Hey, a geek thread, finally !
Pete, if you want to get some amateur or proffessional designing you only need to look into Rhino3D and nothing else (
www.rhino3d.com). It is cheap for students and educators, and you can try for unlimited time the Macintosh version, which is still in developement but ok for learning. For some specific marine design calculations Rhino has a plugin called RhinoMarine, but you don't really need it for start. Rhino is extremely precise, fast, easy to learn and well structured, well put together help file and tutorials, very good customer support. It is the best software for designing stuff and very versatile with lots of plugins and very powerfull modelling tools. The basic 2D drawing is really easy to use and easy to learn, while 3d modelling is a brease compared to stuff like Blender, Autocad, 3DSMAX, Maya, and many others. Rhino's layout is intuitive , uncluttered, has command text entry and does not overwhelm the user with a "professional" looking interface that is normally hard to use because it is made by nerds for other nerds, Rhino is designed by coders for students, artists, engineers and normal ppl, not just for computer nerds like other software.
If you need a demonstration just drop by whenever you want and I will provide cold beer and Rhino lessons. And you can also do stuff like this :
http://www.diversediverse.com/rolf/florin/Prosjekt-hard-milk/hard_milk.htmlFortunatelly for me I come from a geek world, that's usefull if you have to work with pc's a lot. Regarding AV's one of the best piece of software for home use is AVAST (
www.avast.com free license for home use). AVAST uses less resources , that means it won't slow your pc down as others will, it is updated periodically and very reliable. Another extremely good AV is Kaspersky, but it is too much for home use, I have a friend working for Kaspersky and they recommend AVAST for home use...
Just my 2c
Regards,
