Blender Modeling

Hi guys, it's been a while...

Just wondering if anyone has been able to use blender in their development so far - I know there are old tutorials but none of them work for me. I have also tried using DeleD and that doesn't work. I actually model in both blender and Wings3D but wings has limited export capabilities. To date I have not been able to import any of my own models to the game engine, yet the engine works fine on my server.

If anyone has been successful at using custom models can you give me a quick runthru? I cannot afford to buy software so I'm limited to Blender and other freeware like Wings3D and DeleD. I am running both Windows 7 and Ubuntu on my computer.

Basically I have been using as many freeware model programs as I can find to generate different Collada files from obj/mtl's or other basic types and trying to import them to the game using the collada import tool, but I get errors every time. I have a LOT of models that require importing.

Thanks for reading,
Tele

Deled does have a .mesh exporter but it is a little tricky to use, Blender I have no idea how to make work, I use 3dsmax 2011 32 bit with the 3dsmax exported that comes with the platform. Im sure there may be a way to obtain 3dsmax.

I have tried Deled exporter but couldn't get it to work. Does it work better on different operating systems? Could win7 be a poor choice? I looked up 3dsmax and it appears to be hellishly expensive. I suppose there might be an educational version but those often have limitations. Though if I'm just using it for the exporter perhaps that would be okay. Is the .mesh filetype identical to the one used by OGRE? Perhaps a converter could be written if the .mesh filetype could be understood... understanding filetypes baffles me but writing an algorithm to read through the file and convert it to a new type would not be hard to do...