3D

I spent far too much time doing 3D graphics to get me through college (it was tremendous fun but I fortunately had the good sense not to make a career out of it).

Resources:

Modellers:

This list has slimmed down over the years as new and trendy stuff has come and gone, but the remaining packages are still useful to me:

Ray-Tracers:

  • POV-Ray - the one application I spent more CPU time running, easily.
  • Yafray (free, supports distributed rendering)