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Links

Freeware/Shareware graphics software

The world of Open Source freeware has exploded in recent years, and the software now available has amazing capability

Technical Drawing & 3D Modeling
Alibre Design Xpress (3D Parametric Solid Modelling)
UGS Solid Edge 2D (Free 2D Dimension-driven CAD)
ProgeCAD Smart! (Free 2D AutoCAD clone - for private, non-commercial use only. Whatever.)
SketchUp (3D sketching & quick visualization - free version from Google) Take a look at the google model repository (here) to get you on your way.
DESI-III "The most powerful freeware 2D CAD system" (I've not tried, but it looks good - developed over a long period, oriented toward GIS-type work(?))
MINOS (3D Solid Modelling app. I've not tried this one either, but seems to have potential. Not sure if its parametric or not.)
FreeCAD - a very promising open source offering based on Open CASCADE (like BRL-CAD).
KOMPAS-3D LT - linked by special request. I've downloaded, but yet to try out this promising offering from ASCON out of Russia. (Please contact Julia Lankinen (lankinen[at]ascon.ru) for information on upgrades and pricing for the full-blown package.)
CoCreate MPE 2.0 - an interesting offering "free for life" from PTC... not yet tried, tho.
Ayam - designed and intended for RenderMan (RIB) modeling, but supports a bunch of common 3D file formats and makes good use of NURBS.

Bitmap Graphics
ArtRage (Very Cool!)
Artweaver
the Gimp (there's also a version of the Gimp out there that's been pre-setup to look like Photoshop called GimpShop. Google it.)

PDF creator
PrimoPDF - free PDF file maker for windows.
GhostScript/GSView with the PStoEdit plugin - great utilites for anything PostScript or PDF.

2D Vector Graphics / DTP
Inkscape - a very powerful 2D vector graphics editor (and getting better all the time!) Goodbye CorelDraw!
Open Office (MS Office replacement)
Scribus (DTP)

3D Rendering / Animation / DCC
Blender 3D (& Blender User Community) - the best, most rockin', totally kickin' 3D app out there! (Okay, a bit of a fanboy, here...) Open Source and very capable - get it!
4DBlue - I've not used, so I can't verify capability.
Kerkythea - GI Renderer
Indigo - Excellent GI Renderer (ubiased/metropolis). Maxwell-level quality for free.  (single developer, but active development)
Radium - another unbiased renderer in Java (single developer - slow progress)
LuxRender - an open source MLT project.
RenderLight - and still another unbiased renderer (never tried, but looks good like the others...)
Sunflow - GI Renderer in Java (single developer - slow progress)
Yafray - GI Renderer (integrated Blender export, but development has all but stopped. It appears to have been replaced by Yaf(a)ray, rewritten from scratch.)
Wings3D - Excellent 3D Mesh Modeller
Moray - 3D modeling for POVray. Author(s) have opened the source, donating it to the POVray project. Cool.
POVray - The "grandaddy" of free, multi-platform photo-realistic raytracing and rendering.

Video Editing
VideoSpin has replaced Avid Free DV (no longer offered. Probably cut into their payware sales too much. Drop me an email if you'd like a copy and I'll see if I can dig it up.) as Avid's free offering. Quite a nice editor (contains the basics of Pinnacle Studio) but very limited features and some output anomolies that I can't quite debug. Its also a large download. Try it out if you're considering the purchase of Studio, which I recommend for home use if your system can handle it.
HyperEngine-AV (Mac only)
Cinelerra (Linux)
Jashaka (Total junk, from what I can get out of it. In fact, don't even click the link. Why do I still have it listed here?)
Personal rant: the world is in real need of a good freeware/open-source video editor! On the sunny side, Blender in Windows now includes FFMPEG for encoding, so using its sequencer component has become much more powerful and can be used as a video editor for many needs. Check out the sequencer section of the blender wiki to get up to speed on its use.

TMPGEnc (old free version) - great for most anything MPEG, and converts some (old) .MOV (Quicktime) files to AVI or MPG.
VirtualDub - Extremely handy little video processing app. (Also, look for VDub-MPEG to read MPEG 1&2 files)
MPlayer/Mencoder - command line, tho some GUIs are available. See this forum thread for converting unencrypted DVDs to MPEG-2 files.
MPEG-Streamclip - a great app for working with MOV (Quicktime) files and for demuxing MPEG-2. A key ability: grab MOV files from the net (eg. movie trailers) and save them locally as H.264 MP4s (very small & high quality.) Also converts MOVs to AVIs! Allows some basic editing as well (clipping, combining) but not had a chance to try yet. This one will be handy for converting the MOVs my digital camera creates into DVD-ready footage.
Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9 - For translating clips into M$'s proprietary (but good size to quality ratio) WMV format.
Microsoft Photo Story 3 - Jeez, another Micro$oft app! What's the deal, you goin' soft man?

Okay, here's the "scoop": I used this to make a video slideshow for my mom recently and it turned out to be the best option for my needs, tho still far from perfect. Other ones I looked at include Picasa (video part seemed broken) and DVD Slideshow GUI (which was too hard to animate that many pics - needs better automatic settings). I had to convert the resulting WMV to DVD-complient footage using AVISynth and VirtualDub (and HC Encoder - see below.) One tip on its use: make sure to have your photos listed in the import dialog in the order you'd like them to appear (usually chronological, eh?) using the column headers. You may have to change the dialog's view to show details in order to have the right options for ordering them. The rearranging options once imported are limited and clumsy.

UPDATE: Well, I subsequently did another slideshow video and ended up using VideoSpin (see above) for it. However, despite the fact that its easy to put in transitions, pan/scan & titles, I was disappointed with the output quality (there's a subtle vertical pixel shift whenever entering and exiting a video segment containing an overlay - that's both titling and transitions - when using progressive-scan source material.) Thus, I'm resorting, once again, to recommending Blender for this. One has to do all the effects manually (there's lacking a simple drag-n-drop mechanism for this stuff) and work with all the somewhat complex/confusing quirks of Blender, but its the most stable and effective/full-featured free solution right now. Blender user PapaSmurf has authored a helpful tutorial on the blender wiki here that will be of benefit.

AVISynth - I'll go ahead and list this one as its an extremely handy little tool for scriptable frameserving (that is, it lets you grab the frames of most any digital video clip for use in another supporting application. Quite nice once you figure it out.) Combine this with the excellent HC Encoder to encode DVD compliant files from almost any VFW or DirectShow stream.

Miscellaneous Sites of interest

Philip Lasz Gallery - Distinctive African Wildlife Art.
KJV Online Bible - Online Bible resources


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