3D object are of common use in both physical and digital worlds.
There’s a variety of tools – from amateur to professional, expensive or free – that help design 3D products or digital objects to be either to 3D-printed as gift to your client or embedded into a computer game. My short list:
Tinker – free, online, easy, mostly for product design, prototyping, and 3D printing
Blender – free software, community, smart and easy, wide applicability, from products to 3D animations, compatible with Unity
Autodesk – professional, enterprise, with some free stuff, but still…
I got my hands dirty with Blender. And the start was with… WHAT? Dinosaur.
The basic idea is that you take a cylinder and extrude, render, scale, loop cut it and play with it with whatever tools and commands available to make it into a dinosaur shape. And the guy is sitting in the background to help you see you do the right thing.
The legs are tricky, cause you might want to have them moving later – so you either extrude from the body or create an additional shape and then link it to it.
But at this point – do I really need a dinosaur more than just getting the trick? I’ll stop here and go design my perfect wine glass – it’s Friday soon ;)