3D mapping

[Troedel]

Right now I'm the happy owner of vue and photoshop, all my modelling atempts are done in Blender which is a very powerful 3d suit you can achieve almost everything with. Expect steep learning curve. Im just modelling and texturing. In fact you don't need anything else for 3d maps. A 2d programm like Gimp or PS for post work would be good.
Terrain generation is done with world machine 2, a procedural approach guideable by defining areas.
There are free versions of WM2 Vue, Blender is free. So give it a swirl and get your feet wet. Looking forward to a new 3d approach

[steelwarrior]

If you have photoshop CS6 extended, there's a fine 3d engine in it now. It's not as powerful as most of the real 3d software (like blender or 3dsmax), definitly not map-orented and not that easy to use at first, but i think you can already make some fine 3d work just with that. I'm currently in process of learning how to use it well, and the results i got are satisfying for now, the "convert layer to 3d form" is actually pretty handy to shape planets and simple editable forms. It all depend on what you wish to achieve in the end.

[lmbarns]

The game engine Unity 3d has a really awesome set of terrain tools. You can paint on textures with a brush, manipulate the height/shape of terrain or generate it from heightmaps.

Now I've moved to Blender because the meshes are a lot more efficient for games, but it's more difficult to texture, it is really awesome..

[Midgardsormr]

I didn't see any mention of SketchUp in there, so I thought I should throw that one in. It's not so good with terrain, in my experience, but it's terrific for buildings. And it's relatively easy to export the geometry to other programs with better rendering capabilities.

Also, Google maintains a warehouse of free 3d models for SketchUp for use with Google Earth, so if there's a major building you're interested in, chances are good that you can find a reasonably accurate model of its exterior ready-made. I have in the past used a workflow that involved importing a building from the warehouse into SketchUp, then sending it to Blender for clean-up and conversion, and then to Maya (which is definitely not free) for texturing and animation. The texturing and animation could just as well be done in Blender, though.