[Duanemclemore]

No, the concepts are the same. The button you push is incidental.

For example, the GNU Image Manipulation Program now has non-destructive workflows and adjustment layers - and can easily easily be configured with photoshop-like keybinds anyway.

That's not to mention free-to-use tools like Affinity.

The things an architecture student needs it for are:

Photo adjustment:

Lightroom -> Darktable

Photo retouching:

Photoshop -> Affinity Pixel or Gnu Image Manipulation Program

Vector drawing (which for us is mostly processing from 3d modeling programs):

Illustrator -> Affinity Vector or Inkscape

Board and Book Layout

InDesign -> Affinity Layout or Scribus or VivaDesigner

Plus, for motion graphics and video processing, my partner and I have had great luck replacing AfterEffects and Premiere with Blender and DaVinci Resolve, respectively.

And ... believe it or not, I've had excellent luck with LibreOffice Draw as a PDF editor, so anything they would have needed Acrobat Pro for is covered by that (and / or PDF SAM).

The real "sticky wicket" is Revit. Autodesk has been a FAR more abusive company for FAR longer, but it's what we're stuck with - although the emergence of the BIM Workbench (Building Information Modeling) with the release of FreeCAD 1.0 [0] and the continued development of BlenderBIM (oh, now called BonsaiBIM) [1] at least gives some hope.

Anyway, for the Adobe replacements, here's more [2] based on [3]

[0] https://wiki.freecad.org/BIM_Workbench

[1] https://bonsaibim.org/

[2] https://github.com/KenneyNL/Adobe-Alternatives?tab=readme-ov...

[3] https://x.com/XdanielArt/status/1799474607055102257/photo/1

[benterix]

> Autodesk has been a FAR more abusive company for FAR longer, but it's what we're stuck with - although the emergence of the BIM Workbench (Building Information Modeling) with the release of FreeCAD 1.0 [0] and the continued development of BlenderBIM (oh, now called BonsaiBIM) [1] at least gives some hope.

I believe AutoCAD is the epitome of what is wrong with Autodesk. It's expensive, there is no permanent license, there is basically no real alternative, and they aggressively go after pirated copies.

If I were a vibecoder, instead of silly toys like a half-broken compiler that nobody uses, I'd focus all my energy and tokens on creating a real Autodesk alternative. And if it really worked, including seamless witch, the authors would quickly make tons of money.

[SpaceNugget]

I think at the current level of LLM code I have observed there's basically zero chance they can produce a competitive cad/cas. Maybe they could approximate an open source kernel like opencascade but I don't see the point in that when freecad already exists.

[Duanemclemore]

Unfortunately it looks like BricsCAD has gone the SaaS way, but they are an extremely mature alternative to classic AutoCAD 2d and 3d [0]

Additionally, Rhino has always been a good drafting tool [1] but my understanding in the current WIP (which if I'm guessing will probably be released as 9.0, within the next 6-12 months) is making a huge push to include better drafting tools. McNeel, the developer, has no plans to go to a subscription model.

[0] https://www.bricsys.com/

[1] https://www.rhino3d.com/

[g8425]

I'm very interested in moving away from after effects - hearing of your success is encouraging! Can you recommend any resources for making the jump?

[Duanemclemore]

Our use case for After Effects was video stabilization. We have had good luck with Blender for this. I've also noticed that the old simple motion graphics I used to do - title overlays, etc - Blender can do easily. As for more intensive motion graphics, I can't speak too much to that.

As for any After Effects-style NLE capabilities - DaVinci Resolve knocks those out of the park. You'll also probably hear a lot of people singing the praises of Natron for NLE and Motion Graphics, and from our experience with that it seemed like the learning curve was non-trivial, but anything AE (and some aspects of Premiere Pro) could do, it could match... Good luck!