wem83m2

There is one called bryceWikipedia:"Bryce is a 3D modeling, rendering and animation program specializing in fractal landscapes. The name is taken from Bryce Canyon — a rugged region with many of the same landscapes that were first simulated with the software"Best for maps i think.For characters i think you should use Max or Maya, but if you want to integrate ur models into a programe try finding something that support a known format that is easily parsed, or you'd have to buy a converter to do so...

Animator, I wanted to learn about that stuff a while ago.So what programming language do you use , or do you just use programs like Maya or 3dmax to create animations ??Which do you prefer most DX or OpenGL.One more thing .. I like ChessCake

I'd go for the dev-C++ too, nice interface and only uses 30 MB or something like that , although incompatable with Visual Studio as it uses the MinGW compiler, worst part is you can have hard time searching for linking libraries ( libxxxx.a )