Free Alternatives To Commercial Graphics Software

hello ladies and gentlemen it's mike here at game for scratch and today we're going to be looking at all of the wonderful free software that's out there i don't mean free is in free and open source i mean free isn't cost you no money and we're going to focus on graphics now graphics is a pretty wide and vast topic so we're going to cover things like photoshop alternatives 3d programs video editing and so on so without further ado let's jump in we're going to look at the commercial program and then some of the alternatives that are out there for it now these don't all fit perfectly into categories so you might find something is an alternative to this and that because it does some of what another thing does but hopefully you will find something useful here we're gonna start with the big one and that's photoshop now these are probably the most obvious answers if you've heard of photoshop you've probably heard of the alternatives that are out there but the alternative number one is of course now has come a long way recently as far as the user interface goes that has always been the big thing that held it back they've been working on plumbing type stuff lately stands for the new image manipulation program it is a general purpose uh photo editing software if doesn't do it for you the one with the ugliest website in the world might and it's paint.net now i've been using paint.net for years you can basically think of paint.net as a microsoft paint with a whole lot of features plugged in on top of it and it's sort of my swiss army knife for digital editing so it's what i use in place of photoshop most the time or there is also photopia now photopia is browser-based software this is actually if you go to their website which is photopia.com you will find this and i'm actually somewhat surprised that they have not been sued out of existence because this is almost a direct clone of photoshop that runs in your browser so those are the three most obvious photoshop alternatives out there that are all free there's there's photopia and there's paint.net now photopia does have uh ad supported one of those things to be aware of you can get an account and get rid of that uh but something to be aware of so next up we're coming into adobe illustrator this is the vector graphics kind of application out there and there is one clear free obvious choice to it and that is inkscape now if i could make a small uh side suggestion if you're in the cheap market it's also highly worth checking out serif software those are my weapons of choice uh affinity photo and especially affinity designer if you're looking at an alternative to adobe illustrator and you have a little bit of money available affinity designer is an amazing program but if you have no money available there is inkscape some people absolutely love this application it's an open source vector graphics based application uh very steadily updated so it's definitely nice in that regard and they've been focusing on performance lately which is a much needed addition now we have a couple more vector graphics applications coming up in this next category and this is sort of a weird overlap this is uh say you're looking for adobe animate now if you've never heard of adobe animate adobe animate is what became of adobe flash the vector graphics side of the equation so if you're doing vector graphic space animation right now adobe animate is the commercial package of choice but there are some great alternatives to it that are free first off there is rive which is a vector graphics based animation application you see it in action right there there are some premium premium plans available but you can do some very functional things out of the box completely for free with drive if you're looking something a little bit more elaborate there's open tunes now open tunes is more of a it's an alternative more to other programs that i didn't put as a category but if you're doing 2d based animation this is uh started by uh studio ghibli uh it is it used to be a commercial software it is now completely uh open source and free so if you're trying to get into professional quality animation open tunes is definitely one to check out next up we have synfig studio i did a video on this one it is an open source 2d animation software uh for windows linux and mac os um i do believe they got an epic mega grant at one point in time but i might be wrong there they do have some backers they were in google summer of code for sure uh so this is probably the most close thing you're going to find to open source flash so if you need to do animations vector graphics drawing that kind of stuff uh synfig studio is definitely one to check out and then there's also envy i did a video about this one as well this is another uh vector graphics animation package uh similar thing you kind of animate things over a timeline i think this one is probably a little bit on the simpler side uh but if you are looking for options you have quite a few in the flash alternative adobe illustrator for animation and drawing kind of programs uh so after that we are now going to move on to i lost my mouse uh we're going to move on to uh i'll call this the uh corel painter alternative but this is painter artrage and so on there's a number of natural media style painting applications out there and this one uh the alternative is an absolute no-brainer and that is krita is open source the version five beta was just released uh this actually is also an animation software so it could have fit in the last category but if you are looking at um doing drawing digital painting that kind of things definitely check out create a completely free completely open source and another one that's kind of of interest is my paint even though their website sucks my paint provides kind of a natural media painting application now the interesting thing is the digital brushes powering my paint actually now work in krita beta 5. so hopefully at one point in time we'll consider these two a single entry but for right now uh my paint is kind of the area where if you need to get like um uh recreations of charcoal or water paint or that kind of stuff the the drawing engine behind my paint is actually very quite cool all right so now we're going to move on to a very niche area and that is lightroom now this is for people taking up uh generally raw photographs and relighting them re jigging them etc and the obvious open source alternative to this is dark table i think dark table and lightroom is it cool play on words but it may not be it may just be you know dark room dark table but uh anyways this is basically an open source uh image editing program for uh that kind of stuff you can see light table right here so yeah dark table is definitely an open source alternative in that particular space so if you're trying to do some post-production work cleaning up photos that is what dark table is all about the next space we're going to move into is just 3d so i picked maya it could have been 3d studios max it could have been um moto it could have been um what's the one they love in germany uh maxin um cinema 4d any one of those there's a number of commercial 3d applications out there and there is one very very obvious um open or free alternative and that is of course blender and blender is improving at a rapid and staggering rate so if you're looking for a 3d graphics application blender is definitely one to check out it does a shocking amount of features and functionality in there the sculpting is improving every day and so on so definitely you have blender but it's not the only thing in this category another one is sculpt gl now this is actually sculpt gl you can see it here in action i did a video on this in the past there's actually a sculpting application that is remarkably capable and is actually running entirely in my browser so if you want to check that one out a sculpt gl is another sculpting alternative out there uh if that is what you were looking for so next up we're moving on to i guess we could call this texture generation uh and here your big one is uh there was substance painter and substance designer uh used to be run by a company called algorithmic they were swallowed up by the adobe machine and given new and terrible icons those are just horrible icons but these are exceptional programs so basically on the one hand you got substance designer which is for making uh pbr based materials basically out of nothing using procedural node graphs and then you've got substance painter which is used for drawing those things on 3d models uh to oversimplify it and uh for the substance painters some of that functionality is in blender by the way but we have a few options there uh in terms of the first one i highly recommend and i absolutely love this program is material maker so go to the material maker website which i think i now have opened twice this is a program completely free uh that it's updated constantly it is the same thing you create materials using a network base of nodes it's a great program and amazingly enough he actually even added 3d painting it's very primitive but you can do 3d painting with your procedurally generated textures i covered this a number of times on the channel i will continue to cover it a number of times in the future it is an excellent program and i highly recommend you check it out and it is completely free but that's not the only option we have here another one we've got is pixaflux i have covered this in the past as well you can create cg materials using node based workflow sound familiar uh well that's the idea we got basically you build these node networks together and it creates materials as a result normal maps uh you can bring in images and textures to work with and so on so this is another option in that particular space if you're trying to create node based procedural materials pixel flux is another option another one that is getting more and more common is mixer now this is kwiksel who was purchased by epic games and they make they made mixer completely free now mixer isn't a one-to-one peer yet it doesn't do the exact same thing it's not really a procedural workflow it's a remixing workflow is the idea but you can use this guy completely for free it integrates with a number of different applications and game managers other so you can actually use it directly with blender if you so wish um and again it's free and it is pretty powerful so if you need to texture objects it kind of does some of what um substance designer does and it kind of does some of what substance painter does it just has a slightly different workflow but it's the most i guess you could say professional of the alternatives out there and it would probably be the starting point although i highly encourage you check out uh material maker great application uh but qixel mixer is amazingly enough free and if you use uh unreal engine in your workflow you can also access their quiksil mega scans huge collection of textures which you can then bring into mixer and mix them thus the name and then another option out there technically not free is armor paint now armor paint came from the armory engine which was built on top of blender it's an excellent project unfortunately the engine side of things to begin to be somewhat less paid attention to because he's doing more work on this side of things but what it allows you to do is paint in 3d um in uh using a pbr based material workflow so it's a lot like um what substance painter does uh it's definitely a subset here now i do mention it on the free list because if you have the technical ability to build this one from uh source code you can actually get it for free if you can't um it's like 20 bucks or something like that so it's a very affordable piece of software uh but if you build it from source code you can actually get this guy completely for free and then we're moving into our final category and i picked premiere as the the typical commercial application but this could be uh final cut you name it it's basically video editing personally i use camtasia on a more daily basis and then i use something like hit film if i'm doing something a little bit fancier but again if you're using hit film if you're doing premiere if you're doing um whatever else the alternatives out there free options are well for one there's hit film express definitely worth checking out it's a subset where you can buy additional functionality via plugins but the one that is kind of shockingly free is davinci resolve and this one i think basically blackmagic design wants you to buy all of their crap their consoles their panels and so on so they give away davinci resolve 17 video editing software uh it's used in professional environments i also find it very crashy personally but it is a powerful video editing option it's also a very complicated video editing option so that's definitely one of those things you want to be aware of this is not an easy application to learn as far as video editing goes but it's just a professional suite that is completely free which is definitely nice um and then we move on another option you've got is blender again blender actually has a non non-linear video editor built in i don't have good results with it uh at least in running it on windows some people definitely they swear by it never been a personally big fan i've always found the video editing aspects of blender to be the worst parts of blender uh but your mileage may vary just one little thing to be where blender is a capable video editing software um and then finally there's open shot now i've actually got zero experience with openshot but this is 100 free open source video editing software and yep that's the end of the list again not a program i have personal experience with so i can't give you a recommendation or or feedback on it but that is the list by the way the list is all linked down below so if you want to download anything i just mentioned they're all available there and of course this is just scratching the surface so we covered a number of different areas photoshop alternatives adobe alternatives animate alternatives 3d editing substance designer and painter alternatives and so on but there definitely can be more in all of those categories so if you have another recommendation something that didn't make my list uh please do let me know comments down below also worth checking out i will link this as well uh i do a ongoing um tools for game development that are free resources thing over on dev game uh almost everything we just mentioned will probably be there as well as including a number of other free alternatives out there so if you do have a suggestion something i missed in those categories that you would find to recommend please recommend them in the comments down below and hopefully i exposed you to at least one new program to check out all right let me know what you think uh there's a world of alternatives out there and it's pretty amazing the world we live in all right that's it talk to you all later goodbye

Channel: Gamefromscratch

Views: 33,271

Rating: 4.9670782 out of 5

Keywords: 3D Studio, 3DS, 3DS Max, Alternative, Application, Blender, DaVinci, Designer, Free, GIMP, Graphics, Illustrator, Inkscape, Krita, Material Maker, Maya, Open SOurce, Painter, PhotoShop, Photopea, Premere, Resolve, Sculpting, Substance

Id: nIZwPKB_KWE

Length: 13min 48sec (828 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 24 2021