With many years of net browsing under my belt, what stuff have I found for game making? A big load of shit, with some nice stuff.

Although in the past everything was abit crappy, tech was ever evolving, polygon counts were limited and special effects like bump maps and shaders where like a mystic creatures never to be believed.

Anyway, enough with filler, heres some tools that I like using and some that I have found to be useful or not worth the trouble. Some are both.

Lets start with Anim8tor. It kind of falls into both catagories for a few reasons.

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Anim8tor

Pros -

* Easy to use, decent amount of supported models to import and export(3ds, obj,someother one)

* Its fairly easy to model and modify. It comes with the ability to place bones and use skinning.

* And its free, runs from a single exe so its super portable. I like programs I can stick on a flash drive and use almost anywhere. Thats why I hate GM7.

Cons -

* Texture mapping on anything that is not a flat surface is tricky at best.

* Rotating. In general this can be a chore. To rotate at certain angles you have to use left, right and middle buttons. And then it can also depend on how your viewing the object. It can make you go crazy.

* Skeletons. I just don't get it. You set one up, and then sometimes, at some point, it goes all wierd on you and your legs are going funny places and you skin explodes off your body. I will no longer do skeletal animation in this….

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UVMapper is a decent free model unwrapper, it will export a image that you can use to skin. I won't break down the pros or cons on this since its relatively easy and useful.

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PaceMakeR, which is now free(I never heard of it before) is truely a sweet tool that finishes up models like they should.

It handles skeletons, skinning and exports to a few formats. Thats kind of a draw back as I need to use other programs to convert them again.

My opinion on this one is incomplete as I've just started to play with it, but its promising.

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Lithunwrap, also freeware.

I haven't used it much but I already like it. It allows you to unwrap the model to create the skin, much like others, but it also has a nice optimization function.

You never know how much extra crap can be in a model until you run the optimizer. I've seen vertex counts get cut in half, and generally smooths the model out more.

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Gmax. Its free but it fails.

Why? Ever heard of anything that can export a gmax to any other format? Without paying for it? Huh? No. Gmax can suck it.

I'm just glad I didn't waste any time making models on it before I found out it would be impossible to export anything to anything I was going to work with.

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Make Human. Its free, but can you use it?

If you were planning on making a movie with some sort of rendering program, yes, its a very nice thing to have.

You can probably find some way to reduce its massive poly count, and if its enough you may have something usable, but not for me. I'm slapping U3d onto GM and I have limits to consider.

But aside from that, lets look at the coolness of this program.

It basicly acts like a super version of a character creation system. It generally produces a realistic person with plenty of options to adjust.

Things like age, tone, weight, and sex. Its worth checking out.

There is something up with its interface though, its not the most responsive to some alterations that you make.

There is also supposed to be a way to export them into usable model files, but I have yet to figure that out. I think you need to get some plugins to truelly use this program to its full potential.

Also it only has Africa to choose from, even though it has the other continents shown, you cannot select them. In the readme I saw it mention that and japan, but you can't select asia so I'm assuming the person you start with is japanese? Who knows. Either way it provides plenty of variety and tweekability that it can be a very useful resource.

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Thats it. I hope I wasted plenty of your time.