Best tools and cheap/free alternatives

Wings 3D - free open source subdivision surface modeller (never used it, but it seems powerful. No animation, it's just for modelling).

Sketchup - there's a free version that's great for architectural style modelling. Pretty crap at organic stuff, but great for things like insides of houses or buildings. You'd probably want to load the final output into blender or something for better texturing, lighting and optimisation.

Paint.Net - free for windows, great little paint program with c# plugin support. Not as powerful as Photoshop or Gimp, but small and simple.

Some may not consider this cheap, but if you are a student or teacher you can get Photoshop CS6 for around $180. That's way cheaper than the normal version. The student version is fully featured (nothing missing) and allows commercial work (they changed the license a few years ago, in the past it was non commercial only). You need to provide proof to get it.

XNormal - free program for normal map generation (from a high detail model to put on a low detail model, from a height map, or generated from 4 photos of a real life surface with different light positions), cone step map generation, occlusion map generation, cavity map generation, conversion between object and tangent space normal maps, etc.

MapZone - free procedural texture generation. It's the prequel to Allegorithmic's Substance. It's nothing like a paint program, this is a purely node based generator. (Sadly the free version doesn't let you do runtime generation in a game, it only lets you bake the textures into image files).

Truespace 3D Modeler FREE http://www.flat2d.com/Truespace/tS761B8.exe I believe that is a current link

Daz3D Modeler scene build FREE

Both are really good programs

Daz3D works great with Poser as well

for those that do not know or just getting started

Http://www.turbosquid.com/ has some great models in various formats, tons of FREE models as well.

EXAMPLE from tubrosquid: http://www.multiplereality.com/night_building.zip
this is a free building Rendered in 3DsMax

Regards,
Mike

I have added your suggestions (which are really cool BTW) to the list! I added some links/ressources I found too. But finding Truespace is a bit more complicated as their site is apparently dead :( if someone has a good mirror I will add it.

Blender has a sculpting mode similar to ZBrush already built in.

"fschulze" wrote:
Blender has a sculpting mode similar to ZBrush already built in.

Good to know, I didnt know that. I tried to get into blender multiple times but got overwhelmed pretty quickly. Now I have a bit more time on hand so apparently its time to give it a try again :)

I dunno where it would go, but in trying to get some Daz3D models imported into UDK, the free Autodesk FBX Converter has been necessary.
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/item?siteID=123112&id=10775855

Program called

World Machine - terrain generator.

I also Think I have the Source code for:

Quake 1 and 2 if anyone needs it.

For the Coding Scripting section:
Lua is of course a great scripting language. Used in heaps of games. Open source.

Decoda is a pretty powerful Lua editor/debugger by the makers of the game Natural Selection. It can actually intercept and debug Lua code running in programs that don't know about Decoda (assuming they used a Lua dll). It used to be commercial but is now free. http://unknownworlds.com/decoda

LuaJIT makes Lua run faster by doing Just In Time compiling of lua scripts into assembly. I've seen benchmarks of maths code in lua running up to 30 times faster.

HEy, experienced Audio guy here..

Your bread and butter for simple audio waveform/file editing and converting/encoding would be audacity, cross platform.

For music production that is free, I would say: milkytracker, garageband, or Reaper, with Reaper being the most powerful, professional, and fully functioning DAW(digital audio workstation), it is actually shareware but the shareware version is fully functional forever :)

hope that helps :mrgreen:

Thanks everyone and keep on contributing! I just added your suggestions in the Main post. I will clean it up a bit and links for everything when I have time.