Patrick

I like Ubuntu... I recently tried out Linux Mint (Cinnamon) on a laptop and I quite like that, it uses the same repositories as Ubuntu too. Yeah I can see not being able to use the auto updater as being a real pain lol Once you get everything setup and running with Linux everything is pretty smooth in my opinion, I just hope that more applications like Zbrush and such tools most people use support it in the near future!

Also, if you use Maya there is a built in feature to help with that, or there are alternative external plugins that work really well with it to help make trees similar to these that have been linked above but of course it would be easier to use and manage if you already know your 3d package. If you don;t use Maya, Blender has pretty much the same plugins and scripts from the community for similar things

Personally, I like the idea of promoting Linux in that way, releasing your game on Linux first for a limited time. I'm not so sure that everyone would agree though... The only thing that has been holding me back from going to Linux on my desktop is the lack of support for a key piece of software that I use, Pixologic Zbrush, I have read somewhere that it works through WINE but I have yet to look into that in depth and I have no proof but I've been thinking of setting my computer up to dual boot, so I can run linux and when I have to use Zbrush I can just simply boot the computer in Windows. Not ideal but a possible solution for me What distro of Linux have you gone with?

You have officially peaked my interest with this post, I really do want to learn more now, so I can't wait for your next post where you go into more detail regarding this!! It is most certainly a challenging task... I will keep my eyes open for an update on this Thanks for the post Regards Patrick

Try exporting from Silo2 with the .obj export and then converting it to an fbx file in Blender... Perhaps some information besides just the geometry and uv data is getting carried over with the 3ds file and messed up from converting to an fbx somewhere and that could be causing trouble... I know that some people who use fbx files, don't always clean up their scene before exporting to an engine and this is the reason for my above comment, as typically this tends to cause issues somewhere. I guess that its worth a shot but beyond that I can't see why that is happening :\ If its happening with models even obtained from the internet, then I doubt that it is the above... I can't say that I have had that experience with Leadwerks and my content yet :S

I was going to add these but had to go and get some stuff done lol there are more too which I know of and use, thanks for listing them I will add to the main list real soon

I've done this and made videos... I think they are somewhere on youtube but not too sure, I may have taken them down some time ago. I love MODO, but its too expensive to just up and buy and the steam edition isnt worth it in my opinion.

This post will contain a big list of free and paid software that you can use for creating game ready art or software that can be used in the creation process of game ready art. Before I get going with this post I would like to say that the most complete and affordable or free package is by far Blender. (currently) so if you're starting out and wanting to get into 3D, I would highly recommend getting started with this and putting up with the slightly steep learning curve (at least for some people) I will list it below. FREE Software: Blender:This will allow you to do everything from modelling your mesh, unwrapping it and or sculpting upon it before rigging and animation, it even offers a game engine within it not that I have ever used that side of the application. This is well worth a look and will be the best place to start for anyone looking to jump into the 3d art industry. Sculptris:The best free solution to 3D sculpting without having to worry about any sort of poly count and topology. Just create the art and worry about the technical stuff later. Personally I prefer using this to Blender for sculpting however Blender will offer more for the hard surface stuff. RoadKill: This is a free standalone UV solution, pretty nice and very usable. PAID Software: Cheetah3D:This is a Mac only application but It had to be mentioned, I have never used it myself but heard great things about it and it's one of the other applications that do offer modelling alongside animation in a seemingly affordable and professional software. Silo2: Now I quite like this, it offers you a very nice package for a great price. You will be able to model unwrap and retopologise and even sculpt, the sculpting isn't going to be as powerful as something like the other applications mentioned here, its not the same kind of sculpting. I personally just use the modelling and unwrapping side of this software. This software is cheaper to purchase on Steam than the main site, but also the price on Steam has recently increased to, however its worth the money, if you cannot get on with Blender like many other people out there this is a nice solution, but be warned... Run the demo just to make sure it works on your computer, with some people this software crashes unexpectedly right away, I never have this problem and Maya actually crashes on me more than this but its something worth mentioning before you spend chunks of money on something to find that you cannot use it! Nvil: This is a very nice piece of software, developed by one guy and often overlooked. Its not complete yet but it's being actively worked on, the community is lacking a little but there is one! I can only hope that this gets a little more popular this year, I really enjoy using it. Highly customizable and easy to use if you know the basics of modelling already. The one downside is you will have to use Roadkill or another standalone UV tool if you want to unwrap your models. Not a bad thing though. Many use this as opposed to the tools software like Maya and 3DS Max offer you anyway! 3D Coat: This one would be the best premium sculpting application that will also allow you to access great UV tools with a nice set of retopology stuff thrown in, definitely worth the price tag and easy enough to learn how to use. Zbrush: Probably the most well known application for high end sculpting, be it for game or production, this software is great but it comes at a price, however a very good price for what you get but if you're on a budget 3D Coat will be the way to go, this is a very similar software but I find that using a lesser powerful machine is a lot better with this than 3D Coat so you might want to take that into consideration when marking up what you can afford and what you cannot. Topogun: If you want something affordable and powerful for the simple task of retopologising your models to be game ready than this is likely the best software you can add to your arsenal of applications, its easy to use, cheap and very powerful at what it does. Autodesk Maya: Personally I feel that this is one of the best solutions for Animation, although you can use it for a great many other things this is a complete package, modelling, uv mapping, rigging and animation along with rendering and such. It has a high price tag much like every other product by autodesk, but you really do get your moneys worth. Autodesk 3DS Max: Personally I couldn't get on with this one, I found navigation to be too tedious (when I started out) but I know that this is just as powerful as Maya and it has a very nice viewport renderer too. Another full package with all the tools you will need (excluding sculpting) Autodesk Softimage XSI: I loved this software back before Autodesk bought them out, I haven't used it since due to the price tag matching up with the others, its still a great piece of software and no doubt that it'll be more powerful than when I used it, it has a great and exstensive set of rigging tools and animation, as well as modelling and the like. Well worth a look if you plan on getting a premium software. Autodesk Mudbox: Another sculpting solution here, presented by Autodesk, its definitely got the power and a great feature set, personally I prefer 3D Coat and Zbrush, I believe they're actually cheaper too, but if you're looking to go with Autodesk for something like Maya, you can get a major discount for purchasing a bundle of their software including this which will be great to use in that instance. I have to run off for a little while but this list will be an on going thing, I will add to it and expand, I have a set of 2d applications I would love to add to this along with some info regarding some other steam applications for 3d modelling that have not long ago released! I hope that this list will help some of you newcomers and such.

For a complete package I would recommend Blender to someone who has never used another 3d modelling application before, its probably the best thing to start using, its forever growing and has a great community for support. If you want something that is a paid for application I use Maya and would recommend that although its pricy. I use it mostly for my rigging and animation work however the modelling tools are quite adequate. I would like to ask what you mean by complete though? (modelling, uv, rigging & animation?) You can always use a couple of applications alongside each other which is what a lot of people do and many industry artists will tell you is not a bad thing. I find that 3D Coat is likely the best most affordable option out there for sculpting high detailed organic and hard surface objects and creatures, it definitely competes with Zbrush although they have a few differences. (I use both so I'm talking form what I know) If you use Blender you can utilize the sculpting that software offers but in my opinion its not nearly as great as 3D Coat, its definitely getting there, but its not there yet I find myself using 3D Coat (right now) more for the UV and retopology tools than the sculpting, another thing that Blender has (the retopo tools) which Maya 2014 does too, I think that you'll find at the end of the day it all comes down to personal preference and how much you can or want to spend on the stuff. There are cheaper solutions aside from the free Blender just encase you cannot get on with it as I know many people just can't... Silo2: (Affordable but paid) A great modelling solution that offers Uv tools and a set of retopology tools Nvil: (free & Paid) This is solely a modelling application, but you can use Roadkill alongside it for the UV requirements. A very nice and customizable application that I would happily recommend to people that are having a hard time with Blender. There are others and I will likely go and make a full post about them with more information in a short while as to help others looking for this type of thing but I think that you will find it hard to come across a more complete package than Blender without paying a nice lump sum of cash. Like 3D Coat, its great for sculpting, UVing and Retopologising but not so great for things like creating lower poly models, it also has amazing tools to paint on your mesh very nicely too, I will make a tutorial on this very soon! So using this tool alongside your favorite modelling application will only prove beneficial. Also, I love using Sculptris as a free sculpting application, its truly amazing and probably the easiest way to jump into the world of 3d sculpting, like YouGroove has just said, grab a cheap wacom tablet and have fun with it I think you'll find yourself in need of a graphics tablet if you plan on creating good textures and sculpting on meshes. I hope this helps a little!

The problem with that is, if you already own it on your account you can't trade it you have to buy it as a gift and have it in your inventory to trade it... :\ lol

Well the way you would do it in Blender really isn't that different to Maya, its just different controls and interface really... As far as animating faces goes I much prefer to handle it manually, the mocap I would only use for high quality cut scene renders or animated cinematic scenarios. I'm not sure that Blender only supports that that, you're always able to go in and animate the face manually, if all you're looking to animate are facial expressions to express emotion to layer over other animations within your game you can easily do this without a lot of animation knowledge, all you will need is a properly prepared model (A model rigged with facial animation in mind) and know what expressions you want. Usually a rig will have controls to help animators use it and it will have pretty straightforward and easy to read facial controls. I haven't much looked into Mixamo Faceplus but I will look more into it now. Animation itself isn't easy to literally just jump into, but if you're willing to and able to put some time into it you might not struggle in picking up some basic skills with Blender (once you get your head around the user interface) this looks like it might help give you a head start in animation as a whole as well as some cool final result for facial stuff: http://cgcookie.com/blender/cgc-courses/animating-a-character-in-blender/ The good news is with my rigs that I create in Maya I think I can get them into Blender and set them up well enough without having to get someone else on board to help with that. I'm trying to get my head around Blender too myself as more people seem interested in a lot of art related stuff and Blender is easy to get and free so if I succeed I will use that for my tutorials and maybe even animation ones, but if I struggle too much with it and can't configure it more like Maya then I will stick to that for the tutorials I have planned :S lol I find it hard as I have been using Maya for far too long now. After looking up more info on Mixamo Faceplus, it says that it works with both Blendshapes and joint based characters so the second is what you would want for a game character to use in an engine, blendshapes are awesome but not as engine friendly from what I have experienced. I know there are things for software like Blender and Maya that will take your audio from your mic or recorded file and animated your model much like this providing you set it up correctly which is apparently the same as this anyway, if you read over the documentation a little here it takes a little preparation for the character in Unity to work with it. (the docs: http://www.mixamo.com/files/doc/face_plus-readme.pdf )

Another plus side to my character rig, once I complete it I can make a tutorial on how to transfer it to another custom model (that you or anyone else made or obtains, the animations can be transferred too) so you can use it if you can animate, that means the facial rig will transfer too, you just need minimal skills in Maya, the key downside I think, as many more people are going with Blender as its Free and I'm so used to using Maya. I downloaded Blender to try and get into the rigging and animation in that, but I can't get used to the menus and such so quickly You'd be able to get a student version of Maya for up to three years though I think. I need to look into ways of converting my custom rigs into Blender rigs from Maya for users without Maya >__<

When I finally get the first character model of mine complete (I'm not even working on it just yet) I want to add a facial rig that will allow facial animations and motions inside the leadwerks engine for cutscenes or real time expressions during action on AI characters and companions, I have a reasonable amount of experience making joint based facial rigs for use in games and I've done some full on facial animation before too, I'm thinking that once I get all of this stuff done I might start making some tutorials on how I created certain things and everything. As for things to make animation for you, Mixamo would likely be your best bet aside from finding an animator to work with. That or get a few Kinects and go crazy but even if you use Mo cap you will want to know how to clean it up and get the motion onto your character then edit that for use in a game engine (its worth it if you can afford it) A friend linked me to this Indiegogo project before, it looks great and I wish that I could afford to back it!

By "free from turbosquid" do you mean that they're free assets you have grabbed from Turbosquid and prepped for use in Leadwerks? If so you should give credit to the original artist too, and probably link back to their Turbosquid listing or something of that sort

This is quite nice, I have seen it grow slowly over the years, I personally prefer to use my own base models it keeps me in good practice It's a nice aid for those looking to go for the realistic look without having to spend time on the art I guess.

There was nothing in particular right now, I just thought this is perfect for those wondering about GUI and stuff. I would personally rather get in and script it but I see the uses. I will probably use this myself for a while though for now, so if I come by something I need I'll ask here and see if its something you could add without much trouble

Hey Aggror, are you still working on this? I saw it a while ago but I've only just now downloaded the pdf and read over it... This is really handy so far I have yet to play around with it in the engine, I will do that once I have had some sleep, but I just wanted to say nice work. Also, I think I have some GUI graphics I created sometime last year that I never got around to using, If I can find the files you can have them to include in this, they were themed around an RPG game though. I will look for these later (after some sleep) and that was why I asked if you were still working on this.

I've been playing around with a lot of procedural content generation and using perlin noise lately but not for the past week or two now, It was before I got the engine and I was using two different languages, mainly cos I switched from one to the other XD. I'd love to see some of this type of content but if I don't I know I can do it, its just a matter of getting my head in gear for coding in Leadwerks, which the rest of these tutorials will help with So if all else fails and nobody has made a tut for that type of stuff and I get something working, the least I would do is possibly post my code as an example for someone to cleanup or optimize and use for now, I'm all about the art though I want to get a bunch of assets finished up before I start with the code in this engine @Rick, with all that going on... I really don't know how you even manage to spend the amount of time on these tutorials currently so kudos to you good sir! lol Keep it up

Sounds great! I'm currently lurking around the forums again as I'm not at my computer lol

Essentially, yes... It will allow you to make an enormous terrain and have it much more manageable and performance friendly. Its a very useful feature but it shouldn't mater as much unless you plan on working with really large terrains/worlds. Also, the multiple monitor support would help a great deal with efficiency but more a luxury as you don't NEED it

Its not just a sculpting tool so not being able to sculpt you will still find a great use with the software, many people I know use it simply for the UV and retopo tools as well as the painting directly on to the mesh, but Photoshop allows this. The one downside to this solution is that you cannot use your content commercially with the Edu version which is the cheapest. So for someone not looking to purchase it for full price and such Blender is the best free alternative and then Topogun would be my choice simply because I dislike the navigation and such with Blender (a veteran Maya user here )

The scripting feature you won't need right away but the tiled terrains thing could come in very handy... and no problem, I forgot that they had a $99 version to be honest. In any case L3DT has a cheaper commercial license too. i feel they are both worthy options but if you use Blender, so is that... Or any modelling and sculpting application combo You just have to be able to create decent textures yourself and know what kind of details are in the terrain look you're trying to go for... For this, Google is your best friend

Yes its very possible. When you say calculate... You mean create a low poly version based off of the high poly character? I know others have answered this before I got to it but yeah 3D Coat can do this without much trouble. Also 3D Coat now has the Live Clay features and you can also use surface mode which differs from the voxel sculpting mode. If you don't like to use these types of tools you can grab something like Topogun, that you can use to make a low poly game ready version of the higher detailed mesh and then use the freely available xnormals that Rastar linked you to and then work from that. As for the comment referring to Chris preferring 3D Coat over Zbrush, I feel that there are some major differences and they both have their advantages and uses, I prefer Zbrush as its easier on my machine as for the way it manages the geometry on screen, I love using both of them and find 3D Coat better for certain tasks and Zbrush for others. 3D Coat is a healthy option for a sculpting application though, the new feature additions in v4 make it more appealing to me I only own the educational license to 3D Coat right now though, and I will stop here as it may get a little off topic. Also DudeAwesome, if you have/use Blender you can use that as a totally free solution, it has some topology tools but it will require you to do a little work... Have a little look at this:

Even for non coders, it won't take a lot of code to get basic/simple cutscenes into the engine, there is also the option of rendering out a cutscene and playing that, although the file sizes may get large if you plan on having a bunch of cutscenes in the game :S I'm looking forward to the mentioned framework that Rick is working on, and having a shot at getting something going in the engine myself once I have the assets created

Currently the only open type of areas I need to create are manageable with Maya and my main sculpting application, I have yet to import any such ladnscape or open area model into the leadwerks engine though but I will likely do so when I get done with the current character and level assets I'm working on. I usually use a combination of three applications when I make my open area models to use for levels, I start in Maya, then go to Zbrush, add detail and a rough layout of my texture (I don't always do this, but sometimes I do) then I bring the texture into my software of choice for creating textures which is sometimes not Photoshop. The result is a pretty nice terrain piece. I often make pieces that I can attach together in a tile like manor and make certain required edits for sections depending on the requirement of the task at hand. World Machine is great to use and real fun but If I remember correctly it has a steep learning curve to start out. Not to mention the cost of the full version at about $249. L3DT is a great solution / alternative too, I haven't used it extensively but from what I have seen and heard, at $100 less (the free version is very usable although not as amazing ), it might be worth looking into, to include in your terrain creation workflow. Personally I always find myself returning to my default applications at most times though. So if you're already capable and comfortable with your modelling application of choice and you can sculpt on a basic level I'd say use that and practice some stuff. I know that Maya and Zbrush are also costy but I already own them and if you don't you can always improvise and go for the free alternative or what you have available to you... Blender has a nice set of modelling tools and a decent set of sculpting tools that are ever growing and improving. You can also use any image editing software to help cleanup the textures and heightmaps but you may find yourself tweaking things and getting comfortable with your workflow... Like Benji385 said... "improvise"