Time and time again, blogs in the CG community post a collection of free CG software to show what’s available on the freeware and opensource front. Unfortunately, the positive descriptions and legitimate-looking screenshots can lead people into believing that the workflow in the free CG world is identical or even better than that of payware CG apps. So, what I’m going to do is show you a comprehensive overview of free CG tools that you can actually use and not just look at.
Since there are no real offerings in terms of CG compositing, I’ll focus on two fundamental parts of 3D work: modeling and animation/rendering. I’m also going to avoid the really bare-metal applications like POV-RAY and all the RenderMan clones. Writing renderers, it seems, is a fairly trivial task. Writing animation and scene-composing applications, on the other hand, isn’t tackled by the free software community so much.
Modeling
Modeling applications, unsurprisingly, are a dime a dozen. Most of them are polygon (extrusion) modelers that encourage the box-model paradigm. Therefore, I’ll attempt a very simple task, such as creating a box and extruding a single face of the box.
Rendering
Read more: pxleyes.com
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