Lately I've been checking out the waters in the "free 3D" world. What I've discovered is....that its going to be a veeerrrry long time (if ever) before you guys are offered a game here with my name on it (he, heh).. Oh, and I also found this:
http://www.3dlinks.com/links.cfm?categoryid=1&subcategoryid=2&page=1
Its a nice list of (mostly) freeware 3D programs. I'm sharing it because it not only has the usual suspects, like Daz, and Blender, but quite a few other programs not as easily found (at least not by me). In particular, on page 5, http://www.3dlinks.com/links.cfm?categoryid=1&subcategoryid=2&page=5 there is an entry for Caligari trueSpace 3.2 - direct link to registration is http://forms.caligari.com/forms/ts3all_free.html
I don't know very much about 3D and to the more experienced among you, this may not be anything new or newsworthy. But its the full program of an earlier version and after playing with it a few hours, I think its a great program for a beginner to get their feet wet in 3D (meaning, unlike some of the programs I've tried, you can actually make something appear on your screen before you get old and grey). It also accepts Photoshop plugins just fine and works on Vista (although I couldn't install one facet of it, Intel RSX, but so far, no problems).
And while I'm on the subject of retro graphics, here's something else of interest (I hope), a working version of GRAFX2 for Windows: http://www.eclipse-game.com/?menu=tools&sub=graphic&dat=7
I found this about 2 months ago. Everything works fine, save one or two things that aren't major, and according to Google Code (no, hamstergirl is not getting pretentious, I just happened to find this by accident) the project is still open. This link http://code.google.com/p/grafx2/ will actually give you more info than the home page. And it too works on Vista.
I hope someone finds these of interest.
Cheers,
hg
