Blender is the obvious choice, and a longtime favorite of mine.
If you have money, I also like Houdini Indie.
For Pixel graphics I really like Aseprite
I just use blender and my old OTP version of clip studio for as much as I can.
I would really LOVE to see more AI tools for texture and model generation to help with the basic things like walls and clutter objects, but I need to know the AI is trained ethically and I won’t get sued first…
I’m more into audio assets, but on that side AI has really impressed me. I don’t know how it works with the ethics involved in the production of the systems themselves, but I run training on my own engineered soundsamples to train the AI to reproduce specific voices. Makes it really easy to know where that part of the output comes from - 100% my stuff.
Oh actually I forgot about audio, I would love to see some more AI voice stuff done. I think, for AAA at least, they should be paying actors to do their usual lines that are scripted, then also pay them to make a voice model for that character using the lines they recorded for the game already. Then we can still have the same kind of spoken dialog we have today, except they can also have the characters respond intelligently to events in game, or even talk to the player through mic like that one game I saw recently.
Then hopefully there will be some free use voice stuff that indie devs could use to accomplish similar stuff, kinda like mixamo does for animations
