3D & Games

For Games Design and animation, colleges and industry favour Autodesk Maya or 3ds Max for modelling. Students get free licences from Autodesk. 3ds Max is often the first choice for computer-generated images for architectural pre-visualisation. Maya is the premium choice for TV, film and animation work.

Cinema4D is the leader for motion graphics with one of the best 3D interfaces around. There is a basic version hiding inside Adobe After Effects CC.

Blender 3d is a powerful and interesting free open source alternative for Macs and PCs which stands out for recent developments in mixing 2D and 3D animation.

3D and 2D animation software list for 2019 from all3ds.com

Sculpting

Autodesk Mudbox, free to students as part of the Autodesk licence.

Sculptris is a free and sadly no longer supported sculpting app for Mac & Windows. It may not work too well with modern operating systems. Being from Pixologic, famous for zBrush. Sculptris models can be imported easily to zBrush.

Pixologic zBrush. Given the professional price of zBrush is $895 you may want to look at the more basic zBrush Core at $179.99.

3D Coat has a 30 day free trial, and an amateur licence from $99.

Blender 3d has a sculpt mode.

Autodesk Maya has a sculpt mode.

Online Training

After the Developer’s own materuial and YouTube, there are a number of free and paid-for options, some of which offer a free trial, such as seven days at cgcookie.com and a month free at lynda.com