Rendering & Lighting (free)
Blender
Blender is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software product used for creating animated films, visual effects, interactive 3D applications or video games. Blender's features include 3D modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging and skinning, fluid and smoke simulation, particle simulation, animating, rendering, video editing and compositing.
xNormal
xNormal is an application to generate normal / ambient occlusion / displacement maps. It can also project the texture of the highpoly model into the lowpoly mesh ( complete texture transfer, even with different topologies ). It comes with some useful tools like height map - normal map - cavity map - occlusion - tangent/object space and spherical harmonics tools. All these computations are done using multicore/multithreading, distributed/parallel rendering, ray tracing and advanced GPU techniques.
