Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Beta 2 is a good free compiler.

My personal advice:

Go with C# and Managed DirectX. There whole reason *I* suggest it, is because MDX is really easy to understand, and C# offers a lot of excellent functionality(Such as properties, garbage collection). I bought Managed DirectX 9 Kickstart by Tom Miller last week, and I'm getting pretty far.

I loaded models, know how lightning works, can use the camera and world projection and right now, I'm following the book on writing an extremely simple game and directly wrapping up the code into a small 3D engine(The book uses isolated functions, I use nice classes).

Toolmaker

Speaking from the other side of the fence, I'd suggest grabbing any free compiler (eg: Dev-C++) and going through NeHe's OpenGL tutorials. They all come with code that's fully commented on the site. Personally I use VC++, SDL, and OpenGL (SDL takes care of all the Window creation and input handling so you can focus on the OpenGL, plus it's cross-platform).

Quote:Original post by GuitarPlayer0912
Does anybody have any good tutorials or articles to look at on how to start 3D programming. I have no idea where to start, and I can't find any tutorials that I can understand.

what about
this?

What languages do you already know? If you know any already, you pobably want to use a language similar if a 3D library is available. If you don't know any programming languages yet, my advice is to learn one proficiently before trying to write 3D apps. If you feel up to it, I would recommend learning c++, since most programmers really should at some point.

Direct3D and OpenGL are the two major 3D libraries out right now. Both have there pros and cons. If you are just using Windows, I would recommend DirectX. It contains quite a few other libraries for input, sound, and networking and there are probably more resources for it. However, DirectX is Windows only, so if you plan to make your apps multiplatform (Linux and Mac), OpenGL is pretty mush required.