If you’re into designing and need something free yet cool enough to make your designs look good then you have come to the right place. Below are some of the most widely used free 3D Graphic Design Applications for Linux you can download today.

Blender

Blender is a free, open source 3D content creations suite that not only works with Linux but almost all the other major operating systems as well.

Blender gives you a revolutionary non-overlapping and non-blocking UI which delivers unsurpassed workflow and offers flexible and fully configurable window layout with as many screen setups as you prefer.

It comes with a range of 3D object types including polygon meshes, NURBS surfaces, bezier and B-spline curves, metaballs, vector fonts. Other than that it features

• User friendly interface
• Realtime 3D/Game Creation
• Modeling
• Rigging
• Rendering
• Animation
• Shading
• UV Unwrapping and more
• Imaging and Compositing

Download Blender for Linux

Art of Illusion

Art of Illusion is another free, open source 3D modelling and rendering studio which is entirely written in Java and it should be usable on any Java Virtual Machine which is compatible with J2SE 1.4 or later. The goal of Art of Illusion is to provide powerful 3D modeling tools with a user interface that improves on those found in other 3D software packages.

Art of Illusion is powerful enough to be used for serious, high end animation work. It offers

• Extended Functionality Through Scripts and Plugins
• File Handling
• Scripting
• Post Processing
• Rendering
• Provides textures, animation, modeling
• Easy to use and user-friendly interface

Download Art of Illusion

Crystal Space

Crystal Space is a free cross-platform software development kit for realtime 3D graphics, with particular focus on games. It gives you a unique skeletal animation and dynamic shadows features that lets you create characters that look and feel more lifelike.

Other features like vertex and fragment shaders will give you great possibilities of enhancing your art with the nicest, up-to-date effects. Several shaders are included standard with Crystal Space but you are free to make your own.

Download Crystal Space

FreeWRL

FreeWRL is an open Source, cross platform VRML2 and X3D compliant browsers, with script and EAI support . Its an essential tool for every Linux/Mac X3D/VRML toolbox. FreeWRL not only enable us to run only OSS in our 3D modeling platform but also outclass other VRML/X3D plugins by its performances.

Download FreeWRL X3D

K3DSurf

K3DSurf is a Linux application that allows you to visualize and manipulate Mathematical models in 3,4,5 and 6 dimensions and supports Parametric equations/Isosurfaces. K3DSurf can be used by every one interested in 3D Mathematical drawing functions and don’t require any special competences by users.

Studying mathematical surfaces with K3DSurf include doing:

• Interactive visualization with mouse events (Right: Rotate, Middle: translate and left: Scale).
• Real time animation (rotation) and morph (by the introduction of t_time variable). Animation and morph can also be monitored by controls that affect the CPU usage and t_time step.
• Creat screenshots by copying the draw window or by using the best ray tracer on the net: Povray.
• Creat movie scene is also supported
• Generat Mesh files that describe the shape of the mathematical model.

Supported formats are:
1. Povscript : Povray is the best ray tracer available on the net…and it’s free.
2. VRML2: to use with the majority of current browsers via an appropriate plug-in.
3. OBJ: a well-known file format supported by the majority of 3D applications

Download K3DSurf

For Linux, Windows or Mac

PovModeler

KPovModeler is POV-Ray maker that runs on Linux. It allows the users to drag their shapes around in the 3 view boxes. Using this, the users can easily set the placement. They have the option of adding any of about 20 shapes. The users need to type commands in the raw POV-Ray if they want a cool texture or finish.

Key features include

• Management of the scene through a graphical tree.
• Object modification with control points in a graphical view or direct manipulation of object attributes in a dialog
• Nonblocking scene rendering with OpenGL as wire frame views
• Freely configurable view layout with dock widgets
• Copy/paste and drag/drop of (a subset of) povray(!) code into and out of the object tree
• Undo and redo
• Scene rendering and texture preview with povray inside the program
• Support for almost all povray objects
• Support for all textures
• Prototypes (declarations) and references
• All projection modes of the camera

It offers you to preview the texture in the dialog view. This feature is very useful while creating textures to get a quick impression how the current texture will look like without rendering the whole scene.

Download KpovModeler

PovRay

PovRay is a high-quality, totally free tool for creating stunning three-dimensional graphics. One of POV-Ray’s main attractions is its large collection of third party support. A large number of tools, textures, models, scenes, and tutorials can be found on the web. It is also a useful reference for those wanting to learn how ray tracing and related geometry and graphics algorithms work.

Recent versions of the software include the following features:

• A Turing-complete scene description language (SDL) that supports macros and loops.[4]
• Library of ready-made scenes, textures, and objects
• Support for a number of geometric primitives and constructive solid geometry
• Several kinds of light sources
• Atmospheric effects such as fog and media (smoke, clouds)
• Reflections, refractions, and light caustics using photon mapping
• Surface patterns such as wrinkles, bumps, and ripples, for use in procedural textures and bump mapping
• Radiosity
• Image format support for textures and rendered output, including TGA, PNG, JPEG (only input) among others
• Extensive user documentation

It is available in official versions for Windows, Mac OS/Mac OS X and i86 Linux. The source code is available for those wanting to do their own ports.

Download PovRay

If you have been using Ubuntu Linux for some time and have tried better 3D design applications then please feel free to use the comment box below and share them with us.