Software: New software, better than the smell of fresh bread, a brand new car, but not as good as ice-cream, horray for ice-cream!.

Ive concentrated on Blender as i would prefer to use something Opensource when possible and the support in Unity of Blender seems excellent. My feelings for Blender are mixed : ) Clearly very powerful (love) but the learning curve is (for me at least) overwhelming at times : ) (hate). I think i have a reasonable grasp of its basic usage and the time needed to create something is much more reasonable now.. i will continue to play with some of the more advanced features and with time it should be second nature, luckly i have time : ).

Ive also been playing with 3D Coat not for the sculpting features but for the per-pixel texturing features which i find more ummm natural to use. Ive arranged for a student licence and should be getting right into texturing shortly : ). Ive also secured a nice texture collection which should help keep things moving along : ) .

Hardware: Ive put together some old parts and some new ones to create a dedicated graphics pc , the specs of which arnt very interesting except for a couple of exceptions : )

Space Navigator – very useful for the 3d work im doing (not really useful for much else), very well supported (so far all the modeling software ive tried) and seems Very well built for the price (Amazon had the best price for me).

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti – a really nice video card : ) bought because of its impressive performance (# of cores), 1Gb of RAM and was almost within the budget : ). 384 cores makes for some Very fast rendering and I’m very happy with it (so far CUDA support basically in all 3D tools to some degree)