What softwares do you use along with blender for better workflow?

Hi guys,

I was curious, what software are useful for blender users. What I mean is softwares like gimp, photoscan, makehuman, Photoshop, etc. the list is endless. What do you guys use and what’s your opinion about them, if I am not getting too irrelevant :slight_smile:

Would love to hear from you,
Sayan.

EDIT:I will find more about these softwares and make a blog post about some of the best softwares to be used along with Blender.

Would love to hear from you,
What about you getting the ball rolling by telling us what you use and why you use it to do what ?

Substance Painter, Substance Designer - for painting and compositing textures.
Bitmap2Material - for all those times when you don’t have the time to make a texture, or it’s in the background and you really don’t care.
Paintstorm - for sketching. Has replaced Mypaint for me.
IPackThat - for optimizing uv layouts. I’m still experimenting with this one.
Xnormal - for baking
Handplane - for when I need a really clean bake.
Octane - sometimes. It’s still slightly faster than Cycles, though not necessarily better.

Adobe after effects and adobe Premier pro - my usage of blender is very limited but not dispensable. anyhow those two softwares nothing can replace really… both for video editing and effects i use.

and Photoshop for post processing my renders.

I just set up a Blender renderfarm on AWS with the Brenda scripts. I don´t know how I could ever live without the power of a thousand cores again.

3D-Coat - For sculpting and especially for painting textures now that it has PBR texturing.
Octane - For the features it has and because I know it much better than Cycles.

Blackmagic Davinci Resolve

Inkscape - vector editing and quickly mocking up cut out profile objects with real geometry, rather than shaders
Photoshop - texture creation
meshlab - general mesh I/O, skinning pointclouds
visualsfm - generating pointclouds
hugin - generating panoramic backdrops

Legacy DDO (free) is great if you suck at creating textures. Takes a while to work out it’s kinks but you can get great results.AwesomeBump is a great free alternative to CrazyBump for deriving maps.

mischief, SketchBook Copic Edition - concept design
Affinity Designer - vector (and some bitmap) editing (it’s a cool lowcost alternative for Photoshop/Illustrator)
DAZ Studio - scene/shot planning, quick previz (for storyboard) and animatics
Silo, Wings3D, MoI - modelling
Sculptris - sculpting
tf Nuke - compositing
Davinci Resolve - NLE, grading, finishing

I use a lot of different software in conjunction with Blender.

Photoshop + Quixel Suite, for texturing
3DCoat, for sculpting
iPackthat, for UV layout
Substance Painter & Designer, for texture painting
Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya and also some Mudbox, for various tasks that Blender falls short on
Xnormal and Knald, for baking
Unity, for game creation
Marvelous Designer, for cloth simulation

Photoshop/Pixelmator/Krita - textures, matte backgrounds, concept art, touch-ups (Pixelmator is on the OSX laptop, Photoshop & Krita are on the windows box)
Sculptris - Concept sculpting. Used to use zBrush on the Windows box but have honestly not touched it for six months.
xNormal - baking. Cycles is just not up to the task and xNormal is awesome at it.
UE4 (& related tools) - Current game engine I’m using. Looking to an open-source alternative for future tutorials but honestly find UE4 covers all my needs
iPackThat - UV Layout (@#$%ing amazing tool)
Wings3D - Environment/box modelling. Despite Blender having improved substantially over the past five years in this regard, Wings3D is still much faster. This may change with the new keymap (if/when it arrives).

Probably others I don’t recall right now.

Photoshop and X normal :slight_smile:

Substance painter/substance designer - texturing/experimenting with mat ideas
Adobe Illustrator - Textures for signs, displays, writing, etc
Photoshop - Prepping photo textures for substance, painting/editing backdrops and some textures, basically everything illustrator and the substance twins can’t cover. I use PS for a lot of miscellaneous things.
Zbrush - Sculpting, concepting, some hard surface modeling. (haven’t sat down to really study zmodeler yet)

Still searching for a better compositing solution. Not a fan od performance or UI in Blender’s compositor, but it’s what I use atm. Fusion isn’t available for OS X yet. I’m planning to jump back to Windows in a few months anyway, so maybe that. Or maybe The Foundry will relent on non-commerical Nuke having a 1080p resolution limit. After Effects is great for some things, but the layer interface will eventually make me angry.

  • Krita: Textures, concepts, creating reference images, etc
  • GIMP: Image Manipulation that Krita can’t do. Which isn’t a whole lot anymore.
  • ImageMagick: Batch image processing stuff, but I do it often enough it’s worth mentioning
  • Inkscape: Vector and text graphic things.
  • Godot: Game Engine I’m currently trying
  • Git: Version control blend files. Really useful for tutorial recording in case of reshoots.
  • VIM/Atom-Editor: I don’t do Python scripting unless I have to, but I need a good editor for when I do.

Genetica 4.0 - Texture creation
Mixcraft 7 Pro - Music for game projects I work on and off on
Godot - Working on a game project with it
Paint Shop Pro 7 - Image post-pro and simple texture work

PhotoPlus/Genetica/Filterforge/Substance tools/ShaderMap - texture creation
3DS Max - modeling/rendering special stuff, handling big scenes/archviz
VRay/Corona - for better render speed/quality
Sculptris - sculpting
MovieStudio - video editing
Unity/UE4 realtime content

What I use is:
MakeHuman: For quick and accurate anatomy.
Photoshop/Gimp: For post process.
Arbaro:A cool looking tree generator.

Inkscape - vector graphics, logos, typography
GIMP - post for web
Krita/MyPaint - concept art, storyboards, textures
FFMPEG - transcoding, final assembly, screencasting, magic incantations
ImageMagick - batch imaging
feh - Fast image viewing
Mercurial/Git (investigating Fossil) - version control
Redmine - project management and collaboration
Python - automation
Audacity - minor audio editing
Freemind - conceptualization, high-level organization
Scribus - Print layout
vim - scripting, coding, screenwriting, other writing
LibreOffice - editing (text)
pandoc - text format conversion

I’m just a weekend hobbyist, so I don’t use much.

Blender for 95% of everything
Paint.net to make textures and post
Krita for a small amount of texture work