[1] See eg. Gilles Tran at http://www.oyonale.com/3D.php?lang=en
POV ray and IRTC got me into 3D. Once upon a time I thought I was going to have a career in it. Became absolutely obsessed; Modo beta tester, SIGGRAPH trip in '07. Now I'm a systems engineer, go figure. Ah the memories though :)
3D art was going to be my thing too, then I got into programming. It was actually through programming python scripts in Blender that I became interested in programming generally. I'm digging back through old forum posts to see if anything I've made is still about but so many image hosting sites have disappeared. I'm not sure what it looked like but one comment about a head I'd modelled was "personal opinion, but I think he'd look better with eyelids".
Thanks for jogging those memories! :)