Personally I think that any teams who use premade models should be disqualified, because it's cheating. But anyway, I learned how to use the program by reading the tutorials already included in the program. it has an extensive library of most topics you might need. 3d cafe also has alot. I only used the program for about 3 days before I started on my teams animation and the only thing I had a problem with was creating bones, I'm still a little confused about it

. But the GUI is very intuitive and basic modeling is just realizing what basic primitive shapes are used to create a complex object.
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Whats the difference between mechanical engineers and civil engineers?
Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets