What about makehuman!? It’s an open source product as well.
I need your opinion about it for the Blog post.
-Sayan.
Gimp: Textures
Inkscape: Vector textures
Ant Renamer: Batch imaging
Krita: Concept art
Unfreeze: Gifs
ZBrush: most of my sculpting, hand painted textures.
Photoshop: textures and compositing.
After effects: video compositing.
In my work we make intensive use of Cinema 4d for a lot of tasks, too.
Sayan, I decided to use free software or licensed software, only. So, my actual tools are:
Blender: for 3D and post-production
Gimp: for texture editing and some post
Krita: for digital painting
Inkscape: for vectors
DraftSight: to save CAD files in DXF to import in Blender
Ubuntu: I use it at home
Cool. Thanx for the contribution.
virtualdub, to post or pre process video
So, what do you say about free softwares over the premium ones. Does it matter much to you guys?
Provided they do the job as well as one another, no.
The consideration really boils down to valuing one’s time. If you don’t attach value to our time, then it doesn’t really matter how much longer one takes to do something with free software over “premium” (or more accurately, proprietary/commercial) software. However, the more value you put on your time, the more important the ease/speed with which a task can be accomplished is to you. At some point, the value tips past the price-point for the software and most professionals will then pay for the commercial variant.
Certain things are impossible or very difficult to achieve with open source and/or free applications. Need 32bit per channel multi-layered OpenEXR processing for images beyond 4k? Not possible in free software, as far as I am aware. Which is why I use Photoline, which is commercial (although very inexpensive).
Other apps I use in my workflow:
- Blender (obviously)
- Fusion
- DaVinci Resolve (switched from Adobe Premiere to Resolve for my video editing needs)
- Cinema4d 8.5 (mainly for XFrog)
- Unity
- InkScape
- Anime Studio for 2d animation work
- Krita for digital painting/texturing work/illustrations
- Clip Studio for inking work, illustrations
- Photoshop CS6 for PSD file conversions (For everything else in terms of image editing I switched to Photoline)
- Gimp (as a plugin for Photoline for certain effects)
- 3d Coat for texture painting, some sculpting
- Raw Therapee for Raw developing
- Piccure+ for Raw sharpening
- MakeHuman
- Topaz filters
- Filter Forge
- Audacity
- NetBeans and Notepad++ for development work
- IrfanView, ColorQuantizer, RIOT, and other misc graphic utilites for image optimization and batch processing
- InDesign CS6 for DTP work
- sometimes After Effects CS6, although I am switching to Blender and Fusion for that type of work
As you can see, a hotch-potch of various free, open source, and commercial applications that suit my workflow. I believe in the tenet “whatever works best for me at a reasonable price”, instead of “whatever is free”.
And if I might suggest: lose the term “premium”, please. What defines “premium” software to you? Merely the cost? The free versions of Fusion and DaVinci Resolve are extremely professional high quality applications. Merely because those two are freely available does not make them any less "premium’.
itunes, firefox, scrivener, shadermappro, unity
Sculpting Painting:
Zbrush/Mudbox/Photoshop
Textures Baking Mapping:
dDo (photoshop plugin)
Substance Designer
Substance Painter (soon to add)
xnormal
Blender (baking)
Modeling UV Mapping:
Maya
Blender
Animation:
MotionBuilder
Maya
Blender
Physics and Effects:
Maya
Softimage ICE
Blender
Rendering:
Blender Internal
Cycles
Mental Ray
Renderman (learning in progress)
Editing and Sound:
Vegas Pro
Comp:
Vegas Pro
Fusion (learning in progress)
Blender - modelling, texturing, video editing, compositing, sculpting, simulations, rendering - Cycles
Sketchup - sometimes modelling and exporting models to blender from 3d Warehouse
Fusion - compositing, trying Natron, but so far it crashes too much or lacks tools I need
Revit, AutoCAD, DraftSight - preparing models/plans for blender
3ds max - rendering using Corona, rarely Mentalray; imports of formats which don’t work in blender
Photoshop, GIMP, Krita - concept, painting, preparing textures
Awesome Bump - generating textures
In Design, Scribus - layouts for presentations
I use blender
first I make a low poly,
then I bake a normal
then I use the normal to generate a ‘edge map’
using GIMP, then I fill in the edge sections with hand painting
sometimes but mostly use gradients at the moment.
Blender+GIMP…
Cool. What do you guys think about Blender as a render engine, especially cycles? DO you prefer using Luxrender, mistuba or yafaray? I want to include all possible softwares in the blog post ; It’s intended for all those newbies though it maybe helpful for the Pros in some cases.
-Sayan.
I use and have collected a lot of free licensed and commercial software over the years.
If I plan on doing video projects or digital eBooks I make use of Storyboard pro. It is a good and quick solution for getting animatics done easily.
3d content creation I will always use blender or Softimage 7.1. (Old I know but I stopped purchasing softimage licenses after AD got it’s dirty hands on the soft. But I do like ICE. Hoping the nodification of blender brings something similar to the table in this area. Then I will be blender all the way.)
Sculpting: ZBrush. Nothing else comes close.
2d animation I use both anime studio and toonboom’s harmony. (I stopped at version 10 for harmony as I find I can do most things I need to do out of anime studio for a fraction of the price and the support features are the same.)
For game content, I use Unity for 3d, corona or flash (sterling) for 2d.
2d painting needs I use photoshop or Krita (which I am growing very fond of the more I use it.) I used to use artrage, but I kicked that in the butt last year.
Video editing I use adobe after effects or premier only.
Music I use pro tools, alberton live, audacity and recently FL studio (interface needs some getting used to. My favorite of these is pro tools for editing as I am used to the workflow, and fl studio for quick BGM stuff.
for webdesign I use Dreamweaver. But lately I mostly make use of wordpress or drupal and just build on top of that.
For office work I just recently moved over to 365 office from open office. I just found the ease of using and viewing files between desktop and mobile devices a winner in this area. But feature for feature of just the software itself, I find little difference. This was the commercial variant had a great deal of behind the scene features and services not necessarily the soft which was the winner here.
OS I use windows 8.1. Tried Linux but could never get used to it. But not for lack of trying.
Would like to try
Substance Designer
Substance Painter
I heard a lot of good stuff about 4d Cinema from friends in the video editing industry lately. So I would like to get a least one seat of this and give it a whirl. After effects has a slimmed down version built in but I haven’t given it any attention so I cannot say. I wouldn’t like to base an opinion on something without the full feature set.
To be honest As someone mentioned above you can do almost anything with free ware or open source, but if time is of the essence for you then I really feel you must part with some cash to catch up on some Zzzz at night. Really, out of all the stuff I use though, blender is the most stable software I use. I have never with out fault of my own had it crash, freeze or refuse to work. Which all of the above software except blender have done. The next best I found was anime studio. Harmony cost an arm and a leg and was constantly having it corrupt files and or freeze on me. It was / Is the worst purchasing decision I had made. I did like their other products like Animate pro which I loved thus I upgraded to it, but it was a big disappointment.
So I hope that helps.
Probably an odd case here but, I ended up switching to Modo for most of my work. Best modeling tools, great UV and Retopology functionality. Can do most of the work in this app and not feel gimped by using it instead of a specialty app.
Also use:
3d coat (great package for texture painting, sculpting and retopology)
Zbrush
Substance designer/painter
Krita (concept art and illustration, links up to 3d coat for applink workflow)
Marmoset Toolbag (asset preview/showcase)
Hitfilm 2/Sony Movie Studio (editing, basic compositing)
Makehuman
Movieplus video editor
Photoplus