If anyone wants a free production-grade 3D modelling/animation/rendering tool, the venerable Modo just got end-of-life'd and the company is giving everyone a free 10-year license. Sure, Blender exists — but for us HCI-inclined folks this is a rare opportunity to casually check out how a different team approached this corner of the GUI possibility space. I personally find 3D modelling tools to be hugely inspirational, and frequently draw on my experiences with them when designing programming systems. If you've never kicked the tires on one of these, or only have experience with Blender, CAD, or game engines, Modo is a really interesting point of comparison. EOL announcement and free license: https://campaigns.foundry.com/modo-eol-license Download (requires a free account): https://www.foundry.com/products/modo/download

FYI, FWIW @Ivan Reese - orthogonal to your point in this note, but, reminds me of a time when a colleague used Blender to "perform a calculation" (my words) that wasn't otherwise reasonable to do using paper or spreadsheets. He figured out 3D tilts and distortions for a multi-display flight simulator. He just did it. He didn't realize what an amazing feat he'd pulled off.

Yeah! Great example. I'm a lot stronger at grasping abstract geometric concepts than algebraic (or other) concepts because I've had so much practice, eg, wrapping things around spheres.