What are the most important 3D game development tools ?

[scubero]

Question:

What are the most important 3D game development tools ? (when developing 3D games with PureBasic?)

For designing skeletal-animated characters?
For creating and editing 3D maps populated with objects?
For editing textures, UV texturing and 3D objects?

What are the 'essential' tools that you would highly recommend as a 3D game designer / developer, and why?

Thanks for your input!

[Samuel]

This page has a few resources that you might be interested in.

I personally use Blender for my 3D modeling, UV mapping, and skeletal animations. Reasons are it's free and I just enjoy how it works. There are a lot of different modeling software out there. Try a couple of them and find out which one works best for you.
Depending on the 3D engine your using the one problem you may come across is exporting.
For example Purebasic's native 3D is OGRE which uses a custom .MESH format. So, whatever modeling software you choose. You'll need to find an exporter to this format or build a simple converter that can convert their format to OGRE's.

For map creation I just have my own simple map maker. Nothing too fancy and I'm sure most people can make there own in a day or two.

For creating and editing textures I use GIMP. Which in my opinion is a nice free alternative to Photoshop.

The most important tools you need are the one's that will work best for you.

[scubero]

Thanks Samuel. Very helpful link!

[IdeasVacuum]

Take a look at deepMesh it is written in PB: deepMesh
It also serves to demonstrate what you can do with PB.