I just have a few general questions.  I have a background in electrical engineering and computer science.  I currently work in medical software so I have been away from the engineering side of things for some time.

I have many ideas that I would like to prototype and with the costs of 3-D printers and 3-D scanners dropping within reach to people like me I would like to tinker and design... I am ready to take the plunge.

While I'm familiar with many fairly technical graphics and video software applications such as Photoshop, Premier, and Light Room, I have always been intimidated by 3-D modeling from scratch.  I have a friend that works in Maya and 3-D studio max and it just does not look like soft where one can simply dive into.

With the introduction of 3-D scanners for less than one thousand dollars (like the Maker Bot Digitizer) I feel manipulation of existing object models will become much easier for me.  Many of my ideas I would like to prototype already exist in their basic form and just need to be 3-D scanned then manipulated into my vision.  I am a lot less intimidated by 3-D scanning an existing object then learning how to manipulate the model in a CAD application then I am by trying to design a model from scratch.  Now for some basic questions: