Digiart Ten

Ten Things to Help with Your Digital Art

Daz Studio 3D is "a free, feature rich 3D figure design and 3D animation tool that enables anyone to create stunning digital imagery. This is the perfect tool to design unique digital art and animation using virtual people, animals, props, vehicles, accessories, environments and more. Simply select your subject and/or setting, arrange accessories, setup lighting, and begin creating beautiful artwork" (OS: Windows XP/Vista, Mac OS X 10.4 or higher)

Greenfish Relief Map Generator is a neat utility program that "generates random images which resemble real relief maps. The randomized maps contain settlements with random names, hills, plains, lakes and seasides. The program can generate random town names (which are fictious and do not exist anywhere), or pick them randomly from a provided text file. The generated images are public domain and can be used anywhere" (OS: Win 9x/NT/2000/XP/Vista)

Inkscape is a "Linux, Windows & OSX vector graphics editor (SVG format) featuring transparency, gradients, node editing, pattern fills, PNG export, and more. Aiming for capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, Visio, etc." (OS: 32-bit MS Windows (NT/2000/XP), All POSIX (Linux/BSD/UNIX-like OSes), OS X, Linux)

OpenClipArt, founded in 2004 by Jon Phillips & Bryce Harrington, is a project that "aims to create an archive of clip art that can be used for free for any use. All graphics submitted to the project should be waived of all rights, including copyright, according to the CC0 Public Domain Dedication."

PhotoFiltre is "a complete image retouching program. It allows you to do simple or advanced adjustments to an image and apply a vast range of filters on it. It is simple and intuitive to use, and has an easy learning curve. The toolbar, giving you access to the standard filters with just a few clicks, gives PhotoFiltre a robust look" (OS: Win 98/ME/NT/2K/XP/Vista/7)

Sculptris is a "free, 3D digital sculpting program. Sculptris is small and focused at its main task, which is sculpting and painting models" (OS: Windows XP/Vista/7)

Shape Collageis a "free and easy to use Java based application that will allow you to create picture collages in less than a minute with just a few mouse clicks. Shape Collage will place photos automatically and intelligently using a machine learning algorithm" (OS: Windows XP/Vista/7, Mac OS X, Linux)

TrueSpace is "a fully-featured 3D authoring package that will let you model, texture, light, animate and render 3D content. As well as traditional images and movies, you can also make 3D content for online shared spaces, and for Virtual Earth. Truespace features quick easy character animation and physics. 1000 frames real time can be rendered in a couple minutes. An entirely re-written X format exporter lets you save your trueSpace creations to load into game engines such as XNA to develop games for Windows or the Xbox 360. Also included is an export to Virtual Earth which will let you place your 3D creations straight into Virtual Earth from trueSpace. Now you can place whatever you make into real world locations in Virtual Earth and share them with others" (OS: Windows XP/Vista)

Whiteboard Lite is a collaborative drawing tool which allows "two iPhone or iPod touch devices to create pictures together over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth peer-to-peer."

WPClipart is "a collection of high-quality public domain images specifically tailored for use in word processors and optimized for printing on home/small office inkjet printers. The common image format is lossless PNG, but in most cases there are also JPG versions as well as transparent PNG, more clip art now includes SVGs and, for some of the page borders/backgrounds, PDFs" (OS: Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7)