Vendors
E-Frontier - Provider of well-known CG-Software, like Poser and Shade. A lot of pictures on my page were made by using Poser in the tool chain. E-Frontier provides a lot of information and support regarding their products, a gallery, newsletter and a lot of helpful tools.
Eovia - This is the home of programs like Carrara and Hexagon. Carrara is a very complete render and animation package, with a decent modeller, a complex shader system and excellent Poser integration. Most of my new pictures are made with Poser and Carrara.
E-on Software - The company that made the Vue software packages. A great landscape renderer, but stability problems. Improves constantly, but not as fast as user would like e-on to improve it. Personaly I prefer using Carrara instead of Vue lately.
Maxon - Provides the professional cg-software Cinema 4D and texture painting and uv mapping program Bodypaint 2. Excellent software with a lot of options via plug-ins. Unfortunately above my price range, but I love to model with Cinema 4D 6 CE, which is an old version, but available for a great price.