Great 3D Vids on Vimeo and Youtube

For information about the video please use the links under the videos v

Doomed: a biological cartoon!
from El Señor Studio on Vimeo.

Out Of The Ordinary from The Animation Workshop on Vimeo.

Kickstart "The Goon" Blur
on Kickstarter.

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Moviemation Facial Motion Capture Software 2.0

With Moviemation Facial Motion Capture Software 2.0 you can transfer movements of a real person face to a 3D model. To achieve this markers are glued on the face of the real person. These are recorded by a helmet camera. The software can track the movements of these markers and transfer them to a 3D face.

With new features and redesigned interface:
  • 2D images can be converted into 3D movements. 
  • With animated textures and facial expressions are more realistic. 
  • The video and the 3D face can be zoomed and rotated.
(The free version is limited to 15 points, 250 frames and 640 x 640 resolution)

More infos and download on www.moviemation.de

Monday, November 28, 2011

Two HDR files from Dutch Skies 360 free until 31 December 2011

On the website of www.3dworldmag.com you can get two HDR files from Dutch Skies 360 for free until 31 December 2011 from Bob Groothuis, the photographer behind the popular Dutch Skies 360° series. Each set includes an 8K spherical background, a 4K spherical HDR for reflections, a spherical lightmap and a reference document to link everything together using the popular sIBL system. You also get a sequence of 11K exposures for post-production work.

These sets work with any 3D package capable of reading HDR files, including 3ds Max, Maya, Softimage, LightWave 3D and modo. To celebrate the release of his newest DVD, Dutch Skies 360° Volume 4, Bob is offering a prize selection including all four Dutch Skies 360° DVDs in his annual rendering competition. For your chance to win, all you need to do is create a render with the free HDR set created specially for the competition. The closing date is 31 January 2012.

More infos and download on www.3dworldmag.com

Friday, November 25, 2011

130 free Xfrog plants

Xfrog inc.,  the 3d Plantmaker, is giving away 130 plants for free
XfrogPlants are realistic, highly detailed, fully textured 3D trees, shrubs, and flowers, carefully modeled with Xfrog procedural software. They have 600 species available in libraries or as individual species!

The plants are available in the following formats: Maya, Max, obj, lwo, c4d, 3ds

They have free samples from 31 plant libraries available at www.xfrog.com

xNormal 3.17.7 released

An update of xNormal was released:

New in Version 3.17.7:
  • Added support to import/export WebP images ( which is aimed to replace JPG/JPG2K/GIF/PNG images ). 
  • Now it's possible to write image importers/exporters using Java. 
  • The FBX mesh importer has been completely rewritten. Now it can load the tangent basis from the files which is specially good if you use the Unity engine. 
  • Fixed several bugs ( CS5 filters, problem closing the SBM exporter in 3dsmax, use shortest diagonal, dilation in the OS2TS tool, Optix error message with some GPUs, etc... ).
  • Added a new experimental renderer based on the Caustic Graphics / Imagination Technologies's OpenRL ray tracing API. 
  • Added a new map type: the derivative normal maps ( which are aimed to replace old-school problematic tangent-space normal maps ). 
More information and download on www.xnormal.net 

Thursday, November 24, 2011

Voodoo Camera Tracker 1.1.0

The Voodoo Camera Tracker is freeware and it estimates camera parameters and reconstructs a 3D scene from image sequences. The estimation algorithm offers a full automatic and robust solution to estimate camera parameters for video sequences. The results are useful for many applications like film production, 3D reconstruction, or video coding.

The estimated parameters can be exported to the following 3d formats:
  • 3D MAX Script 
  • Blender Python Script 
  • Lightwave 3D 
  • Maya Script 
  • Softimage 3.9 | XSI 
  • Textfile 
  • CAHV 
  • Cameras Feature Points 
  • User Primitives
More Information about Voodoo Camera Tracker 1.1.0 can be found at www.digilab.uni-hannover.de

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Digital Cut Out


Digital Cut Out is a free cut out site for architectural, landscape architectural, and planning graphics.  The entire site is free to student and professional designers. 

It offers cut out images in the following categories:
Home, people, plants, animals, furnishings, sky, perspective, vehicles.

More info at www.digitalcutout.com

MakeHuman 1.0 alpha6

MakeHuman(TM) is an open source, innovative and professional software for the modelling of 3-Dimensional humanoid characters. Features that make this software unique include a new, highly intuitive GUI and a high quality mesh, optimized to work in subdivision surface mode (for example, Zbrush). Using MakeHuman, a photorealistic character can be modeled in less than 2 minutes.

MakeHuman is released under an Open Source Licence (GPL3.0) , and is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

 More info & download at www.makehuman.org

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Free Cutout Textures from Vyonyx

On the vyonyx website (in the download section) you can get 150 cutout people, 200 cutout trees, many ressource photos and textures that are perfect for architectural visualizations.

More info & download on www.vyonyx.com

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Ivy Generator 1.3

Ivy Generator is an open source program that generates ivy around objects.
The ivy grows from one single root following different forces: a primary growth direction (the weighted average of previous growth directions), a random influence, an adhesion force towards other objects, an up-vector imitating the phototropy of plants, and finally gravity. This simple scheme reveals that the goal was not to provide a biological simulation of growing ivy but rather a simple approach to producing complex and convincing vegetation that adapts to an existing scene. The ivy generator imports and exports obj+mtl files.

Ivy Generator is available for Windows, OS X and Linux at http://graphics.uni-konstanz.de/~luft/ivy_generator/

Saturday, November 19, 2011

Free HDRI Studio packs

On www.deviantart.com you can get 3 HDRI Studio packs for free from user zbyg.
(in total 34 files)

More info and download:
HDRI Studio Pack 1 
HDRI Studio Pack 2 
HDRI Studio Pack 3

Edit: 
And there exists Highres version of some of the HDRI´s of the Studio packs downloadable on the 3dtotal forums.

Friday, November 18, 2011

Sculptris Alpha 6

From the maker of ZBrush, Pixologic, comes a free sculting program that is an elegant, powerful and yet easy to use 3D sculpting software, allowing the artist in you to simply focus on creating amazing 3D artwork. Gone are the technical and often tedious constraints typically associated with digital art.

Sculptris frees you from the need to worry about your model's geometry. As you model, Sculptris is constantly analyzing the surface to ensure that there are enough triangles to display the details that you're creating. If there aren't, Sculptris automatically divides the area under the brush while leaving the rest of the model unchanged. This also allows Sculptris to make better use of your computer's resources, since polygons are only added where they are needed.

More information & download on www.pixologic.com

Thursday, November 17, 2011

xNormal

xNormal from Santiago Orgaz is a free application to generate normal / ambient occlusion / displacement maps. It can also project the texture of the highpoly model into the lowpoly mesh ( complete texture transfer, even with different topologies ).
It includes an interactive 3D viewer with multiple mesh and textures format support, shaders and realtime soft shadows / glow effect.
xNormal comes with some useful tools like height map - normal map - cavity map - occlusion - tangent/object space and spherical harmonics tools. All these computations are done using multicore/multithreading, distributed/parallel rendering, ray tracing and advanced GPGPU techniques.

xNormal is available for Windows.
More information & download at www.xnormal.net 

Free NASA 3D Models

The NASA has its own collection of 3d models related to its spacemissions.
The are almost 100 3D models free for download in LWO, FBX or OBJ formats.

More infos & download on www.nasa.gov

Autodesk 123D Beta 7

Autodesk 123D is a free 3D CAD software to help you quickly give shape to your idea, explore it, and most importantly, make it. Design precise and make-able objects using smart tools that let you start with simple shapes and then edit and then tweak them into more complex designs.

123D is available for Windows at www.123dapp.com/123D

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Pixel Flakes Teaser Pack

A while ago xoio released a pack of some cutout people. Pixel Flakes found these extremely useful and as a result of this, they were inspired to create some of their own…

This is a small teaser for the upcoming 'Goodie Pack' which will include a variety of royalty free 2D imagery such as cutout people and trees. As well as this it will also include some top of the line HDRI’s which they have created especially for their renderings.

So until that time comes here's a little teaser of what you can expect:
www.pixelflakes.com

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

MeshMixer 07

MeshMixer is a free tool for combining 3D-models and sculpting. MeshMixer´s official name changed to "Autodesk MeshMixer" with version 07, so possibly the software gets a redesign in the future. Get it as long as it is free!

The software is available for OS X and Windows

More information at www.meshmixer.com

OpenFlipper 1.1

OpenFlipper is an OpenSource multi-platform application and programming framework designed for processing, modeling and rendering of geometric 3D data.

Currently supported platforms are Windows, MacOS X and Linux.

More information on www.openflipper.org

Monday, November 14, 2011

Wings 3D 1.4.1

Wings 3D is an advanced subdivision modeler that is both powerful and easy to use.
It is Open Source and available for Windows, OS X and Linux

More Information on www.wings3d.com

TextureKing

On the TextureKing website you get material textures for free.
Categories are: Concrete, Grunge, Wood, Stone/Rock, Metals, Fabric, Paint, Rust, Plastic, Dirt/Sand, Liquids, Plaster, Glass.
No registration required.

More Info on www.textureking.com

Google 3D Warehouse

The 3D Warehouse from Google is the storage place for models uploaded from Google Sketchup to the internet.
These, all free if downloadable, 3D Models are possible to download directly into Sketchup or are available in Collada file format.

More Info at http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse

Blender 2.60

Blender is a free Open Source 3D suite that is the very complete.
Modeling, sculpting, texturing, animating, particles, fluids, rendering and compositing is possible.
It is Open Source and available for Windows, OS X and Linux.
More infos and download at www.blender.org

See work that is done in Blender in the Blender Siggraph 2011 reel:

Texturepilot

Texturepilot is a website with thousands of free available textures and modelling references .
Categories include:
Animals, Fabric, Fences, Food, Ground, GrungeSplatter, Lamps, Landscapes, Metal, Objects, Ornaments, Plants, Plastic, Posters, Roofs, Rubbish, Seamless, Sequences, Signage, Skies, Snow, Stones, Tiles, Vehicles, Walls, Wood.

A free registration on the website is required for a free daily dose of 20MB of images.

More information on www.texturepilot.com

Meshlab 1.3.1

The free opens source software Meshlab is a great tool for the processing and editing of unstructured 3D triangular meshes (3D scan data). But because it has the ability to open a variety of formats and is multiplatform it serves nice as a 3D viewer or 3D converter too.
It is Open Source and available for Windows, OS X and Linux.

More infos and download at www.meshlab.sourceforge.net

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Google SketchUp 8

First free 3D program is Google SketchUp 8:
SketchUp is a lot of fun. You can freely sketch nonorganic forms very fast.
The free Version is almost the same as the Pro version besides some exporters, printing and the Layout-program. You can export as Collada what should be ok. (in later posts i will show how you can convert this into other 3D formats)

Google SketchUp is Freeware and available for Windows and OS X.
More information on www.sketchup.google.com

Free 3D News start!

Lets bring this thing to live!
The news blog about free 3D tools, programs, textures, webservices etc. is here.
To have all tools listed on this site in the end, i will begin with existing tools even if they have no news at the moment.

Lets begin!