What is your end result.

If you are looking to produce a "relief" of the object via engraving or CNS then Vetric Aspire or ArtCam Pro would work, however it does not have the actual 3d mesh that traditional 3d models are consisting of. If you have a company that can produce your 3d art then have them recommend a program that works with their workflow.

True 3d is a mesh made up of rectanges and triangles, and sometimes complex polygons but those are usually avoided for cross compatibility. The mesh is what makes up the general body of the object. This is the rough in. The displacement and bump maps are where you see the details such as wrinkles, viens in leaves and general texture. If you are only doing 3d for sculpture then this is all you really need to know.

if you were wanting to put on color and have a life-like feel to the object in a rendered image then you would want to learn the other maps such as diffuse(color), specular, reflection, refraction etc.

There's a few places online now that do offer individual rapid prototyping of your finished mesh. One of which is http://www.shapeways.com/

recommendation would be Mudbox 2011. it's $795 (on autodesk's site) and it has a few features which I think you could very well take advantage of.

The main concept behind Mudbox is that it does "clay" type 3d modeling, where as you can push and pull the mesh from a blob into a sclupture. Then once the form is roughed in you can switch to other tools to get the details. The main tool set would be using the brushes and displacement map to create the fine details such as wrinkles and texture. Other fine tuning can also be done with a bump map which like the displacement map allows smaller "bumps" to appear on the surface of the mesh.

The main reason I suggested this program is because of the new "vector displacement tool" this allows you to add details rapidly to your object. Which from a traditional viewpoint it actually is not importing an AI file, it's using a rapid mesh building concept. For example you are doing a series of human figures. Rather than recreating the ears 10 times for 10 people, you create one mesh export that as a vector displacment then you can use it over and over. Once placed you can alter it for more fine tuning.

Here's a video to check out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIC7e4zBuhM

Jade

Thank you for such a thorough answer. It was really appreciated!!

Shapeways is a very cool site indeed, and I am contemplating eventually getting either a CNC mill or 3d printer. Not really sure at this point. Figured it was best to start with the software.

Actually, last night, I downloaded the Mudbox trial and followed a pepper tutorial—my first 3d project ever —in the book Digital Sculpting with Mudbox.

I am looking to produce bas relief type work. Can this be done with Mudbox? If I was able to create my relief in Mudbox, could the file be translated for a CNC mill?

))

Cindy