Re: How does it compare?

Don't worry about my time, I don't see your arm coming out of my screen and holding me at the keyboard :) These are all good topics that I'm sure are of general interest.

>I am starting to wonder why I invested in putting 16 GB of RAM in my Mac,
>though. I haven't found anything that uses it yet. I suppose it >isn't utilized in Blender either?

When you'll start rendering you will see the benefits. Rendering in one thing that uses all the available cores and it's very, very memory hungry. In fact render-nodes are usually configured with poor or no video cards but lots of memory and high number of CPUs.

>I thought I heard in one modeling tutorial that you can recalculate the
>mesh into all quads. Does that mean it's possible to work up the model
>without worrying about tris & quads and just have it reorganized, or is
>that likely to cause unwanted results?

Today we have tools that make the old "polygon-pushing" a thing of the past. You can freely sculpt in Blender, ZBrush or 3DCoat (voxels) and don't worry about topology. When you have the shape that you want you use re-topology tools to create a well-defined and well-aligned topology.
Here is a demo of retopology in Blender:

Blender retopology tutorial from Niosop on Vimeo.

By far the best retopo tool for the money, IMHO, is 3DCoat:

3D-Coat Training Series - Mesh Topology & Retopology Tools - Human Head Pa... from Javis Jones on Vimeo.

Retopo might seem like an additional step but it's really the key to creating good shapes without having to compromise on the result. The two videos above should give you an idea of the process involved.


--
Paolo Ciccone
Pret-A-3D
http://www.preta3d.com
http://www.paolociccone.com