Every single time I look at this thread, I feel like Homer looking at a hotdog truck.
Very nice stuff
A question though: after the release of the final version of my mod, I intend to do more serious stuff and implement some new concepts. These will need that I make all my models as skeletal, basically psk/psa files, and although the current program I use (MS3D) supports it nativelly and exports well, I can't really define animation sequence names which are needed (as in the case of psa files, in the import you don't define the animation sequences, and I am not sure if a "#exec ANIM SEQUENCE=... ANIM=someAnim ... " would work, probably not) nor poly flags (translucent, 2-sided, etc).
So I looked at 2 possibilities: Blender and 3DS Max.
I tried Blender at first, and it totally blew me away, really a good editor, but once I tried the available export/import plugin, it didn't work well. It can import the psk mesh just fine, but the import of bones or animation of any sort gets messed up, and the export of new models is never successful giving tons of python errors in the exporter.
I used version 2.6.something.
So now I am going to try 3DS Max, given that it has full ActorX support and since it's at the same level of Blender (if not above).
Hence my question: I prefer to use Blender since it's a *free* good modelling tool, and it seems to me that some folks here use that as well. Therefore, which version should I use and which exporter/importer to make it work properly? If there isn't, I guess I will have to go with Max.