Hey everyone. I just noticed that there isn’t much of a breakdown of 3rd party tools on the forum. I was hoping that maybe we could make a list of programs and their price. Here’s what I’ve seen so far:
3d Modelers Sketchup - Free and a $500 pro version. (Very simple program, but quick workflow and accurate measurements) Blender - Free! Maya - $3,700 3d Studio Max - $3,700 Softimage - $3,1590 Hexagon - $20 Carrara - $89-199
“Digital Clay” Modelers Zbrush - $700 (Very cheap for a program that is used in many movies and commercial games including Gears of War and King Kong). Sculptris - Free! (pretty much the tech demo for Zbrush). Mudbox - $800 3d Coat - $350 commercial, $523 floating.
DAZ Studio- Free!
*Blender and Hexagon also supports sculpting.
2d Editors GIMP - Free! (As good as PS but sucky interface and needs lots of plugins to get full use out of) Photoshop - $700 Sketchbook Pro - $60
*Zbrush also includes an impressive paint program.
3D coat is also widely used for retopo, painting and some use it even for scultping.
Also Topogun for retopo and Xnormal for texture generation (normal maps, cavity maps etc.)
You could put Blender also into the sculpt section since it has sculpting tools. Not advanced as Zbrush but better than the stuff Maya and 3ds Max offers out of the box.
If you are on a Mac, Pixelmator is an amazing Photoshop replacement for just $14.99 (think that’s a special price… I recall it being $30.) Biggest disadvantage to Photoshop (IMO) is lack of Layer Styles. If you need that feature, then Acorn is my second choice and actually has Layer Styles, a bit pricier at $50, though.
A Vector based 2D tool I also love and use a lot to compliment my work is Xara, it’s so good I keep my PC by the side of the Mac so I can use it native (due to many custom controls and graphic features, no emulated environment or crossover like tool works well with it.) Bonus for Xara: it also has some nice Web generator features. My website, starsmangames.com was done with it in a lazy afternoon.
The basic edition of Xara costs $89 and the Pro one costs $299. I use the basic one and never felt I lack anything.
Milkshape 3D - a low poly box modeller. $36 - pretty intuitive and easy to use.
Wings 3D - good for organic meshes. Free I believe.
Shader map Pro 2 - $50 = good for doing norml, specular and Ambient occlusions .and heightmaps
UVMapper pro -$50 pretty easy to use.
Ultimate Unwrap 3D -$50 a good UV Mapper, possibly one of the best decimators on the market.
If you want to animate pixel art - promotion 6 (unless it’s 7 now). Less than $50 I believe.
Paintshop Pro is cheap and quite good as it has a large community and a lot of actions etc created for it which can come in handy for postprocessing, again around $50.
World Creator V.2 - excellent for isometric games - around $50
Timeline FX - quite a good particle creator - the EZ GUI guy links to this
Crazy Talk 7 if you need pieces of dialogue. The basic computer voice is not so good but the addons are excellent. I think about $80 plus $60 for a set of less computer sounding voices.
iClone 5 for games with speaking characters - however, these are movies so one does need Unity Pro. However, mimic for Daz Studio will animate lip synched faces and these can be exported as 2D frames so in theory one could get around (with effort) the limitation of having talking heads to Unity Pro. I think mimic is $40. Daz is free at the moment.
Mimic I think is Daz but could be Poser
Fot sound Steinberg Cubase 7 (£488 comes recommended) as does Adobe Audition (£400)
For textures cgtextures is good, a yearly membership is only $57 and there is a new one called gametextures.co which has a monthly subscription but limits texture size depending on what the subscription rate is.
Nearly forgot - Axialis Cursor workshop for custom game cursors.
Messiah Studio for cutscenes. I got this for $40 but normally several hundred.
I’m not sure of the worth of this, I mean basically you can include any and all CG, audio and video related tools out there, the list will be virtually endless, it only gets worse if you start to include things that are pipeline related, SCM etc, soon you’ll have to include “apache” in the list. I’ll add a few glaring omissions, but honestly this is more something for Google…
Mari - Texturing
Cinema 4D/Bodypaint - Modeling, “Clay” Sculpting, Texturing (2D and 3D painting), Animating, Windows, OSX Linux.
Silo - Modeling, Windows OSX
Modo - Modeling, Sculpting, Texturing, Windows OSX
MOI - Nurbs only modeling.
Lightwave 3D - Modeling, Animation, Windows OSX
Painter - 2D Texturing, Windows OSX
ArtRage - 2D Texturing, Windows, OSX, IOS
Firewords - 2D editing Bitmap + Vector hybrid, Windows OSX
Illustrator - Vector Art, Windows OSX
Inkscape - Vector art, Windows
Visual Studio - Coding
Wing IDE - Python (Boo) coding
What’s truly ridiculous is that I have had to use these tools at some point or another… I usually keep in mind my main tools and I have forgot how many I actually know how to use and operate and can remember the interface by simply seeing their name in a post.
Okay- few additional tools that I personally use/have used.
World Machine- Landscape (heightmap) generator with shiny erosion simulation, Windows only. Free non-commercial version, Standard is $89, Pro $189.
Topogun- UV retopology tool. Mac/Win, $100
CrazyBump- Normal map production. Win/Mac(Beta), Personal license is $99, professional $299.
Filter Forge- Texture creation using a node-based system, Mac/Win- Basic license $59, Standard $99, Pro $159 (…current discount price)
Substance Designer- Another node-based texture tool, more powerful than FF. As well as standard image maps it produces Substance Material files which can be tweaked directly inside software which supports them, including a strange little game engine called Unity. Win/Mac, $99 non-commercial use, $599 for full license
Bitmap 2 Material- Takes image files and converts them to Substance Material files, including computed specular, normal, heightmaps, and suchlike. Light version included in Substance Designer, Win/Mac $149
Art Text 2- Simple vector/text tool intended for logos, headers and suchlike- I use this for UI elements quite often. Win/Mac, $20
FX Composer- Shader IDE. Win, Free