3D Game Engine and Modeling Software
Unity3D
is a flexible game engine for the design of cross-platform
(Windows, OSX, Linux, web, mobile) game development. The
Personal Edition is free. This is the engine we use in cs426 (versions 5; 5.2
and above including 2017 should do fine).
For those working with VR: CAVE2 works currently with Unity 5.4.3.
Instructions for plugins and for mapping controllers: https://github.com/uic-evl/omicron-unity/wiki/Guide-for-running-Unity-in-CAVE2.
VIVE works directly with Unity, although you do need to map the controls:
OpenVRControllers.
Aside from these mappings, you'd also need to consider how to set up
things to reduce motion
sickness:
VR motion sickness.
Spriter is an art-oriented product which enables the “modular” method of animating where, instead of each frame being a single complete image, it is constructed from many small, re-useable images (such as body parts). Each of these images that are used to construct the full frame can be scaled and rotated to further increase the “mileage” an artist can get from them.
Blender is a free and open-source comprehensive 3D production suite, used for making real-time interactive content. Like Maya, Blender can also have a high learning curve.
CGTrader offers a
collection of free 3D models to download. Please make sure to give CGTrader
full credit if using any of these models in your project.
Yobi3D is a 3D model search engine. It finds 3D
models on the Internet with simple keyword search.
Adobe Mixamo allows downloading 3D character models with
animations.
Audio
Credits: UCSC's CS020
FL
Studio FL Studio is a commercial music composition and remixing
system, with a free demo version
Audacity is a free, open source system for recording and editing
sounds (Win, Mac, Linux)
New Grounds features music tracks licensed using a Creative Commons
license, along with an extensive user rating system (use of tracks in
your games may be OK, see license details)
Jamendo
Jamendo features music tracks licensed using a Creative Commons
license (use of tracks in your games may be OK, see license details)