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In addition to Grease Pencil, Blender boasts many powerful tool sets such as its sculpting tools. The 2D-use cases for Grease Pencil are just incredible: storyboarding, concept development, onion ’s nuts. It allows you to draw directly in your 3D viewport. One of its most well-known features is Grease Pencil, which I'm not ashamed to say has this C4D-maestro a tad jealous. Once you get past its not-so intuitive UI, it’s a very powerful application that supports all aspects of the 3D pipeline such as modeling, rigging, compositing, and even video editing. Did you know it’s free? Well it is, and that’s one of the major benefits of this open source and fully featured software.
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Okay, let me take my C4D fanboy hat off for a second and talk about Blender. You can even grunge up your models by painting on wear and tear, scruffs, scratches, and rust! It enables you to paint directly onto the surface of your assets in real time, allowing for a very intuitive, artistic, and immersive way to texture. You can even use it to create HDR’s - how cool is that?Īnd last but not least is Substance Painter, which you can think of as Photoshop for 3D models. It’s got a crazy amount of control, and the materials you generate can easily be brought into your 3D app of choice as normal, displacement, and roughness maps. Substance Designer is a super powerful, node-based material authoring app that allows artists to procedurally create tileable materials. While Alchemist allows you to create high quality 3D materials out of 2D photos with a simple click, Substance Designer and Painter allow you to create materials from scratch. The gold standard in material authoring is the Substance software suite that includes Substance Painter, Designer, and Alchemist. SUBSTANCE PAINTER, DESIGNER, AND ALCHEMIST
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