External Tools

Blender is free. It can be used for modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, water simulations, skinning, animating, rendering, particle and other simulations, non-linear editing, compositing, and creating interactive 3D applications. Blender is available for several operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, IRIX, Solaris, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD with unofficial ports for BeOS, SkyOS, AmigaOS, MorphOS and Pocket PC. Blender has a robust feature set similar in scope and depth to other high-end 3D software such as Softimage|XSI, Cinema 4D, 3ds Max, Lightwave and Maya. These features include advanced simulation tools such as rigid body, fluid, and softbody dynamics, modifier based modeling tools, powerful character animation tools, a node based material and compositing system and Python for embedded scripting.

Wings 3D is ideally suited for modeling and texturing low to medium density polygon meshes. It has a wide range of very effective tools optimised for these tasks hidden behind its 'minimalistic' interface. Designed as a stand-alone modeller, without animation or 'proper' rendering facilities it should not be confused with software that does include such features - although its modelling capabilities stand extremely favourable comparison with equivalent sections of such applications - whether free or commercial.

The use of 'context-sensitive' menus is the reason for its sparse look, whereby tool menus relevant to the current selection mode are only displayed when needed - so no 'greyed out' options.

(It looks like the author of SharpConstruct will implement its functionality into Blender as a google summer of code project.)
Note:
SharpConstruct is no longer under development. Project files are still available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/sharp3d.

A commercial version of the software is also available and is capable of creating larger terrains, renders with higher image resolution, larger terrain files, and better post-render anti-aliasing than the freeware version. The terrain is generated from a two-dimensional heightmap. The program contains facilities for importing and exporting heightmaps to images, for use in other programs.

Terragen can also be used to create skyboxes for 3D video games. The game Serious Sam is a prime example. Engen, an internal version of Terragen 2 by Digital Domain, was used to render Earth terrain scenes in the film Stealth and planetary scenes in Star Trek Nemesis.

Also have a look at the Seamless Texture Tutorial!

Some of Audacity's features include importing and exporting WAV, AIFF, MP3 (via the LAME encoder, downloaded separately), Ogg Vorbis and all other file formats supported by libsndfile library, editing via Cut, Copy, Paste (with unlimited Undo), multi-track mixing, a large array of digital effects and plug-ins (Additional effects can be written with Nyquist), amplitude envelope editing, noise removal, support for multi-channel modes with sampling rates up to 96 kHz with 24 bits per sample and much, much more.

In addition to English language help, the ZIP file of the downloadable Audacity software program includes help files for Afrikaans, Arabic, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian and Welsh in its user interface. A partial Bengali help file is also included.

VirtualDub was originally created for the purpose of compressing anime videos of Sailor Moon but eventually developed into something more. It is designed to process linear video streams, including filtering and recompression, but lacks features common to dedicated video editing software.

It features complete customizable setup types (e.g. Full, Minimal, Custom), complete uninstall capabilities, creation of a single EXE to install your program for easy online distribution (including disk spanning), includes integrated support for "deflate", bzip2, and 7-Zip LZMA file compression. The installer has the ability to compare file version info, replace in-use files, use shared file counting, register DLL/OCX's and type libraries, install fonts and much more.

NSIS was created to distribute Winamp. It is based on a previous Nullsoft product, PiMP (plugin Mini Packager), and is also known as SuperPiMP. After version 2.0a0, the project was moved to SourceForge where developers outside of Nullsoft started working on it on a regular basis. NSIS 2.0 was released approximately two years later.

NSIS version 1 is in many ways similar to the classic Windows Installer, but it is easier to script and supports more compression formats. NSIS version 2 features a new streamlined graphical user interface and supports LZMA compression, multiple languages, and an easy to use plugin system.

A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.

It is an image-centered diagram that represents connections between portions of information. By presenting these connections in a radial, non-linear graphical manner, it encourages a brainstorming approach to any given organizational task, eliminating the hurdle of initially establishing an intrinsically appropriate or relevant conceptual framework to work within.

It is configurable in the Control Panel or context menu for 3D files giving the user control over the rendering priority. It also supports a thumbnail cache. Latest version may include unspecified updates, enhancements, or bug fixes.