VS Code and Ant Incompatibility?

Question

I am not a developer but have used Eclipse in the past to download the metadata which is easy to use with ant for deployments as the file structure is compatible. ie the Package.xml and related folders can be found off the src folder.

I am trying to use VS Code instead of Eclipse to download the org metatdata and it has a different file structure which I was aware of before I started, however I havn't been able to successfully deploy this via Ant.

I have been searching unsuccessfully to find some instructions as to how to download a salesforce org metadata using VS Code and then deploy using ant.

Any advice or guidance would be appreciated as I want to move to VS Code, but can't get it to work using my traditional salesforce deployment tools and procedures.