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.
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.
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.
ShareCG is a site with a huge amount of modelling tutorials, 3D models for download, and textures.
Assimp is a Cross-Platform Open Source Library to load 3D modes. Currently, as of version 2.0, it can import an impressive list of formats and it also exports to Collada and 3DS MAX. Once loaded, all the models attributes are easily accessible through the API.
The library also performs some post processing tasks on the imported models. These range from the common triangulation and conversion to left handed systems (Direct3D is an example), to mesh performance tunning and improve vertex cache locality.
Assimp is tailored at typical game scenarios by supporting a node hierarchy, static or skinned meshes, materials, bone animations and potential texture data.
It is fairly easy to use Assimp in an OpenGL context, and a few demos are provided in the release package.
Free3DModelZ.com – Several models in many categories. Formats: 3DS and MAX. All models are free for personal and non-commercial use and for learning purpose.
Blender and Gimp Tutorials. On the Blender side it focus on precision modelling. GIMP is then used to create a texture for a machined metal gear.
