Started with Wings3D for no apparent reason other than I remembered the website address first.
Wings3D
http://www.wings3d.com/
Nice little modeling program, and good for massaging models in other formats. It is falling out of use a bit now that I am settling down into a Maya/FragMotion partnership.
MilkShape
http://chumbalum.swissquake.ch/
Very happy I have this. Don’t use it much at the moment. (Again the Maya/Fragmotion taking over most functions.) But it has been good for converting some formats that FragMotion doesn’t deal with. Between the two of them I’m covered for most low-end, street urchin level modeling formats.
FragMotion
http://www.fragmosoft.com/
This is my workhorse animation program at the moment. Why? Because our target platform required md2 models. “Yikes! Are you idiots still using MD2?” Yes. We are still using MD2 models in our games. And, we actually find they are useful as part of our keep it simple philosophy of programming. Would we use a different format given the chance? Perhaps, but given a chance means we stumble across another lead programmer that is willing to work for nothing (not next to nothing, for nothing) on a non-profit charity project. At the moment the few chumps (i.e. worthy volunteers — of which I am one) are busy handling other aspects of the engine. Notably lighting, particles and physics. Next we tackle mp3/ogg. Later, we might get around to tearing everything apart so that we can use a more modern model. However, for me, I’d rather jump back into the AI a bit more. We already have one of the best AI systems available this side of Arcturus. But, games can always use a little more AI.
Also worthwhile but maybe not required:
MD2 Viewer
(available from the MilkShape folks) http://chumbalum.swissquake.ch/md2v/index.html
I use then when I can’t tell if a model is whack or if the game is misbehaving. If the model behaves in MD2Viewer, I figure it should behave in most games that use MD2.