taken from RPG by Andrés F. Martín Martín / andresmartin8787@gmail.com
modeling, texturing, rigging and animating
Blender is a free, open source 3D graphics application that can be used for modeling, texturing, rigging, animating, rendering and so on. Blender is available for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.
To this project I want to create my own animated models. It is a really hard job, so I just downloaded some created models and perform only a few changes in the meshes, textures and animations.
3D Studio MAX is a commercial tools that allow students to work with a student trial license during 3 years. One strong point of these tools is that most of 3D models that you can find on the Internet are only available in .max or .3ds format (not supported by Blender)
development of a 3D game
Unity is an integrated authoring tool for creating 3D video games or other interactive content such as architectural visualizations or real-time 3D animations. The editor runs on Windows and Mac OS X and can produce games for Windows, Mac, Wii, iPad or iPhone platforms. It can also produce browser games that use the Unity web player plugin, supported on Mac and Windows. The basic version is completely free, but there is also available a Pro version that cost about 1000$ (free trial during 30 days). Unity Pro allow you to build your game for different platforms and include some new features to improve quality and effiency level.
To this project I decided to use Unity to learn about one of the most easy, powerful and innovative game development tool. Unity allow to design almost every detail of the scene and the assets using the scene editor, but to develop all the interactivity is required to use scripts. Programmers can use JavaScript, C# or Boo. In general the best choice is use JavaScript since it is the most widespread scripting language and almost all the tutorials only use JavaScript.
There are too many alternatives but none as famous as Unity for the indies developers. Blender also can be used as a Game Engine to develop games using the models designed in that tool using C++ to program it