Art of Illusion is a free tool for creating and editing 3D graphics, which has been developed continuously since 2000. This 12 MB tool has a lot of possibilities - from modeling objects from solids and grids with all kinds of transformations, through setting lighting, cameras, defining textures and their attributes, using both uniform and procedural materials, to rendering (both realistic and stylized) and ray tracing. This is complemented by several dozen plugins and several hundred scripts available for download by the built-in manager.

The interface of the program is clear and understandable, even for a 3D layman - it certainly seems more friendly than Blender - but still we can't master the program without familiarizing ourselves with the documentation and tutorials. Interestingly, the Art of Illusion turned out to be a tool quite suitable also for designing objects for 3D printing - a lot on this subject can be found on the pages of the RepRap project.