com> which
costs $99 and is made for OS X only. I did the "Hello World"
tutorial but couldn't obtain the animation you're supposed to get.
(The earth globe didn't rotate and I couldn't figure out why. For
every frame that was rendered another angle was shown in the field
that shows the angle in degrees, but in the finished animation all
frames are shot from the same angle and thus the planet doesn't
revolve.) I'll try again later from scratch.
Blender 3D <http://blender.org> sounds promising on paper (even if it
seems hard to learn) but it didn't launch on my system (PowerBook G4
17" 1.5 GHz, OS 10.4). I have no time to figure out why. Blender is
open source and free.
I took a short look at <http://brlcad.org> but what I saw and read
didn't convince me to download it. This app is developed by the
military and seems to be free.
POV-Ray <http://www.povray.org> does only the ray tracing and isn't
therefore exactly what I'm looking for even though I've been told I
should be able to build simple shapes from scratch with it too. This
isn't exactly a GUI application either. I'm still mentioning it
since it's free and open source and seems to be highly regarded as
one of the best ray tracers around. Blender for example has export
scripts for it.
Render-Boy <http://render-boy.com> is $39 shareware but it seems like
development has been stopped in February 2002. It's for Mac Classic
and it doesn't look like there's ever going to be an OS X version. I
didn't download it.
Any other suggestions are still very welcome!
Many thanks to those who responded so far,
Marc
Occasionally I set out to look for a 3D application for OS X that
doesn't cost an arm and a leg and is easy to learn. So far I've
never found one. I feel the need for 3D only about twice a year so
I'm not really looking for a high-end product.
This time I'm taking the liberty of asking if anybody on this list
can recommend such a GUI application.
As a selection criterion: I want to make a transparent glass ball
with a solid cube inside and appropriate shadows and reflections.
The surface of the ball should also reflect and appropriately
distort the image I have in a jpeg file. I'm looking for an
application that allows me to build this from scratch and gives a
photo-realistic end result, and I would ideally like to be able to
learn how to do the above in less than two hours by reading the
application's documentation.
Any suggestions are welcome.
Thanks,
Marc
PS: Feel free to respond off-list since this is OT.
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