Quote - I think that Peng's point was more along the lines of a free application beating out the more costly pro apps for distribution numbers.  Not unusual, for something that's free.  I'd be curious to know if the number of active Blender users is anything near the number of downloaders -- kind of like Poser freestuff downloads.  I suspect that many people download, but never actually use.

To be honest, that would be about the same across-the-board. Incidentally, Blender is predominantly installed under Linux (the OS which it was primarily built for), which is why I used it as a reference. All of that said, the poll I referenced was based on the number of respondents by a general 3D mag, not by the folks at Blender. > Quote - In any case, Linux is an OS with a predominantly specialized user base at the moment.  It's a chancy thing to attempt to get Windows apps to work under Linux.  You might or you might not be able to do so successfully. 

I repeat: Blender runs natively in Linux. As does AC3D (which I have). As does Shake, Maya, Wings3D(IIRC), POV-Ray, and a whole panopoly of other 3D proggies. This also explains why I use GIMP and not Photoshop - even on my Mac. The only thing really missing for my workflow IMHO is a cheap compositor (Poser or D|S - Shake is hella pricey). > Quote - BTW - that's also an issue to keep in mind for those who occasionally insist that e-frontier needs to create a whole new version of Poser with re-written, new technology from the ground up.  The loss of the use of substantial reams of existing Poser content wouldn't be received gladly by many in the Poser community.  Even if the sacrifice meant a fantastic new program.

1. Porting and re-writing a program are two vastly different things. I could most likely take the existing OSX/Intel codebase for Poser and port it to Linux with only moderate effort - most of that spent in porting the UI (both are BSD-flavored *nixes). D|S would be almost trivial to do (as it uses Qt for its UI library set). 2) on tangent, re-writing a program from scratch does not mean loss of compatibility: see also D|S and Poser 4 content (which is what they originally wrote it for). Just some thoughts. /P