What are your fav programs for doing your artwork and design, be it in 2D or 3D? I’m always looking for good programs, espüecially freeware, and already got some really nice recommendations here, so feel free to list everything you really like to work with!
Here is my current list of favs and some wishlisted things. You can see a lot of free stuff and I tried to list free alternatives for more expensive programs. If I don’t use the free alternative, I have reasons for it, but those might be related to my personal workflow, limited knowledge and so on, so always try out the free stuff first if you are interested.
- Basic 2D pixel editing and similar:
- Gimp (my fav for most tasks) [free]
- Topaz stuff for AI-based denoising, masking and other effects [rather expensive but can be impressive and I didn’t find good alternatives]
- Painting
- Krita or Gimp [free]
- Corel Painter or Escape Motions Flame Painter for really interesting and flexible brushes [both in different Humble Bundles]
- 3D
- Blender for just about anything [free]
- iClone for human animation [rather expensive; free alternative is Daz Studio, but they want to sell you models; Blender with additional tools or Mixamo would be other alternatives]
- TwinMotion [was free but not anymore] or FlowScape [very inexpensive] for simple 3D environment building
- Sculptris for simple sculpting [free]
- Substance Painter (Adobe bought it, but it’s still a great program for texturing models) [rather expensive; free alternative: Blender]
- Game engines
- Unity and Unreal for very flexible audio visualization [free]
- Quixel Mixer and Bridge for getting lots of free assets [free, but only free for Unreal projects]
- Video editing
- Hitfilm for anything video [Humble Bundle]
- Audio-responsive visuals
- Resolume for audio-responsive effects and live visuals [rather expensive, cheaper alternative: Magic Visuals; free alternative: VSXu]
- also (with various limitations): Blender, Daz Studio [with free Audiomation script], Hitfilm [see above]
- Additional one-trick stuff:
- Amberlight and Inspirit for interesting abstract and Mandala-type animated visuals [Humble Bundle]
- Mandelbulber and Mandelbulb3D for 3D fractals [free]
Let me know what you like to work or play with!