Modo (AKA: The Foundry MODO) is a professional, comprehensive, and flexible 3D modeling, texturing and rendering toolset developed by The Foundry Visionmongers (Foundry for short) from United Kingdom. It integrates advanced polygon subdivision surface, modeling, sculpturing, 3D drawing, animating and rendering in one place, and serves as a comprehensive and complete software solution for many design and creativity links.

Voxel (short for voluempixel) refers to the smallest unit of the world that is made up of objects rendered in three dimensions, which can be cube, sphere, cylinder and many other basic geometries, as well as the iteration forms of complex geometry. When it comes to voxel games, the representative work is of course the well-known sandbox game Minecraft, in which the entire game world was created using voxels.

If you want to learn 3D modeling and animation design, but are unable to afford the Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya such kind of 3D modeling or animation software costing thousands of dollars, then the very popular, free, and open-source Blender is currently the best choice for you. However, the available books or any tutorials written for Blender have been always scarce, really not systematic, and incomplete all the time, until the day Blender For Dummies, 3rd Edition comes out.

Rhino (full name: Rhinoceros, AKA: Rhino3D) is a lightweight but extremely powerful advanced 3D modeling tool with a lot less hardware configuration requirements. Don't dismiss it, because it contains all the NURBS (Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline) modeling functions. As a matter of fact, many users often use it to perform modeling, and then export high-precision models for other 3D software to use.

V-Ray for SketchUp rendering plug-in integrate V-Ray into SketchUp, thus successfully follows SketchUp's lighting and mapping practices. It comes with few parameters, flexible material adjustments, and simple but powerful lighting features. As long as mastering the correct method, it is easy to produce highly realistic (photo-like) rendering works.