Creative software that's free for students, educators, or everyone.

Just a list of free software I've found useful for my own purposes, but might be of use to some, I'll add more as I find them:

• Autodesk Suites including: Maya, 3DS Max, Mudbox, MotionBuilder, Smoke, AutoCAD, & many more (free for students/educators).
• DaVinci Resolve: lite, but pretty complete colour grading package that also can be used as an editing/conform tool.
• Fusion: excellent free for all (lite version) VFX/compositing package.
• RealFlow: great fluids package (free for students/educators).
• Blender: free for all 3D modelling/animation, also one of the few free 3D object and camera trackers.
• Sculptris: free for all interactive modelling, like a very basic version of zbrush or mudbox.
• MakeHuman: great easy free for all  tool for creating 3D human characters if you don't have the skills/time to model from scratch.
• UDK: game engine, free for personal, non-commercial.
• CryEngine: game engine, free for personal, non-commercial.
• Unity: game engine, free for personal, non-commercial.
• Nuke: VFX/compositing tool has free for personal, non-commercial version.
• Audacity: free for all audio editing.
• MPEG Streamclip: free for all encoder.
• RenderMan: free non-commercial version  of Pixar's render engine available in 'early 2015'.
• MeshLab: free mesh editing tool, very useful for editing dense triangulated meshes (like scans) before bringing into your 3D sw.

Not really 'creative', but worth sticking on your machine:

• Open Office Suite: free alternative to MS Office.
• Recuva: free file recovery (lite version) saved my ass a few times.
• VLC Player: free media player.
• Microsoft Security Essentials; free security suite, windows only.
• CCleaner: removes unnecessary files freeing up space, and fixes registry issues (windows).