Spring RTS Engine

.....Thinking about possibly spending a load of money to learn some of it.... what do people know/think of it?

http://www.escapestudios.com/course_outlines.php

I would strongly advise AGAINST shelling out money for these courses. There's plenty of free tutorials and free help (dedicated 3D modeler communities) available online as it is. Teach yourself - sepnd about 2 hours a day on it, without missing a day - and if you feel you dont have the basics down within a month, then go and pay for classes.

Well... hmm...

I guess my first question is, what is your intention? If you just managed to, er, "acquire" a copy of Maya, and are thinking about modeling a bit with it, I'd have to say skip that, learn Wings and teach yourself modeling using a simpler tool that is still capable of sophisticated results. Really. I don't use Wings as my primary modeler, but I still highly recommend it- it's simple but powerful, and a good starting-place. If it only had proper booleans, I'd probably drop Rhino out've my workflow, except for the really tricky stuff or precision work...

The thing about Maya is that it's massive overkill for anything except for studio-level work for movies and first-person shooters, and to do that kind've stuff... you really need Maya, Lightwave, and zBrush, imo, to get into the latest techniques, because of the huge emphasis on subdivision surface modeling these days.

If that's what you want... I'd strongly urge you to find a class at a local university, preferably an art school or somewhere with a very strong computer art program. You'll get better value for your dollars, especially if you've already taught yourself from a book or three (there are lots of good books on using Maya, for cheap from Amazon).

You making a blockbuster movie, Cabbage? Joining Industrial Light and Magic?

If you're planning on working on spring, you totally dont need Maya, like Argh said. Even if you're doing a huge range of other stuff, you still probably dont need maya.

If you can get a good tutor it's worth it but far too many are crap and you're better off with tutorials to get started. Once you're sufficiently proficient you can take lessons from great modelers to make better models but at that point you're platform agnostic.

Cheers for the comments chaps, I want was thinking about getting some sort of proper qualification in it or something, i think i have the imagination/desire to something along these lines, just a frustrating lack of ability

It's either that or become a male model, but i prefer a challenge..