More on 3D tools - Houdini

So after my rant on 3D products a few posts ago, I did some more research into industry standard 3D modelling tools and stumbled upon a tool call Houdini. Although Houdini seems to be primarily based on the movie industry, it does have a free personal learning edition called Apprentice. The free edition is limited and has a water-mark on what you create, but it is supposed to be full-featured. There is an Apprentice HD version that has more options and is $99 per year per workstation and has no watermark and is built so that you can export into Torque 3D (so the website says).

Here is a link to the downloads page: http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=589&Itemid=221

The main page is here: http://www.sidefx.com/index.php

The full version of Houdini starts at just under 2000USD, for more details see this link: https://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_purchase&Itemid=234


The ZBrish 4 trial is over, so it'll be interesting to see if they offer a free trial of their next version. However, ZBrush is 699USD so a lot cheaper than everything else out there (apart from the free editors, obviously) and you can buy a 5-license pack for the same price as the single-user license and has a 5-seat minimum restriction on it. More details are here: http://www.pixologic.com/store/#volume.php

For a list of games/studios using ZBrush, then check here: http://www.pixologic.com/zbrush/industry/