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Linux Graphic Tools

Recap: at my presentation at the July 1998 NTLUG meeting, I gave demos of Blender, Moonlight Creator, POV-Ray, ImageMagick, Mesa, and Pryan. All of these packages are available for free. I've also included links to other free and non-free graphics tools for Linux. This list is by no means complete. Enjoy.

3D Modeling/Animation Systems (free)

3Dom - free 3D modeling package
Blender - free 3D design/animation package from NeoGeo .
GL-Space - free Open GL-based 3D modeling package similar to TrueSpace. Requires Open GL or Mesa.
Midnight Modeler - modeler and GUI interface to POV-Ray raytracer
Mind's Eye - free 3D modeling/animation package
Moonlight Creator - free 3D modeling package. Exports a variety of formats, including POV-Ray and RenderMan.
Pixcon/Anitroll - free 3D render and animation system
SCED - free constraint-based modeling package
Virtuoso - free 3D modeling/animation package

3D Modeling/Animation Systems (shareware/commercial)

AC3D - shareware 3D modeling system ($40 registration)
Amapi - shareware 3D modeling system ($25 registration)

3D Raytracing Systems (free)

POV-Ray - free 3D raytracer. Well-established, fairly easy to use, and mostly bug-free. Scene description language somewhat resembles C programming language.
Panorama - new free 3D object-oriented raytracer. Looks very promising. Scene description language somewhat resembles C++ programming language. (Not compatible with POV-Ray, though.)
Radiance - free 3D radiosity raytacer, developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Rayshade - free 3D raytracer developed at Stanford University. Currently not in active development.

3D Raytracing Systems (shareware/commercial)

Blue Moon Rendering Tools - shareware RenderMan-compliant renderer. NOTE: RenderMan is the rendering standard developed by Pixar. Among other things, Pixar's PRMan commercial rendering package is the RenderMan-compliant package used to create the movie Toy Story.
RIBit! - commercial RenderMan-compliant renderer from Eidolon Research. Free demo available. Full version is somewhat expensive ($950).

3D Programming Libraries (free)

Mesa - free Open GL "workalike" developed at the University of Wisconsin. Used to program 3D graphics in applications.
GLUT - free GL Utility Toolkit. Easy to use. Adds some basic GUI functionality to Open GL programs. Not functional enough for complex Open GL-based applications, though. NOTE: GLUT is already shipped with the Mesa source distribution. If you download Mesa, you do not need to download GLUT as well.
GLTT - free GL TrueType library. Allows rendering of TrueType fonts in 3D applications.
GL4Java - free Open GL bindings for the Java programming language. Allows Open GL programming in Java. Requires an Open GL implementation or similar, such as Mesa.
Open GL Perl Module - free Perl5 module for Open GL programming. (Somewhat outdated?)
Togl - free Tk widget for rendering Open GL graphics. From the author of Mesa.
Pryan - free Open Inventor "workalike" that won second prize in TrollTech's Qt programming contest. Requires the Qt widget library.

3D Programming Libraries (shareware/commercial)

Magician - commercial Open GL bindings for Java.
Metro Open GL - commercial Open GL implementation from Metro Link. Includes Metro-X server. ($199)
TGS Open Inventor - commercial Open Inventor implementation from Template Graphics.

Paint/Image Manipulation Utilities (free)

GIMP - GNU Image Manipulation Program. Excellent free graphics package similar to Adobe Photoshop.
xpaint - simple free paint program for X.

Image Display/Conversion Utilities (free)

Image Magick - excellent suite of free image display and conversion utilities.