3D Graphics Links
Science Fiction Brin-L David Brin Fan Fiction Scans Links Babylon 5 Star Trek Isaac Asimov Spacer Worlds Art and 3D Graphics Online Store Chmeee's 3D Objects 3D Gallery Drawings Blueprints Links Computers Software BMRT & VC++ Desktop Animated GIFs Linux Web Design Software Links Other About Me Million Dollar Band Misc Space Science	Click one of the links below, to go to the corresponding section of the page. General IRTC Competition Fonts Rendering Packages Modelers Planet Image Maps Graphics Studios Conventions Open GL BMRT/Renderman Hash Animation:Master POV-Ray General Include Files Textures Poser General Characters and Props Utilities 3D Objects General Babylon 5 Star Trek Other Science Fiction Resources General Sound and Music 3D Viewers 3D Format Converters Movie Utilities General Comp. Graphics. Algorithms Frequently Asked Questions Help for those thorny graphics problems you might run across... Graphics Gems Source Code Actual programs to implement graphics algorithms! My OpenGL Links Links to OpenGL, an extremely popular (and free!) real-time 3D graphics library. OpenNURBS Initiative A site with tools to help software developers accurately transfer NURBS patch info between 3D programs. Graphics Muse A long-running e-zine devoted to creating graphics in the UNIX/Linux operating system. Also includes a lot of good info about POV-Ray. LinuxArtist.org Links and tutorials that help graphic and audio artists learn to use all the great new tools available to them in the Linux operating system, including Blender and the GIMP. Textures, models, tutorials, and lots of other free stuff. Internet Raytracing Competition (IRTC) The Internet Raytracing Competition (Here's a fast mirror site) A database of members of the IRTC mailing lists Fonts Kevin's Free Fonts Over 900 free fonts available for download. Rendering Packages The Persistence of Vision Raytracer, a free, professional- level 3D graphics and raytracing software package for Windows, DOS, Linux, and many UNIX machines. I can't say enough about it! Go to this page's POV-Ray section Blue Moon Rendering Tools BMRT is an excellent 3D renderer, based on the RenderMan software used to create Toy Story. It's free to non-commercial users, and now it runs on UNIX AND Windows operating systems! Go to this page's BMRT/Renderman section The company that was once behind RayDream, Bryce, Poser, and now Carrara. I am currently boycotting their page in a protest. I don't want to completely cripple a link on my page -- just slow things down in protest -- so if you must go there, you can type www.metacreations.com. Pay special attention to the press release where they announce their intentions. It's buried in their page, so that you have to know where it is to find it. PolyRay Graphics Workshop PolyRay 1.8 is shareware ($35). It runs on DOS and UNIX machines. Its home page used to be here, but the guy has apparently moved, and I can't find a replacement page. Modelers Anim8or Freeware triangle mesh modeller, with the ability to imprt/export 3DS and Wavefront OBJ formats Hash, Inc. Home of Animation: Master, a spline-based modeling and animation package targeted especially for character animation. Very nice, and reasonably priced. I finally broke down and bought it, and now I'm working through the tutorials. It looks like it's well worth the money, so far... Freeware 3D package: "in-house software of a high quality animation studio". Available for various forms of UNIX, Windows, and BeOS. Metasequoia A shareware modeler for Windows, with very impressive features for only $40. Unfortunately, the creator is Japanese, and there is currently no way to get money to him to register the software. The software's nicer file exporting features are only enabled in the registered version, so it would be nice to figure out some way to get the money to him. Moonlight 3D Atelier A new modeler and renderer for Linux. It even has 3D hardware support for TNT2 graphics cards! An excellent shareware modeller for POV-Ray 3.0 and PolyRay 1.8 -- in fact, I registered it, I use it, and I really love it! They recently added a new version, for use with POV 3.1. It not only implements all the new atmosphere and media functions of POV 3.1, but it also has local coordinates and inverse kinematics! Poser is a great way to model humans. I just recently upgraded from Poser 2 to Poser 4. Poser 2 came with several nude and clothed male, female, and child bodies you could pose, plus skeletons and mannikins. Poser 4 is even more impressive, with animal models, facial expressions, more outfits, and morph functions that let you create various ethnic types -- your characters can look more like people, and less like waxwork dummies! Unfortunately, Poser can't export directly to POV-Ray, but I've written a free, easy-to-use Poser OBJ to POV conversion program to help make up for that lack. By the way, here's a link to the old Poser 3 page Go to this page's Poser section Home Page for POVLab, a modeller for POVRay -- now, you can get it for free! I didn't like it as much as Moray the last time I tried it, but now that the price is right ;-) I may have to give it another chance... Home Page for Rhino 3D, which can do NURBS. It was free for a while, when it was in beta. Unfortunately, after they finished beta testing, it suddenly became about as costly as most professional 3D graphics software. It can't export directly to POV-Ray, but the meshes it creates are gorgeous! sPatch Freeware modeller for POV-Ray 3.0 bezier patches -- it has to be the best free modeller I've ever seen, but unfortunately, you must have Win 95/NT to use it. It was one of the main reasons I upgraded from 3.1! Planet Image Maps The Planetary Maps Hub Maps of planets useful for raytracing, including cool maps showing what Venus and Mars would look like if they were terraformed. Maps of the Solar System The "solar system surface map database, a NASA/JPL/Caltech spyglass on the cosmos." Mister Print's 3D Rendering More great maps of planets, plus bump maps! Björn Jónsson's homepage Very realistic maps of Ganymede and Europa, plus maps of other planetary bodies, and animations. Graphics Studios Mainframe Entertainment This Canadian company produced three of my favorite shows: Reboot, Beast Wars, and Beast Machines. One of the pioneers, and the award-winning creator of "Toy Story" and "A Bug's Life" Another great studio, that did the computer effects for several hit movies. Conventions FilmCon 4 A small education-based convention, devoted to sharing knowledge, and lively discussion of film and television issues. This year's convention, FilmCon 4, will be held February 20th-22nd, 2004, in Madison, Wisconsin. It features Emmy award-winning CG artist Lee Stringer, who will show his work from many of the shows he has worked on, including the new "Battlestar Galactica" miniseries, "Firefly", and "Voyager". He will also be spending time talking to people, and helping out animators with more specific questions. FilmCon is a non-profit convention, so all funds above the cost of running the convention go to The Breast Cancer Recovery Foundation. Back to the navigation list OpenGL OpenGL THE home of OpenGL, complete with links, news, and downloads Mesa The free OpenGL work-alike library GLUT The OpenGL Utility Toolkit, a window system independent toolkit for writing OpenGL programs Addison-Wesley OpenGL Books A very good series of books on OpenGL, plus their errata and source code. Using OpenGL in Visual C++ Version 4.x Excellent tutorial! Note: It used to be at this address, but that site no longer exists. Starting OpenGL in a dialog Another little tutorial about mixing OpenGL with Windows programming, including examples of antialiasing, Gouraud shading, and texture mapping, lighting, and shading. Druid's GL Journal Utilities, links, news, and help Way cool, way fast OpenGL rendering techniques Really cool tips, plus complete code listings! Silicon Graphics' OpenGL Page They invented OpenGL in the FIRST place... Jack Harasta His page includes pseudo-code algorithms for shadows in OpenGL Nate Robins A page full of links to tutorials, and even a project that can generate fast soft shadows Back to the navigation list BMRT/Renderman Blue Moon Rendering Tools Home Page BMRT is an excellent 3D renderer, based on the RenderMan software used to create Toy Story. It's free to non-commercial users, and now it runs on UNIX AND Windows operating systems! Using BMRT with Visual C++ 4.0 How to make the Blue Moon Rendering Tools libraries work with Visual C++ 4.0 Back to the navigation list Hash Animation:Master Hash, Inc. Home of Animation: Master, a spline-based modeling and animation package targeted especially for character animation. Very nice, and reasonably priced. I finally broke down and bought it, and now I'm working through the tutorials. It looks like it's well worth the money, so far... Sherwood's Forest The place for A:M tutorials Animaster List Archive Have a question about A:M? It was probably answered on the mailing list before, so try looking it up here. Animation Pit-Stop "Your PitStop for Animation Master Software, Training Materials, Free Models, Textures, Reference Images and More!!" Eggprops Eggington Productions' home for 3D models, textures, tutorials, and utilities for A:M. Eggprops Free Models Free models and actions from Eggington Productions. Using the instructions, you can transfer the 2001 Eggington skeletal rig from the freebies to your own models. Anzovin Studio Raf Anzovin created the Dennis the Dog character, and he's also one of the great A:M gurus. His skeletal rig will be the official setup used for characters in version 9. Anzovin Studio's A:M Training Tapes A very helpful video tutorial that teaches about bones, constraints, smart skin, and Raf's skeletal rig system. You can also buy the incredible Setup Machine, which can automatically transform your model's basic skeleton into a fully rigged animator's dream! Back to the navigation list POV-Ray General The Persistence of Vision Raytracer, a free, professional- level 3D graphics and raytracing software package for Windows, DOS, Linux, and many UNIX machines. I can't say enough about it! Nathan's Pages Nathan Kopp's site contains MegaPOV (formerly POV-UV), a patch for POV-Ray that handles UV texture-mapping. You can use it in combination with my Pose2POV converter to render exported Poser figures complete with all the textures! The Matrix Page Help using matrices in POV-Ray to do fancier transformations than translate, scale, and rotate Joel NewKirk's POV-Ray Page POV-Ray tutorials, and a small gallery, with plans for expansion. location <0,0,0> A new POV-Ray site with great potential. It plans to have POV news, includes, tutorials, and links. There are many useful things already there! POV! 3D Raytracing Resource! This site's creator intends it "to become the be all and end all of POVray" Warp's Homepage: POV VFAQ This site answers the "Very Frequently Asked Questions" about POV-Ray Ken Tyler's Bookmarks A bunch of links to 3D graphics stuff, especially POV-Ray Include Files Sonya's Page of POV Stuff Excellent POV include files like TREE, BOOKS, and KEYBOARD POVRay Include Files Lens Flare, Spline Generator, Object Exploder, Liquid Spray, and other include files for POV The PILE The "Pov Include Library Enhancement", a complete library of all known POV-Ray include files Textures Texture Library 3.0 A whole buncha textures for POV-Ray! Back to the navigation list Poser General Poser is a great way to model humans. I just recently upgraded from Poser 2 to Poser 4. Poser 2 came with several nude and clothed male, female, and child bodies you could pose, plus skeletons and mannikins. Poser 4 is even more impressive, with animal models, facial expressions, more outfits, and morph functions that let you create various ethnic types -- your characters can look more like people, and less like waxwork dummies! (POV-Ray users can combine my Pose2POV converter and Nathan Kopp's MegaPOV patch to render Poser-exported OBJ files, complete with textures!) Curious Labs The new company that bought Poser from MetaCreations in April 2000. It was co-founded by Larry Weinberg, Steve Cooper, and Seath Ahrens. Larry Weinberg was the original creator of Poser, and Steve Cooper and Seath Ahrens were the Poser product manager and the co-lead engineer at MetaCreations. Looks like Poser will be in very good hands. egi.sys Parent company of Curious Labs. The original German-language page Renderosity.com Communicate with other Poser users, and download a wealth of free Poser stuff from their "Free Stuff" section. Poser Forum Online A new site, but managed by the same folks who originally created www.poserforum.com. Apparently, it's a long story... By the way, there's also PoserForum.org Ghost Effects Home page of Larry Weinberg, the original creator of Poser, who has also contributed a lot to its later development. You can find the unofficial Poser 4 patch, plus plenty of Poser links, tutorials, and illustrations there. Characters and Props Zygote has been making cool 3D models for video games and movies for several years. They created most of the figures that come with Poser 3 and 4, and now you can buy additional Poser characters, creatures, props, clothing, and motions from their web site. Remember to look in every Wednesday, because they put up a new free model every week! Dedicated Digital Another place making 3D models. Check in every Monday, because they put up a free model, in several formats including Poser. The 3D Comic Collective Superheroes, super-villains, and other comic book denizens in Poser and Hash Animation:Master! Absolutely 3D Bladed weapons and tools, plus excellent whale and dinosaur models, all ready to use in Poser Bushi's Graphics Homepage Poser models and tutorials, especially help in creating new models that can work in Poser. Fairy Woods Fantasy and mythological Poser characters The Forge Studios Ltd. The home of PoseAmation. PoseAmation is a collection of professional animation, poses, faces, hands, and lights by 15 year Feature Animation veteran Chris Derochie for use with Poser or any 3d program that accepts BVH motion capture data. It also includes new models and props by other Poser users and Zygote. MorphWorld More excellent Poser stuff! Nerd 3D Poser characters, props, and outfits, plus an excellent tutorial for creating conforming clothing Pixelatious Creations An impressive collection of RayDream 5 and Poser models, featuring Godzilla (the original version, from the old movies) and the rest of the monsters, plus several other fun sci-fi models and an excellent Poser T-Rex Poser Props Guild Just about everything you could want for Poser, including props, morphs, characters, textures, tutorials, and rooms. PoserWorld More excellent Poser stuff from Internet EYE Magazine! PZ3 Props A whole buncha free Poser props. rbtwhiz's right-side of the Brain Great characters and props, largely related to water and extreme sports. Many of his models are showcased at Zygote. Winscape 2001 and Objects Objects and textures for Poser 3 or later, although some of the textures can be adapted to Poser 2. Some of the selections can be pretty risque... ;-) Utilities Unofficial Poser 4 Patch The original creator of Poser has released an unofficial patch, since MetaCreations' support is doubtful now that they're selling Poser to another company. It's not official, and you won't be getting any support for it, but this patch still fixes several problems with Poser 4. Thanks, Larry! MorphMasher A utility that removes extraneous lines from any Wavefront OBJ file, making them about 15% smaller. UVMapper A utility that lets you add UV texture mapping info to an OBJ model, or replace the mapping it has with a new one. Pose2POV My conversion utility, for converting Poser OBJ files to POV, with complete texturing. To use the textures, you must render with Nathan Kopp's MegaPOV patch (formerly POV-UV) Back to the navigation list 3D Objects General POV Legos A Lego library for POV-Ray, plus sample Lego Space and Lego Town models built from the library. My favorite place to look for 3d models More 3d models POV-Ray Space Probe Objects Includes a POV-Ray native-format model of the Voyager spaceprobe! Awesome! Pixelatious Creations An impressive collection of RayDream 5 and Poser models, featuring Godzilla (the original version, from the old movies) and the rest of the monsters, plus several other fun sci-fi models and an excellent Poser T-Rex The123d.com Furniture models in 3DS Max and 3DS formats. This site was developed to help architectural 3d artists add further realism to their projects. The 123d model library contains high quality assets giving an accurate representation of the original objects. Babylon 5 THE source for B5 3D graphics models -- and, I'm proud to say, I finally got four models and a conversion there. Babylon 5 3D Objects Another list of B5 3D models (now defunct, but I think I'll leave the link here, just in case...) Bab5ModLR's Babylon 5 Model Index More B5 3D graphics models, including a lot of POV-Ray objects Star Trek POV-Ray Star Trek Gallery POV-Ray-native vessels from Star Trek Home of the "Wolfpak", a group that models Star Trek, Star Wars, and Babylon 5 3D objects. Joerg Gerlach's Star Trek 3D Studio Models Exactly what it says. Includes Voyager, Defiant, Enterprises A and C, DS9 station, a shuttle, an Oberth-class starship, a Jem'Hadar ship, a Borg cube, and several original ship designs. Taura Learfox's Star Trek Moray Objects She's been creating great Star Trek objects in Moray for a while, now. Other Science Fiction 2001: A Space Odyssey -- 3D Modeling Archive A gorgeous collection of 3D models from the groundbreaking movie, in several different formats An impressive collection of POV-Ray-native vessels from Star Wars Transformers 3D Assembly Plant A nice, centralized resource for people recreating the Transformers in 3D. It includes a gallery of many people's TF models, plus downloadable models and movies. It even has some nice reference sketches to help more people build 3D Transformers in their favorite modeling programs. The Great Escape Studios This trueSpace modeler has an impressive collection of Transformers models (including Optimus Prime and Soundwave), and quite a few Star Trek ships, in a variety of formats Back to the navigation list Resources General Irfan View My all-time favorite 2D image viewer for Windows! It's free, it's fast, it reads and writes several formats, and you can quickly skim through a directory of pictures with the space and backspace keys. Animal Pictures Archive Over 20,000 high-quality animal photos. Great examples for creating your own animal models. Links to just about every utility even remotely related to POVRay John Beale's Home Page Great height field utilities for POVRay, plus his POV work. An old issue of the Graphics Muse has a short tutorial on his excellent height field program HF-Lab. The GIMP is an incredible freeware graphics tool for UNIX systems. It can do the same kind of beautiful image manipulation you have to pay hundreds of dollars to get in professional software like Adobe Photoshop! The GUM GUM, the GIMP User Manual, can help you learn to use the software. Script-Fu.org A central site for information, tutorials, and examples of Script-Fu, GIMP's scripting language for automating graphics tasks, like automatic logo creation and fancy special effects. GTk+ and GIMP for Windows The GIMP is now available for Windows! (You can also get it at the original GIMP for Windows page.) Freeware program that uses LSystems to create uncannily organic-looking plants and animaloids, among other things Universe Shareware program, designed to create realistic deep space images. It's especially good at creating starfield backgrounds for POV-Ray. 3D Photorealism Toolkit Bill Fleming's book (ISBN 0-471-25346-4) is very helpful for any 3D artist, and here's a "companion" web site (and no, it has nothing to do with bald-headed, androgynous aliens... ;-) ) with helpful samples, models, and texture maps from the book. You should also take a look at his new book, Advanced 3D Photorealism Techniques. Sound and Music Sound Dogs "The Internet's first online sound effects and production music library, since May 1st 1997. Immediate download delivery of Hollywood's best sounds in all popular sound file formats" Sound Ideas The world leader in professional-quality, royalty-free sound effects and production music -- and not just for professionals. Several of their CD collections are quite reasonably priced, well in range for the hobbyist. Royalty Free Music.com A royalty-free and buyout music library produced by Shaun Harris, Gold and Platinum Award Winning producer and artist of music for film, television, recordings and commercials. The site offers affordable CD music packs, as well as free resources like sound effects, MIDI files, and music loops. 3D Viewers 3D Exploration An excellent $30 shareware viewer with a Windows Explorer-like interface, the ability to view many different 2D and 3D formats using either hardware acceleration or its own very fast software renderer, support for Metacreations' OBJ/MTL texturing info, and the ability to convert any of its supported formats. It's so useful, I registered my copy! Thomas Baier's free 3DWinOGL lets Windows 9x/NT users view and convert 3D objects in many different formats. POVPan Homepage POVPan is a FREE package designed in order to easily create and display 3D panoramas for static and dynamic scenes written with the Persistence Of Vision Raytracer. POVPan first makes POV-Ray 3.x render six views to create an environment map, then CubeMove uses OpenGL to show you the environment map from any viewpoint, in real-time. POV-Pan even supports animated POV scenes! 3D Format Converters Keith Rule's Home Page Home of the excellent (and free!) 3D format converters WCVT2POV (for Win 3.1 or 95) and CrossRoads 3D (for Win95) Home of Thomas Baier's excellent freeware 3D format converters 3D to 3D (for DOS, Win 95/NT, and Linux) and 3DWin (only for 95/NT.) You can also find his 3DStoPOV converter there. 3DStoPOV implements 3D Studio textures as well as its meshes. 3D Exploration An excellent $30 shareware viewer with a Windows Explorer-like interface, the ability to view many different 2D and 3D formats using either hardware acceleration or its own very fast software renderer, support for Metacreations' OBJ/MTL texturing info, and the ability to convert any of its supported formats. It's so useful, I registered my copy! Pose2POV My own Poser to POV converter, that can handle UV texture mapping for UV-POV Movie Utilities Apple's great MOV movie viewer Windows Media Player Much as I hate endorsing a M$ product ;-), this is a really good little (actually, not so little! ;-) ) program. Excellent freeware program for putting together FLI and AVI movies. They just added Bink, a newer, better movie format! Axogon Composer Freeware program that exports to AVI and Quicktime. It can add a soundtrack, create movies from still frames, and edit movies, and it even has some sort of scripts that let you create 2D animation effects. It looks really powerful... and really complicated... :-) AK's Multimedia Corner A site with several good movie format utilities, including ConvMPEG (containing the excellent, DOS-based, freeware MPEG utilities CMPEG and DMPEG, and more!) and TRMOOV, a utility that converts between Quicktime MOV and Windows AVI formats. Back to the navigation list
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