A guide covering 3D Graphics and Design including the applications, libraries and tools that will make you a better and more efficient Graphics Designer.
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Blender's Cycles Render Engine. Source: Blender
Blender VFX(Visual Effects). Source: Blender
Designing a simple UI/UX for an application in Adobe XD. Source: Adobe
Introduction to Pixar's Universal Scene Description (USD)
Intro to using Universal Scene Description with NVIDIA
First steps with Universal Scene Description in Blender
AMD Radeon ProRender Developer Suite
Blender Foundation Certification Training
AutoDesk Learning, Training & Certification
AutoDesk Courses and Specializations from Coursera
Getting Started with Cinema 4D
Graphic Design Masterclass(Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign) from Udemy
Vectr: Beginner's Guide To Graphic Design from udemy
Canva MasterClass: Design For EveryDay Use from Udemy
Adobe Creative Cloud is a collection of 20+ desktop and mobile apps(Lightroom, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Rush, Etc.) and services for photography, design, video, web, UX, and more.
Autodesk® is a collection of professional software products and services used in 3D design, architecture, engineering, manufacturing, and high production entertainment companies.
Maya® is a 3D computer animation, modeling, simulation, and rendering software that can create realistic effects from explosions to cloth simulation.
Maya LT™ is a game design software for indie game makers that can create and animate realistic-looking characters, props, and environments using the sophisticated 3D modeling and animation tools.
Autodesk® Maya. Source:Autodesk
3DS Max® is a 3D modeling and rendering software for design visualization, games, and animation.
Autodesk® 3DS Max. Source:Autodesk
Arnold is an advanced Monte Carlo ray tracing(Global illumination) renderer that helps you work more efficiently.
ReCap™ is a Pro 3D scanning software to transform the physical world into a digital asset. With reality capture data you can better understand and verify existing and as-built conditions to gain insights and make better decisions.
Flame® is a 3D VFX and finishing software provides powerful tools for 3D compositing, visual effects, and editorial finishing. An integrated, creative environment means faster compositing, advanced graphics, color correction, and more.
Mudbox® is a 3D digital painting and sculpting software that let's you sculpt and paint highly detailed 3D geometry and textures.
Autodesk® Mudbox. Source:Autodesk
Blender is a professional, free and open-source 3D computer graphics software toolset used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D printed models, interactive 3D applications and video games.
Cinema 4D is a professional 3D and VFX software suite that is capable of doing procedural and polygonal modeling, animation, lighting, texturing, motion graphic and rendering.
Houdini is a 3D procedural software for modeling, rigging, animation, VFX, look development, lighting and rendering in film, TV, advertising and video game pipelines.
Open Graphics Library(OpenGL) is an API used acrossed mulitple programming languages and platforms for hardware-accelerated rendering of 2D/3D vector graphics currently developed by the Khronos Group.
Open Computing Language (OpenCL) is an open standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous platforms consisting of CPUs, GPUs, and other hardware accelerators found in supercomputers, cloud servers, personal computers, mobile devices and embedded platforms.
Vulkan is a modern cross-platform graphics and compute API that provides high-efficiency, cross-platform access to modern GPUs used in a wide variety of devices from PCs and consoles to mobile phones and embedded platforms. Vulkan is currently in development by the Khronos consortium.
Metal is a low-level GPU programming framework used for rendering 2D and 3D graphics on Apple platforms such as iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS.
MoltenVK is an implementation of Vulkan running on iOS and macOS using Apple's Metal graphics framework.
MoltenGL is an implementation of the OpenGL ES 2.0 API that runs on Apple's Metal graphics framework.
Mesa 3D Graphics Library is a project began as an open-source implementation of the OpenGL specification. A system for rendering interactive 3D graphics. Mesa ties into several other open-source projects: the Direct Rendering Infrastructure, X.org, and Wayland to provide OpenGL support on Linux, FreeBSD, and other operating systems.
OpenGL ES is the mobile subset of OpenGL. It's supported on all major mobile platforms, and is also the base for WebGL.
OpenCL is a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, FPGAs and other processors or hardware accelerators.
Vuforia is a comprehensive, scalable enterprise AR platform. Our wide-ranging solution suite ensures that we can provide the right AR technology to every customer based on their business needs.
Vuforia Studio is a tool that allows anyone to create beautiful 3D augmented reality (AR) experiences in a matter of minutes with no coding required.
OpenVX™ is an open-source, royalty-free standard for cross platform acceleration of computer vision applications. OpenVX enables performance and power-optimized computer vision processing, especially important in embedded and real-time use cases such as face, body and gesture tracking, smart video surveillance, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), object and scene reconstruction, augmented reality, visual inspection, robotics and more.
openXR is a free, open standard that provides high-performance access to Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) collectively known as XR—platforms and devices.
GPUImage framework is a BSD-licensed iOS library that lets you apply GPU-accelerated filters and other effects to images, live camera video, and movies. In comparison to Core Image (part of iOS 5.0), GPUImage allows you to write your own custom filters, supports deployment to iOS 4.0, and has a simpler interface. However, it currently lacks some of the more advanced features of Core Image, such as facial detection.
GPUImage3 is the third generation of the GPUImage framework, an open source project for performing GPU-accelerated image and video processing on Mac and iOS. The original GPUImage framework was written in Objective-C and targeted Mac and iOS, the second iteration rewritten in Swift using OpenGL to target Mac, iOS, and Linux, and now this third generation is redesigned to use Metal in place of OpenGL.
EGL is an interface between Khronos rendering APIs such as OpenGL or OpenVG and the underlying native platform window system.
VDPAU is the Video Decode and Presentation API for UNIX. It provides an interface to video decode acceleration and presentation hardware present in modern GPUs.
VA API is an open-source library and API specification, which provides access to graphics hardware acceleration capabilities for video processing.
XvMC is an extension of the X video extension (Xv) for the X Window System. The XvMC API allows video programs to offload portions of the video decoding process to the GPU hardware.
AMD Radeon ProRender is a powerful physically-based rendering engine that enables creative professionals to produce stunningly photorealistic images on virtually any GPU, any CPU, and any OS in over a dozen leading digital content creation and CAD applications.
NVIDIA Omniverse is a powerful, multi-GPU, real-time simulation and collaboration platform for 3D production pipelines based on Pixar's Universal Scene Description and NVIDIA RTX.
Universal Scene Description is an efficient, scalable system for authoring, reading, and streaming time-sampled scene description for interchange between graphics applications.
OpenTimelineIO is an interchange format and API for editorial cut information. OTIO is not a container format for media, rather it contains information about the order and length of cuts and references to external media. OTIO includes both a file format and an API for manipulating that format. It also includes a plugin architecture for writing adapters to convert from/to existing editorial timeline formats. It also implements a dependency- less library for dealing strictly with time, opentime.
OpenSubdiv is a set of open source libraries that implement high performance subdivision surface (subdiv) evaluation on massively parallel CPU and GPU architectures. This codepath is optimized for drawing deforming subdivs with static topology at interactive framerates. The resulting limit surface matches Pixar's Renderman to numerical precision.
Affinity Designer is a professional vector graphics editor used by many industry leading illustrators, designers, and other creatives looking to create high-quality concept art.
Sketch is a professional vector graphics app with a beautiful UI and powerful toolset.
Krita is an open source professional painting program for digital painting and 2D animation.
Vectr is a free graphics software used to create vector graphics easily and intuitively.
Glimpse is a cross-platform raster graphics editor based on the GNU Image Manipulation Program available for Linux, macOS, and Windows. A great tool for making YouTube video thumbnails.
GNU Image Manipulation Program(GIMP) is a cross-platform raster graphics editor based on the GNU Image Manipulation Program(GIMP) available for Linux, macOS, and Windows. A great free alternative for Photoshop.
PhotoGIMP is a simple Patch for GIMP 2.10+ to help all Adobe Photoshop Users feel at home.
Photopea is an advanced online photo editor supporting Adobe Photoshop(PSD), GIMP(XCF), Sketch App(Sketch), Adobe XD(XD) and CorelDRAW(CDR) formats.
Inkscape is an open-source vector graphics editor; it can be used to create or edit vector graphics such as illustrations, diagrams, line arts, charts, logos and complex paintings.
Gthree is a GObject/Gtk+ port of three.js.
FreeCAD is a free and open-source general-purpose parametric 3D CAD modeler and a building information modeling software with finite-element-method support.
Ultimaker Cura is the world’s most popular 3D printing software. Prepare prints with a few clicks, integrate with CAD software for an easier workflow, or dive into custom settings for in-depth control.
Dust3D is a cross-platform open-source modeling software. It helps you create a 3D watertight model in seconds. Use it to speed up your character modeling in game making, 3D printing, and so on.
Goxel is a free and Open Source 3D Voxel Editor.
Sketchfab gives you open-source 3D models ready to view, buy, and download for free.
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