Do I HAVE to use Blender to model/paint aircraft?

[Bear]

Self-explanatory. Is Blender the only option or are there other tools?

[Gordo]

Nope! There are plugins for other applications aswell, im not sure of the specifics, but they're out there.

[Neocon]

I've painted models and made new models and have never used Blender except for a couple of times when I exported models. I have always used the Legacy tools, along with Windows Notepad. These are all tools that are over a decade old at the newest, and they run fine on a core2duo with integrated graphics and 5 GB of DDR2 RAM, which Blender does not do so well.

I have some tutorial videos in this playlist about how to use those programs.

[waspe414]

You can also model in Sketchup and import to Blender, which is what I do. In theory you can repaint in Sketchup too, but the conversion, import, export, conversion stages just make it not worthwhile