Slashdot Mirror

As a blender/crystal space user I'm more interested in the development of Apricot, the open game based on the movie. It'll be great to see improvements in the area of 3d Linux game development, and certainly make it a more attractive platform for developers in the future.

I have particularly been watching their open game.

Where FOSS fails and fails hard is in the creative space - and I don't mean grammar checking or forty different ways to parse text. I mean, ultimately, FOSS alternatives for applications like the Macrodobe MX

and CS suites

the Final Cut Studio suite

3d Studio MAX etc.

The areas where the major ISVs are still raking in buckets of money.

I'm talking about the hard, nasty, horrifying shit that nobody wants to program without a fat salary and plenty of fringe benefits. The kind of functionality that keeps creative art nerds who can't program paying thousands - or tens of thousands - of dollars a year for the aforementioned applications.

Your grandmother will care when it's as easy to use as the Mac you insisted she get

Your 3d modeling geek friend will care when something MAX or Maya compatible comes around. Fortunately, .obj seems to be pretty useable, and interchanges between Blender and Max, so (for modelling, anyway) it's down to learning curve and individual application features.

Your video editing friend will be a real challenge to convince. FOSS is not renowned for being user-friendly, and it's really, really hard to top Final Cut Pro and its interaction with the Quicktime API. For what it does and the users it's aimed at, the Final Cut Studio is cheap.

Your gamer geek friend wouldn't care either way, so long as it runs all of his games.

Joe Average - who doesn't play games, doesn't use photoshop or big 3d suites, doesn't use AutoCAD.... if it looks like and functions like whatever he's used to, you could probably switch his computer, change the desktop wallpaper on the new box to whatever he's using.... and see how long it takes him to notice.

The ribbon UI in Office 2007 mimics the one used in Blender, which has been extensively criticised by the OSS community as unintuitive.

As noted aobove, tools for creating trees are pretty common, ie Blender now has a fairly powerful treemaker that is being used for the Peach Open Movie,

http://peach.blender.org/index.php/trees/

The author does mention that Dryad is 'easy to use', but there are a fair number of easy to use tree making tools already so not sure how 'revolutionary' it is.

LetterRip

You can't have those particular proprietary programs. But with the exception of iTunes, you will find programs which do the same things exactly as well. The ones you are looking for are:

• Flash player and PDF reader are available direct from Adobe. Additionaly, there are several open source flassh players, and PDF renderers are everywhere. Open source Action Script compiler here. Blender can directly generate Flash movies as good as anything produced anywhere, while lots of other Linux programs can produce some Flash output;
• Open Office; KOffice;
• granted, there's no equivalent to iTunes which will talk to the iTunes store;
• Freewheeling, SooperLooper, Audacity, Rosegarden...;
• Starry nights? Hell! you know the professionals use Linux, don't you? Start here and stop somewhere beyond the horsehead nebula...
• As for GPS software, the list is so long I don't know where to start. Anything you want to do with more or less any GPS - from professional navigation for shipping (although that's proprietary and expensive) to mapping your walks in the woods - is available. What is it you want to do?

MC-10. My first PC. Borrowed a book from a friend with a bunch of BASIC games and quickly learned how to modify the games to be more entertaining. Wrote my own crude etch-a-sketch program from scratch. Wow, the memories...

1983? I was 10...

My 11 year old son is whipping me silly. Play video games? nah, he'd rather modify the subsurfaces controlling the wire frames of his latest character he has created in blender. (or something like that - I honestly have very little idea of what he's doing, but it looks cool!)

# Adobe: GIMP(shop) and Inkscape; evince and gnash

What are the colour depths of Photoshop and GIMP? PS CS3 has 32 bits per colour change whereas GIMP only has 8. Can GIMP work with CMYK? Only with a plugin. Does PS? Natively. So, if you want print then you need PS as GIMP won't do. However Film GIMP AKA CinePaint can do it. I plan on working in photography and I'll give CinePaint a try but if it doesn't work I may have to get PS. As for Inkscape, it is for vector graphics not photo editing. I'll also try Inkscape, as well as Blender.

It's stated pretty clearly on the Apricot web page who the lead game designer is, as well as the roles of everyone in the team. More information here: http://apricot.blender.org/?page_id=5 Where did you get the impression that this would be a game 'designed by comittee'? Cheers, Briggs

Well, first of all, it will be primarily the same team that worked on the last project, which, if you havn't seen it you really are missing out. You can download it here if you want. If even a little bit of the passion and brilliance that went into that can be carried over to Apricot and Peach, then I highly doubt we will be disapointed. Keep in mind that Elephant's Dream was a project which aim was to further the tools in Blender for larger scale movie production work with a focus on it's post-production toolset. I have high expectations for Apricot and Peach, and I think that they can pull it off.

Doh! So used to typing peach that I typed the wrong project. I meant that if you go to http://apricot.blender.org/ [blender.org] one of the recent stories is a request for feedback of what you want added or changed about Blender to improve it for game content creation.

LetterRip

"To save time and to benefit from cooperation with the artists working in the Blender Institute on the Peach project, we will re-use as much material from Peach as possible.
That means that the game will have funny & furry animals, and play in an outdoors environment.

This probably means an adventure/platform style of game, or maybe it's going to be like mini games or party games. The Apricot team will have - within above constraints - the full creative freedom in designing the game concept and game play."
http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/apricot-open-game/

If you go to http://peach.blender.org/ one of the recent stories is a request for feedback of what you want added or changed about Blender to improve it for game content creation.

LetterRip

apricot will be a sort of companion to the peach open movie project. The genre will, im sure, not be FPS as it will be using furry little forest characters. i believe the developers will be working on it full-time - the peach project has all of the developers working together full time at the blender institute in amsterdam.

"Start february 2008, until july 2008"
http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/apricot-open-game/

> So the Free Software community is going to produce another FPS.

Where did you get the idea of FPS?

"But the real start will be the first week of February. Only then real decisions will be made on game concept, game design and other targets, although we do know it'll be derived from Project Peach, furry & crazy characters in a forest."
http://apricot.blender.org/

Someone into graphics and photography is not going to be happy with the Linux offerings, no matter how complete, since the apps don't even exist for the platform.

While I agree different Linux distros come with different programs there's not much of a problem with apps for graphics and photography. Sure Adobe hasn't released Photoshop for Linux yet, but it can be installed on Linux systems with WINE or CrossOver. Even if Linux won't install CS3, though it doesn't have everything CS3 does, there's CinePaint, formerly Film GIMP, used in the movie industry. For graphics other than for photography there's Inscape, Xara Extreme, Blender, and other programs that are cross platform. Actually because I want to learn it I picked up a book yesterday on Blender. Now, only if I could find one for CinePaint. And yes, though only an amateur now I hope to break into photography freelance. Because I've only done film and not digital work, I'll probably be working with film a lot at first. But I'll scan film and work digitally, so I'll tryout CinePaint first and then only if it doesn't workout well will I get Photoshop. Then to save money on it I'll get an old version then get the upgrade version.

Ah, it's be good to get back into the darkroom.

Not that I want to run them out of a patent (if they TRULY deserve it), but I think most decent programmers might be able to effect the same results with existing code and some head-banging on the wall.

Yes, I think so too. Get started :)

CC.

Thank You Google, from the Blender Summer of Documentation. (BSoD, Awesome Name)

Introduction to Character Animation
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BSoD/Introduction_to_Character_Animation

I remember the old version Gingerbread man, which I found difficult to remember. This on somehow gets you used to each function repeatedly so by the time you are done you got a good chunk of it memorized. Before I was finished I had created several Models of rather good quality, if I do say so myself, just by branching off on my own at different points in the tut. Complete list of ne Goggle Sponsored Docs
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BSoD

Thank You Google, from the Blender Summer of Documentation. (BSoD, Awesome Name)

Introduction to Character Animation
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BSoD/Introduction_to_Character_Animation

I remember the old version Gingerbread man, which I found difficult to remember. This on somehow gets you used to each function repeatedly so by the time you are done you got a good chunk of it memorized. Before I was finished I had created several Models of rather good quality, if I do say so myself, just by branching off on my own at different points in the tut. Complete list of ne Goggle Sponsored Docs
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BSoD

I'm going to add to that list. Most of these are in Edit mode.

• X, Y and Z constrain to their respective axes (X=Red, Y=Green, Z=Blue)
• Shift+ X, Y or Z essentially mean Not That Axis (i.e. Shift+X constrains to Y/Z plane, etc.)
• Ctrl+Tab to switch selection mode (Vertices, Edges or Faces).
• W brings up the Specials menu, which is sort of a grab-all toolkit.
• CTRL+R to add Edge Loop, and Ctrl+E for Edge Loop Specials. Both useful when working with edge loops, which you should learn to use with great haste.
• Click and drag down the top bar for options. A lot of useful stuff is hidden up there.
• Looking for a seemingly obvious and super useful function, but can't find it? Try the Python scripts. There are many useful tools there that will make your life a lot easier.
• When in doubt, read the manual. Ah hell... just read the blasted thing anyway. http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual

I'm going to add to that list. Most of these are in Edit mode.

• X, Y and Z constrain to their respective axes (X=Red, Y=Green, Z=Blue)
• Shift+ X, Y or Z essentially mean Not That Axis (i.e. Shift+X constrains to Y/Z plane, etc.)
• Ctrl+Tab to switch selection mode (Vertices, Edges or Faces).
• W brings up the Specials menu, which is sort of a grab-all toolkit.
• CTRL+R to add Edge Loop, and Ctrl+E for Edge Loop Specials. Both useful when working with edge loops, which you should learn to use with great haste.
• Click and drag down the top bar for options. A lot of useful stuff is hidden up there.
• Looking for a seemingly obvious and super useful function, but can't find it? Try the Python scripts. There are many useful tools there that will make your life a lot easier.
• When in doubt, read the manual. Ah hell... just read the blasted thing anyway. http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual

Try these video tutorials: they'll show you how Blender looks at the same time: Blender Underground tutorials: http://blenderunderground.com/category/video-tutorials/ Blender.org videos http://www.blender.org/tutorials-help/video-tutorials/getting-started/ And this thread on our forums: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=106503 May I add that I'm happy with the Blender UI, even though I'm a beginner. I find it quite easy to understand in fact. I can't say I see what the fuss is about really.

Pretty much. The GIMP was designed from scratch as an open source product. Blender, though open source now, was originally a commercial (but free) product. some Blender history.

The GIMP knows it has problems, and has asked UI design professionals to evaluate and contribute to a redesign.

I really don't see what everyone thinks is so "hard" about blender's interface though. It's definitely different, but I thought it was much easier to learn than the maya interface. I will grant however that blenders texture tools suck the big one.

Oh, and GP? Truespace is a toy. That's why you didn't need instructions.

That's a harder question than it sounds.

I didn't get much from the tutorials on the blender.org site, apart from the basic interface tutorial, mostly because they don't clearly separate learning 3D from learning Blender. If you already know how to visualize and work in computer 3D, the wikibooks manual is better. If you don't know how to work in 3D at all, I'd suggest starting with Google's Sketchup, which is an unconventional 3D architectural modeler capable of spectacular results.

once I've learned it, am I more or less productive than with the alternatives?

You'll be more productive.

The harsh comments you'll see here are from people who can't wrap their heads around Blender's hotkey-based UI. If you get used to the idea of keeping your left hand on the keyboard to command, and the right hand on the mouse to move, you'll be able to work faster than most of the alternatives. The critics are right in that it doesn't reward casual experimentation; you have to commit to learning the hotkeys. They're wrong in claiming that the experience won't translate well to other apps. It doesn't take long for any consistent UI to vanish, and your mind to drill into the modeling or animation, and Blender's UI is consistent.

Not to troll too much, but... Are you being sarcastic?

Blender's renderer is really nothing special (and I mean really nothing special). It's no more ethereal than any other renderer out there. If you're perhaps referring to the glow effect in Elephant's Dream, that was done in post; check out the production files at the bottom of this page.

I'd think the development of an "Open" movie - much like Blender's Elephant's Dream and Project Peach - only more ambitious, would be more interesting to Slashdot readers.

D'oh! I am in Homer-Mode again. Of course I didn't mean PEACH, I meant the Apricot project: http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundati on/2007-plans/apricot-open-game/

All those fruits... :-)

Well then, everyone, let's head over to Project Peach: http://peach.blender.org/

Yes, the blenderheads are at it again, and they are doing a game this time...

I just made a quick check and found a download site with 1000 image editors. How many open source applications do you need? There's GIMP and Krita and... honestly, I can't think of a third one.

• POV-Ray
• Blender
• Xara
• Krita
• Inkscape

I've got a few more bookmarked. As for why there are so many, some are meant to do specific things, run in specific environments, or to edit specific formats. Some, like POV-Ray, are vector graphics editors. Some are bitmap editors. Some are 2D and others 3D. Some only run on Y OS in Z like Krita is for KDE. There are a number of reasons there are so many different FOOS image editors.

I wonder if the growing need for OS and client software diversity will finally make hardware manufacturers start to do real multiple OS support and web site designers to finally code to be non-client dependent.

I met one website developer who only used Macs. She ran Windows in a vm so she could test in Windows browsers but that's it. I've heard others are the same.

OpenOffice on Windows

Though I'm using Windows on my desktop now I plan on getting a MBP RSN, and I'll try OO, NeoOffice, or another version of OO. I'm wondering what db to get though. I don't know if it's still true but I heard MySQL doesn't properly handle relations, and I've been thinking of trying PostGres and, or Firebird.

Once you replace the killer app you really open the door to your flavor of linux distro on the PC.

I've got a PC running Linspire Linux which I use as a server or storage right now, but as I say above I want to get a Macbook Pro for a laptop. The killer app(s) for me will be a graphics/photo editor and tools for web development. Photoshop is available for the Mac however before I fork over the money for it I want to try some FOOS apps, like POV-Ray, blender, or Inkscape to see if any of them is a good replacement for PS.

The interface is more intuitive than Blender. Maybe that interface needs to be fixed instead. (Of course I've only used it for 15 minutes and tried one of the "how to use Blender's unique interface" tutorials before giving up.)

I liked Elephants Dream very much. BTW: You can download it here as Avi or Quicktime.

Will users be able to create content? If so what free tools (http://www.blender.org/ or http://www.artofillusion.org/ ?) and formats will be supported? Will we be able to export animations or create normal mapped items?

LetterRip

I recently tried to download "Elephant's Dream" (the open-source 3D blender project) via BitTorrent

This is more like "I finally found something legal on BitTorrent, so now I can complain." Right.

It's easy enough to download Elephant's Dream. There are nine mirror sites. And if you download one of the streaming formats, you don't even have to wait for the download to finish.

It's a beautifully rendered, but otherwise unimpressive short film. It's more of a demo reel for Blender.

gmueckl,

I'm sorry sir but you seriously mistaken,

"
Blender is a design that was never intended to grow into what it is now. Remember that it was an inhouse developement of an animation studio so the whole application was designed to get the job done that was at hand."

Perhaps you should read about Blenders actual history?

http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundati on/history/

Blender was a rewrite of the inhouse design tool of neo-geo. The design of the rewrite was very forward looking. There were a few design errors, one such design error due to Blender being used inhouse is that the input design wasn't made easily customizable. This error is one that we are going to correct with Blender 2.50.

"But when the program itself was commercialized it started to outgrow itself. This was never anticipated and Blender still suffers from that."

It had been anticipated that Blender was to be commercialized. The technological and design foundations of Blender are pretty impressive. Blender has had some issues (all but a small handful of which have been addressed), but not anticipating commercialization is not one of them.

"The other applications that I pointed out have a solid design which is able to grow. Commercial applications like Maya, Softimage and Houdini have demonstrated that. Comparing blender to all of those on a design level makes blender stand out as the toy."

I suspect that you have close to zero knowledge about the designs of XSI, Maya, or Houdini similar to your close to zero knowledge of Blenders design.

Blender has been able to sustain absolutely ridiculous growth rates in its code base and functionality. Professional 3D artists find the pace of development eye popping/jaw dropping.

LetterRip

so what do these are "not yet here" apps offer me?

Actually working on 64-bit platforms is nice. Reference

Also, I think it's a personal problem, but I haven't been able to get Blender to even work on my system. All the controls show up, but the actual modelling area is blank. No grid, no objects, just dull gray nothing. And it seg faults when I try to add an object. Maybe it's just a precaution since I wouldn't be able to save correctly anyway.

Personally I like K-3D better, although I haven't been able to configure it to use 3Delight correctly.

Aparently the poster is a developer at moonlight3d and blender http://www.moonlight3d.eu/cms/index.php?page=news http://projects.blender.org/users/gmueckl/ Somebody in the blender community must have pissed him off, but I am too lazy to search for his name on the blender mailing lists.

It's easy to pick on the XML bit (though I don't understand why XML is so awesome it has to be used), but that's a pretty small demerit compared to all the major feature enhancement Blender has attained over the past few years.

It's earned a fluid simulator. Particle effects have been dramatically improved, yafray integration was a huge improvement for rendering, materials can now be created with a node based system.. the list goes on and on. The feature enhancements that went into the latest point release is worth an essay all on their own:

http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/bl ender-243/

Blender stays afloat because it's seeing active development and is already a mature platform. People are used to the interface (one that newbies hate, but veterans fall in love with), and it runs on all three of the major operating systems.

I don't think an aging codebase is a critical flaw. Too often people think redesigning the wheel is a panacea for repairing a kludgy system, without realizing that all code projects fall prey to this at some point in their life. Sure we could rewrite Blender.. but to what end? It'd take another 5 years to get where we are now.

I have not actually seen what is on their CD, but there are some examples of free programs, most of which, have already been mentioned, that are available for both Windows and Linux.

• Firefox Web browser
• Thunderbird full-featured email program
• GIMP Image Manipulation Program
• ImageMagick software suite for creating, editing, and composing bitmap images
• Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor
• ClamWin free antivirus scanner for Windows
• 7-Zip file archiver
• Celestia space simulater that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions
• OpenOffice office suite
• Scribus professional page layout program
• AbiWord word processing program
• Gnumeric spreadsheet
• LyX Document Processor
• Gaim multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client
• Audacity Sound Editor
• Blender the advanced 3D modeling program capable of producing high quality animations
• VLC - the cross-platform media player and streaming server
• Nvu complete Web Authoring System

Linked version with condensed summary. I wanted to find out more about some of them. Others may benefit too.

Ecto a blogging client (but the site seems to be down: try this for more info). Shareware, $17.95.
Transmit an FTP client. Shareware, $17.95
Sync Services -- comes with 10.4
BBedit text/html editor. $125, but worth it.
Missing Synch for Windows Mobile - synchronize with PDA/smartphones. $49.95/$39.95
OmniGraffle - diagramming / flowchart program. $79.95 / $149.95
ConceptDraw - another diagramming / flowchart program. $299
IChat AV - built-in to 10.4
AppleScript, Scriptdebugger - also built-in. No link. I'm getting lazy.
Microsoft Entourage -- part of MS Office.
Sketchfigher 4000 Alpha -- a game from the great Ambrosia Software. $19.00
TypeIt4Me - keyboard macro expander. $27
NetworkLocation - automatically trigger configuration changes depending upon where you are on the network (e.g., at home, work, etc.). $15
Apple Remote Desktop 3 - control / configure Mac systems remotely. $499 / $299 (unlimited / 10 systems)
MacLinkPlus - file conversion software (e.g., from WordPerfect documents to/from Word, and many others). $79
Parallels Desktop for Mac - virtualization software (e.g., run Win XP simultaneously with OS X). $79.
Remote Desktop Connection - connect remotely to a Windows desktop. FREE
Snap X Pro - screen / movie capture. $29
Boot Camp - dual boot Windows. I'm lazy.
PDF - Portable Document Format from Adobe? What?
Lingon - tool for making launchd scripts for 10.4.
Workgroup Manager - manage local systems - part of 10.4 Server.

---
Okay, a mildly interesting list. Here's a few more suggestions:

Cyberduck - FTP and SFTP client. Donationware.
VLC - cross-platform video viewer / transcoder.
Blender 3D - cross-platform 3D modelling / rendering.
Bookends - excellent bibliography software. $99
Celestia - cross-platform real-time 3D astronomy simulator.
Plot - a, uh, plotting / graphing program.
proFit - another plotting / graphing program, non-free. $95
WordService - adds a bunch of text reformatting tools to the Services menu, making them accessible in any program. The same page has a bunch of other useful and free services.

The original article lists PDF, but no tools. While its true OS X native support makes PDF pretty easy to use, there's still some tasks that are awkward and some useful tools out there to do t

Some thoughts from a parent of two children. One, that child should be in a bed, not a crib. Two, just the thought of one's child picking up a set of car keys is chilling on to many levels to discus here. Three, who ever GIMP'ed or Blender'ed the surfing scene should look at surfers surfing, and do that part of the commercial over. Overall, coooooooooool surfing commercial; But I will stay with my Discovery Series II.

Cheers Mate

"I LOVE, MY CAR" - A. Schwarzenegger

What, no link to the very nice changelog page?

Yes, I know it's in TFA, but come on, the story is about a release, so why not link to the changelog as well?

Agreed! Especially for photographers, serious amateurs and pros. When GIMP offers at least 12 bit colour depth then it may be a good cheap, free, replacement for Photoshop.

If you want to take on photoshop... You have to get serious. Its not that hard to make a better app than photoshop. Painter and Alias Sketchbook pro both feature things that make photoshop seem primative....

Are Painter and Alias really good photo editors, better than PS? I'm hoping to break into photography but as I'm on disability and don't work I can't justify the expense of PS. So I've been considering other programs like Painter, Blender, Xara Xtreme, Inkscape, or ImageMagick. I'm hoping to get a Macbook Pro rsn and when I do I've give them a test drive.

Last time i ran linux.. the whole dependency thing drove me mad and installing things were varied experiences.

Linspire is coming out with ports for different distros of linux for Click N Run or CNR. Installing software with it means there's no dependencies to deal with, CNR takes care of installing software. Once the CNR software is installed the user goes to the CNR software warehouse, choose what software they want, then click the install button. CNR downloads and installs the software, if there are any dependencies it takes care of them. Linux geeks may frown on such things, but they have to realize that if they want the average computer user to use Linux then there has to be an easy way for users to install apps.

They want to turn it into a toaster, an "appliance." They want control over what you can and cannot do, and they are slowly gaining it too, from region codes (RPC II) in DVD drives, encryption (in EVERYTHING) like HD DVD and BluRay, HDCP, HDMI, etc... "trusted computing." All of this stuff is creeping into hardware daily, and it's getting to where you can't buy computer hardware WITHOUT this shit.

Of course, this is all necessary so you can "enjoy" all of the great "premium content." This is not normal 'content' mind you, this is Gee-Whiz Shazzamo "PREMIUM" awesome content that just requires all of this new DRM-out-the-wazoo hardware.

And here I thought it was the same crap they have been peddling for years in slightly higher resolution... Guess what, my computer can ALREADY play 1920x1080 AVI's perfectly fine (Elephant's Dream). And I don't have any of that DRM crap on MY system...

Or it could recognize the presence of "game engine" libraries, such as SDL, Allegro, ClanLib, and the DirectX import libraries, and use heuristics to mark some executables as "games".

Sounds extremely far-fetched to me.

Besides, just because it uses SDL or DirectX doesn't mean an application is automatically a game. 3DMark uses the very latest in game development technologies, yet it's not interactive. Or how about all apps that use OpenGL? Yes, used by quite a few games, but it's mostly used by just about all serious 3D modelling apps, last I checked...

Which is more likely if they ban Blender: a) "This is an open source application and therefore the very manifestation of evil," or b) "It's entirely, if remotely, possible that someone uses GameBlender to play one of those evil 'game' thingies and possibly circumvent the ESRB limits. It's an European program, for crying out loud."

(Speaking of which, I really hope Vista doesn't subjugate us to the ESRB system. We have PEGI and some countries also have their regional systems. Gee, I wouldn't want the headache to implement this thing in games themselves, let alone at the OS level =)

If you have a grasp of the basic concepts (which should come first), but can't do some nifty stuff like making 3D like drawings by hand without serious difficulty (not everyone has drawing skills), then perhaps having some 3D software would be useful. Of course these are an entirely different beast than PhotoShop or Illustrator. Once learned, you may find that they can be quite valuable for making various graphic elements from scratch. However, this doesn't mean you shouldn't learn GIMP or PhotoShop, as 2D graphics software is quite necessary for doing any postwork manipulation of rendered output.

I'll post some that I know of, since they might be handy:
Wings3D, a fairly straight forward polygon 3D modeler.
Blender, an all around 3D modeler, rendering, and animation program.
Arbaro, a Java based tree generator. (Might be handy. Who knows?)
Makehuman, so you can have 3d people if you need 'em.

http://orange.blender.org/blog/stupid-memory-probl ems
--
- Justin

Macs are fine, but you will be spending more on Photoshop licenses and such in addition to the extra Mac cost.

Yea, I know PS is expensive. Because of that I checked some into other software and have used some. I have used GIMP as well as Paintshop Pro and I've been thinking about trying out Corel Painter. Before I do I'll at least check out MacGIMP, POV-Ray, blender, and/or others. What I may end up doing though is buying an old version of Photoshop, there are some shops in the area that sale and we occasionally have computer shows that displayers sale them as well, and there's a steep discount for upgrades to PS CS.

And yes, I'd like to do some graphic design as well as web design. I was in college until running into some problems almost two years ago working on a web programming degree (it's only a two year degree not a four year degree). However I met a number of student photographers on campus, I took a couple of photography classes myself as well as hung out in the photography rooms, and a few of them expressed interest in setting up online portfolios to showcase their work and sale some photos as well, so I've been thinking of combining both interests and designing websites for photographers.

there really is very little hardware that does not have Linux support.

I've got an HP Pavillion which I got specifically because HP was supposed to be Linux friendly. When I got it I also got a second hdd as well as another graphics card. The second hdd was to install Linux on and the new graphics card was so I could setup a dual head, er two monitors. I only found out later that the PC wasn't Linux compatible, checking out hardware compatibility databases I didn't find any distro that supported it. Graphics, the modem, ethernet, sound, and such were all built onto the motherboard. I even emailed HP tech support about it and they said a PC had to be ordered for Linux, that otherwise they didn't check to see if PCs were Linux compatible.

I do have two PCs with Linux though. The first one is a dualboot machine with a DEC Alpha cpu running NT 4.0 and Redhat. However as the builder didn't offer a modem with the 56k standard my ISP used, I didn't get the PC with one. Then because the cpu's an Alpha I didn't get much software installed so I haven't used it much and not at all in more than 3 years. Recently however, about 2 months ago, I did get a new PC with Linspire Linux preinstalled. I haven't really used it much directly, about all I've done so far is to use one of the hdds for storage. I keep saying I'll actually start using it but I haven't done anything more than play games. I got it because the PC I'm using now has been giving me troubles constantly crashing and needing to be rebooted, now I'm thinking I won't actually get to using the new PC seriously until this one finally dies. At least when it does I'll have all my important files on the new PC, which takes up about 150 GB.

Out of curiosity what is your disability?

It's a neurologcal impairment, I am a survivor of a TBI, Traumatic Brain Injury. And I do mean "survivor". That's what "we" are called, but also in my case while I was in a coma the docs told my family it would be a miracle if I lived. NOT!!! But that's another story.