First things first

So where do I start with my introduction into 3D?

Ok so what do I need to achieve?

* draw some buildings of varying heights in a grid
* have a player object that I can move around in 3D space and have it fall to the ground unless I'm thrusting
* view the whole scene through a controllable camera

Fairly straightforward so far.

But I need to get the absolute basics, how do I get a 3D model? How do I load it in to XNA and how do I get a camera viewpoint of the scene?

Well XNA takes all sorts of 3D model formats but I've decided on .fbx (no real reason for this, it just works)

There are plenty of resources on the web where I could download 3D objects from, but I want to make My own. So what are my choices? Well, anything that can export to fbx!

Blender can do this and is free, many people swear by it. I tried it but it's not the easiest thing to use.

Luckily, I've got 3D studio max and have used it a fair bit so it was easier for me to use.

I started by creating a basic cube that would be the building block for my towers. No textures or anything clever just yet, I just want some assets to play with.

Then I made a player UFO, just a torus and a sphere again with no textures.

So now I have some assets to play with I just need to get them into XNA and render them to screen.