i dont get how this works... it's a free piece of software, but surely it is complicated enough to a take a long time to develop/write.... so how they do it without making any money? or they make money? if so, how?

On the website they say:
"The Blender Foundation currently runs without official offices, but is organized virtually around the world. Revenues from e-shop and publishing enable Ton Roosendaal to work full-time on Blender, and pay for bookkeeping and admistration expenses. "

spiderdad -

have you ever used firefox. best internet client...completely free.. done without any need to generate a profit. It's called caring..

although its not open source, modo is a free 3D app thats quite impressive. I just started playing around with it recently so I can't vouch for its use for architecture. but from what I've seen its very robust and appears to be more user-friendly than Maya. anyone else given it a go?

Modo seems to be $895.00 or $99.00 for students. Am I missing something here? Also has anyone tried Blender yet?

modo is free through the free product evaluation.

from the Creative 3D news website:

“When Luxology makes business decisions we look through the eyes of the user,” said Brad Peebler, president of Luxology. “What is the point of test-driving software if you can’t evaluate its performance in a real production environment? A lot of people are surprised we are offering free and unrestricted access to modo. But we believe this is the way software should be evaluated. We think it demonstrates our confidence in modo’s capabilities and trust in the user community.”

BTW, firefox is part of mozilla, which is part of netscape, owned by AOL. They get money from Google too. Just because they don't charge end users doesn't mean that they don't get money.

Also, the caring part helps.

blender is extremely non-newbe friendly. It makes Maya look like Walt Disney's Modelling Fun For Everyone. My own experience is limited to not being able to get it to do much and giving up, several times. It is rumoured to produce quite good images. It might even be able to connect to mental ray for rendering. But i doubt it will be up to the standard of the big commercial packages

jitter12-
agreed everything takes some sort of capital. but my point is the end goal isn't always revenue... or it's at least not the most important reasoning for the products creation.

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I have used blender some. It was certainly tough to get into it . . . kind of different from other stuff I have used. I followed some tutorials they have posted, and got good enough to actually use the program as a tool. Very customizable, and can be scripted through python.

Another good open source app is Terragen. Pretty easy to use. Kind of like a free Bryce. Maybe Bryce might be a bit more robust, but Terragen has a lot of its best features. Can export terrain files as .lwo and some other formats. Good to use with DEM files, etc.