Indie development tools.

[epsilonion]

I was wondering what you think are the best indie development tools?

I am looking at buying some more in the near future so whats are your suggestions?


I use:
Hexagon 2 (3D design package, I can not seem to get along with blender)
Ultimate Unwrap 3D (UV, Texturing tool)
Painshop Pro (drawing package)
Adobe After Effects (For video FX, good for youtube video intro's etc)


Thinking of getting:
Fuse (character Creation (steam Edition)).
Substance painter
Substance Designer 5
Magix Music Maker 2015 premium.


Bought but did not like so gave away
AGFPRO (wish I did not, its crap)
3D Coat (I have used it but can not get along with it as I am not artistic one bit)

[AuShadow]

I have fuse steam edition and like it but yet to actually put a character Into any engine with it, I will have a go when I get a chance and let you know what its like.

On 3d modeling, I tried a few cheaper ones but found blender to be crazy good for free but yes at first it is difficult to get your head around, I really suggest giving it a chance though and I know a great tutorial set that got me actually creating things and if you do it then hit me up afterwards and I'll show you some other things I found to do with blender to make life easier again.

Image editing I do it all in GIMP with a DDS plugin and love it, I actually hate Photoshop, used to use Macromedia fireworks so I like the gimp outlay

Scripting, here I use notepad++, very handy program that can open windows side by side in a single instance, and also standard has some awesome syntax highlighting if you select a language, the LUA highlighting works a treat


Here's the blender tutorials I used, just ignore no.5 I think it is the export import one as its for another engine, and where he scales it (which may be in no.5 as the scale for that engine was ridiculous).

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... wm6iF_o1s3

[Shando]

For me it's:

Modelling - Carrara 6 (I love Carrara and will upgrade to a more recent version when I can afford it!!), Hexagon 2.5 & Ultimate Unwrap

Scripting - Notepad++ & LuaEdit 2010 (very useful for basic syntax checking)

2D - Paint.net & GIMP

Music - Audacity

Regards

Shando

[SolarPortal]

some very good tools listed here.

@liam, Another user was using "Magix Music Maker", and i believe they had problems getting the sounds working with skyline due to some weird compression etc... I think it was "lordalmighty1" or "TattieBoJangle" who had the problem. StarFire doesn't seem to like this toolset.

I would like to try mixamo fuse and i know that most characters can be exported directly from the mixamo site into skyline. Then when you have an animation, that too can be added directly into skyline using .fbx without the need of a modelling package. Pretty cool shame their animations are so expensive though.

My Setup:
Modelling: 3dsMax & blender.
Audio: Sound forge 9, ableton live( courtesy of StarFire's background ).
Textures: Photoshop(main) and also use paint.net from time to time. Also PixPlant for normals, speculars etc..
Script: Skyline Script Editor , Notepad ++ with a few extensions.
Game Engine: Skyline lol ...


@AuShadow, Macromedia Fireworks. lol used to use this myself for splitting webpage images into chunks for faster loading on old dialup lol

Blender playlist: Seems the youtube link is broken for me, i get taken too a page saying invalid parameters.

[AuShadow]

fixed the link, was another error from trying to do on my phone, it didn't copy the whole link

[TattieBoJangle]

Crazybump for me is a tool i cannot go without it covers your Normals, Displacement, Occlusion, Specular, Diffuse textures all in one go and to any format.

[epsilonion]

Just saw this on my recommended thingy on steam, looks very interesting indeed.
Is it too good to be true?

http://store.steampowered.com/app/325910/

[TattieBoJangle]

i have it but still prefer crazy bump the one thing it is good at is making seamless textures from almost any texture so its good for terrain ect.

[TattieBoJangle]

This is what i want but need to wait till i have the cash, its an amazing bit of kit and does all the hard work for you including baking everything

[epsilonion]

I have used quixel DDO and NDO before and I thought it was amazing...
Fast and fantastic looking results..

The substance series of products look amazing, its ok if your artistic not like me, I tried a friends Zbrush and I could not do anything with it, tried some hard surface sculpting and yeah I will stick to CAD drawing that is what I am decent at lol.

I don't think substance painter would be useful to me even though after looking at the youtube vid's and adverts I really wanted it but I think it would be a waste of money for me.

I have some ideas for basic assets and I am going to get the DSLR camera out and go hunting for textures when the weather picks up..

[SolarPortal]

I tried the Quixel suite while it was on beta. It did create some good looking materials.

Substance painter is a really impressive package. Wouldn't mind playing with this one either
Whats funny though is that popcorn FX were mentioned a few days ago. Substance painter uses popcornFX for all its particle brush effects.

Really high quality and i reckon some could make some really great looking models with this.

[StarFire]

We did try to get the substance suite integrated into Skyline but they wanted too much % of engine sales plus still sell the substance editor to our users. If they are listening we are still up for integration but have to be a sweeter deal especially that we are retailing at a low price.

[Gtox]

Substance painter is terrific - I've barely scratched the surface of what it can do, but it's very powerful and very rewarding.

[StarFire]

May be once we get a bigger community we may get a chance to integrate substance as I agree it does look good.

[TattieBoJangle]

Another little handy tool for converting or batch converting to dds also makes the mipmaps and compresses.

http://ns6.impex.ro/contribution/dds-converter

[StarFire]

Will give that one a try tatty.

heres a link to the Nvidia DDS Photoshop plugin:https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-texture-tools-adobe-photoshop

[TattieBoJangle]

thanks i already have that for Photoshop but it will help others when trying to find it the above link is more for people who don't have Photoshop or want Photoshop it also uses the Nvidia tool but built into a simple gui handy if you want to keep costs down as i know a lot of people use gimp and what not.

[StarFire]

cool, just downloaded the tool. Looking at its batch convert as we have loads of asset packs full of tga files that need converting and require a fast workflow to convert them.

[epsilonion]

I totally forgot I have that plugin, its been that long since I used it lol

[CreativeOcclusion]

This is a very nice program at a good price...It's kind of a hidden jewel, just like Skyline is.

http://shadermap.com/home/