With Blender, I can subdivide before or after rigging a model. The subdivide function is a non-destructive modifier. It can be applied, removed, or changed whenever I want. That's really good because if I find out I made a mistake, I can always remove and re-do it.Blender was really hard for me to learn. I didn't find it intuitive, but have now gotten used to it. Definitely worth it though to learn, if you don't have any other 3d software like 3DSMax, etc. Basically, everything I know, I found out from Googling or watching Youtube tutorials.I do have to apply all the coloring manually. There is something interesting I saw on the FFXIVExplorer wiki, that may be able to port out textures with full color. I haven't tried it yet though.I give all thanks to the Luxrender rendering engine for making the renders look good.Blender comes with a Cycles renderer. From the pics I've seen, it seems to produce images well enough too. Plus it will probably be faster. Using Luxrender, my renders typically take 8-15 hours each, on a 6-year old PC. Will depend on what hardware you have.Making models from scratch should come in very handy. That's something I'm not very good at.