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« on: December 31, 2006, 03:46:13 am »
The difficulty of making a tutorial is that there's no one way to do it, every tool does it a little differently and seeing a tutorial in 3DStudio is probably not going to help you because you probably don't have 3DStudio and other tools while they may be similar can also be totally different. Personally I use Silo for modeling ($100), Ultimate Unwrap for UV mapping (35$ ish), and PaceMaker for animation (24 GBP). You could substitute Wings3d for the modeler since it's free, I've used it but I prefer silo's interface.
As far as UV mapping, rigging, animating.. all that stuff goes there's no real way to know if what your doing is going to work without going thought he full process several times. It's just like any other art, there's no better way to learn it then to bang your head against the wall repeatedly for hours. The tools get more complex and as a result so does the learning curve. It could take you a week or two to get comfortable in whatever 3d modeling package you use, and at least a few days to get a basic grasp of UV mapping, rigging, and animating.