It really pays to read tech news. Today, I stumbled upon an article that claimed that Unity 3D, the powerful 3D game engine, was free at last. I thought it was too good to be true, so I investigated further.

For those of you who don’t know, Unity 3D is a really powerful enviornment that allows developers to create interactive 3D content. It can be embedded in a web page like Flash, or made as a download for Mac or PC.

Unity 3D originally has been $199 for the Indie (independent developer, kind of like Lite), and the pro version has been $1499. There’s also an iPhone and Wii tool available for an elevated cost. Now there’s a few reasons why I did not buy this earlier:

1) cost

2) I already own Flash CS4

3) I’m really bad at art, so I’d need a 3D artist, preferably someone I could get away with paying really little (least I’m honest)

However, now that it’s free, I might as well download it.

I haven’t had more than a few minutes to play with it, but so far it seems pretty awesome. It seems like it has a pretty big learning curve, and I’m inept with 3D art by nature. I’ll also need to be careful about investing my time in Unity, as I need to keep up with all my other favorite programming languages and projects.

I really do feel bad for the guy who downloaded this the day before it became free.

Download Unity 3D