The Joys of Free & Open Source Software

We love expensive software but there's nothing like good'ol free stuff. Here's a list of my favorite 'legal' free or open source software you need to get going.

Image Editing
Gimp (GNU Image Manipulation Program)

Gimp is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It's available for Mac, Windows and Linux.

3D Modeling/ Rendering
Google Sketchup

Sketchup needs no introduction. Its a simple easy to use 3D modeling software from google and best of all it's free! Though if you need some advanced options like file export to other formats like 3DS, DWG etc or make custom components then consider buying the 'pro' option.

Blender

Blender is a free 3D graphics application. It can be used for modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, water simulations, skinning, animating, rendering, particle and other simulations, non-linear editing, compositing, and creating interactive 3D applications. Blender is available for several operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, IRIX, Solaris, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD with unofficial ports for BeOS, SkyOS, AmigaOS, MorphOS and Pocket PC. Blender has a robust feature set similar in scope and depth to other high-end 3D software such as Softimage|XSI, Cinema 4D, 3ds Max, Lightwave and Maya. These features include advanced simulation tools such as rigid body, fluid, cloth and softbody dynamics, modifier based modeling tools, powerful character animation tools, a node based material and compositing system and Python for embedded scripting (from wikipedia)

Office Suite
OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose. (from openoffice website)

Media organization

Every single office I have worked for had a million images scattered across ten thousand folders! why not use a simple program like Picasa to organize all the images and find what you need fast. Picasa also has decent image editing options. It's much faster to tweak images in a software like picasa compared to Gimp or Photoshop.
If you use a mac, there's nothing better than iPhoto!


Also check out TAD: The Architects Desktop the open source project here >. If you know of a good open source software share the link in comments.