[Shivan Hunter]

So, I am in need of a 3D program than can do hierarchy. Wings3D can't, unless someone knows of a plugin or something, Truespace screws up smoothing and Blender's UI is worse than Truespace's, not to mention it won't even import models after I've installed Python and set the environment variables.

What 3D programs other than the 3 I mentioned can do hierarchy, and are preferably easy to use?

Also: This thread will not turn into a debate about which program is the best. I'm just looking for alternatives here. If I absolutely need to, I'll hassle with Blender's monkey-designed UI, but stay on topic.

[Rampage]

Blender.  Its UI requires a lot of memorization, esp the hotkeys as not all features have easily-accessible corresponding buttons.  So be sure to spend several days (no exaggeration; the learning curve is very steep) just familiarizing yourself w/ the basic interface.  Also for import/export and other Python scripts, you need to not just have Python installed but the right version of Python.  Check the Blender website for more details.

-R

[headdie]

on another note, I dont know which version you are using but the 2.5x betas have problems with their collada (.dae) script which is why I and i think others have gone back to 2.49

[Vasudan Admiral]

Blender's interface is, as has been mentioned, almost entirely shortcut keys. The ones relevant to hierarchy are:
-> "Make all selected objects into children of the active object (the object that was selected last)" Ctrl+P
-> "Clear parent" Alt+P

If you haven't discovered the outliner, you get it up by changing the current window panel type (bottom left corner of the main 3d window) to outliner. (I'd also recommend getting the hang of splitting the various window panels and resizing them etc.)

About the problems with 2.5 betas, I've not tried them just yet but if there are issues with the DAE scripts/python then yeah just switch back to 2.49 - which is what I currently use with python version 2.5.4:
http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.5.4/

[Nuke]

i use max8. never did much like blender. of course with max you got to make sure you really dont screw up with xform reset.