After much struggling, I figured out a way to get things moving down the content pipeline. I wanted to see if Carrara was a viable solution. I used the demo as a test. Can Carrara be used to make models for XNA? It seems likely, but I'm not 100% sure. If you've been following the story up to now, I wasn't able to get textures to export. Carrara has an export to .FBX feature. Apparently, it does not export the textures - just the models. I had to contact Daz3D directly to find that out.
No wonder I couldn't get it to work right.
However, all was not lost. I still favored Carrara, as it was cheap and easy to use. OK, I can't export to FBX. That was my only reason for buying the pro version. Can I save $300 by going with the $250 version? It would seem so, as Carrara can export to .3DS or Wavefront .OBJ. From there, I could use Wings3D to do the conversion. I converted the .OBJ to .FBX, then dropped it into .XNA. (To think, I had no idea what any of this meant just a few weeks ago.)
I left out a part. I used Corel Photo-Paint to create a texture. I suppose you can use any program you like, but I've gotten used to Corel. So OK, put it all together and you get this...
No really, I made this Asteroid from scratch!
...but it doesn't seem to make it all the way into XNA.
The bump texture map seems to be missing. That's what gives the Asteroid a gritty look. Also, for some reason, the asteroid seems to be very brownish in XNA. I don't want my rocks to resemble flying turds. I'm not sure, but maybe bump mapping needs to be turned on in XNA. I know anti-aliasing isn't on, as I can see jaggies.
Anyhoo... I'm almost ready to take the plunge. I mean come on... look how real that rock looks. Isn't that type of creativity worth $250? I have next to no experience with 3D animation. Now, I'm almost ready to make artwork for XBOX 360 games. I haven't made the final decision though. I'm still wondering what happened to my bump map!