[Terramax]

I've noticed all these fan games being made, the ones with these simple but very beautiful to look at pictures.

Recently I've started writing my own script for a possible 1st person adventure and have just got hold of "Adventure maker".

Now all I need to do is make some of these fancy pictures and I'm underway.

Anyone know how you can make them? Are there any simple programmes out there that I should know about? Are there any on the net?

[bigjko]

Hmm, for 3D making the only decent free program is Blender. It's actually quite nice, but with a steep learning curve.

[Terramax]

I'll check that out. Thanks

[insane_cobra]

Blender is amazingly powerful, but might be hard to use for beginners. Maybe you'd be better off with OpenFX or Wings 3D (I believe it's just a modeler, but you can export your models to POV-Ray or even render using POV-Ray from within Wings 3D) or perhaps Anim8tor if you just want to learn the basics.

hamaPatch and sPatch are two nice free spline modelers so you could give them a look as well.

For landscapes you could use Terragen which is free for personal non-commercial use and Arbaro seems like a neat tree generator.

There are plenty of tutorials on all those sites, good luck!

[Terramax]

Thanks

[bigjko]

Originally Posted by insane_cobra

Blender is amazingly powerful, but might be hard to use for beginners.

Yeah, it's really amazing for the price tag (nothing!) With the new Orange project pushing its animation capabilities to the limit, I'm sure the next version will be just awesome.

And to hi-jack the thread even further, I'm always finding out some new cool stuff about Blender each day. Like the sequence editor. Oh. My. God.

[Stroggy]

Or you could use the cheapest popular piece of software: bryce.
It's very user-friendly in terms of usage, but it's difficult to make something pretty with it. Here is the last picture I ever made with it: Misery

[Terramax]

I tried to find that one but I don't think it's on the market anymore.

[insane_cobra]

Originally Posted by Terramax

I tried to find that one but I don't think it's on the market anymore.

It is.

However, if you plan on spending money on software and you don't need Bryce specifically for its landscaping capabilities, I'd suggest you consider Maxon Cinema 4D. Apparently, non-commercial academic licence can be acquired for as low as 130 EUR, but you'd probably need to find a different reseller. The commercial version of the XL bundle sells for ÂŁ1,400 so there might be a catch, but I don't speak German.