Cool free creative video/visual art/graphic design software.

[Ostinato Rubato]

We live in amazing times. All of these programs are excellent, pro-quality, and they're free and reputable. There's significant learning curves to all of them, but if you have the creative itch then be glad you were born when you were born. It's never been easier.

Enjoy!

Video Editing: https://shotcut.org/

3D Animation: https://www.blender.org/features/animation/

3D Sculting: https://pixologic.com/sculptris/

2D Animation: https://www.synfig.org/

Photo Editing: https://www.gimp.org/

[Steinmetzify]

Nice, thanks Mike. Not involved with much of this anymore but I’ll check out the photo software for sure.

[Chris Z]

Thanks for theads up!

[Ostinato Rubato]

This video was made on Blender.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhWc3b3KhnY[/youtube]

[Ostinato Rubato]

The future belongs to the creative. Get your kids to learn how to use software like this.

[nightflameauto]

Blender is awesome and keeps getting better and better. I've used it for years to make little cartoon characters I use for making stupid comics for my own amusement. Somewhere around here I posted up one of my characters that I use to take my frustration on users out on. I need to see if I can find those somewhere.

I've also used GIMP quite extensively over the years. It's great for touch-ups on photos, or straight-up drawing.

[Ostinato Rubato]

Blender is awesome and keeps getting better and better. I've used it for years to make little cartoon characters I use for making stupid comics for my own amusement. Somewhere around here I posted up one of my characters that I use to take my frustration on users out on. I need to see if I can find those somewhere.

I've also used GIMP quite extensively over the years. It's great for touch-ups on photos, or straight-up drawing.

Bro that's dope. I didn't know you could do some animating. Share that shit fool. Make this thread worthwhile!

[Ostinato Rubato]

Also,

The geek shall inherit the Earth.

[TurboPablo]

I'll have a look at this stuff later. There is a better than good chance that I will be bringing home a 1967 Mustang Coupe over the winter. The car is a full on project with all of the sheet metal work done(which is huge). I am having serious thoughts about setting up cameras in the garage and a youtube channel to try and, if not monetize it, get free parts for the build through sponsorships and free advertising.

So anyway, video editing software has been on my mind for a little while now.

[ajaxlepinski]

I use Gymp at work - it's a decent PhotoShop Elements clone photo editor.

Just downloaded ShotCut

[nightflameauto]

Bro that's dope. I didn't know you could do some animating. Share that shit fool. Make this thread worthwhile!

It's been a while, but I'm searching for some of the old stuff. I know it's around here somewhere.

[TurboPablo]

Years ago on a street racing website, one of the members started making animations out of all of the crazy shit talk that was happening between racers on the forum. The results were hilarious.

[nightflameauto]

Hmm. I did find this:


He's used for talking about fuckers that bother me at work.

[Ostinato Rubato]

Hmm. I did find this:


He's used for talking about fuckers that bother me at work.

That's awesome and adorable.

More people should have animated bitching bots. Sign of health.

[nightflameauto]

That's awesome and adorable.

More people should have animated bitching bots. Sign of health.

Going back over my working files I realized I got about three days into building a robotic band in Blender to do videos for my songs and then got distracted and never came back to it.

[leftyaxeman]

Awesome! Thanks for the heads up Mike!

[ajaxlepinski]

NFA.... I'm not familiar with Blender.... Did you put your robot in front of a green-screen so you can add the background later?

[Ostinato Rubato]

NFA.... I'm not familiar with Blender.... Did you put your robot in front of a green-screen so you can add the background later?

Yeah blender allows you to greenscreen your animation so that you can put it into a more detailed background or landscape. So does shotcut the video editing software.

[ajaxlepinski]

NFA.... I'm not familiar with Blender.... Did you put your robot in front of a green-screen so you can add the background later?

Yeah blender allows you to greenscreen your animation so that you can put it into a more detailed background or landscape. So does shotcut the video editing software.

That is so cool... thanks!!!

[atrox]

This is what I do for a living, but take my comments with a grain of salt. "pro" can mean many things to different people. I, personally wouldn't touch any of these... but that comes from someone who is pretty much latched onto the apps I use.

Pro Quality is up for debate on a few of these. Mainly because they don't support a lot of pro plugin's and add-ons. I barely consider After Effects a "pro quality" application, when you have things like Fusion and Nuke.

Blender is an exception here. I don't use it, but have seen some amazing stuff done on it. However, when it comes to 3D, which is my profession occupation, it comes down to the renderer of choice and not so much the modeling. Blender supports Octane, which is a good start. Though Arnold and RedShift would help it along as well. But when you have apps like C4D, Maya and Houdini... meh.

here's a couple work things i did the past few months

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41y6z67SxcY[/youtube]
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ex7Ko66trI[/youtube]

[nightflameauto]

NFA.... I'm not familiar with Blender.... Did you put your robot in front of a green-screen so you can add the background later?

It's actually my prototyping cube I built to help determine if new models are going to work in different lighting. Green screen back, red one side, blue the other side, with heavy lighting reflecting the blue and red.

Atrox, that's awesome shit.

[Ostinato Rubato]

This is what I do for a living, but take my comments with a grain of salt. "pro" can mean many things to different people. I, personally wouldn't touch any of these... but that comes from someone who is pretty much latched onto the apps I use.

Pro Quality is up for debate on a few of these. Mainly because they don't support a lot of pro plugin's and add-ons. I barely consider After Effects a "pro quality" application, when you have things like Fusion and Nuke.

Blender is an exception here. I don't use it, but have seen some amazing stuff done on it. However, when it comes to 3D, which is my profession occupation, it comes down to the renderer of choice and not so much the modeling. Blender supports Octane, which is a good start. Though Arnold and RedShift would help it along as well. But when you have apps like C4D, Maya and Houdini... meh.

here's a couple work things i did the past few months

Can you elaborate on that bold part?

I know nothing...

[K-Bizzle]

Maybe throw in Inkscape for a free vector editor.
I use that and GIMP all the fucking time.

Sure I often find myself longing for the Adobe versions but when you've got a budget of 0 due to the limited need (making/editing graphics for machinery UI) they're great.

[atrox]

This is what I do for a living, but take my comments with a grain of salt. "pro" can mean many things to different people. I, personally wouldn't touch any of these... but that comes from someone who is pretty much latched onto the apps I use.

Pro Quality is up for debate on a few of these. Mainly because they don't support a lot of pro plugin's and add-ons. I barely consider After Effects a "pro quality" application, when you have things like Fusion and Nuke.

Blender is an exception here. I don't use it, but have seen some amazing stuff done on it. However, when it comes to 3D, which is my profession occupation, it comes down to the renderer of choice and not so much the modeling. Blender supports Octane, which is a good start. Though Arnold and RedShift would help it along as well. But when you have apps like C4D, Maya and Houdini... meh.

here's a couple work things i did the past few months

Can you elaborate on that bold part?

I know nothing...

Sure. Most 3D applications have their own rendering engine built-in. Some are great and other are terrible. Some are slow and great and some are terrible and fast. The three i mentioned, Arnold, Redshift and Octane (and a few lesser knowns) are all physically based renderers and are movie industry standards. Some are great at some things and not so great at other things. I use all three mentioned above for various things.

So, for instance... I use mainly Cinema 4D for 3D stuff. You can buy these renderers mentioned above as plug-ins. When you do this, you are bypassing the built-in render completely, so you are using lights and materials, as well as handing off final rendering to these 3rd party engines. All three are node based rendering, meaning you use a node system to built materials etc (Screen shot below).

They are all essentially engines that mimic real life as much as possible, but all have ability to "cheat the system" (remove shadows, have lights only affect certain objects, etc). All 3 i mentioned have GPU support and very very fast rendering times. All support proper global illumination and shit. Arnold can use CPU or GPU. My studio has about $40k worth of graphics cards for rendering using these engines and they are super fast renders.

I hope that makes sense. I can certainly elaborate or answer more questions.

Here is an example of what i mentioned within Cinema 4D using the Redshift renderer. Basically, it's just a snowman that slowly gets dressed as Harry Potter. I used particle simulations to have the various things pop on him "magically".

This frame took about 3.5 minutes to render with DoF and everything. Final quality. Using just my 2 GPU's on my system. I can see any changes i make in real time in this view. It's great.


Just the C4D viewport to show how lighting and materials make the difference. You can see i used Redshift lights (and materials) and not C4D lights.


Just showing the various rendering engines i have in C4D


A Redshift material node tree. This is the scarf material. I can break this down if you wish. Not as hard as it looks to comprehend.

[nightflameauto]

Holy carp, I'd kill to have a system that could render a scene like that in three minutes and some change. I often find even my stupid simple scenes I'm just best off launching the renderer when I'm shutting down for the night and won't be back to the system for most of the next day. Then again, I do this on a system geared much more for music production and this is just a side hobby for me.