I've said it again -- 3d is not yet a matured tool. When you go to oil paints you are working with tools that have been refined, packaged, bug-checked -- millions of operators have figured out what works in a canvas and you can get them sized and stretched for you in convenient sizes. Same for pigments; thousands of years in findng what natural pigments work well, blend well, with now modern professional formulations of the most useful and lots of rules of thumb about how to use them. When you set down to paint, you spend the smaller part of your time learning the peculiarities of the tools; most of you time is spent with the greater artistic issues of perspective, color balance, composition, anatomy, etc. Well, in a way 3d as we have come to know it gives with one hand what it takes away with the other. 3d offers to automate much of the perspective and lighting issues (ever plotted shadows by hand for a canvas?), and even takes a whack at the anatomy. In return we have a tool set that is still in development; standards and commonalities are still arising, the equivalent of the grumbacher starter set hasn't arrived yet, and no-one has yet figured out how to make a brush that doesn't shed bristles all over the page and sometimes snaps in mid-stroke; or paint that doesn't seperate before you can paint it, or a clean white oxide that doesn't produce muddy greenish gray when you mix it. We are spending much of our energy and what should be our creative time doing things that are not themselves creative. Of course this is a given in all art; most of the time I spend lighting the stage, for instance, is either staring at lists of numbers or carrying twenty-pound lights up ricketty ladders. What makes 3d more annoying than most -- to a great many of us -- is that the grunt work of 3d is complicated where it doesn't need to be, unpredictable and lacking in overall structure, and so poorly documented that each of us becomes a 17th-century painter grinding burnt sticks and clays in a pestle and wondering what will come out.