Crocotile 3D

Highly unintuitive controls but undeniably good at providing a streamlined workflow for creating very specific environments/art styles. Gets a lot of love from the developer, so I would certainly recommend this at full price if you find the store page examples compelling and want to work with these tools / in that style. Good export/import features too.

I spent weeks crash-coursing Blender for one of my projects, and the entire process from beginning to end felt unbearable. Maybe I enjoyed the idea of working in 3D, but Blender's infinite menus and add-ons were too much. It was far too easy to accidentally do something beyond my comprehension and break everything. Crocotile 3D has GOT to be a necessity for any dev who's intimidated by Blender and not outright looking for a high-poly style, though it seems that if you're determined enough, you can definitely make some smooth models. It is remarkably intuitive once you learn the basics, and from my experience, it seems just about anything you could think of is highly customizable; you can remap nearly every action to make it similar to programs you're already familiar with, you can adjust the size of your tiles and grids at any time in order to add fine details, and experimenting with shapes and textures for my environments and building interiors has never been easier. This program is awesome, to say nothing of the dev who's still active in its community and updating it to this day, and I'm absolutely going to be getting my money's worth out of it.