If you already use Blender and want Inkscape-like functionality, grease pencil has gotten REALLY impressive! Worth checking out! But let’s talk about materials real quick:
I personally got burned when I dropped hard-earned cash on Substance and they sold out from under us.
It might not be 1:1 for the most powerful features found in Alegorithmic’s traitorware, but the PBR Painter add-on has been AWESOME for painting materials in Blender.
There are some other add-ons for materials and advanced effects too.
(For designing, I’m glad fo see Material Maker mentioned! It’s impressive and legit! I hope that project goes far!)
I honestly think a majority of that stuff is totally doable in Blender right now, add-ons just make it easier and/or a bit more efficient, and these devs are worth supporting.
Armorpaint looked pretty cool, but is it still being developed? Seems like it’s been awfully quiet, which is a shame because it seemed very promising!
It’s sad because Substance was the ONE time I relented and said “Hey, maybe this commercial software will be really worth it.” Fool me once.
I’m still using the 2018 Substance, which is the last one for which there was a proper license (which I have). Then Adobe bought the Allegorithmict and turned that suite into a subscription application.
Still works fine and apparently the software hasn’t significantly improved ever since it turned into a subscription.
By the way, cheers for mentioning PBR Painter - I added it to my list of possible replacements.
Honestly, depending on what you need it for, there may not be an alternative. I’ve tried a bunch over the years, and most don’t handle overprint, don’t have colour management settings, don’t know about the more complex shading types or type 3 fonts, etc.
There are specialised software packages that do know about these, but they are closed source and expensive, and then ignore other parts of the PDF spec like 3D or animation.
Acrobat is awful bloatware that somehow still lacks basic functionality - but it’s the only one I know of that covers pretty much all of PDF.
Blender is just the most amazing peace of software I know and I actually enjoy using it. Unless I try to do retopology again. Screw that all the way to hell!
100%. Retopology kinda drives me up the wall because I always seem to end up with mismatched loops and stuff.
One day I’ll save up and support Retopoflow, but in the meantime, check out a new fork of Poly Quilt! it’s freely available in Blender’s extension repository!
I see a lot of people say it works a lot like Maya’s poly-build/paint/something(?) function, and a lot of people would say they import Blender meshes back into Maya just for retopology, so that sounds like quite high praise if this works similarly.
Looking forward to trying it myself. :)
I don’t know if retopo will ever be fun, but maybe at least it won’t be miserable? Hahaha.
please don’t edit videos in Blender, that sounds like masochism
it’s not open source but i will always recommend Davinci Resolve, by far the best video editing sodtware i’ve used and it’s free! (well 95% of it is, it’s fully functional and outstanding without paying a cent but if you want some extra presets especially for the colour grading stage then you gotta pay. how i see it is that it’s free software with a few built in ads for an effects package)
Both would be fine options tbh. I personally find the blender one to be functional but a bit clunky since it’s clearly not the main focus though so it’s probably the lesser of the two options if that’s all you’re doing
Was going to say this. Unlike Gimp, Photopea’s UI is extremely similar to Photoshop so it’s much more intuitive to use if you come from that background.
Also I want to mention Graphite.rs for graphic design. It aims for vector/raster image with procedural customization capability and in early development. Last I checked they don’t do much outreach and having feedback helps too.
Here is a list of foss Adobe related stuff:
Kdenlive
Gimp
Krita
Okular or SummatraPDF
I use Shotcut for video editing. Haven’t seen that mentioned here yet.
One posted by someone recently
Where Fl :(
Blender 3D Artist here:
If you already use Blender and want Inkscape-like functionality, grease pencil has gotten REALLY impressive! Worth checking out! But let’s talk about materials real quick:
I personally got burned when I dropped hard-earned cash on Substance and they sold out from under us.
It might not be 1:1 for the most powerful features found in Alegorithmic’s traitorware, but the PBR Painter add-on has been AWESOME for painting materials in Blender.
There are some other add-ons for materials and advanced effects too.
(For designing, I’m glad fo see Material Maker mentioned! It’s impressive and legit! I hope that project goes far!)
I honestly think a majority of that stuff is totally doable in Blender right now, add-ons just make it easier and/or a bit more efficient, and these devs are worth supporting.
Armorpaint looked pretty cool, but is it still being developed? Seems like it’s been awfully quiet, which is a shame because it seemed very promising!
It’s sad because Substance was the ONE time I relented and said “Hey, maybe this commercial software will be really worth it.” Fool me once.
I’m still using the 2018 Substance, which is the last one for which there was a proper license (which I have). Then Adobe bought the Allegorithmict and turned that suite into a subscription application.
Still works fine and apparently the software hasn’t significantly improved ever since it turned into a subscription.
By the way, cheers for mentioning PBR Painter - I added it to my list of possible replacements.
Some poor pickings for acrobat there. Why no okular?
Honestly, depending on what you need it for, there may not be an alternative. I’ve tried a bunch over the years, and most don’t handle overprint, don’t have colour management settings, don’t know about the more complex shading types or type 3 fonts, etc.
There are specialised software packages that do know about these, but they are closed source and expensive, and then ignore other parts of the PDF spec like 3D or animation.
Acrobat is awful bloatware that somehow still lacks basic functionality - but it’s the only one I know of that covers pretty much all of PDF.
I think it is better to focus on foss when you can. This is more of a list of alternative companies to Adobe.
Cool graphic though
Foss has the most standout icon
Gimp really shouldn’t be on anyone’s “alternate to” lists.
It’s so bad.
Affinity, on the hand… it’s pretty great. For now, at least.
Blender has a really good video editor built in.
Kdenlive is surprisingly good from my limited experience with it. But blender can do basically everything so that’s also an option.
Excel probably does too.
I do all my video editing in emacs
Blender is just the most amazing peace of software I know and I actually enjoy using it. Unless I try to do retopology again. Screw that all the way to hell!
100%. Retopology kinda drives me up the wall because I always seem to end up with mismatched loops and stuff.
One day I’ll save up and support Retopoflow, but in the meantime, check out a new fork of Poly Quilt! it’s freely available in Blender’s extension repository!
I see a lot of people say it works a lot like Maya’s poly-build/paint/something(?) function, and a lot of people would say they import Blender meshes back into Maya just for retopology, so that sounds like quite high praise if this works similarly.
Looking forward to trying it myself. :)
I don’t know if retopo will ever be fun, but maybe at least it won’t be miserable? Hahaha.
Blender can do video editing but I wouldn’t recommend using Blender unless you are already using other Blender features.
Kdenlive is a proper video editor and is actually designed for purely video editing. Just because you can do it with Blender doesn’t mean you should.
please don’t edit videos in Blender, that sounds like masochism
it’s not open source but i will always recommend Davinci Resolve, by far the best video editing sodtware i’ve used and it’s free! (well 95% of it is, it’s fully functional and outstanding without paying a cent but if you want some extra presets especially for the colour grading stage then you gotta pay. how i see it is that it’s free software with a few built in ads for an effects package)
I think Kdenlive is about the same as Davinci Resolve at this point but I’m no where near a video editing expect so I could be wrong.
By chance, any idea how either of them compare to Final Cut Pro for basic video cleanup?
I use FCP for cleaning up instructional YT videos (cutting out flubs and flowing back together) but have been looking for a viable Linux alternative.
Both would be fine options tbh. I personally find the blender one to be functional but a bit clunky since it’s clearly not the main focus though so it’s probably the lesser of the two options if that’s all you’re doing
I post this on every realted thread:
https://www.photopea.com/
Web-based Photoshop.
Was going to say this. Unlike Gimp, Photopea’s UI is extremely similar to Photoshop so it’s much more intuitive to use if you come from that background.
Not foss but still an alternative
The (attempted) Figma acquisition announcement promptly led to emerge FOSS alternative of collaborative prototyping tool too.
Penpot
Also I want to mention Graphite.rs for graphic design. It aims for vector/raster image with procedural customization capability and in early development. Last I checked they don’t do much outreach and having feedback helps too.
Anything using peer2panda?
I know the gnome project was making a p2p collaborative editor at one point.