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For those that are interested, here are my prized OSS Windows applications and their links. Sorry for such a long post, but hopefully this'll be interesting to someone.
Entertainment:
Audacity
Version: 1.2.3
License: GNU General Public License
Link: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Sourceforge Site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/audacity/
A fast multitrack audio editor and recorder for Linux, MacOS, and Windows. Supports WAV, AIFF, Ogg, and MP3 formats. Features include envelope editing, mixing, built-in effects and plug-ins, all with unlimited undo.
Battle for Wesnoth
Version: 0.9.1
License: GNU General Public License
Link: http://www.wesnoth.org/
Sourceforge Site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/wesnoth/
The Battle for Wesnoth is a turn-based strategy game with a fantasy theme. Supports online multi-player.
Blender
Version: 2.36
License: GNU General Public License
Link: http://www.blender3d.org/
Open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback. Available for Windows, Linux, Irix, Sun Solaris, FreeBSD or Mac OS X.
CDex
Version: 1.51
License: GNU General Public License
Link: http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/
Sourceforge Site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cdexos/
CDex is a CD-Ripper, thus extracting digital audio data from an Audio CD. The application supports many Audio encoders, like MPEG (MP2,MP3), VQF, AAC encoders.
Celestia
Version: 1.3.2
License: GNU General Public License
Link: http://celestia.sourceforge.net/
Sourceforge Site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia/
Celestia is real-time 3D space simulation which lets you travel through our solar system and to over 100,000 stars in our neighborhood.
Glest
Version: 1.0.9
License: GNU General Public License
Link: http://www.glest.org/
Sourceforge Site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/glest/
Glest is a project for making a free 3d real-time customizable strategy game. Current version is fully playable, includes single player game against CPU controlled players, two factions with their corresponding tech trees, units, buildings and some maps.
Scorched 3d
Version: 38.1b
License: GNU General Public License
Link: http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/
Sourceforge Site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/scorched3d/
Scorched3D is a 3D remake of the popular 2D artillery game Scorched Earth. Scorched3D can be played against the computer, other players and remotely across the internet or LAN.
VLC Media Player
Version: 0.8.1
License:

I taught a computer class for a large group of home school students and private school kids this year. They were, at the beginning, interested in learning to program. However, when it came down to actually doing it, and learning to code, they all, except for one, said "We're just more interested in playing games."

If you teach such a programming class again, I'd recommend using Blender http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Home.2.0.html and teaching them to program in python.

Blender has a built in game engine that can easily be scripted in python. Also by the end of summer I believe it will have a shockwave exporter (I know one is currently in development and is fairly far along, but won't be ready for the upcoming release) that can turn their games into shockwave games they can put on the web for their friends.

You should give Blender a try...

People still make innovative games in their garage. With Open Source tools and engines growing up, you should start to see alot more too.

Capable of what, exactly?

Modelling and texturing? Sure. Especially for sub-d character modelling, Blender's toolset is extremely capable. The LSCM UV unwrapping is arguably better than in many of the big 'high end' apps - some people have been bringing it into their pipeline for that feature alone.

Character animation? Technically yes, but can be very difficult and inflexible, so practically, probably not. A big rewrite of Blender's animation tools is planned for an upcoming version, after which, the answer will a lot closer to yes, but that remains to be seen. Having said that, it held up fine for the previs animation on Spiderman 2.

Rendering? No. Blender's renderer is fantastic and very fast for video work, but doesn't have nearly the same sort of flexibility and robustness as you'd get with something like PRMan or Mental Ray, that these guys doing Star Wars would be using. On the other hand, there are a few Blender -> Renderman exporters in various states of completion, and if you had the resources, it shouldn't be difficult develop these further or write your own.

Effects such as particles, dynamics, etc? No. Blender's particles are rather limited and don't provide enough programmable control for the hard-core cases. Blender has no dynamics system yet, though the next release will include soft body dynamics. Since it's in development, it remains to be seen how robust it will be, the tests so far have been promising for everyday work, but still probably won't compete with a fully specialised system with teams of TDs tweaking it. I don't think it's targeting that audience anyway - more of an artist's tool.

Acutally it's pretty cheap these days...Free even.

When OS X came, everyone in the Linux/BSD camp said "Cool, the best and smartest thing to do for a vendor - take OSS and build and polish it around your plattform." And everyone said they'd wait until OS X has lost it's glitches and matured. This has happend with Panther. That's why everyone who needs to get 'computer stuff done' with zero hassle and no hardware compatibility problems is flocking towards Apples OS X. Including me.
x86 Linux is gaining ground here in germany. Corporations are pondering the alternatives to MS left, right and center, while just the other day a guy at Saturn, a german mass market electronics chain, told me that the mac mini is selling like hot cakes with iMacs going away in its wake and that they'll stock up seriously on mac games within the next few weeks because of that. They currently have two mac compliant games in stock and plan to have 30 in stock by the end of next month!
It's as I've said earler: Linux from below, OS X from above. We have some interesting times ahead of us in IT.
... Now if you excuse me, I gotta get going and try out frame skimming on Blender with my new Griffin Powermate I just got for my iBook today. :-)

That would be cool if someone could add something like that to Blender

Blender

Ok, so, Gould Academy is where I went, and they use linux for everyday use, in the labs, classrooms and even faculty offices. Mostly what students learned to use was IceWM, Konqueror as a file manager, OpenOffice, Mozilla (although Firefox might be a better choice), gAIM (not in class!), the Gimp and xpdf.
They didn't have a big budget for the computers, so they used the old 386 (true, I've used them!) and a bunch of old machines, bought a dual Xeon 733 MHz server, and ran LTSP on the whole thing. They had a special file server with a quota of about 1 Gig for students in their home directory, which was plenty, and a separate mail server.
I think that if you install those PIII with LTSP you'll be missing out on responsiveness, so instead maybe install the same distro on all of them, and use a NIS domain for login (with gdm, or even better, Entrance, which is prettier than gdm to look at!) and getting one machine with several drives to use as NFS server for the /home directories would be good.
Then if you want to start a multimedia class, it turns out a lot of people are actually thrilled when using Blender. A whole bunch of people active on Blender forums right now are not much older than 13. I've basically taught my Linux professor at Gould to use blender, and the Advanced Linux class at the same time.
I think that's plenty of things to show eye-candy and the real horse-power you can get in the managing of such a lab with linux.
Also, most of these programs have spanish localizations, iirc.

• An acceptable resulting impact of the piece onobservers
• A demonstratable amount of skill implemented as to the design of the product
• Originality of the final product
• Time and effort given to the product (just because you're a known artist does not mean what you product is art, a lot of them run on reputation or sheer arrogance after a time)

Blender's (http://blender3d.org/) file format is compatible between older and newer versions. They use so-called DNA code which allows older versions to open files saved in newer ones. I don't know how technically it is realized but it's a proof that things like that are still available in todays software.

I think Blender is an excellent choice here. It's free, cross platform and very easy to get started in. Combinde with Pythin and the info available at GameBlender.org it should be very easy to get a awesome project out quickly. My 11 year old daugher got going with the 3D modeling in an afternoon after watching the online video tutorials.

http://www.blender3d.org/
http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Game_Blender.365.0.ht ml

It's a 3d design package, that gives you a game engine, so you could have the graphics part solved, and can worry just about the actual game. I believe you can program for it with python.
It works on MSWindows, GNU/Linux, and other platforms, and it can generate .EXE or web 3d games viewable with its own (small) plugin.

http://www.blender3d.org/
http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Game_Blender.365.0.ht ml

It's a 3d design package, that gives you a game engine, so you could have the graphics part solved, and can worry just about the actual game. I believe you can program for it with python.
It works on MSWindows, GNU/Linux, and other platforms, and it can generate .EXE or web 3d games viewable with its own (small) plugin.

Oops, double htttp's in link. Try this: http://www.blender3d.org/cms/History.53.0.html

Use http://www.blender3d.org/cms/History.53.0.html.

The link in parent goes to http.com, an advertising firm.

On the other hand, the question is about windows. Here's the best freeware list I've found, taken off of the neowin.net forums. These are not guaranteed Clean, but most of them are. Also, you might want to check tinyapps.org, which specializes in SMALL apps (usually not enough space for ad/spyware).
Category 3D Graphics: ----JunkCharactersToDefeatLameness/CharacterCountF ilterForAValidList----
3Delight Free - http://www.3delight.com/index.htm
Anim8or - http://www.anim8or.com/
Aqsis - http://www.aqsis.com/
Blender - http://www.blender3d.org/
gmax - http://www.discreet.com/products/gmax/
Houdini (Free Edition) - http://www.sidefx.com/apprentice/index.html
Maya Personal Learning Ed. - http://www.alias.com/eng/products-services...ple/i ndex.shtml
Now3D - http://digilander.libero.it/giulios/Eng/homepage.h tm
OpenFX - http://www.openfx.org
SOFTIMAGE|XSI EXP - http://www.softimage.com/products/exp/v3/
Toxic - http://www.toxicengine.org/
Wings 3D - http://www.wings3d.com/
Category Anti-Virus:----JunkCharactersToDefeatLameness/Char acterCountFilterForAValidList----
AntiVir - http://www.free-av.com/
Avast - http://www.avast.com/i_idt_1018.html
AVG - http://www.grisoft.com/
ClamWin - http://www.clamwin.com/
Category Anti Spyware:----JunkCharactersToDefeatLameness/Charact erCountFilterForAValidList----
Ad-aware - http://www.lavasoft.de/software/adaware/
Bazooka - http://www.kephyr.com/spywarescanner/index.html
Diet K - http://www.dietk.com/
SpyBot Search & Destroy - http://spybot.safer-networking.de/
SpywareBlaster - http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareblaster.htm l
SpywareGuard - http://www.wilderssecurity.net/spywareguard.html
Category IRC Clients:----JunkCharactersToDefeatLameness/Charact erCountFilterForAValidList----
BersIRC - http://www.bersirc.com/
BitchX - http://bitchx.org/download.php
HydraIRC - http://www.hydrairc.com/
TinyIRC - http://www.tinyirc.net/
XChat - http://www.silverex.org/news/
Category Audio Players:----JunkCharactersToDefeatLameness/Charact erCountFilterForAValidList----
1by1 - http://www.rz.uni-frankfurt.de/~pesch
Billy - http://www.sheepfriends.com/?page=billy
CoolPlayer - http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net/
DeliPlayer. http://www.deliplayer.com/
Foobar 2

If yuo like POV Ray, you might be interested in Blender with a new vbersion just released. OSS, free, cross platform. - Terrific

How about blender,

http://www.blender3d.org/

LetterRip

Blender, that wonderful open-source 3D rendering/modelling application, has a bunch of tutorial videos which are distributed using BitTorrent (to ease the load on their servers). Unfortunately, because of the negative publicity around P2P software, our administrators have blocked BitTorrent traffic and I have to use the mirror site to download them.

Blender, that wonderful open-source 3D rendering/modelling application, has a bunch of tutorial videos which are distributed using BitTorrent (to ease the load on their servers). Unfortunately, because of the negative publicity around P2P software, our administrators have blocked BitTorrent traffic and I have to use the mirror site to download them.

Blender is an industry strength 3D package, has a full fledged game engine and even has it's own Video NLE built in. It's been used for the animatics during the Spiderman Movies preproduction. It's newest release (just 3 weeks ago) has a large amount of new features that move it to a new, very professional level.
Anything you'd want to do with, f.e., the Unreal Editor to make Machinima Clips you'll probably be better of doing with Blender. And maybe even you'll choose to use acutally CGI rendering. The award winning industry strength Blender-Plugin Makehuman has all you need to go for "real" CGI in the first place. And there are other Plugins such as Topixcloth that can do a lot more.
I strongly recommend that you give Blender a try.
If it's not your thing you can allways switch to something else such as the Unreal Editor. But as I said, I wouldn't recommend it.

~/CS for my computer science programs, ebooks etc.. ~/system for any programs or other themes I download that I haven't extracted/installed yet. ~/school for all my homework, sub-dirs by subjects ~/Music -- self-explanatory ~/blends for all my Blender files, with subdirs relevant to type of files (materials for textures, rendering for images in progres...) and most of the other stuff, well, since my windows C:\ drive is a mess with all those windows dirs anyway, I just put things randomly in it... Still boots, for when I'm off a network and wanna play a game... So most of the crap I dunno where to put goes in /win :) Cheers

UI drawing

Live updates of buttons and menus have been recoded to not use frontbuffer drawing anymore, resulting in substantial speedup...

When has anything like that ever worked?

It has worked before. For reference, please see the History of the Blender Foundation.

If you're too lazy to read the history, here's a synopsis: in 2001, when the company developing Blender folded, Ton Roosendaal gathered a core of volunteers, collected 100,000 euros in seven weeks, bought the rights to the source of Blender, and released it to the public under the GPL. To this day, Blender is an extremely active, successful 3D animation and rendering program, and it is starting to rival many of its commercial competitors, such as 3DSMax and Maya.

Although I can think of other potentially convenient applications such as 'context sensitive menus' such as those found in the 3d modeling package Blender http://www.blender3d.org/. In there, function keys bring up completely different sets of buttons. Kinda like the armament consoles in F-16s.

It's UI is completely done in opengl and the library (Ghost) hasn't been mentioned. The blender developers wrote it when Glut didn't quite fit the bill for them.

Blender

http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Animatics_for_Motion_ Pictures.393.0.html/

Blender helped with Spiderman-2

Wings3D is also good for doing models in.

I don't know; that first image (presumably the one you say looks "real") kind of reminds me of this* just a little.

*I hope the image works right; it seems they try to avoid direct linking (if not, look for "Snog" in the May 2004 gallery)

Get a hold of Blender for 3D animation and rendering. You can use Terragen to create photorealistic landscapes. You can grab a kick-ass free model of the martian tripod, or if you've got $65 to spare, you could buy a pre-made model of a martian tripod. I don't recall what type of ship the Thunderchild was supposed to be, so I can't provide a link to that, but there are lots of free models you can find for that, too. That should just about do it... all you need for a CGI recreation of the scene, on a budget of $0.

If you don't like CGI, you could just make a paper model of the martian tripod and shoot it on video in your kitchen sink. The quality might suffer a bit, though.

There's a really cool collection of various WotW artwork here that should help inspire you.

= 9J =

= 9J =

Heres another nurse training system... at the bottom of the page..

Here you can download Blender 2.34 for all platforms.

What about my Amiga you insensitive clod?

Well, you could just follow the link to the site and find out yourself, but since you're too lazy, and apparently not up on the open source scene, here you go:

Blender was originally a freeware 3D rendering program developed by NaN software, capable of modeling, animation, and even had a built in game engine. NaN fell on hard financial times and had to be shut down. Not wanting to see it go to waste, NaN release it under the GPL license for a payment of 100,000 (generated by an online fundraiser), where it has enjoyed a new life as an open source project.

Can it do 3d modelling?

Computers can.

--

hm, i'd rather stick with yafray, it's open source, has a nicer language (ok, depends on taste) and is (somewhat) integrated into blender. and the results are simply amazing.

Not nearly as nice as some of the pro stuff out there,...

Do you mean suff like this?
free, open sourced and professional

Here's an excerpt from the release notes for Blender 2.32...

"- Blender Meshes now have a limit of 2 Billion faces (instead of 64k). This doesn't break backward or upward compatibility, but will cause .blend files to grow about 30% in size. "

Also, in case you're interested, they've recently released Blender 2.33a which can be downloaded here.

There are TONS of new features...

Enjoy!

Here's an excerpt from the release notes for Blender 2.32...

"- Blender Meshes now have a limit of 2 Billion faces (instead of 64k). This doesn't break backward or upward compatibility, but will cause .blend files to grow about 30% in size. "

Also, in case you're interested, they've recently released Blender 2.33a which can be downloaded here.

There are TONS of new features...

Enjoy!

Here's an excerpt from the release notes for Blender 2.32...

"- Blender Meshes now have a limit of 2 Billion faces (instead of 64k). This doesn't break backward or upward compatibility, but will cause .blend files to grow about 30% in size. "

Also, in case you're interested, they've recently released Blender 2.33a which can be downloaded here.

There are TONS of new features...

Enjoy!

Here's an excerpt from the release notes for Blender 2.32...

"- Blender Meshes now have a limit of 2 Billion faces (instead of 64k). This doesn't break backward or upward compatibility, but will cause .blend files to grow about 30% in size. "

Also, in case you're interested, they've recently released Blender 2.33a which can be downloaded here.

There are TONS of new features...

Enjoy!

www.blender.org is the developer's site (as opposed to www.blender3d.org the user's site) but they also meet in #blendercoders on freenode on Sundays at 4-6pm (CEST) - but there's generally a bunch of people in there anyway if you just drop in.

It needs GOOD DOCUMENTATION

Here you go.

And here too.

I'm afraid documentation for blender won't get any more in-depth than that. Or documentation for any 3D program for that matter.

this is good news since blender 2.33 is going to be released soon that has the 2.25 game engine enabled allowing (almost) anybody to create a game (the quality of it will be dependant on the creator though).

simon

... and use Blender. I've tried switching to 3DSMax, Lightwave, Maya, and I just keep coming back to Blender. I can do all you want and more. A lot of people whine about the learning curve, but there are many tutorials on the web to get you started.

Oren-Nayar, Blinn, Phong, and Toon shaders were added to Blender in version 2.28. There was a massive UI overhaul for version 2.30 (read the release notes at blender3d.org) and work is still continuing on this front. There is also work going on to integrate yafray (a global illumination renderer, under fierce and rapid development) seamlessly into Blender, too.

Cheers

Copies of the 2.0 Blender book can still be fond in some shops or simply downloaded as a PDF (of course, this one doesn't cover armatures and has the 'old' interface) There is also a newer documentation project using the 2.0 guide as base but completely reworking the obsolete content. Of course, there is also a truckload of tutorials available on the Net

Since the move to Open Source, Blender has gotten, amongst others

• internationalisation
• way better meta ball implementation
• knife tool
• raytracer (reflections&shadows)
• completely reworked GUI (and still changing)
• a newer, better Python API and plenty of great scripts ( Fiber2, MakeHuman,Tesselate,...)

These are just my favorites. There is tons of other stuff as well.
In the coming weeks/months, we'll see

• Beast script (including card-based fur just like IceAge)
• better nurbs based on Nurbana
• integrated bevel tool (script-based bevel already exists.)
• Integrated REAL raytracer (YafRay)
• further tuning of the new GUI
• ???

Copies of the 2.0 Blender book can still be fond or simply downloaded as PDF (of course, this one doesn't cover armatures and has the 'old' interface) There is also a documentation project using the 2.0 guide as base but completely reworking the obsolete content.

Since the move to Open Source, Blender has gotten, amongst others

• internationalisation
• way better meta ball implementation
• knife tool
• raytracer (reflections&shadows)
• completely reworked GUI (and still changing)
• a newer, better Python API and a truckload of great scripts ( Fiber2, MakeHuman,Tesselate,...)

• Beast script (including card-based fur just like IceAge)
• better nurbs based on Nurbana
• integrated bevel tool (script-based bevel already exists.)
• Integrated REAL raytracer (YafRay)
• ???