APPENDIX C
Top 20 Free 3D Resources
YOU CAN SAY NOTHING IN the world is free, but in the 3D world there are endless resources available for all of us to improve our workflow. The following is a compilation of 20 great websites that you can use to download free software or free information. Some of these resources are well known while others are relative unknown. All of them provide something unique and if you haven’t investigated each to see how it might be incorporated into your workflow, you would probably be doing yourself a favor to check them out.
www.animoto.com – Animoto Productions is a bunch of techies and film/TV producers who decided to lock themselves in a room together and nerd out. Their first release is Animoto, a web application that automatically generates professionally produced videos using their own patent-pending technology and high-end motion design. Each video is a fully customized orchestration of user-selected images and music. Produced on a widescreen format, Animoto videos have the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer. The heart of Animoto is its newly developed Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology that thinks like an actual director and editor. It analyzes and combines user-selected images and music with the same sophisticated post-production skills & techniques that are used in television and film.
www.autodesk.com – Of course, the list wouldn’t be complete without a reference to the company that makes 3ds Max. The official 3ds Max forum (the 2nd link) is a great place to get help and advice from peers for any problem you can’t solve on your own. It’s also a great place to search for a 3D job or to post an available position.
www.bluevertigo.com.ar – A great source for textures, fonts, Photoshop brushes, sound clips, and much more.
www.blu-ray.com – With the explosion of high-definition over the last few years, a mention is in order regarding the most popular source for everything related to the Blu-ray Disc – the king of high-definition media. This site provides movie and product reviews, news, guides and forums covering Blu-ray movies, players, recorders, drives, media, software and much more. Warning: don’t feed the trolls. They bite!
www.ceruleanstudios.com – Trillian is a fully featured, stand-alone, skinnable chat client that supports AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, and IRC. It provides capabilities not possible with original network clients, while supporting standard features such as audio chat, file transfers, group chats, chat rooms, buddy icons, multiple simultaneous connections to the same network, server-side contact importing, typing notification, direct connection (AIM), proxy support, encrypted messaging (AIM/ICQ), SMS support, and privacy settings. Trillian provides unique functionality such as contact message history, a powerful skinning language, tabbed messaging, global status changes (set all networks away at once), Instant Lookup (automatic Wikipedia integration), contact alerts, an advanced automation system to trigger events based on anything happening in the client, docking, hundreds of emoticons, emotisounds, shell extensions for file transfers, and systray notifications.
www.cgarchitect.com – In just a few short years, CGarchitect has established itself as the premier visualization website, with over 85,000 active visitors every month. The site contains all of the latest visualization news, fantastic tutorials and discussion groups, product reviews, and more. While numerous websites have come and gone, CGarchitect appears to have the right ingredients to continue to be the industry-leading website indefinitely.
www.cgtextures.com – Perhaps the largest collection of free textures available on the planet.
www.cozimo.com – Say goodbye to scheduling meetings, sitting in traffic jams and waiting in boardrooms. With Cozimo you can collaborate and review images and videos — together in real-time or on your own time. Get feedback from clients and colleagues instantly. Cozimo is the faster, better, simpler way to work.
www.download.com – Download.com offers a huge library of free and legal software downloads. They provide timely, relevant, and credible information about important software updates as they come available. Their editors write unbiased reviews and ratings for thousands of free downloads, and they are committed to maintaining coverage that is objective and accurate. All the downloadable software in their library undergoes a rigorous testing process to ensure it is safe and spyware free.
www.dynamicdrive.com – A great website to obtain free, original DHTML & Javascripts to enhance your 3D website.
www.earth.google.com – Google Earth has established itself as the premier satellite imagery company, providing users with highly detailed imagery and the ability to implement numerous other graphical features not available with any other program. Although you can download Google Earth for free, I highly recommend Google Earth Pro for those users who want to take their work to a new level. With the Pro version, you can create interactive fly-throughs that show aerial tours of a project and its environment, you can create movies in real time, add graphics and blend 3D visualizations into the satellite imagery. Google Earth never fails to impress my clients.
www.engadgethd.com – Perhaps the best Internet source available for entertainment-based technology information. This site is often the first place you would ever find information on emerging technologies.
www.gijsdezwart.nl/tutorials.php - A short and sweet guide to linear work flow and monitor calibration. http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator – An easy-to-use procedural ivy generator that provides amazing realism.
www.materials-world.com – A big challenge in creating visualizations is the ability to use the correct colors on the walls in your scene. If you do not have a good system in place for choosing and applying colors, you may go back and forth with the client numerous times trying to provide the correct color. Clients will often not even know what colors they will be using in their project. Even if they have a paint manufacturer and a paint name selected, that chosen color may not look right to them on their computer screen. This website provides a great solution. Materials-World.com lists virtually every major paint manufacturer and almost all of their available colors. Simply have your client go to this website and pick out or confirm their color selections, and regardless of variations in monitors, when you send them back the final product, it will match the colors they selected.
http://www.maxplugins.de – An immense source of free plug-ins for 3ds Max. This site also includes information about a wide variety of plug-ins for purchase.
www.sba.gov/starting_business – The growth of any business is closely tied to the application of good management skills and techniques. I highly recommend visiting this website to gain some great insight to managing a company, especially for those just starting out. Also worth checking out is the SCORE business toolbox at (www.score.org/business_toolbox.html), which contains numerous sample business templates, online counselors available for free advice, and numerous business guides to make running your own business easier. Equally valuable is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Small Business Center (www.uschamber.com/sb/toolkits).
www.scriptspot.com – ScriptSpot is a diverse online community of artists and developers coming together to share and discover scripts for 3ds max and SketchUp. Their users come from a variety of fields - from Visual F/X to Game Developers, Architects or even hobbyists. Come discover. Share. Blog. Comment. ScriptSpot is powered by you.
www.skype.com – Here’s a product that I didn’t even know existed until the end of 2005. Once I learned about it, I began using it every day. Skype is a program that allows you to call anyone, anywhere in the world at no charge, provided they have Skype also. Since the basic version is free for download, there’s no reason why anyone couldn’t use it. For myself, the biggest benefit has been the ability to talk to my overseas subs at any time at no cost.
www.vray-materials.de – A website dedicated to the creation and sharing of V-Ray materials. With thousands of donated materials, it’s easy to find one for any need.