Editing Tools

This is a article about editing tools, which are NOT specifically for the game titles we feature in our site. They are just the backbone of any good developers arsenal.

Check out our General Editing (tools) area in our forum.

3DS Max

The heavy hardcore industry standard 3d modeling and animation program.

Homepage here.

Gmax

Gmax is a light version of 3DS Max, aimed for gaming community, its free of charge but is not supported anymore.

Homepage here.

Blender

Quite popular free of charge program.

Homepage here.

LightWave

Another well known, big bulky modeling program.

Homepage here.

ZBrush 3

Homepage here.

Cinema 4D

Homepage here.

SketchUp

Homepage here.

MilkShape

Homepage here.

MudBox

Homepage here.

Polygon Cruncher (3DS Max Plugin)

3DS Max Plugin that will remove polygons from your objects, can easily help by creating lower poly resolution LODs.

Homepage here.

Modo

Model, paint, render, animate, sculpt. Their homepage also has nice coverage of video tutorials. Modo is becoming (if not already) industry standard for 3D modeling.

Homepage here.

Wings-3D

Free 3D modeling software.

Homepage here.

Anim8or

Freeware 3D modeling software.

Homepage here.

UVMapper

UV Mapping software.

Homepage here.

UVLayout

UV mapping software.

Homepage here.

Zip

ZIP was hardcore the good old times, now its dying away. DO NOT USE ZIP anymore, just use RAR nowadays as its better in all areas.

Homepage here.

RAR

The best and scene accepted archive program, both for Linux and in Windows. It will make the packets much smaller than zip, maybe even 25-50mb on large files, its amazing difference. RAR can also open zips and many other archive formats. Make no mistake, RAR is the way to go.

Homepage here.

7-Zip

Its archive util which has more powerful packing capabilities than RAR, however its not scene accepted at 2010 yet (being reason for Linux support or whatever, its just not there yet). RAR and 7-Zip are compatible between each other.

Homepage here.

Adobe PhotoShop

The industry standard image editing program, somewhat difficult to learn for beginners but this tool really is feature rich and good to use (once you master it).

Homepage here.

Crazy Bump

Crazy Bump is nice tool to create normal/specular maps. Its command line driven and has free and commercial versions.

Homepage here

Jasc Paint Shop Pro

PSP is much lighter and easier to use than PS.
Recently Jasc was purchased by Corel, so now they say PSP is located in their web page, go figure if its the same tool anymore.

Homepage (Corel) here.

GIMP

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.

Homepage here.

Adobe Acrobat Professional

Not really image editing, but. Acrobat pro creates good PDF files. There is many free PDF creators also, but its luck if you find one that really works as you want it to be.

Homepage here.

Paint.NET

Free image editing program.

Homepage here.

Perl

Used for lots of stuff. Check out Active Perl for Windows (Linux has Perl built in or easy to get etc).

Homepage here.

PowerGrep

PowerGREP is a powerful Windows grep tool, its very useful to search, replace/modify several text files with simple to complex regexp search phrases.

Homepage here.

RegExpBuddy

RegExpBuddy is powerful regexp software for all your regular expressions needs. It can be linked to other editors like EditPadPro. Learn, Create, Understand, Test, Use and Save Regular Expressions.

Homepage here.

TortoiseSVN

TortoiseSVN is an SVN client, used to version control a source codes etc. Check out tutorial how to install this client here.

Homepage here.

Cool Edit Pro / Adobe Audition

Cool Edit Pro changed its name to Adobe Audition. Integrated audio recording, mixing, editing, and mastering. Record, mix, edit, and master digital audio files with powerful tools that bring flexibility and control to your desktop studio.

Homepage here.

GoldWave

GoldWave is a top rated, professional digital audio editor.

Homepage here.

Steinberg WaveLab 6

WaveLab 6 - Audio Editing and Mastering Suite. WaveLab 6 is the all-in-one solution for professional mastering, high resolution multi-channel audio editing, audio restoration, sample design and radio broadcast work right through to complete CD/DVD-A production.

Homepage here.

Sound Forge

Precision, Stability, Ease, and Speed. The Sound Forge 9 professional digital audio production suite includes everything you need to quickly get from raw audio to finished master.

Homepage here.

Audacity

The Free, Cross-Platform Sound Editor. Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.

Homepage here.

L3DT

Its a terrain generator which uses all sorts of “advanced” stuff to create the terrain in steps.

Homepage here.

Wilbur

Wilbur is a free terrain editor, this is very easy to use and even has some terrain erosion features.

Homepage here.

You never ever should use windows notepad or wordpad to edit OFP/ArmA configs or rvmat etc scripts. So here is few much better text editing utilities which include syntax highlighting and such.

EditPad Pro

Excellent text editor with syntax highlighting and other features.

Homepage here.

Notepad++

Its a free source code editor (and Notepad replacement), which supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment.

Homepage here.

UltraEdit

Powerful Text and Hex editor, can search and replace text in multiple files / directories.

Homepage here.