Truespace is a good proggie, it's one of the one's I used early on, but I would recommend doing a back order of one of the mags such as 3d world which had Cinema 4d ver6 (full product) on the cover CD. That said if you've got to get max for uni then bite the bullet, Max is one cool piece of software, I'll see you in the Max forum at some point in the future :-) (although Max here is a bit dead, consider 3dbuzz, 3dcafe or 3dluvr for good Max Tuts.)

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Toolset: Blender, GIMP, Indigo Render, LuxRender, TopMod, Knotplot, Ivy Gen, Plant Studio.