Digital Media Minute has done posts before on tools for making 3-D art including a slick 3D character creator, but take a look at Sculptris, a really impressive, free digital sculpting tool or 3-D modeler that you can use to make incredibly detailed and organic-looking 3-D figures. If you have ever wondered how the incredible figures that you see in video games and other places are created, take a look at this piece of software. I think that a fairly untapped market is to sell to people who might be interested in 3-D sculpture just for the sake of making cool models in 3-D without any further application necessarily. For Mac, Windows, Linux.
tech tools
Class Design Tipsheet
Over at Dzone, Giorgio Sironi has a very nice list of generic class and interface design questions you should ask yourself before committing a new code artifact, relative to naming, structure, and length. I’ve posted a few pointers to articles at DZone lately; they remain one of the very best sources that I know of for serious programmers to get relevant, high-quality tutorials and articles on even the most obscure tips relating to web development and many other subjects. This class design tipsheet is just one of the many helpful resources that I’ve made use of myself in the last year by way of DZone.