Personally, Milkshape is by far the easiest, It is cheap, reliable and will have everything you need to get started. You can download a 30 day trial here:
http://files.filefront.com/MilkShape+3D+179/;5185134;/fileinfo.html After your trial runs out, you must purchase a registration code for $25 USD, (Or about £12.32 GBP). I'm giving you the link to the 1.7.9 revision, because it is by far the most stable version of Milkshape, as the newer ones, such as MilkShape 3D 1.8.1b (Found here:
http://www.chumba.ch/chumbalum-soft/files/ms3d181b.zip) , tend to get a bit glitchy and sometimes think that your trial is over when it's not (It works for the full 30 days, but every now and then it'll behave like your trial has ran out, to put it in simpler terms). You can find some good tuts here:
http://chumbalum.swissquake.ch/ms3d/tutorials.html here:
http://detritus.silgrad.com/mstut_texturing.html and here:
http://www.tutorialguide.net/3d_software/milkshape/ I'd advise you to learn everything you can before asking for help, because you aren't going to learn all of this overnight. It took me about 6 months to completely get the hang of modeling, texturing, section grouping, exporting, scaling and UV mapping, and I've been modeling since October 2006, and using FPSC since November of 2005, and I still have yet to learn how to animate. My very first model was a pot, which I made by using Anim8tor and Avenging Eagle's lathe tutorial (Found Here:
http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=82418&b=24). My first decent model I didn't even make by myself. I used this tutorial:
http://halflife2.filefront.com/file/Milkshape_3D_SPAS_12_Shotgun_Modelling_Tutorial;36160
That's basically what set me on the right track, but we all have to start somewhere. Anyway, good luck on this and I hope to see what quality work you start producing in the future.
Cheers,
-Postal
