To summarize my predicament: I am working on an animated short. Its deadline is around July 15. Character animation will be done through traditional (2D) animation, but I wanted to use some sort of 3D software to help me create the backgrounds.

Things I want from this software:

• The ability to create terrain/landscapes in an intuitive way
• Custom textures
• The ability to create lakes, rivers, waterfalls, natural arches, forests, sand beaches, paved roads, tunnels, fences and buildings (exterior and interior)
• Lighting (optional)

My original plan was to use the Hammer Editor for this, but the Hammer Editor is (1) not FOSS and (2) doesn’t natively work on Linux, and getting it set up on Linux is a pain and not guaranteed to work.

Hammer++ and Rathammer also either don’t work, or seem like a pain to set up on Linux. Trenchbroom actually works pretty OK, however as a Quake/HL1 map editor it doesn’t have displacements, which means it’s very tedious and clunky to do terrain.

Godot is unintuitive. The voxel engine Luanti isn’t really what I’m looking for insofar as I couldn’t figure out how to do smooth terrain with it given it’s a voxel engine and all. Blender I haven’t tried yet but is almost certainly going to prove very unintuitive for the basic tasks I want to do.

The Far Cry 2 map editor I managed to get working on my computer, and is fairly close to what I want… but it froze and crashed when I tried to save the map. Dessuten “close” only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, as they say.

So if Blender ends up being too much of a pain in the butt, and I can’t get any better ideas for what to do from this thread, then I can either try borrowing a Windows computer and using Hammer on that (which would sacrifice my pride as a Linux Weirdo), or I can just give up on the 3D backgrounds idea altogether and draw my own crappy backgrounds in GIMP.