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When you don't have any menus on normal startup then something with your Blender is messed up. Personally, I would advise you to download the latest installer for Windows and install Blender that way. Then you should have the Blender directory in your AppData with a correct startup.blend. It should work fine then. You can then also easily uninstall it if you don't like it.

I understand that Blender is not everyone's cup of tea. Especially when you are used to the tools/workflow of another program it's always hard to adapt to new software. Everyone has to decide what suits them best.

Zam wrote:I would like to hear from you, what are the tools that you prefer to use, and if possible, if you know something with the "feel" of 3d max. If its free or not too expensive, will be much better for me. I'm in the Low Budget Indy way.

I use Blender and I'm a keyboard guy (to this day, even on Windows 8, you won't find me sitting on a PC without a DOS prompt open to do my file management stuff).

My first contact with Blender turned out similar to yours. There was no guidance that nudged you into a certain workflow and many things were accessible exclusively by keyboard shortcut. But I kept bouncing back and in the end, I bought CG Cookie's Blender Training videos for $50 or so. It was an eye-opener watching someone who actually knew Blender inside-out work on a model. Whenever he pressed a key, it would pop up as a big floating key in the video.

Picking up the Numpad and the G,R,S (Grab, Rotate, Scale) keys was a no-brainer and everything came together after that. Want to mirror? type S-1 (scale, negative, full size). Want to merge two vertices? select both, type S0 (scale, zero). Want to move only on the X axis? type GX then move with the mouse or continue typing the coordinates. It suddenly was all very logical and obvious

I did use Milkshape during my Blender-is-too-complicated-for-me time, but it doesn't do skeletal animation (unless you're happy with loading existing skeletons only). I also tried XSI Mod Tool Pro (a free version of Autodesk SoftImage, but only registered XNA developers may use it commercially) but that was the most horrible modelling experience I ever had.