any good general 3D-building forums?

Hello,

SL has gotten my interest in 3D design high enough that I'm looking for other forums to extend my knowledge in. SL is still my primary area of 3D building and design but I want to both preserve the models i build and extend their detail in other apps. Maybe even someday converge it with my day design job.

I have URLs for all my product related forums, but looking for general forums on the art.

thanks

You can't go wrong with CG Society http://www.cgsociety.org/ Probably the largest forum of professional 3D CG artists on the net. Many different 3D specialties are represented by the user base. There are articles, tutorials, and many other useful aspects to the site as well. Check it out.

I also "hang out" on Polycount http://boards.polycount.net/ which started in the 90s as a Quake mod board but has become a hangout for video game professionals. The technical forums have a variety of helpful knowledgeable folks on them who have modeled game assets.

Recently I've been hanging out on 3D Buzz http://www.3dbuzz.com/vbforum/sv_home.php . It has decent forums, but they have amazing amounts of video training material up for a variety of 3d apps if you wanna get up to speed in wider spectrum of 3D than the slice that is used for SL.

For modeling specific forum recommendations I would have to know more about your preferred application and if there is a particular type of thing you enjoy modeling.

thanks for the tips! i will check them out, looking forward to it.

Currently my 3D suite is more related to object modeling (thanks to an interest in sculpties): zBrush, AC3D & Hexagon. zBrush was purchased about a week ago after spending 2 weeks in the trial. I also have years of pro Photoshop experience that im looking to apply to create seamless textures, etc--something ive never really gotten into before.

Where i go from here, not sure yet

heyas;

try http://www.theartdoor.com

the forum had a little glitch, and the only good backup was 2 years old, so they are recovering from that. but those are mainly 3d app artists (and other kinds of artists), who have recently moved into sl. about one year ago, in fact.

For Zbrush I've found Zbrush Central indispensable http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/index.php
Tips, tricks, tutorials, and plug ins galore. Also, check out Zapp Link if you haven't yet. Works really well for texturing sculpties. Not much SL specific stuff there mind you, but I'm not a SL specific 3D artist, so it's all good to me.

I'm not too familiar with the other apps. I'm sure AC3D has forums and I know DAZ has several forums with a huge user base for their various apps.

Take a look at anything having to do with SIGGRAPH. The IEEE Special Interest Group for Graphics. Almost always, ideas and techniques appear here before anywhere else.