MISFIT 3D MODEL
A free, multi platform 3d modelling tool with a long history. Very easy to use, saves natively md3. Doesn't support md5 but there seem to be a number of exporters in development.
Misfit 3d Modeller
There's a nice example of how to make a tree using Misfit here
Misfit 3d tree tutorial
And a better tree
Misfit 3d better tree tutorial
FFMPEG
Cross platform, free command line video and audio converter. Can be used for example to extract audio from video and save it as .wav. Can also convert video to single frames. Can convert to .roq format which is the q3 internal video format.
FFMPEG
Audacity
Free, Cross-Platform Sound Editor. A very simple to use sound editor/converter. Quicky convert any audio into q3 format (mono) .wav files. Has a lot of built in effects, tone generators, etc.
Audacity
OpenShot
It's not often that you'd need to make video for maps (I tried it) but a cheap, cheerful, simple to use (Linux and Windows platforms) video editor. It's similar to Windows Movie Maker but has a very interesting advanced titler which uses blender (has to be installed) to create animations.
OpenShot
Terragen (classic)
Terragen is a commercial scenery generator - there is a free version (terragen classic .09) which runs on Windows, Mac OS9 OSX. The windows version works perfectly on Linux thanks to wine.
Terragen can be used to make your own skyboxes.
Terragen downloads
Tutorial (how to make skybox using terragen)
Please note : This tutorial works but the left and right images need to be swapped.
imagemagick
I've recently needed to make a lot of scripted textures, like tiles with a nice bump map or windows with light maps. I've been using imagemagick (sic) to make these and also convert/resize pretty much anything to .tga
There are windows, linux and mac versions, free download thought you might need to build it.
Imagemagick
Also a guy named Fred has assembled/written a lot of bash scripts which help to create a large variety scripted images, stained glass, grids, border effects, chromes, etc.
Freds scripts
Normal maps
Normal maps (in urthd) describe the shininess of a texture and mimic some 3d effects. There are plugins for gimp and photoshop to create these images automatically for you but I found this tutorial on how to make your own quite interesting.
http://zarria.net/nr...o/nrmphoto.html
This post has been edited by Johnnyenglish: 11 January 2011 - 11:20 AM