An impressive 3D work inspired on a painting by Gyula Benczúr (1844–1920), an Hungarian painter. The painting, entitled Budavar visszavetele, portrays the recapture of the Buda Castle in 1686 (see here for more info)
The 3D modelling and texturing is by Zsolt Ekho Farkas, an Hungarian digital artist. A short “making of” is provided by the artist himself in Buda repossession on Behance.
The JSON format is an easy and simple way to get 3D models uploaded into a WebGL application. Lighthouse3D provides a tool (source code and visual studio project available) that uses Assim to read standard 3D model files (OBJ, Collada, 3ds, among many others) and produces a JSON formatted file containing the vertex information (positions, normals and tex coords) as well as material description.
An example of a WebGL page where such content is used is available in here.
JHT’s Planetary Pixel Emporium is a site devoted to planetary texture maps. Here you can find hi-res texture maps, bump maps, and normal maps, for all the planets in the solar system as well as some moons. Most of these are free to download, read the copyright info if you intent to use them.
Morgan McGuire makes available a collection of Meshes that are common in recent papers. Most meshes are available in OBJ format.
The Brown Mesh Set, also by McGuire, provides a huge collection (1139) of older models. These models are in IFS format. Sample source code to read them is provided in the G3D engine.
The Large Geometric Models Archive provides the iconic Stanford Bunny, a large (+4 million vertices) skeleton model, and terrain data for the Grand Canyon and Puget Sound areas.
OpenGL, unlike Direct3D, is operating system independent. While this eases the portability among different OS, it implies that we have to resort to external libraries for a number of tasks, loading images being one of the most used.
There are many libraries to load images, DevIL being one of them. It loads a large number of image formats and it is cross platform.
A short tutorial for loading an image, getting its data and attributes, and finally creating an OpenGL texture is available in here.
Humster3D is a 3D model online store site dealing mostly with vehicles. A large collection of free car blueprints is also available at the store.
Metal Barrels – ShareCG. This model comes with a set of colour textures to provide lots of different looks, as well as four bump maps.
Archive3D is a site with a large collection of 3D models in 3DS or GSM format (GSkinMesh format, a proprietary format created by Sierra). There is a large selection of themes. The models are normally low poly and are free to use and modify without restrictions (read the terms and conditions). No registration is required.
Dynamics and Particle Effects is a two part article on creating particle systems on Maya. Smoke and rain are two of the effects that are taught in this tutorial by Audri Phillips from Intel.
From their very inception, 3D programs have been used to imitate natural phenomena, creating realistic, stylized, or artistic effects. A greater range of effects is now possible than in the past, before the advent of computer technology. The dynamics/particle effects component of 3D software combined with compositing programs-many of which also have particle capabilities-have primarily been used to create these effects, which have become a mainstay in film, commercial, and game production.
ShareCG is a site with a huge amount of modelling tutorials, 3D models for download, and textures.