I am working on building a Strategy Game (it will be in 2.5D), and for graphic design part we are using Illustrator and Photoshop for designing (including designing characters). Now we want to start building 3D modeling for characters to simplify the animation process. It seems photoshop does not support 3D modeling, so what tool would you recommend in this case?
Answer
I have been modeling 3D characters for many years, and the best tool I can recommend to anyone, beginner or not is actually a free opensource program called Blender.
It has many useful features and is easy and quick to learn, but the best part is the amount of keyboard shortcuts it has as standard to really speed up development time. You can create your mesh, animate it, texture it and map it in many, many ways just using the one program. It also has its own game engine that uses Python script, but you don't need that for model creation, and the best part is that it's free!
I have used such tools as Maya, 3DS Max, Bryce and ZBrush. Where they all are great tools, Blender is the easiest and quickest. You can get professional standard models no problem from Blender.
As a side though, ZBrush is also a great tool, it has many unique features of its own that none others do, like the ability to literally draw your 3D mesh, (it's especially great if you have a wacom tablet or similar) but it's a bit harder to master.
I'd recommend building your mesh in Blender, then (if you can afford it) use the texturing tools in 3DS Max or Maya as they have some really amazing texture and mapping tools.
But for free, Go with Blender to start with.
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