Six years and several unstable releases since 2.8.0, GIMP 2.10 is out in the wild for the general public.

Release highlights include features that users have been asking the team all along:

• Processing with 16/32-bit per color channel precision, integer or float;
• Optional linear RGB workflow;
• 15 new blending modes, including Pass-Through;
• Color management rewritten and now a core feature, all color widgets are now color managed, ICC v3 profiles supported;
• CIE LCH and CIE LAB color models now used in a few tools;
• Performance improvements for some filters thanks to multi-threading;
• New Unified Transform (rotating, scaling, perspective etc. in one go), Handle Transform, and Warp Transform (think Photoshop's Liquify) tools;
• Gradient tool now allows on-canvas editing;
• Digital painting improved with threaded painting, canvas rotation and flipping, new MyPaint Brush tool, symmetry painting;
• Exif, XMP, IPTC, DICOM metadata viewing and editing;
• Newly added support for WebP, OpenEXR, RGBE, HGT;
• Improved support for TIFF, PNG, PSD, PDF, FITS;
• Pre-processing of raw digital photos with darktable or RawTherapee at your preferences (more processors can be plugged);
• Over 80 GEGL-based filters with on-canvas preview, including custom split before/after preview.

Having written most of the release notes for 2.10, I don't particularly intend to do a full review here (yes, it's my disclaimer that I'm affiliated and thus biased). Instead here is something I'd like to share regarding ongoing development of GIMP and future plans.

Is GIMP dead, stalled, or picking up pace?

Over the past few years, I've heard these and other ideas quite a few times. Pat David recently covered that (among other things) in his famous talk at SCaLE:

Essentially, since a couple of years, the workload has shifted from Michael Natterer (who, at some point, did ca. 80% of the work) towards other contributors. These days, Michael, Jehan (Pagès), and Ell do about the same amount of commits — 25%, 25%, and 24% respectively, per OpenHub's data for sliding 12 months — although one might successfully argue that this is a stupid metric.

In terms of focus, Michael does most of the under-the-hood work and some user-visible stuff, Jehan does mostly bugfixing and adds painting-related features, and Ell does all of that and he makes impressive contributions to GEGL.

On the backend side of things, Øyvind Kolås is very active with GEGL and babl, and he gets a lot of help from Debarshi Rey (GNOME Photos) and Thomas Manni. Thomas, in particular, was instrumental in getting as many GIMP filters ported to GEGL as possible. If you've been waiting for Shadows-Highlights to become available in GIMP, Thomas is the one you should be thanking.

All in all, the development pace has been about the same throughout all of 2.10 development cycle. The difference that made people think GIMP was first stalling and is now picking up pace is simple: more frequent releases. Let's have a look:

• May 2012: 2.8.0 released. GEGL port for tiles management in future 2.10 announced.
• 3.5 years later: GIMP 2.9.2 released, that's the first unstable version.
• 8 months later: GIMP 2.9.4.
• 13 months later: GIMP 2.9.6.
• 4 months later: GIMP 2.9.8.
• 3 months later: GIMP 2.10.0 Release Candidate 1.
• 1 months later: GIMP 2.10.0 Release Candidate 2.

It appears that developing major new features in branches wasn't sufficient. Hence a new solution.

Relaxing development/release policy

During Libre Graphics Meeting 2017, the team decided to relax the policy and start introducing new features to stable versions, where it's technically feasible, starting with 2.10. That way, most work would be done on the main development branch (master), and new features would be backported to the 2.10 branch when it's possible.

One particular reason for that is the upcoming work on completing the GTK+3 port. Simply put, nobody knows how much time this is going to take, just like nobody knew how much time the GEGL port would take. If I wanted to scare you, I could say that we might be looking at another five or six years long development cycle. But noone really knows.

That's why it's important to keep giving users new exciting stuff, while "boring" work on internals is ongoing.

What kind of new stuff? Again, it depends. E.g. there is a certain interest and even some preliminary work to add mipmaps support to improve performance for resources-hungry operations. There are more painting-related optimizations to be done. Or there could be something completely unexpected. Completing the N-Point Transform tool maybe? I'd love that!

Which leads us to the next point.

Development priorities

People have been rightfully wondering, how much time it's going to take the team to implement the most desired feature: non-destructive editing. Even if we are looking at a couple of years leading up to 3.0, there would be at least a year or two to complete 3.2 (but, again, nobody really knows).

And then the CMYK/spot colors support is in the Future section of the roadmap. So is the autoexpansion of layer boundaries... And the list goes on. So there's this idea that priorities should be swapped.

The problem with this is that GTK+2 currently used for UI of GIMP 2.10 is barely maintained. While the GIMP team doesn't like everything they see in GTK+3 (oh, some of the IRC conversations!), the newer version is vastly superior in almost every aspect.

But here is some good news: priorities do in fact change based on activity of developers, if the foundation for new features is ready.

Case in point: the Unified Transform tool was originally in the Future section too. Then Mikael Magnusson arrived and just did the work. So now you can enjoy doing all of your rotating, scaling etc. in one go.

And that's where relaxing the release policy come in handy again. It's difficult to engage new developers when their work is likely to see the light of day as a stable release in an unknown period of time. It's a lot easier to do that when you have regular stable releases with new features.

Is this going to work? We'll just have to wait and see.

In the meantime, you can support the work of Jehan Pagès and Øyvind Kolås on both GIMP and GEGL on either Patreon or Liberapay. This page on GIMP.org lists all available options.

And the last revelation: I have both Patreon and Liberapay campaigns too, but frankly, I spend so much time on GIMP that I'm not even sure that my work on LGW is something you would be rewarding me for. Tell me!

The Scribus team announced the release of a new version of this free desktop publishing software, featuring some interesting improvements.

While v1.5.4 is officially called "stable development release" (something that former GIMP 2.9.x users can relate to), the idea is to eventually release a "stable stable" v1.6.0 (no timeframe is given).

Much like simultaneously released v1.4.7 (stable branch), Scribus 1.5.4 features a lot of fixes, particularly for "fringe uses" of PDF files generation, as well as security fixes. But a few other changes stand out.

The main change in this version is newly added support for color swatches in the CxF3 file format, designed by X-Rite and standardized by ISO. The initiative was fueled by the FreieFarbe project that has a confusingly large scope, but mostly aims at making a positive change in the industry where Pantone and other proprietary color systems dominate.

Technically, CxF3 is superior to most existing formats for storing color palettes/swatches as it supports storing color values in various models, including device-independent CIE LAB, LCH, and XYZ.

It also supports storing color as spectral values (either transmittance or emissive) in nanometers. And on top of that, you can write actual color recipes into these files, with colorant names and their respective percentages.

Currently, Scribus is the first desktop publishing software to support CxF3 files.

There are more consequences to this. First of all, originally, Scribus required at least 16-bit per channel precision for the HLC Colour Atlas by FreieFarbe, but Jean Ghali went ahead and made this to be 64-bit per channel with floating point precision. Secondly, Adobe IDML and VIVA Designer import filters have been updated to support the LAB color model.

Another user-visible feature is a contribution from Terry Burton who updated the Barcode plug-in to support DotCode and Ultracode in Two-dimensional symbols group, and GS1 North American Coupon in the GS1 DataBar Family.

Finally, Scribus continues reusing libraries created by the Document Liberation Project and introduces initial support for importing ZonerDraw (v4 and v5) and QuarkXPress (v3 and v4) documents (see our earlier report on libqxp for more info).

Scribus 1.5.4 is available for downloading for a variety of Linux-based systems, as well as for Windows and macOS.

Life doesn't go easy on the SVG file format. While development of this W3C standard continues, some features are to be axed from SVG 2.0. They remain in the nascent SVG 2.1 specification, but there is no guarantee work will continue on SVG 2.1 after SVG 2.0 is finished.

This article was triggered by a new post from Tavmjong Bah, Inkscape developer and participant in the SVG Working group. We talked to Tavmjong a little more about that, and here is our recap of the situation.

Why features get removed from SVG 2.0

First of all, this isn't exactly news. Removing features such as gradient meshes from SVG 2.0 was discussed back in 2016, when we published an interview with Tavmjong.

To reiterate, the standardization process requires two implementations of a feature for it to be considered bullet-proof. But some new features such as gradient meshes and hatches are only available in Inkscape. All other stakeholders play it safely:

• Browsers stick to whatever is used in already available content on the Web.
• Even more, Mozilla and Google stopped contributing to the spec and barely patch their respective renderers for new features support.
• However, they didn't stop making decisions about which features go in the spec and which won't make it.
• Adobe is interested in new features, but they want at least one browser supporting those.

So what we have here is a classic vicious circle: no content without new SVG features in authoring software, no browser support without content, no new SVG features in the spec and in the authoring software without browser support.

It gets even weirder than that, if you summarize the situation like this:

Essentially, we have arrived to the point where development of a major vector graphics file format for the Web is shaped by inactivity of Mozilla and Google, while Microsoft and W3C do the real work, a developer of one design tool contributes a lot, but has no say in what goes into the standard, and a vendor of another design tool is taking a wait-and-see stance.

Who could've predicted it'd come to this?

Why else features don't make it to specifications

Some features, however, just need more time to be completed, such as much anticipated user-defined stroke positioning. Tavmjong Bah explained (and illustrated) the complexity of implementing this feature in a blog post from 2015. The respective Strokes section of the CSS Fill and Stroke Module Level 3 spec currently lists 35 unresolved issues.

Note that over the last several years, there have been multiple cases of SVG features being moved from SVG over to CSS.

What's next

The working group hasn't yet decided how far they go in removing features from SVG 2.0. What is known is that hatches and gradient meshes will definitely be removed and then re-inserted to the v2.1 draft "as-is", without guarantee of keeping them for the final v2.1 spec.

We talked to Igor Novikov of sK1 project, if he would be interested in adding support for SVG 2.x features to UniConvertor and the editor itself. Here is what he replied:

Our project currently focuses on SVG 1.1, but eventually will support SVG 2.x features, as I do see demand for them coming from our user base.

Before you get excited, there are three things to consider here.

1. New major update of sK1 is at its final development stage, no new big stuff will be added.
2. Once the final release is out, Igor has a long list of feature requests to choose from. And that's on top of a lot of bugfixing that's only to be expected.
3. While technically this will count as the second implementation (whenever that happens) and demonstrate to the working group that these features are important, it still won't secure the fate of features that are to be axed from SVG 2.0.

In the aforementioned interview from 2016, Tavmjong states:

Now with just a handful of renderers in browsers it becomes harder to find two implementations, and even if there are two, it does not guarantee something staying in the spec. If one browser comes out adamantly against something, then it gets removed (e.g. SVG fonts, etc.).

We can talk all we like about gut feelings, the balance of power, and suchlike. But the truth is that no one really knows how things are going to play out for SVG in the future. So far it looks like the progress will be glacial. At any rate, the current working group is scheduled to be disbanded again end of June.

In an unimaginable turn of events, LibreDWG, the free/libre library for opening proprietary CAD files in the DWG file format, is becoming a stellar example of a FOSS project.

Where we left off

Back in 2012, when we last covered the project, LibreDWG was in a rough state. After FSF declined the request of the library’s developers (who forked it from LibDWG) to downgrade the license from GPLv3+ to GPLv2+ and thus make it compatible to LibreCAD and FreeCAD, it all went south.

The original team abandoned it, a few GSoC students tried to get this project to work again, but they too eventually shifted their interest elsewhere (one became a regular LibreCAD contributor).

Eventually, LibreCAD started their own libdxfrw library with DWG reading support (now also used at the very least by SolveSpace). FreeCAD went for proprietary Teigha, and Blender still has no solution for opening DWG files, let alone exporting those.

So until fairly recently, there were pretty much no developers, not much progress, and not even a single public release. At some point, Felipe Castro, developer of the original LibDWG library, even forked it back from LibreDWG to add support for more entities, as well as for R2004, R2010, and R2013 files, and make a few releases, then admitted the game was over.

What’s changed

While we might have to wait for end-user software other than GRASS and PythonCAD to start using LibreDWG (or take matters into our own hands, all limitations of GPLv3+ considered), the project’s own pace has dramatically increased with the arrival of Reini Urban in late 2017.

Reini cleaned up the code base, added support for many new entities and half a dozen of convertors from DWG to other file formats such as DXF, BMP, PS, and SVG. The library can now read most R13-R2018 DWG files and write R2000 DWG files.

Two weeks ago, he made the second public release of the library (v0.6) featuring bugfixes, API changes, GNU Parallel support, basic support for more types of objects, and the parsing of ACIS version 2 (3D data).

Reini kindly agreed answering a few questions from LGW.

The interview

To an outsider, LibreDWG could look a bit like a lost cause, while libdxfrw might be considered a better candidate for spending one's time. That is, before you came. And yet you picked it up and started improving it and got it to a releasable state. Why?

Because there is still no acceptable free solution out there, which is terribly needed. libdxfrw is good at supporting all versions and DXF, but not more. You cannot write DWG, there is not much support for all the new entities and classes. E.g. SolveSpace needs both parametric constraints and BIM — the two most important technologies in modern CAD. Only Teigha offers these, but Theiga is non-free, and I'm annoyed by that. Everybody should. Their spec is also full of small annoying bugs. We really need to collaborate to get rid of those.

Yes, but LibreDWG wasn't much different in terms of entities support from libdxfrw when you started? Or am I under a wrong impression?

No, I've added support for much more objects and entities that are in libdxfrw, and will add more. I'm working on some reverse engineering solver, examples/unknown, for the possible combinations of data fields with some modern prolog/solver system picat.

People don't usually work on a library unless they need it for another, higher-level project. Do you have one?

No, not all. I took it, because I'm good at this low-level stuff and had time available. I also liked the structure of the library, I like good code. I was also the first to work with Frans Faase to decode the early DWG formats and created many useful tools with it.

Do you have any use for CAD in your daily work or maybe hobbies?

Not anymore. That was 20 years ago. Nowadays I'm mostly writing compilers and languages for completely other fields.

Okay! Now that you mention BIM, do you think a dwg2ifc converter (at least IFC2x3) would be feasible within LibreDWG?

I haven't looked at that yet, sorry. But adding support for more output modules is easy, for input modules not so.

IFC support would be important for BIM support, I guess. I was more looking into OpenStreetMap and GIS lately.

How much better is the DWG reading support than the DWG writing support?

Reading is supported for all versions, writing so far only for r2000. There's much more work to do for writing newer sections, compression, CRC, and Reed-Solomon.

But more important than write support for newer versions is support for more entities and classes. Especially MATERIAL and TABLE for BIM, parametric constraints for advanced modelling, and the ACIS 2 format for 3D data. I'm making great progress with examples/unknown to decode those unknowns.

AutoCAD can easily read r2000 dwg's with these new entities, so write support is good enough for a while.

Wait, my understanding from reading the reverse-engineered spec was that 3D ACIS data was encrypted.

ACIS 1 yes. ACIS version 2, i.e. Autodesk’s variant of ACIS 7.1 named ShapeManager is stored differently, in the unencrypted binary SAB format. I added decoding to ACIS version 2, the binary SAB format, for the 0.6 release with the help of the new examples/unknown tool. Maybe a converter from binary to ASCII SAT version 2 later will be added, but this can be also some other library. The SAB format comes with full precision, ASCII only with half, and precision is a big problem in 3D data, esp. thin hulls.

Currently, the project has bus factor one. If you were to point out specific areas to work on for interested contributors, what would those be?

Well, I'm not a friend of the bus factor analogy at all. In fact the best run projects either have a busfactor of 0 or 1. As soon as the busfactor increases >5 the quality of the project decreases dramatically, as seen with Python, Perl, Ruby, C++, GNOME, ... Only Java, Swift, JavaScript and C# are run properly, but in a commercial environment. The best projects are usually run by 1-2 people max.

I got great contributions by users who came up with broken DWG's, problems in the library. Also real world use cases from GIS users showed that I had to optimize data structures. A change from linear search to a hash table improved read-time from minutes to 7 seconds. Also omitting free() got 2 minutes destruction time down to 2 seconds when used in a binary. As library one unfortunately cannot leak memory, but as binary you need to, as long as the libc malloc() performs so badly. LibreDWG is a very good malloc stress test, with tons of fragmentation. It's much worse than a stop-the-world garbage collection on a very slow GC. I even got code fixes from contributors in several areas, but it's a tricky library, so I don't expect much. Best is coming up with broken DWG's.

But even better would be a change of mind about licensing, as the GPLv3 is really the best license around currently, an improvement over the APGL. SolveSpace has an iOS app, which apparently prohibits the use of the GPLv3 libredwg. LibreCAD and FreeCAD are free to switch now, but they got the OpenDWG Teigha library already with a trick, and Teigha is still better than LibreDWG. Best would be a cooperation with the Russians working on Teigha. I've found and fixed so many bugs in their spec already, and LibreDWG doesn't harm their business model at all. And I love working with Russians.

SVG 2.0 is getting closer to completion, with a new candidate recommendation draft published earlier this month. And the working group will continue to work at least till December 2018.​

SVG 2.0 status

In early August, the SVG working group published an updated Candidate Recommendation now hosted at https://www.w3.org/TR/SVG2/. The update does have hatches and gradient meshes removed exactly as expected, as well as various bugs already fixed.

The focus is currently on further bugfixing and updating the test suite which is now hosted at Web Platform Tests.

Charter extension

The working group charter has been extended to 30 November 2018 to update the candidate recommendation (this is now done) and improve the test suite (work in progress). If the group will succeed, W3C expects to bring a new charter to the Advisory Committee before TPAC 2018 (22–26 October 2018).

In an official statement on the charter extension, W3C management said:

The SVG Working Group is currently focused on aligning the SVG 2.0 specification with browser implementations.

That pretty much confirms that browsers do decide what goes into the standard, even if they don’t exactly participate in the standard’s development (one exception from that is Eric Willigers of Google/Chromium, who recently started participating at teleconferences).

Additionally, Bogdan Brinza (Microsoft) has stepped down as the chair of the working group after leaving Microsoft and is now replaced by Dirk Schulze (Adobe).

While not everyone might like the idea of having either corporation at the helm of SVG, it’s worth saying that Bogdan did a very good job at his post, and Dirk is one of a handful of people in the working group who really care about the standard, he’s been present and active at the majority of WG’s teleconferences for at least a decade.

Outlook

If anything, the development pace of SVG has taught us patience. Hatching and gradient meshes are currently scheduled to return in SVG v2.1, ETA unknown. Both features will continue to be supported by Inkscape, but it’s unclear whether they will be supported by browsers any time soon, and it does directly affect the standard. Nevertheless, there definitely is some light at the end of the tunnel.

We are not exactly spoiled with animations made with Synfig Studio. All the more reasons to start following Van Chatto, a Filipino artist who recently started a Patreon campaign to fund him showcasing the use of the software and providing tips and tricks to aspiring users.

Van Chatto is a freelance animator who currently makes explainer videos for businesses using Synfig and has a great passion for anime. On Patreon, his main project appears to be Virion, a series of short animated movies. The artist recently posted the first clip:

The story, he says, is basically inspired by viral replication. A general storyline will be published soon, along with rewards and explanation, how one could contribute to the story development.

Van Chatto expects to not only showcase his use of Synfig, but also share some project resources and get more people involved with the production. He already does that for some sketches (regrettably, posting PSD files rather than XCF or KRA, but hey).

Meanwhile, Synfig development is still ongoing despite Konstatin Dmitriev's continuous affair with OpenToonz.

On September 9—13, the Inkscape team met in Kiel (Germany) for the second hackfest this year. They came back with a bagful of improvements we are to see in the upcoming Inkscape 1.0 beta.

Here are some of the major changes.

Thomas Holder introduced the inversion of the Y-axis. Which means that by default, coordinates origin starts in the top left corner rather than the low left corner now. That finally makes Inkscape consistent with... well, just about most other graphics software out there.

Should you really want to go back to the Cartesian coordinate system and the low left corner for the origin, there's a global switch on the Interface page of the Preferences dialog.

Martin 'doctormo' Owens revamped the XML editor dialog and made it possible to add, edit, and remove attributes of XML tags in the SVG document:

Marc Jeanmougin introduced basic Autotrace support. This is not yet available via user interface. Marc expects to provide unified UI for potrace and Autotrace engines.

The fun part here is that unlike potrace, Autotrace supports centerline tracing of strokes. Which means that as a result of tracing, you get a path with stroke of certain width rather than a shape that encloses the shape of the stroke. By the way, just like Tav, Marc is also on Patreon.

Jabier Arraiza worked on his seemingly favorite part of Inkscape — live path effects. He introduced fixes and improvements to both Fillet/Chamfer and Power Mask/Power Clip, making the latter work even on objects without applied clips and masks.

If you don't follow development in the master branch and thus are unfamiliar with Power Clip and Power Mask, both of them extend regular clips and masks by introducing options like inversion, so you can make a tweakable hole in an object. And Fillet/Chamfer allows doing things like rectangles with just one rounded corner.

As you can see, the UI of live paths effects looks somewhat cleaner now, which is also the result of Jabier's ongoing contribution to the project.

Patrick Storz added smooth scrolling to multiple features such as panning, zooming, and rotating the canvas. And it goes further: selection cycling in the Select tool while holding Alt key, spraying in the Spray tool with the mouse wheel, adjusting the color by scrolling in lower left stroke/fill fields etc.

Patrick also merged a patch by Rainer Keller from August, that implements UNIX pipes support. As the commit message thoroughly explains, you can now do something like

cat vector.svg | inkscape --export-png - --file - | convert - out.jpg

Finally, one other topic at the hackfest seems to have been SVG2 fallbacks, which Tavmjon Bah posted about a while ago on his Patreon page.

There is no expected timeframe for Inkscape 1.0 beta yet, stay tuned for official announcements.

With so much going on the libre graphics/audio etc. departments, we are now giving you weekly updates of the most important and bizarre things.

This week: new Krita fundraiser, new OpenShot and Shotcut releases, MuseScore resumes work on Jianpu notation system support, SolveSpace contributor releases a new online CAD built with Unity 3D, and more.

Graphics

The Krita team started a fundraiser to squash as many bugs as possible and make the program more stable and polished. They've already raised ca. $13K and have been busy fixing bugs hand over fist. You can join the fun too.

MyPaint doesn't seem like a very active project these days, but there's a lot going on in its friendly fork by a new team member, Brien Diterle. We recommend following him on Twitter for updates. In a private conversation, Brien told us he's going to merge all his changes back to the upstream MyPaint project eventually.

Rotating hue by mixing in color from +60 degrees. Spirals towards a lovely grey mud. Remember the starting color so we can get home again. If I can mix from limited palette colors instead of +/-60 will have a real 3D @GurneyJourney gamut mask. @lgworld @MyPaintApp pic.twitter.com/tg1n0lNTFH

— Brien Dieterle (@BrienDieterle) September 20, 2018

The GIMP team has been mostly fixing bugs since 2.10.6 (released in August), but there are some interesting changes too. One of them is newly added perspective correction mode in the Measure tool (which got a Straghten option in 2.10.4). On top of that, both babl and GEGL libraries get their share of fixes and performance improvements. There is a certain way of thanking Øyvind Kolås for the latter.

Earlier in September, the Inkscape team did a hackfest in Germany and delivered some impressive improvements. You can read more about the results in our coverage of the event and in the official announcement.

Blender Institute has completed the renovation of their new office in Amsterdam. They are also beginning an on-site training program.

The Blender Amsterdam team in front of the @blender_org building. The future is bright! #b3d pic.twitter.com/gZUTsdByXY

— Francesco Siddi (@fsiddi) September 22, 2018

Video

Jonathan Thomas et al. released Openshot 2.4.3. The new version of the video editor intruduces support for images and videos as masks, improves threading to make effects crash less, and ships with a lot of bugfixes. See official announcement for more details.

Dan Dennedy released Shotcut v18.09 with much anticipated ripple editing mode, a timer video filter, and shaking presents for the Size and Position filter. Dan illustrated the usefulness of the latter with this tutorial:

Music and sound

FluidSynth has finally reached v2.0, with support for 24-bit sample soundfonts, polyphonic key pressure, seeking in the MIDI player, portamento/legato/breath control, on-demand sample loading, and a lot more. The full list of changes is available on GitHub.

VCV Rack announced that Macro Oscillator 2 (based on Mutable Instruments Plaits) is now open-source (the 3-Clause BSD license) and avialable on GitHub. To update your existing patches, use the utility in the Audible Instruments Preview manual.

The MuseScore team pointed out that there is ongoing work on adding support for the Chinese numbered musical notation system called Jianpu.

Meanwhile, part of the MuseScore team will in Paris on September 28, at the 5th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology, talking about their side project called OpenScore.

CAD

Alexey Egorov, former contributor to SolveSpace, announced his new pet project called NoteCAD — a free/libre online CAD (the code is on GitHub) streamlined for producing STL files. There's a long thread in Russian on linux.org.ru where people mostly contemplate the fate of libre projects built with proprietary Unity 3D, which is exactly what NoteCAD is.

Andrew Mustun released an update of QCad. The community edition features a handful of improvements like a "Scale" property for angle dimensions and arc length dimensions, and the Pro version now features support for overlays.

Urban Bruhin posted an update on recent changes in LibrePCB, a new EDA tool he's beenm working on for the past few years. Urban says he improved the PCB fabrication output generator, implemented airwires support and the placement of NPTH drills on boards, started bundling fonts used in schematics, and there's a lot more. He's getting close to releasing 0.1, the first public version of the program.

Fun

Need a procedural almost-klimtian pattern? a 70's circles pattern? an alien cityplan? a purple zebra? just plug a voronoy into the coordinates slot of a brick texture (and have fun) #b3d #npr #eevee pic.twitter.com/NNzo3xUkLk

— AnotherKPresser (@AnotherKPresser) September 14, 2018

New 2D template!, now is more easy than ever start to draw pic.twitter.com/Zswe3pJdCm

— Daniel M Lara (@_pepeland_) September 19, 2018

New production technique video on Blender Cloud! @artificial3d showcases the hair dynamics setup for the Spring open movie character. #b3d https://t.co/kNJuPW4lKE pic.twitter.com/zbP2Erk0J3

— Blender Cloud (@Blender_Cloud) September 13, 2018

We are resuming showcasing artists who use free/libre software, whether it's commissioned work or interesting personal projects. Today, we talk to Adrian dela Cerna, an artist from USA who has been using Krita quite a lot for the past few years.

Adrian, what's your background in painting and digital art? Is it your job?

I mostly do freelance work making digital art.

Concept art?

I've made indie board game designs, banner illustrations, and some concept art. All for freelance clients. All of the concept art you see on my Artstation page are personal works.

Leo

When and how did you discover Krita?

Around 2016, I was looking for a free digital art program that didn't feel too limited, which I thought was the case for most free programs.

Little did I know I would end up liking painting in Krita, then soon discovered you could also animate in it! And I thought that was really cool too.

So what would you say is the most compelling aspect of Krita for you? Particular features? That it's free? Something else?

I'd say the most compelling aspect of Krita is that although it's free, I'm able to comfortably create digital paintings and other digital art. I find the different workspace presets to be quite useful, yet simple.

Makeshift Home

Possibly my favorite part of working in Krita when I make digital paintings there is how the color picker tool is automatically bound to the CTRL key, which makes my painting process run much smoother when I start picking up colors from other parts of the artwork.

I study 2D animation as well, and I really like Krita's animation workspace. I found it very intuitive and easy to use and manage. The newest version of Krita, which has the added feature of importing audio, is very useful when I'm working with lipsync homework.

Taurus

Can you tell a bit about the open world project you've been working on? A lot of environment paintings you posted on Artstation seem to be part of it.

Ah yes, I started working on that open world project earlier this year. It was supposed to be a world based on the zodiac signs. I decided to discontinue it, because I didn't feel like the project had that much depth when I started it. I might decide to restart that project someday though. The pieces Leo, Virgo, Taurus, Aries were part of that project.

The work I made after that were all stand-alone concepts and illustrations. There was a pair of "Apothecary" pieces, which I did just because I was interested in making a building that would be along the lines of an apothecary.

Apothecary - Interior

What would you say are the kind of things/events that trigger your imagination and get you to start a personal project most of the time?

It's usually something simple that makes me want to work on a personal project. For example, if I see a really good lighting scene as I'm walking outside, I'll start to take note of it into my mental library and get inspired to make a piece or two that somehow incorporates that good lighting scene.

Comfort Zone

My inspiration could come from seeing interesting tree shadows creating pockets of light to seeing a pink and purple sky. In other words, most sources of my inspiration are mundane, everyday things, then I try to exaggerate or make it look a bit fantastical as I work on a piece.

Are there any artists you look up to?

Definitely! Off the top of my head, Marco Bucci, Pascal Campion, and Peter Mohrbacher are digital artists I really look up to. All three have very different styles, but I love all of their work!

Adrian is on Artstation and Instagram.

Highlights of this week: new releases of Audacity, Krita and Pencil2D, new Blender add-ons, PipeWire project is getting serious about pro audio workflows, and grafikwork dominates the Inkscape/Krita tutorials scene on YouTube.

Graphics and animation

The Krita team released version 4.1.3 full of bug fixes as the result of the ongoing bug hunt sponsored by the community. It also features a new welcome screen that simplifies opening recent files and discover project's online resources. So far the campaign raised 16K euro, you can join in! Scott Petrovic is also exploring ways to improve the brush editor experience.

The GIMP team is skipping the monthly 2.10.x update due to conflicting schedules among developers. Meanwhile, Ell answered the load shaming by further improving startup time of GIMP. He also made all tools commit their changes when an image is about to be saved or exported (GIMP used to lose unapplied rotation or warping when saving). Jehan Pages also got Brien Dieterle to start shipping MyPaint brushes as a separate shareable package. This should simplify packaging.

The Synfig team posted a weekly report on their progress. They started addressing (again) various performance issues during rendering. This time, they fixed freezing when you scrub on timeline during background rendering and mad eSynfig only render frames inside a playback region (when one is selected).

The Pencil2D team released v0.6.2 of their animation tool with a completely overhauled color inspector, improved color palette workflow, auto keyframe insertion, improting/exporting GIF, and various bug fixes.

Sébastian Fourey, David Tschumperlé, and David Revoy will present the Smart Coloring algorithm in G'MIC at the Eurographics VMV'2018 conference on October 10th in Stuttgart, Germany.

3D

Dalai Felinto wrote a new weekly status update about his work on Blender 2.8. Highlights: lots of improvements in multi-objects editing, texture paint clone now fully functional in 2.8.

Zacharias Reinhardt explored sculpting changes in Blender 2.8.

Blender Institute celebrated its 11th birthday with crew and friends. Ton reminds that visitors are always allowed in and get a short tour.

Soft8Soft released a Verge3D plug-in for WordPress to simplify embedding 3D content into websites.

TkSakai published a MultiCam render add-on for Blender.

Jose Conseco demonstrated some new changes in his upcoming new Blender add-on for making garments.

Added some more features to #blender #garment #b3d. It's mostly finished except, blender 2.8 is still do not have BGL drawing, so there is no ability to preview, edit stitches in blender 2.8 :(. pic.twitter.com/wSD4DJ6dGj

— JoseConseco (@JoseConseco3) September 27, 2018

Jeroen Bakker completed the introduction to his CrowdSim3D add-on for Blender. The last video in the series shows how to add behavior to agents in the scene.

Music and sound

The Audacity team released version 2.3.0 swarming with new features and improvements. Most notably, Audacity now has punch-and-roll recording which means you can now stop in the middle of recording, go back over a mistake you made, then resume recording. If you don't like cutting your voiceovers and prefer to fix errors as you go, you might find this new feature quite useful. For a complete list of changes, see the official release notes or download the update here (it has already landed to some Linux distributions).

The VCV Rack team announced the beginning of v1.0 development. The project is now getting a lot of mainstream attention, Deadmau5 recently streamed himself on Twitch using VCV Rack.

Christian Schaller (GStreamer), Wim Taymans (PipeWire) and Arun Raghavan (PulseAudio) are hosting a PipeWire hackfest at the end of October in Edinburgh. The objective is to work out a roadmap of bridging the gap between PipeWire and JACK. Filipe Coelho seems to be the only developer coming with extensive pro audio background, being the current lead developer of JACK. The rest of attendees are mostly PulseAudio, GNOME, KDE, and GStreamer developers. This could be good or maybe not so good. We'll see. The idea to make professional audio (read: JACK-like) as accessible as the usual desktop audio is tempting.

Raph Levien announced he will be giving a talk on his Rust audio synthesis work at a meetup in the San Francisco Mozilla office on November 13.

Nils Hilbricht is launching a fundraiser to help him organize the second annual Sonoj Convention 2018 that is scheduled for October 27-28 in Cologne, Germany. Sonoj Convention is a bit like the annual Linux Audio Conference, but don't tell Nils we said so!

Video

Nathan Lovato posted a tutorial that explains how to make fast and precise selections in the Blender's sequencer using his Power Sequencer add-on.

Tutorials

New Inkscape tutorial by Nick Saporito: how to create a maze.

There are also two new Inkscape tutorials by grafikwork on YouTube. The first one is drawing a black cat on a sofa.

The second one is drawing a landscape with ships.

And since Sergey (grafikwork) is so very productive, here's him doing an autumn lanscape speedpainting in Krita.

MyGimpTutorialChannel published a new video that demonstrates using simple tricks to "cinematically" color-grade photos.

CG Thoughts posted a new tutorial on creating a LED shader in Blender.

Art and showcases

Daniel Bautista is back to shredding with Ardour 5 used for tracking:

Thomas Kole posted a fun video of making a pencil-and-paper normalmap, featuring GIMP for digital processing:

Pencil-and-paper normalmap, by tracing a coin in 2 directions. A sunday experiment #gamedev pic.twitter.com/3Gjs1TmHTz

— Thomas Kole (@ThomasKoleTA) September 30, 2018

Libre Graphics World (that's us!) resumed publishing showcases and featured Andrea dela Cerna who extensively uses Krita in his work.

Aliciane posted concept art made with Krita, that she created for "Morgan Le Fay", an illustrated book written by Morgan of Glencoe.

"You may have been told I was the enemy of my brother Arthur. This is not true."
Some of my illustrations for #MorganLeFay, an illustrated book written by @MorganOfGlencoe#kidlitart #picturebooks #childrensbooks #digitalartwork #fantasyart #celtic #kingarthur #krita pic.twitter.com/16sflqjvZc

— Aliciane �� (@AlicianeArt) September 24, 2018

Activemotionpictures posted a very interesting technical review of the use of Blender in the production of the 'NextGen' animated movie:

Apparently, Blender/EEVEE were used to produce background video for Emmy's 2018 Awards ceremony. See Alan's post on BlenderArtists.

Quentin Le Duff created 'Shinkai', a short animated movie made with Blender. It's about the journey of a japanese submarine under the sea:

MikeRed posted an extremely cozy render of his fun art for Goro Fujita's Firefly Story:

The Box, a short film by Dusan Kastelic, made in Blender, is now Oscar qualifying (like his previous 'Darrel' and 'Alike' short movies before). Here is the trailer.

Mohamed Chahin put northern lights into a jar:

One my bucket list items is to go see the northern lights, so I ended up making some random thing about it really late night yesterday#blender #northernlights #auroraborealis #b3d pic.twitter.com/07OYeTw3OF

— Mohamed Chahin (@beastochahin) September 27, 2018

This week’s highlights: new major versions of Valentina and G’MIC, development updates from Blender, Krita, Pencil2D, and FreeCAD, new FreeCAD book, upcoming GodotCon meetup and a new release of the Armory game engine.

Graphics

Arguably, the news of the week is the release of Valentina 0.6.0, free software for (clothes) pattern drafting. To give you more idea, what the app does, here is one of the older videos:

Roman Telezhinsky has been working on this new version for almost a year, if not longer. The new version comes with a (good) scary amount if improvements, including but certainly not limited to Fabric manager, new Duplicate Detail tool, new Place Label tool (to mark position of buttons etc.), importing existing measurements from CSV files in the Tape app, experimental OpenGL rendering of the scene, and so much more. Check out the ChangeLog for the complete list.

Roman also did something most developers these days refuse to do: repackaged Valentina with a (much) older version of Qt to provide support for Windows XP and Vista. This is a separate installer.

Back when we covered the Seamly2D / Valentina split, the question was whether both projects would succeed at filling their respective gaps. Sadly, the dynamics hasn’t changed: Seamly2D is still lacking developers and hasn’t done much progress beyond rebranding, changing some terminology, and configuring CI; and Roman is still lacking the promotion his project deserves.

G’MIC 2.4.0 arrived with the usual feature madness: new filters, before/after split preview now accessible for most filters and in more variations, and more. Hint to glitch artists: you absolutely want upgrading.

The Krita team published a review of new features to expect in version 4.2: improved masks and selections workflow, gamut masks, improved performance, smoother UI, and tons of bugfixes.

Meanwhile, Krita is at 17K+ euro in their campaign to raise funds for bugfixing. It isn’t as much as they hoped to get at this point, which is kinda critical given that Dmitry’s full-time work on Krita is paid by fundraisers. Nevertheless, the team gathered in the Netherlands once again for a development sprint.

Ramon Miranda did a live session demonstrating Digital Atelier, his new package consisting of brushes, patterns, brush tips etc. for Krita. The digital download will be sold in Krita’s online shop since October 16 for €39.95. Ramon is one of the earliest adopters of Krita as a tool for professional work. Several years ago, he also created the second ever Krita training DVD, ‘Muses’.

At 2+ hours of screen time, the live session suggests a certain dedication on your side. So if you want to get a basic idea first, here is a short promo Ramon did a few weeks ago:

Inkscape team started posting videos from the recent hackfest in Kiel. Here you can see Tavmjong Bah, Martin Owens et al. discussing the possibility of merging ‘Layers’ and ‘Objects’ dialogs and what the workflow would be like for users:

Blender 2.8 finally got a real units system. Now you can not only select the metric system, but also define an actual unit that will be used throughout UI (so it’s never a mix of ‘cm’ and ‘m’ anymore). You can also set rotation in either degrees or radians, and set units for weight and time.

Pencil2D is doing a hacktoberfest between October 1 and 31, and invites everyone to participate. So far the results are: TIFF I/O support, individual grid division lines, and multi-frame operations like copying, moving, reversing, and deleted a user-defined range of frames.

An updated W3C Candidate Recommendation for SVG 2.0 was published and features a more complete and tidy list of changes since SVG 1.1, as well as a consistent use of the term “user coordinate system” (the previous revision also used “local coordinate system”). They really are wrapping up SVG 2.0, if there was any doubt about it.

Boris Hajdukovic points out he’s been maintaining a forum thread at Pixls where he shares tips and tricks for GIMP 2.10 users.

TypeThursday published an interesting interview with Eli Heuer, contributor to the free/libre typeface design app called TruFont.

3D and game engines

Armory 0.5 game engine has been released with lots of improvements: better character skinning CPU performance, new raytracing API (Vulkan support coming later), more robust shader compilation, lots of improvements for Direct3D12, Vulkan, and Metal back-ends, new templates, etc. Armory supports both Blender 2.79 and 2.8.

The project now also has a Roadmap page where you can vote on feature requests. The team also reminded that earlier this year they released ArmorPaint 0.4, a work-in-the-progress tool for physically-based texture painting of 3D models.

There will be a GodotCon meetup in Poznań (Poland) on October 10/11. The Godot superstar we’ve grown to know and admire as Juan Linietsky will be participating too. Talk submissions are still accepted.

Meanwhile, Juan uploaded a third-person shooter demo on GitHub and keeps posting impressive detailed shots from it on his Twitter account.

Video

Jean-Baptiste Kempf (VideoLAN) announced that the VideoLAN, VLC, and FFmpeg communities started to work on a new AV1 decoder, sponsored by the Alliance of Open Media. Newly introduced dav1d is designed to be as fast as possible, cross-platform, correctly threaded, and free/libre.

David Mcsween started a new blog on his use of Blender VSE in broadcasting. David has 15 years of hands-on experience producing videos for this industry.

Music and sounds

Ardour replaced their Drupal forums with Discourse which seems to be the new norm now: Blenderartists made the switch to Discourse earlier this year, and Pat David’s Pixls has been using it from day one.

Vladimir Sadovnikov announced the release of LSP Plugins version 1.1.4 with new linear impulse response profiler plugin, local structure preserving convolution (LSPC) files support, experimental Raspberry Pi 3B/3B+ (ARMv7A) support, and lots of DSP changes and fixes.

For more information on Vladimir’s background with this project, you can read an older interview with him at Libre Music Production.

CAD

Yorik van Havre posted September update on BIM features development in FreeCAD. New features developed in September: new External Reference tool in the Arch/BIM workbenches (similar to Xref in AutoCAD, and File Link in Revit) to move parts of a project to separate files for better organization and/or collaborative work,

Yorik also started writing docs for the BIM workbench and shot a video introduction to it:

Brad Collette known as Sliptonic on the FreeCAD community completed his ‘FreeCAD For Inventors’ ebook and is selling it on Amazon and Kobo:

FreeCAD is a powerful tool, but it is also complex and has a steep learning curve. This book guides you on a series of CAD projects from the point of view of someone trying to model and produce real-world objects. It not only clearly describes what to do, but it also introduces the core concepts, tools, and techniques.

Urban Bruhin announced he’s pretty much ready to cut the first public release of LibrePCB and asked for input on changes that it would be a good idea to try fitting in.

Fundraising

‘Patreon of the week’ award goes to Andrea Ferrero who has been juggling development of PhotoFlow and building AppImages for graphics apps for a few years now. Pat David posted a quick interview with Andrea on Pixls. The Patreon page is here.

Tutorials

Nick Saporito posted a rather simple to follow GIMP tutorial on making t-shirt mockups:

Graphic Design Studio posted a neat tutorial on designing 2.5D objects and their long shadows with Inkscape:

Artistic Render continue their exploration of the principled shader in Blender. This time, they "take a close look at how this is all implemented in the node editor using image textures to power the principled shader".

Blender Market launched new paid training on creating nature environment.

Art and showcases

Blender Institute posted the 7th production log of Spring, the next Institute’s short animated movie:

System76, a US-based laptops and desktops vendor who ship them with either Ubuntu or their own Linux-based system, are now exploring their creative / media self. Last week, they announced a US-manufactured open source desktop codenamed Thelio (expected to be available for pre-order later this October) and launched a multi-episode animated sci-fi movie created with Inkscape, Blender, Krita, and Natron.

Aliciane keeps posting on Twitter great paintings she makes with Krita:

Mohamed Chahin is doing an Inktober/Voxeltober with Blender:

Week highlights: Microsoft granting access to 60,000+ patents including type design ones, upcoming UI changes in Inkscape, Krita fundraiser and bugfix sprint, mono icons controversy in Blender 2.8 and Grease Pencil improvements, new Shotcut release, and more.

Graphics and animation

The big news of the week was Microsoft joining the Open Invention Network which is a defensive patent pool. Simply put, companies that join OIN grant royalty-free access to their patents. Nathan Willis notes that the OIN license agreement explicitly covers type design patents. That, in return, means that Linux distributions like Fedora can start shipping FreeType with ClearType support enabled. Indeed, here is what the license agreement says:

“OIN Patents” shall mean all patents and patent applications including utility models and typeface design patents and registrations, under which OIN has at any time during the Capture Period, the right to grant licenses to You or Your Subsidiaries of or within the scope granted herein without such grant or the exercise of rights thereunder resulting in the payment of royalties or other consideration by OIN to unaffiliated third parties.

But it goes further than ClearType. E.g. there are at least 38 OpenType-related patents issued to Microsoft, and not everyone bowed down to that. Case in point: Khaled Hosny admits that he learnt about the "Method and system of character placement in opentype fonts
" patent only after he had implemented the technology in XeTeX and he decided to do nothing about it.

The Inkscape team continue the UI changes discussion that they started at earlier hackfests. Developers keep attacking the issue from multiple angles, and now the time has come to start retiring the GDL library that Inkscape uses for docking dialogs. Tavmjong Bah ended up creating a test application to try various ideas and wrote a detailed post about upcoming changes, some of which are expected to land after the release of v1.0.

In one last stretch, the Krita team succeeded getting 25K euro for their bug-squashing fundraiser. They make every cent worth donating, last week they made yet another release featuring over 40 bugfixes. They also posted a full recap of the bugfix sprint they did last week.

The GIMP team has been mostly fixing bugs in both GIMP and GEGL and improving async operations. Specifically, now GIMP can give execution priority to more time-consuming operations running in parallel to others.

Much like GIMP since the release of 2.10, Blender 2.8 is now getting some heated discussions about newly introduced monochromatic icons.

There is a very long and rather insightful thread at devtalk.blender.org which I would carefully characterize as a collective attempt to keep down the visual noise, while still using some color coding to make icons easily distinguishable.

Among other things, Antonio Vazquez added a new user preferences options to set Grease Pencil layers in the top-down order and a new Grease Pencil option to keep the fill texture size equal, independent of stroke size.

There have been some interesting Blender-related 3rd party project releases too. Renderhjs, known for the TexTools add-on, released a new version of FBX Bundle, a Blender add-on that batch-exports your object selection to FBX file bundles by a common identifier. Version 1.5.0 has a new modifiers system, easy re-exporting, auto-selection of grouped objects, and more changes.

Soft8Soft released Verge3D 2.8 with workspaces support in Puzzles (via user-defined tabs), an upgraded Wordpress plugin, code examples and many other changes.

And earlier this year, Maxime Herpin announced a new major version of his add-on for Blender called Modular Tree. The add-on makes it possible to parametrically build trees with nodes and includes a wind operator for wind simulation:

Synfig team demonstrated a new feature in the development branch, to be available in upcoming version 1.4.0: simple background rendering toggle.

Pencil 2D team continued their Hacktoberfest 2018 with GPL (GIMP palette) importer fixes, making auto-named layers have number suffixes, and adding a preference for the playback image cache threshold. If you want to participate, see this page. If you want to just test new stuff, grab a nightly build. Given that nightlies also contain a fix for a nasty copy/paste bug in latest release (v0.6.2), you really might want one of those.

One last fun bit of news here. Nathan Lovato published Godot Slides 2.0, a Godot project that can be reused to create presentation slides by dragging and dropping media files. Here is a video about it.

Video

Dan Dennedy released Shotcut 18.10. Notable changes:

• New Grid and Safe Area overlays in the player, with snapping to them available for Text, Size and Position, and more filters.
• You can now drag’n’drop folders from a file manager into Shotcut.
• 25 bugfixes, including the regression that led to audio preview distortion on Windows.

For a full list of changes, see this post.

Music and sounds

More great VCV Rack news: Audible Instruments’ Random Sampler and Segment Generator are now open source as well. As usual, to update your existing patches, use the utility in the Audible Instruments Preview manual.

MOD Devices posted a photo of the first assembled Duo X, their new Linux-based sound FX box.

According to the latest update, Duo X is coming in late October 2018 with user profiles (up to 4), better accessibility for when you don’t have the luxury of fiddling with the browser-based editor (new menu and 8 rather than 2 switches in comparison to the original Duo unit), navigation via MIDI, a pagination button to easily scroll between tons of FX parameters, and more changes.

MOD are extremely community-friendly. They come with extensive experience programming audio, and they employ Filipe Coelho who is behind the KXStudio repository, projects like Carla and Cadence, the DPF framework (born out of frustration with JUCE), and who also currently maintains JACK. Duo heavily relies on LV2 plug-ins, and while they use as many as they can, they also give back to the community a lot as in publishing development tools, source code patches etc.

Tutorials

There is so much excitement with Blender 2.8 that nearly every major new Blender tutorial covers v2.8 features, and the new Blender version isn’t even released yet!

Random Art Attack posted a video that explains using the multi-resolution modifier for sculpting.

Jayanam created a video tutorial on PBR Texture Painting.

Jama Jurabaev created a multi-part tutorial on using Grease Pencil. The price starts at $19 (you can name your own one above that). Here is the trailer:

Zacharias Reinhardt posted an interesting low-poly animation and he’s wondering if he should make a paid online course how to make it. You can join the waiting list here.

Texture Haven posted a 1 hour long Eevee workshop covering interior room design:

More great things from Nathan Lovato: a tutorial on input remapping in Godot, with a free project and code overview.

Art showcases

Olga Bikmullina starts showing her artwork made with Inkscape again: https://twitter.com/AhNinniah/status/1051400145634508801

Lone McLonegan showcases her use of Inkscape and Krita for making game artwork:

Sampo Pesonen says this is probably his first and last Inktober entry, made with Krita. No, please don’t stop at that, Sampo!

Pablo Dobarro posted a new render he made from original concept by Laia López. The benefit of visiting the artwork page is that you get to see the lighting setup (among other things).

Cici posted another render that mixes low-poly and, well, not so low-poly style:

And speaking of low-poly, here is a new Blender-made render from Aljas Hubert.

Aliciane just keep posting more Krita-powered artwork:

Highlights of the week: Krita fundraiser successfully completed, GIMP team releases GEGL update, Blender Foundation introduces community badges and revamps recurring donations system, Cairo gets much improved PDF backend and variable fonts support.

Graphics, 3D, and animation

The 2018 Krita fundraiser is now over with 26,512 euro. The original goal was raising 25,000 euro. The team continues fixing bugs hand over fist just as expected.

The GIMP team released a new version of the GEGL image processing library. Apart from a lot of plumbing work, developers made buffer duplication more efficient, introduced double precision to the 'mantiuk06' operation (tonemapping) to get it to work on larger images, bumped standard deviation (radius) for the 'unsharp-mask' operation from 300px to 1500px, and introduced the 'gif-load' operation to decode GIF animations. The team is also getting closer to releasing GIMP 2.10.8 with mostly bugfixes.

Blender Foundation introduced Community Badges and retired the old "simplistic" PayPal subscription. All recurring donations are now tied to Blender ID, and all websites that support Blender ID will display a badge next to the user's nickname. So far, Blender Cloud, BlenderArtists, devtalk.blender.org, and a few more sites already support that.

On the development side, Antonio Vazquez demonstrated an early version of a new 'Time' modifier for the Grease Pencil in Blender:

Jacques Lucke started porting his Animation Nodes add-on to Blender 2.8. The code is already live on GitHub:

I started to port #AnimationNodes to Blender 2.8 this evening to figure out what needs to be done. #b3d pic.twitter.com/wvmJfsS0IX

— Jacques Lucke (@JacquesLucke) October 17, 2018

Yiming Wu posted his/her plans for further development of line art NRP rendering in Blender following a successful Google Summer of Code 2018 project.

Blender Market now features a paid PBR Texture Bakery add-on that allows baking complex Cycles materials to PBR textures.

Installing the G'MIC plug-in for GIMP on macOS is now easier thanks to Andrea Ferrero who managed to create a G'MIC installer for that operating system. See the ongoing discussion at Pixls for more information.

The Synfig team posted a weekly update on their activities. One notable change is 'Solid Color' and 'Checkerboard' layers ported to the new rendering engine and working faster now.

The Cairo team released version 1.16.0 after a few years of work. One major new feature is the updated PDF backend that now supports thumbnails, page labels, metadata, document outlines, structured text, hyperlinks, and tags (see here for more details). Another major update is the support for variable fonts.

Tutorials and education

Last week, Aryeom Han did graphics courses on using GIMP at the Université de Cergy-Pontoise for two classes: computer graphics (20 students) and 3D heritage (9 students). Aryeom is 50% of ZeMarmot animation project and icon design contributor to GIMP. Needless to say, Jehan Pages was there to fix a drag-and-drop bug on macOS in GIMP, but he reports that there have been no crashes in 28 hours with 30 people running GIMP constantly.

Now here is the last day with the 3D heritage �� class (@AryeomHan on the right) of @UniversiteCergy @ucp_lpmn. They worked on retouching (+ painting basics) e.g. old frescos/painting. As last exercise, they digitally saved Mona Lisa from vandalism thanks to @GIMP_Official ! ;-) pic.twitter.com/8xJw8BeBWn

— ZeMarmot (@zemarmot) October 20, 2018

On October 23, there will be Krita classes in Toronto Public Library. See here for more details and booking.

Another Krita presentation will take place on October 31 at the University of La Plata, in Argentina.

Blendiberia reports that there will be Blender classes in Barcelona in mid-November, by Patricia Muñoz, Carmen Córdoba, Odín Fernández, Diego Moya, and Oliver Villar. See here for the full program and info about teachers.

Nick Saporito posted a new GIMP tutorial, this time — on designing a simple logo.

Blender Frenzy continues their 'Blender for blogs' series of tutorials with a new video where you can learn how to create fake transparency for your fades or your background in VSE. They also explain image cropping in VSE.

DFIR.Science posted a tutorial on basics of using Shotcut to edit and export recorded video for screencasts.

Art and showcases

Sanda Krstulović posted a portrait of Edgar Allan Poe, drawn in Inkscape:

Ozant Liuky topped that with a sunset-lit landscape illustration:

Soulty posted some Ichimoku Ren fan art made with Krita:

New 'Old house in the forest' speed painting by Sergey, made with Krita:

Aliciane painted some cute characters for her daughter, using Krita again.

It's puuuumpkin time! Gregory Ischenko posted a set of Halloween renders on BlenderArtists, rendered with Cycles.

Rositsa 'roz' Zaharieva posted her recent character design art made with Krita.

Most interesting thing for Blender this week is probably the public screening of 'La Grande Aventure de Non Non' in theaters across France. The animated movied made with Blender is available in French and English, but right now there are no plans for screening outside France. Here is one of the trailers.

The crew also made a very clever 'the making of' video, prominently featuring Blender:

More awesome Blender art:

.@lowpolycurls showed how she sets up amazing hand-painted food with the help of #Blender and #Sketchfab. https://t.co/OAskf5kwDm #gamedev #indiedev #3dart #gamedesign #b3d #Blender3d @Sketchfab @blender_org @BlenderNation pic.twitter.com/6EwwbqdWwu

— 80Level (@EightyLevel) October 15, 2018

Davide Pellino redid Goro Fujita's artwork with Blender. As is usual for BlenderArtists threads, the artwork discussion reveals some interesting implementation details.

Christian Dannemann wrote an article about his experience using FreeCAD to model tiny replacement parts for watches, as he is a professional watchmaker.

Assets

BlenderNation posted a detailed update on the CC0 Archviz project, written by José Sena. The team continues publishing new models available as public domain (CC0) and asks for support via Patreon.

Earlier users of Krita may recall an interview with Sylvia Ritter published on krita.org in 2014. Since then, Sylvia completed an impressive amount of beautiful paintings made with Krita, so it’s time to revisit!

We spoke to Sylvia and asked, how much has changed since that original interview by Irina Rempt.

One major new project is a series of paintings inspired by the Ubuntu release names. So far, Sylvia has completed 29 artworks from “Warty Warthog” (4.10) to the current release “Cosmic Cuttlefish” (18.10).

Another ongoing project is an animal-themed set of Tarot cards.

Sylvia has already completed the Major Arcana cards.

Currently, she is working on the Minor Arcana cards to create a full deck.

In 2017, she did a ‘Wakeful Wolf’ tattoo commission and then launched a successful campaign on Indiegogo to produce a hoodie with this design.

Sylvia also continues making commissioned art for festivals, musicians, labels, authors, publishers, and game companies.

…and explores various concepts:

Some of her artworks were featured in “Spectrum: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art”, the “Made with Krita 2016”, the ImagineFX magazine, the Linux Format magazine, and Scott Petrovic’s book “Digital Painting with KRITA 2.9”.

The Grand Koi Hotel paintings above, in particular, was featured in the Fresh Paint section of ImagineFX’s issue 117, 2014.

But maybe one of the most challenging projects is NOWHERE, an indie game that she’s been working on with her husband, Leonard Ritter. It’s an alien life simulator, for which Leonard is currently building a procedural open source engine Tukan.

NOWHERE is focused on social artifical intelligence, trading, exploring, cultivating, making friendships, and maintaining peace.

You can follow Sylvia’s art stream on multiple platforms, depending on which one you like best: ArtStation, DeviantArt, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Etsy, and probably something else we forgot.

Brace yourselves, for this is a long recap! Week highlights: Blender Conference 2018, Materialize source code release, new sK1 2.0 pre-release, lots of tutorials, new online Blender courses, and even more artworks and showcases.

Graphics, 3D, and animation

First off, Blender Foundation announced that the first official beta of 2.80 is now just a few weeks away. The team says Asset Management and Overrides won't make it to 2.80, but will become available in further 2.8x releases once completed. Pablo Vazquez also did a long, thorough update on the state of Blender 2.80.

The week continued with a major event, Blender Conference 2018. Video of all (most?) talks have already been upload to YouTube, here is the playlist. You can also use the schedule page to figure out which ones you want watching. You can also see BlenderNation's post on Suzanne Award 2018 winners.

This year, tickets to the conference were sold out in a matter of days, and given the limited amount of places in the institute, next year, the conference will take place on October 24-26 at a new venue, in the Compagnie theater (still in Amsterdam).

It wasn't the only Blender event last week either. On October 27, there was a Blender conference in Tokyo, with ca. 150 visitors. As much as is possible to extract from an automatic translation from Japanese, topics focused on programming and showcases, including the use of Blender for a VR visual novel Tokyo Chronos.

But there have been more Blender-related news.

DeepBlender posted an update on his AI-based DeepDenoiser for Cycles. That got additional attention given Andrew Price's talk about the future of AI in the 3D industry at Blender Conference later same week.

Meanwhile Nathan Letwory (Rhino developer and long-time Blender contributor) publicly announced his Rhino importer for Blender 2.80. You need the latest rhino3dm.py module to run it.

Tim Coster reminded there is an add-on for Blender called AddMIDI. The add-on allows binding MIDI controllers to Blender features, which he used to get his KORG nanoKONTROL2 to control the brush size and strength of the sculpting brushes.

Bounding Box Software released their Unity-based Materialize program for converting images to materials under the terms of GNU GPLv3+. The code is available on GitHub. Here is an introduction video:

The darktable team recently did a lot of work on enhancing their denoising tools, both the denoise profiler and the rawdenoise filter (mostly developed by 'rawfiner'). Pascal Obry introduced an ability to further fine-tune the UI of darktable by moving effects around effect groups (Basic, Tone, Color, Correct, Effect), as well as changing the order of effect groups in the interface.

Additionally, Maurizio Paglia and 'rawfiner' added a whole bunch of context help links to various parts of darktable's user interface. Finally, on the RawSpeed side, the GoPro ".GPR" raw format is now supported.

The sK1 vector graphics editor got another pre-2.0 release, featuring support for dragging and dropping files into the application. You can find all nightly builds here.

Johan Mattsson released new version of Birdfont, a free font editor. The changelog focuses on newly added support for round, bevel, and miter line joins.

Finally, Firefox 63 was released with a new Font Editor supporting variable fonts:

Video

Adrien Maglo posted a quick demo of face recognition inside VLC, a new feature he's been working on for a while.

Meanwhile, the VideoLAN team posted a picture of themselves working on the video output model for VLC 4.0.

Tutorials and training

Graphic Design Studio posted a an Inkscape tutorial on isometric design.

There's also a new 'How to make mountain logo in Inkscape' tutorial by tinta warna on YouTube. The tutorial goes a little too fast and contains some trial-and-error bits, but the end result is good enough to share this.

MyGimpTutorialChannel posted a 'Frequency Separation and Colour Vibrancy in Gimp 2.10.6' tutorial. The tutorial implies doing frequency separation manually and applying a kind of cross-processing effect. It has no voiceover (all videos with voiceover on this channel are in German), but it's still rather easy to follow.

Nathan Lovato demonstrated how conditional blending can be done in Krita with cross-channel curves. A more straightforward implementation of the feature is said to be expected soon.

Lucas Falcao demonstrated his workflow of modeling a character with Blender 2.80 and, partially, with Substance Painter. He explained all steps of completing the work: blocking to make basic shapes, modeling and sculpting, retopology, making UVs and ID masks, texturing, making materials, lighting, and compositing.

Wayward Art Company explained using the Edge Detect node in Blender 2.80 to add edge details to objects.

YouTube user masterxeon1001 explained how to make a retractable camera insert with Blender and his KIT OPS add-on. Do checkout more of his tutorials and the KIT OPS website. BoxCutter look like magic!

Kuldeep Singh posted a breakdown for a video that illustrates the black hole accretion.

Chocofur's Interior Design Visualization course is now available for pre-order (disclosure: LGW is not affiliated). It's based on Blender 2.80 feature set, covers pretty much all angles, and is expected to be out in December 2018.

Another commercial Blender course, this time — by Martin Klekner — explains the modeling of a Spartan warrior. Please note that it is based on the Blender 2.79 feature set.

The #125 issue of the 3DArtist magazine prominently features Blender 2.80 and pro tips from Daniel Bystedt, Mike Pan, Paul Chambers, Nazar Noschenko, Gleb Alexandrov, Aidy Burrows, and Reynante Martinez.

Art and showcases

There has been an increasing amount of Grease Pencil adoption around the world lately.

James Lewis-Vines did an homage to Ian McQue and recreated one of his 'Mortal engines' sketches in 3D.

Learning blender's grease pencil tools, as an homage to the great @ianmcque recreated 1 of his mortal engines sketches In 3D as a quick test. Blender feels like a nice inbetween of 2D & 3D especially during #inktober ,#scifi #greasepencil #mortalengines #conceptart #3d #blender pic.twitter.com/EJpQfm7bdd

— James Lewis-Vines (@jamesense) October 18, 2018

Brain Graft posted a whole ton of animations and drawings made with Grease Pencil.

Even more #greasepencil fun :D
I cant stop pic.twitter.com/OkShrTiUEi

— Brain Graft (@brain_graft) October 23, 2018

Mike Pan demoed his use of Blender 2.80 for medical visualization.

On a favorite subject of modeling, cars, here is a seventies Chevrolet Corvette Stingray, by fin.eskimo.

BlenderNation featured the art of Jose Luis Camacho.

Dorian Zgraggen demonstrates an interior designer made with Blender and Verge3D.

Currently working on a project using #Verge3D for Blender by @soft8soft ��

(A batch of textures are coming soon, too.) pic.twitter.com/0htpcxyQO0

— Dorian Zgraggen (@dorianzgraggen) October 21, 2018

There's more awesome low-poly art from Mohamed Chahin:

Dmitry Maslov posted examples of his use of Inkscape for industrial design/illustration. This caused a bit of discussion, whether Inkscape is the right tool for the job though!

Sylvia Ritter posted a new animal-themed Tarot card painted with Krita. See our feature of Sylvia posted earlier same week.

New work-in-the-progress art from David Revoy:

As usual, new work from Aliciane:

Preparatory drawing and final painting :)
This is one of my illustrations for #MorganLeFay depicting a sweet moment between young Morgan and her mother Ygern ��

Book in progress by @morganofglencoe#kidlitart #kidlit #digitalpainting #fantasyart #artprocess pic.twitter.com/9ZRdv5a6Mi

— Aliciane �� (@AlicianeArt) October 23, 2018

New timelapse video by Sergey of grafikdesign: using Krita to paint a landscape with a cave.

Jorge "akirasan" provides another example of using FreeCAD to make replacement parts:

Mi padre tenía un apaño de reductor de manguera de unos depósitos que usa para recoger agua de lluvia. Y me dice: "Esto se podría hacer con la impresora 3D, no?“
Pues claro!!!
Lo interesante de todo esto, es que ha sido mi padre el que ha tenido la idea ������ #CambioDeMentalidad pic.twitter.com/3HVgKK1ZtF

— Jorge :P (akirasan) (@akirasan) October 21, 2018

Oh, and speaking of replacement parts, this video is not new at all, but it resurfaced online in a timely manner. Vassiliy Shishkin from the Central Clinical hospital in Moscow talked at Blender Conference 2017 about Blender being used for modeling orthopedic surgical implants.

Week highlights: cryptomatte support in Blender, new QGIS release with 3D and animation features, new sK1 pre-release, feature freeze in FreeCAD, 3mf support in OpenSCAD, upcoming Flowblade 2.0 and Pitivi 1.0 releases, and more.

Graphics

GIMP's port to macOS is getting some long-deserved love again thanks to Alex Samorukov who's been contributing to both the gtk-osx project and GIMP. There's continuous integration work for macOS in progress to be announced soon. Meanwhile, Øyvind Kolås continues progressing towards CMYK support in babl and GEGL. Baby steps...

The GMIC team made a bugfix v2.4.1 release without new features. Upgrading much recommended!

The Krita team is mostly fixing bugs for the upcoming v4.2 release. But they also started revisiting the idea of introducing better support for HDR imaging, including support for HDR displays. Right now, they handle HDR-to-SDR use cases with OpenColorIO (GIMP's approach is using a custom ACES RRT display filter). It goes further than that though. Check out the full thread on Phabricator. Another new thing is centralized caching of resources and storages.

Active Krita contributor Scott Petrovic also released his Animator Video Reference plugin for upcoming Krita 4.2.

The sK1 team made yet another pre-release of v2.0 featuring file managers support across operating systems.

Last but not least, WebP support is finally landing to Firefox 65! We probably won't see the end of GIFs any time soon ('Cat WebPs' doesn't roll off the tongue just as smoothly), but it's a start.

3D

It feels positively weird to say, but one of the two big Blender news this week was the introduction of a vertical toolbar for the properties dock. The change was made by Julian Eisel who's behind many other UI improvements in Blender 2.8.

Note that you can quickly switch between the tabs by hovering the vertical tab and using Ctrl + mouse scroll.

So far, people seem to want babies with this new feature, although jokes were really inevitable.

Using advanced extrapolation I present to you the user interface for Blender 3.0 #b3d pic.twitter.com/DLvXmMZxlj

— Mike Pan (@themikepan) October 30, 2018

The second most important change was newly added cryptomatte support in Cycles (original patch was submitted by Stefan Werner in 2017). Zacharias Reinhardt was quick to record a demo of the new feature.

Antonio Vazquez added optional auto-locking of inactive grease pencil layers.

In less programming-flavored news, Blender Development Fund is now well over $13K a month. This is still behind the first milestone of being able to pay 5 developers' salary ($28K a month), but still a great start.

Mikhail Rachinsky released Booltron v2.2, his Blender add-on for super fast booleans. He added an adaptive boolean method, Keep Objects and Mesh Cleanup options, improved the Intersect tool, and removed the Subtract tool (Difference + Keep Objects does the same).

Aku Kettunen is teasing people with a preview of his Blender add-on that mirrors metaballs for quick prototyping.

Metaball mirroring in my wip #b3d add-on. Pretty nice for making quick basemeshes. #3d #addon #python #coding pic.twitter.com/V7AGtUD00Z

— Aku Kettunen (@ErkBlender) October 29, 2018

Dealga McArdle is also teasing people with the port of Sverchok for Blender 2.8.

Even more teasing comes from Cody Winchester.

WIP script for baking cel shading to grease pencil strokes in 2.8#b3d #blender3d #3dblender #b2d #greasepencil pic.twitter.com/0S2ufoECVQ

— Cody Winchester (@CodyWinch) November 2, 2018

But probably not as much as Pablo Dobarro who added symmetry preview for sculpting. His patch has been submitted for review next to his earlier patch that adds a new brush cursor with surface normal and vertex preview.

Now the sculpting cursor previews symmetry before starting the stroke. It doesn't support radial symmetry yet. #b3d pic.twitter.com/9FHKUxoTim

— Pablo Dobarro (@pablodp606) November 2, 2018

Soft8Soft kept the promise they made at Blender Conference and did a pre-release of Verge3D 2.9 with support for Blender 2.8 and Eevee.

Pre-releases are a new thing they are trying. Having both enterprise customers who want it stable and cooked, and a community that wants access to the latest and greatest, they expect to ship both pre-releases and stable release to users now.

CAD

For FreeCAD, the big news is that the project has finally entered feature freeze for v0.18. No more new features, save for Assembly3 which should finally make it to an official release. Yorik van Havre detailed that and some changes in the Arch workbench in his public monthly report on Patreon. He also posted a new video about producing 2D drawings from 3D models, placing dimensions, hatches, and annotations.

OpenSCAD, which unfortunately hasn't seen new releases since spring 2015, keeps getting new features. Most recently it received experimental 3mf importing/exporting.

The code was originally written by Torsten Paul in 2016 and then put on the backburner. He recently returned to it and made quite a few updates to complete his work. You will need lib3mf from the 3MF Consortium.

There's no telling when the new release will happen, but the team recently started tracking their progress with GitHub Projects for the next release. For a preliminary changelog, please see this page.

QGIS 3.4 was released last week with a very impressive amount of changes (note that this is work-in-the-progress release notes). Lutra Consulting made a very nice overview of 3D features in this new version, including keyframe-based animation, new Identify Tool in 3D map, more camera control etc.

Animation

The Pencil 2D team did a 2 hours long live session on YouTube covering results of the Hacktoberfest and answering users' questions.

The Synfig team posted their own weekly report. In a nutshell, they integrated video importing with the rendering cache system which made it possible to scrub/playback cached segments on the timeline smoothly.

They also improved video rendering defaults by switching to AVI/MPEG4 and added GIF importing (lightsabre cats are probably not the best example, but it's good fun).

Video

Good news, everyone. There's a Flowblade 2.0 release coming soon. Janne Liljeblad recently announced strings freeze, and that means no user-visible features will be added or changed much.

The new version of Flowblade will land with workflow and UI improvements, a new Cut tool, Ripple Trim as a separate tool, multitrack ripple deletion, sequence splitting, Alpha Combine compositors, and more.

Igalia started publishing videos from GStreamer Conference 2018, where Thibault Saunier talked about the state of video editing features, using Pitivi as the app primarily benefiting from the relevant changes (he is aslo lead developer of Pitivi).

Judging by the official roadmap, the Pitivi team is still planning v1.0 release for Q4 2018. According to the gitlab board, they are 89% done in terms of bug reports and feature requests.

Photography

The digiKam team released the second beta of upcoming v6.0 expected in December 2018, featuring re-introduced Adjust Time & Date tool for patching timestamps in metadata, fixes for the embeded video player's slider, separating icon-view items by properties, and 208 bugfixes.

The darktable team mostly worked on improving the existing feature set, which makes sense, because they tend to make major releases around Christmas time, and we are less than two months away from that time of the year already.

Aurélien Pierre continues improving his color balance tool (see this Pixls thread for more information), while rawfiner continues working on denoising, and Pascal Obry improves cropping in the [perspective correction tool.

Tutorials and education

New Inkscape tutorial by Graphic Design Studio demonstrates the drawing of a stylized looped arrow.

There have been a few nice timelapse Krita tutorials. Sergey (grafikwork) posted a new Krita painting timelapse for his recent 'Coffee break' work.

And the other one, 'Halloween Pumpkin - Jack-o'-lantern in Krita', is by Digital Drawing channel on YouTube.

Metin Seven wrote a comparative review of two commercial auto-retopology add-ons for Blender: DynRemesh and Tesselator, also known as Particle Remesh.

Metin aslo made another post explaining realistic Specular value in the Principled BSDF.

Nathan Lovato posted a new tutorial explaining how to use search and other tools to quickly find files and properties in the Godot game engine.

In other news, Nathan's course on Godot 3 is now complete.

Art and showcases

After an eventful summer, David Revoy is back on track with the production of the Pepper & Carrot comics. Issue 27 is now out, produced with Krita (and a bit of Inkscape) as usual.

More than that, Krita is now cool enough to poke fun at Thor himself!

UPDATE NOCTURNO#animation #2danimation #ThorRagnarok @Krita_Painting #animacion pic.twitter.com/5f70d8xRT5

— Rafa Fdez (@SoyElGene) October 31, 2018

Chris Armstrong paid a quick tribute to recently aanounced Discworld-based BBC series 'The Watch', using nothing but good old MyPaint.

Brain Graft posted a video of using Krita for photo manipulation.

He also keeps showing new Grease Pencil tests.

He's not the only one though. Pepe-School-Land, an animation school based in Barcelona, posted some videos made by their students with Krita and Blender's Grease Pencil.

Aidy Burrows demonstrated Inception-like deformation in real-time with Eevee.

Trying out some @texturehaven textures in #Eevee #b3d Went all inception on a simple underpass! :D The fun that can be had in realtime! :D pic.twitter.com/qOsNpYVm45

— AidyBurrows (@AidyBurrows3D) November 3, 2018

Mohamed Chahin celebrated 30K followers on Dribble with a dedicated low-poly render.

BlenderNation showcased Mystic model by Yuditya Afandi, where modeling, sculpting, surfacing, and rendering was done with Blender.

EriS made quite a splash with his demo of a stylized river shader for Eevee (folowing another popular post showing cartoonish fire). Follow this Twitter thread for details.

Stylized river shader for Eevee.
procedural lines and dots, the foam is dynamic paint and vertex colors.#blendereevee #eevee #b3d #blender #procedural #river #shader #stylized pic.twitter.com/2d95n7z34P

— EriS (@Erisdraw3D) October 29, 2018

Highlights of the week: new releases of ArmorPaint, appleseed, and FFmpeg, a new version of GIMP and upcoming CMYK support in GEGL, interesting developments in Inkscape and Ardour, preview of the 3D track at Capitol du Libre 2018 conference in France.

Graphics

The last week was somewhat quiet for Krita. Boudewijn was on vacation, and Dmitry was looking into HDR support in Krita. He ended up writing a little test Qt application that can show an HDR image in HDR on Windows.

The GIMP team finally resolved conflicting schedules and released v2.10.8. This time it's more of a classical bugfix update, and even then they squeezed a few new features in. The Gradient tool now supports hard-edge gradient fills, and you can now view CIE xyY color readouts in the Color Picker's Info window and in the Sample Points dock. Plus there have been some usability improvements. See the release announcement for more info.

One new feature that might hit the master branch soon (and then get merged for 2.10.10) is smart colorization based on the algorithm from G'MIC.

But to be completely honest, the most exciting changes are coming to babl and GEGL libraries right now. First of all, Ell is moving a lot of parallelization code from GIMP over to GEGL. In particular, he introduced centralized solution to distribute work across multiple threads instead of running local thread pools for every GEGL operation (filter) that supports auto-threading. In his own words:

There were a bunch of different pools all over the place, GIMP had its own thing, and plug-ins had nothing. Now it's all in one place, for GEGL, GIMP's core, and GIMP plug-ins, and it's overall simpler. There's even a small performance win.

And then there's this coming directly from Øyvind Kolås, fresh off the #gegl channel on IRC:

I just got reasonable hacked up results for loading a CMYK JPEG with a CMYK ICC profile, then compositing a PNG on top leading to implicit conversion of the PNG to premultiplied CMYKA for handling in the over op — including either display in the GEGL UI or writing to PPM. So by now CMYK JPEG input/output is fully operational, and initial u8 CMYK TIFF loading exist as an initial hack.

Please note that there is no plan for getting this into GIMP just yet. From the conversation on IRC, it seems that more color management related work needs to be done first. And there's still a lot of work on GIMP 3.0 to be done, which is a higher priority. But just a friendly reminder: Øyvind accepts reward for his work on babl/GEGL.

It feels so very good to say that there is also a lot of activity in the Inkscape project. While most work is plumbing, they still find the time for the fancy things. For instance, Jabier Arraiza is working on canvas splitting to compare full-color view with outlined view, where you can drag around the separation "curtain".

But wait, it's only one little thing.

Tavmjong Bah rewrote the inkview application and added a preload option for when you have e.g. presentation slides in SVG. Thomas Holder is adding pinch zoom support to be used on trackpads/touchpads. And a really huge change is coming from Thomas Wiesner who is working on integrating Python interpreter into Inkscape.

The team now also provides a more detailed roadmap that suggests v1.0 release around May 2019.

Photography

After Blender, Krita, and GIMP (ACES RRT display filter in the master branch), filmic now found its way into darktable as a new filter written by Aurélien Pierre:

This new module is the log profile + tone curve bundled at once in order to perform a quick, efficient and powerful dynamic-range compression with contrast addition, allowing to remap the middle grey value to a specified value.

Another interesting new feature, added by Heiko Bauke, is blend mask feathering by a guided filter. For parametric and drawn masks, it allows refining mask edge using ligthness, contrast, and blur radius options. If you want technical details on the algorithm, see the original paper by Kaiming He.

Interestingly, not long before that, Alberto Griggio started employing a guided filter in RawTherapee for computing masks in various filters: Shadows/Highlights, Haze Removal (new tool), and Color Toning. The latter also got a new method called "Lab* correction regions" which allows specifying various "regions" of the image with masks and correct for hue, saturation and lightness.

Also, thanks to heckflosse, RawTherapee now also reads Blackmagic native DNG and Magic Lantern CinemaDNG files.

3D and VFX

Lubos Lenco released a new version of ArmorPaint, a PBR texture painting application based on the Armory game engine for Blender. There are a lot of exciting changes in this release, most notably, project saving, unlimited undo support, improved performance, more polished .obj and .fbx importers, initial .blend importer, symmetry painting, assorted bits of color management etc.

The developer still warns that ArmorPaint is beta software and is likely to contain major bugs. Binaries are available on Gumroad for €16. Source code is on GitHub.

Another major release was appleseed 2.0, an open source, physically-based global illumination rendering engine designed for animation and visual effects. For the full list of changes see the release announcement.

Most important changes are: improved random-walk subsurface scattering, initial support for non-photorealistic rendering, newly added post-processing pipeline, adaptive tile sampling, roughness clamping, an Albedo AOV, a Substance Painter compatible OSL shader, and an experimental Intel Embree-based intersection kernel for faster ray tracing. Some of these feature were written by Google Summer of Code 2018 students.

In addition, the team released blenderseed 1.0.0-beta for Blender 2.79 (Blender 2.8 is not yet supported). Following a major revamp of appleseed's Pythin bindings, the team was able to provide interactive rendering within Blender via rendered preview viewport, AOV support, and increased stability and performance.

Quite coincidentally, Blender also got Embree support merged to the master branch. Even without GPU supoport (for now), a scene from Agent 327 featuring motion blur was rendered with Embree in 4m48s using 6GB of memory as opposed to 16m03s and 7GB without Embree.

Among other things, render and output settings are now separated in the Properties dock of Blender 2.8. BlenderDiplom demonstrates that:

Loïc Norgeot released the first public version of BakeMyScan, a Blender add-on for model optimization which is typically usable for photogrammetry and 3D scanning, but has more uses.

Tintwotin is teasing people with a Storyboarder importer for Blender VSE.

Import FCP X files from Storyboarder into #Blender3d #b3d #vse So far code is only POC(& only images and timings are imported) pic.twitter.com/iJnWeYwDuh

— tintwotin (@tintwotin) November 7, 2018

The second pre-release of Verge3D 2.9 is out with HDR rendering pipeline, post-processing effects, and improved support for Blender Eevee.

Simon Thommes released a new version of his procedural cloud system for Eevee. You can find it on BlenderArtists.

Cédric Lepiller shot a new demo of Speedflow, his paid Blender (2.79) add-on that's designed to speed-up the modeling process.

Fahad Hasan Pathik created a cryptomatte plug-in for Natron, available in his fork of the official natron-plugins repository on GitHub.

Among puzzling news of the week, the closing of the Manuel Bastioni Lab project really stands out. Almost a week prior to that, Manuel announced that he needed financial support to keep going with the project. However he doesn't seem to have had planned a media campaign and merely made one Facebook and one Twitter post. The overall reaction of the community and see on Facebook and on BlenderArtists seems to be that he should have planned the announcement better and waited (a lot) longer.

Video

FFmpeg 4.1 was released. The new version features AV1 parser and AV1 support in MP4, 22 new video and audio filters (including lensfun, chromahold, 1D LUT), several new decoders (ATRAC9, IMM4 etc.), AVS2 encoder and decoder, SER demuxer, bugfixes and improvements. For the full list of changes, see here.

Speaking of AV1, here is Nathan Egge from Mozilla diving into the depths of this video compression format at the Mile High Video Workshop in Denver recently.

We also spoke to Alexandru Băluț of Pitivi regarding v1.0 release plans. He clarified that the official roadmap is somewhat outdated, and Pitivi 1.0 is unlikely to be ready by December because of several major issues that remain to be fixed. They do hope to release the last 1.0 RC in December though.

Music and sound

It would be nice to give weekly updates on such a major project as Ardour, but here is the deal. Early on, Paul Davis (lead developer of the project) warned the community that v6.0 will be a major rewrite with probably not many user-visible changes. This is turning out to be a more or less correct prediction.

While the team does push changes that affect workflow and UI, a crazy amount of changes is under-the-hood work. So there can be two-three weeks of "boring" yet important internal changes, then some user-visible activity, then another month of "boredom". These past few weeks, we've been lucky to see some "excitement" next to a lot of "boring" patches.

On the user-visible side, Paul has been doing some work on the beatbox again, taking place in the 'newbbgui' branch. The idea is to give users a familiar (step sequencer) environment for making grooves. If you know Mulab, you might find Ardour's implementation somewhat similar (but definitely not a rip-off). Right now, this subproject is raw to an extreme, you should not expect it to be usable at all, which is why I'm only mentioning the branch for precision's sake.

Meanwhile, Robin Gareus made it possible to record directly into FLAC (configurable) and introduced convolution DSP based on zita-conviolver to Ardour's core, topping it with an example convolution Lua script with a hardcoded impulse response file. Finally, Damien Zammit did some more work on ProTools importing.

On the plumbing level, patches continue to arrive from Ben Loftis of Mixbus fame. Of all Ardour's past and present partners, Harrison Consoles have proven to be the most resilient one.

Tutorials and education

The annual Capitole du Libre 2018 conference is taking place on Novemvber 17 and 18 in Toulouse, France. David Revoy is giving a talk again, but this time it's not related to Krita at all. Instead, he will be talking about keeping FLOSS projects healthy and taking care of communication, website, repository, and community.

Apart from that, there will be a 3D track at the conference:

• Henri Hebeisen will present his add-on called Ropy builder that allows doing game level design with Blender.
• Francois Grassard will give two talks: an overview of new tools in upcoming Blender 2.8 and an introduction to Meshroom, free/libre photogrammetry software.
• A more general overview of changes in Blender 2.8 will be given by Collectif RGBa.
• Julien Duroure will explain how to build a rig with the Rigify add-on for Blender.
• Artist from Les Fées Spéciales studio will showcase their scenography project for the Lodève museum.
• Finally, Mathias Fontmartywill will introduce you to 3D asset creation with Blender and Krita for video games.

Olivier Amrein announced that he will be giving workshops and talk about Blender 2.8 in Shenzhen (China) during the China High Tech Fair, on November 14-18.

UH Studio Design Academy created a short video tutorial explaining how to create an architectural section in Blender using Blender Internal:

Ethan Snell created a tutorial on modeling stylized hair using nurbs curves. The entire project is available at ArtStation.

Check out this Twitter thread started by Craid David Jones where he explains how to use a simple noise procedural set to random for a brush mask to create a nice soft pencil in Blender 3D.

New Godot tutorial from Nathan Lovato: how to detect gestures and horizontal/vertical swipes.

Timothée Giet announced that the second edition of his book in French “Dessin et peinture numérique avec Krita” is now available in stores. The content has been updated to match the feature set of Krita 4.1.1.

Art and showcases

Blender user 曹連澤 created fan art remake of Hilda season 1 opening, with Grease Pencil. He claims he used another program for coloring and editing though. Even so...

Rafael Mendes took the 3rd place in the Epic Pumpkin Contest at CG Cookie with his Blender project:

Leonardo Braz published a new character concept, Paradeigma, rendered with Cycles.

Cherry blossom render by aroyduyao:

New work called "Virtual Reality" by Pablo Dobarro, based on a design by Hiroto Ikeuchi.

Something new and, let's face it, very cute from Louis du Mont.

Exterior of squad car modelled for the detectives, animated with noise offset modifiers. #b3d pic.twitter.com/FzIch0cEzJ

— Louis du Mont (@louisdumont) November 5, 2018

New Krita speed painting by Sergey "grafikwork":

Alyssa May posted some tentacles galore made with Krita and the video of the process.

Assets

Enrico "Ico-dY" Guarnieri published his "Expansion" brush pack for Krita 4.x.

New downloadable interior setting from Lucrea3D:

Week highlights: Inkscape officially releases its computational geometry library and starts exploring multithreaded canvas rendering, Shotcut gets VA-API hardware video encoding on Linux, new free/libre camera matching software is now available, Tracktion Software Co. releases Tracktion Engine under dual GPLv3+/Commercial license.

Graphics

The Inkscape team finally made the first official release of 2Geom, a computational geometry library used by the project for things like live path effects. There aren't many other projects using 2Geom, save for Scribus, and the objective of this release is to aid in fixing that.

Again, more fun is happening in branches. Most interesting recent thing is probably the new branch with a self-explanatory name: multithreadCanvas. Results of this work by Jabier Arraiza should give us some performance boost in certain scenarios.

The GIMP team is toying with the idea of supporting DDS out of the box, as it's commonly requested by the community (indeed, our news post from 2012 on this very topic is among top visited pages regarding GIMP).

They merged the existing yet abandoned gimp-dds plug-in and pushed it into a public Git branch. But since none of the GIMP team developers are into gamedev, it seems that a new contributor would have to step up.

Jehan, who contributed to making the DDS plug-in build again, also moved his work on the updated Bucket Fill tool to the main development branch. So if you are one of those few brave souls living on the very edge of GIMP, you can already try new smart colorization.

Finally, the team created a wiki page that explains where it is with a more complete PSD support, why some related features take time and how one could start contributing.

Michael Mayer of the PhotoPrism project recently demonstrating darktable running in Chrome via Broadway. PhotoPrism is a server-based photo management software written with Go and Tensorflow. It currently uses darktable-cli for conversion of raw photos, but judging by a recent discussion in darktable's mialing list, it will be switching to libdarktable soon.

As for Krita, Anna Medonosova continues contributing UI polishing, most recently improving layout of the color selector and the Arrange docker. And Boudewijn Rempt resumed his work on centralized resources management.

The team also updated the shop which now features a new USB-card with the newest stable version of Krita and several tutorial packs, as well as Digital Atelier by Ramón Miranda.

3D

Blender 2.80 nightly builds now suggest choosing left-click or right-click selection at the start.

#b3d pic.twitter.com/3mnUk4Y9ee

— Blender.Today (@BlenderToday) November 15, 2018

Per Gantelius created a replacement for his earlier project, BLAM, a Blender camera calibration toolkit. The new camera matching software called fSpy works as a standalone software written in Electron and comes with a Blender plug-in.

Video

Dan Dennedy released a new version of Shotcut, major new feature being hardware encoding on macOS and VA-API encoding on Linux. It also comes with an optional Video Waveform docker and a new Spot Remover video filter. See the release announcement for a full list of changes.

A team of passionate Blender users started a series of discussions on blender.community about ways to improve UX of Blender VSE. Ton promised some development time for VSE at the last BCon, there are interesting ideas floating around, and you are welcome to join.

Music-making

The biggest news this week was the release of Traction Engine under the terms of GPLv3+.

The engine is essentially a JUCE module in 115K lines of code. It allows recording and editing both audio and MIDI, time-stretching, pitch-shifting, tempo ramps, MIDI quantization, plug-ins support, automation curves, support for external control surfaces etc.

In a nutshell, it's very nearly all you need for a backend of a basic, usable DAW, except for the user interface which, thanks to JUCE, you can write for Windows, macOS, Linux, Raspberry Pi, iOS, and Android. The source code is already available on GitHub.

Nevertheless, while the code is GPL, some additional commercial licensing requirements are imposed by the company, depending on which one of the support tiers you are on. And this system is a little confusing.

Usually, the more money you pay, the more benefits you get. But both "Education" and "Personal" tiers are free and have equal benefits. There is no benefit to go from "Personal" to "Indie" other than admitting that your annual revenue is between $50 and $200K, at the cost of paying $35 a month for at least 12 months. And everyone except for corporate clients gets just the forum support and has to use the Tracktion logo in their products.

It's also unclear where GPLv3+ licensing applies and how Ardour-like models would work here.

Other than that, it would seem that Tracktion is catering here to the mobile market rather than to the desktop market. The latter is oversaturated, while the former is still growing, with a lot of opportunities for startups. Not having to develop a back-end for your mobile DAW from scratch would be a considerable cut to production costs.

Meanwhile, Jan Lentfer is putting last finishes on his code to support Novation Launch Control XL in Ardour 6. The (eventually upcoming) sixth version will be also shipping with support for PreSonus Faderport 16 and Faderport 2 (the 2018 model) control surfaces, as well as with initial support for NI Maschine 2. However, developers say that Maschine Mk2 support is likely to be most usable in Ardour 7, and macOS/Windows users can already use NI's plug-in to control the device in any DAW.

VCV Rack team announced VCV Host, an upcoming module for loading VST plugins in VCV Rack. Here it is using the Helm synthesizer.

And here it employs the VST version of Dexed, a popular free/libre DX7 emulator, in a patch using CV modulation.

Tutorials and education

Andreas Schneider wrote a hands-on guide for Pixls on creating lens calibration data for the Lensfun library that is used by pretty much every raw convertor on Linux out there. The article covers profiling both lens distorsion, chromatic aberration, and vignetting.

Nick Saporito posted a new GIMP tutorial on changing the color of eyes.

There's a new timelapse video from grafikwork on drawing a landscape illustration with Inkscape.

Ed Tadeo published a new episode of the "Let's Animate" series featuring Krita (compositing and color-grading was done in HitFilm Express though).

Steve Lund posted a detailed video on photoscanning a human face with just free tools — Meshroom and Blender 2.80 alpha.

And you might like checking out this intro tutorial from Ian Pitkanen on using Grease Pencil and Eevee toon shader.

Art and showcases

Weybec Studio released their first short animated movie "Hooka Pooka" rendered with Eevee. Pratik Solanki explained their move from Blender Internal to Eevee and shared the studio's experience in a talk at Blender Conference 2018.

Manuel Grad published a Ketapan commercial, where he was responsible for concept, CG, and compositing, and did everything with Blender except for the comp.

The Japanese Blender community is having fun with cell shaders in Eevee, although judging by automatic translation of the discussion, there is still room for improvement (wasn't it ever so, for anything?).

ようやくEeveeが身体に馴染んできました(笑)
これでセルルックな見た目でも少しは仲良く出来そうです
これでblenderレンダラの時みたいにベイクでテクスチャ生成出来れば完璧なんですけどね… pic.twitter.com/LSPhioZcfC

— ryuma (@kiry0107) November 17, 2018

Yuditya Afandi posted a K/DA Akali bust sculpt made with Blender.

Jonatan Mercado posted another interior design render.

Cloud-Yo created a low-poly render of his little home studio.

Albert Weand posted some new work-in-progress artwork:

David Revoy posted another interesting speed painting. By the way, check out his new small brush bundle for Krita.

There's a new painting by Ritesh Lakra.

Ramon Miranda showed a new example of using his Digital Atelier pack.

Mimi made this project with the intention of learning textures of nature environment.

Trey Bigsby has a vector orc to share with you, made with Inkscape.

It's common for artists to stick with just one 2D painting app for most work, but Yaroslav Chyzhevskyi likes using it all: both Krita, MyPaint, and GIMP.

Yaroslav comes from a town of Vinnytsya in Ukraine, where he got classical training in painting before going digital for some of his work (he still does "analog" painting on canvas professionally).

And his stream on ArtStation indeed features works made with all three major painting applications on Linux (he uses Linux Mint, by the way).

One interesting thing is that he makes enough tiny details when using MyPaint — a program traditionally associated with speed painting.

However, at some point in our conversation in the past, he admitted that GIMP's MyPaint Brush was his ideal tool:

The main advantage of the program is the interface. I can do work of any complexity there.

As you can see, the majority of Yaroslav's paintings online are sea-pieces and rural landscape.

Check out more of Yaroslav's work on ArtStation!

Natron, free/libre VFX compositing software, has been in serious trouble for at least the past year. With dozen of releases, active community, and well over 300 dedicated tutorials in many languages on YouTube, some of them posted as far back as last week, Natron would seem like a healthy free/libre software project. But it's not, and here is why.

First off, there seems to be a doom (apocalyptic much?) looming over standalone free/libre compositing tools. Ramen went on and off for a while and even became a closed software project, until Esteban Tovagliari pulled a final plug on it (he's now a lot happier working on appleseed and blenderseed). It's been 7 years since we last heard of Synapse. And last year, Fabien Castan ended up admitting that ButtleOFX is done for.

So given the release frequency and persistance of Natron developers, one would think we are finally getting there. Unfortunately, nothing lasts forever.

The project was sponsored by the Inria institute and worked on mostly by just two people: Alexandre Gauthier-Foichat, principal developer of the project, and Frédéric Devernay, his mentor at Inria. For a short period of time, Ole-André Rodlie, another Inria employee, helped out.

The collaboration wasn't without its moments. At some point, the duo started developing a falling-out over things like making Natron a clone of Nuke or focusing on original work and new ideas instead. Eventually, Alexandre's contract with Inria ended, and he started to work on a closed-source application.

Frédéric continued maintaining the project and releasing updates until August 2018, but these were mostly bugfix releases, while more serious work had to be done. To give you idea, while Alexandre was working on a private tracking plug-in requested by Inria, these things stood out:

• Natron had lots of memory issues when reading very long video files
• A lot of race conditions were caused due to multi-threading
• A lot of logic in the internal engine had to be re-written

Given that, Alexandre started working towards a more solid rendering engine that would become the staple of Natron 3, but says he never had the time to complete it (the code is in the master branch). His contract with Inria, in his own words, subsequently ended in December 2017.

The most up-to-date GitHub repository is now this one (and the repository of community-contributed plugins is nearby).

Now that neither original developers works for Inria or wants to continue contributing to this project, the question is: how could it have been prevented and where do we go next?

We spoke to both Alexandre and Frédéric about it.

Development of Natron was at some point paid by Inria. I think they paid for the first 12 months, then extended for at least another year. Is that so? Why did they stop supporting it?

Frédéric: Inria did not stop supporting it, since I kept maintaining Natron until I left Inria in September 2018. Inria still owns most of the Natron code (as it was my employer). In Dec 2017, Alexandre Gauthier left the project to start a closed-source commercial graphics software which I know nothing about.

What were the conditions of Ole-André's paid participation?

Frédéric: He was paid as an engineer by Inria to work on his contribution to the Natron infrastructure (source code, build and test systems). Any code he produced was property of Inria, as with the code I produced. The fact that Alexandre still owns part of the code was due to an agreement between him and Inria during his first year on Natron.

Did you try to find other funding sources?

Frédéric: Any user can offer a bounty to solve a github issue (using bountysource, there's a link at the bottom of every issue). Since when I started this in April 2018, no bounty has ever been offered. My hope was that if there were bounties, this could attract new developers, but it didn't. In April 2018, I already knew I would have to quit Natron a few months later.

Has the signing of Contributor License Agreement ever been a problem (that you know of) for potential contributors?

Alexandre: Not that I know of. The lack of contributors is mainly due to the lack of talented developer who want to and have enough skill to maintain such a code-base. Generally they already work in a company or structure of some sort.

Frédéric: I don't know. Nobody ever said "if you dump that CLA, I'll gladly contribute to Natron". People only said that the CLA was bad, without offering any help.

At some point, you had a content team of three people and an online communication guy. What happened to their involvement?

Frédéric: The communication guy (is that Ren D'vila?) was the original Natron website designer, but the web site was since totally redesigned. Ren also wrote that initial "team" page.

Francois Grassard and Jean-Christophe Levet are VFX artists, and may still be working with Alexandre on his commercial project. I had no contact with them since Alexandre left.

Alexandre: Since we were almost always 2 developers maintaining the project, we never had time to focus on communication.

Communication has to be focused on users targeted by Natron. On one end you have a small group of experienced users, who are very familiar to commercial counterparts (Fusion, Nuke) and just wish they could find the same things they are used to, but for free. They tend to push in the direction of maintaining Natron in the way it is (i.e: as close as possible to Nuke).

On the other end you have people learning with Natron, that sometimes find it very frustrating and confusing and don’t understand why we (developers) don’t make it more user-friendly (documentation, tutorials, etc…)

The reason I asked the previous question is that as far as I can tell, at some point you kept producing releases, but media stopped covering your work. It might or might not have something to do with dropping News section on the website. What's your opinion on that?

Frédéric: The Facebook page was still very active, and was actually the only reason I had a Facebook account (which I since closed). I think many people were still using Natron and following Natron development but did not talk on social media, mainly because they were also working for VFX studios (small or medium). Now that BlackMagic Fusion is being stopped, they start crying for help...

Natron's source code is very nearly half a million lines of code large. That could be a bit too much for new contributors to chew. Is the developers' guide sufficiently up-to-date (seeing how it's built from source code anyway) and does it provide information that would help newly arrived contributors to get the hang of the source code structure etc.?

Frédéric: Yes, at least a few developers managed to build Natron on Linux and Windows. I also made sure during the last few months to add sources and documentation for all our build systems (Mac, Linux, Windows) in the Natron sources (see the "tools" directory). This also includes patches for Qt4.

The source itself is hardly documented. This is often the case when using Agile software development.

A lot of the source code is also generated by shiboken (directories Engine/NatronEngine and Gui/NatronGui), so these should really not be counted as human-written source code.

Supposing, someone gets interested in continuing the development. What do you think would be a good place to start? What kind of work do you think would help establishing the feeling of ownership (and, by extension, accountability for the future of the project)? Are the any low-hanging fruits you could think of?

Frédéric: By order of difficulty (from 0 to 10):

• 2: pyplugs, shadertoys (there are still developers for these, see https://github.com/NatronGitHub/natron-plugins)
• 4: write an OpenFX plugin, starting from an example in openfx-misc or from the official openfx examples, for example try to make an OpenFX plugin from a widely-used PyPlug. There are a few OFX plugin developers in the community.
• 5: build Natron locally (on any system)
• 7: compile a redistributable Natron binary (Linux is easier, since we build and ship most dependencies using the build scripts)
• 9: fix a simple Natron bug
• 10: add new functionality to Natron (see issues)

There is a hard slope from building Natron to fixing a bug. But I have just started assigning difficulty levels to Natron issues, to help newcomers.

Alexandre: The number of users that are able to set up a complex node-graph, starting from scratch with a blank page is incredibly low. Most people hit a big wall with Natron, because there are very few presets and guidance for the user.

Usually, the user must at some point link parameters or nodes all over the place or create expressions in a scripting language (like Python). This makes the learning curve of the software really steep, almost exclusively reserved to experienced users.

Whoever is going to take over will have to face a decision:

• Keep it in the same direction.
• Strongly brainstorm the workflow and user experience to attempt to make it better and unique.

The former is easier to do, but Natron will be looked at the same way it had be to this date: a weaker, but free counterpart to commercial compositing software. If it is targeted only towards experienced users, you could say that the best to happen to Natron would be that a high-end studio takes over Natron to steer it even further in that direction.

The latter requires a lot of work with users, designers, and developers. This is extremely expensive, and few open-source applications (without a business backing them) have the luxury to do any market research. Generally development of a software is dictated by developers who anyway do this in their free time and don’t consider it a “real job”.

Is there some sort of a roadmap, or do you think a new maintainer have to come up with his/her own one? Basically, since you have a unique insight into the code of Natron, what do you see as must-do items on the TODO list, if the project would continue?

Frédéric: With the widespread of 4K, people are now finally asking for working proxy support in Natron, which allows working on low-resolution videos and rendering in full resolution. This almost works, it just has to be debugged and tested. We should have the same functionality as in Nuke.

Then, there should be an open-source movie project using Natron. This will bubble up the remaining 2D bugs and help fixing these.

I think support for metadata in the compositing graph goes next. Everyone keeps asking for "3D space", but this is not possible without metadata support. Metadata includes camera parameters, timestamps, 2D (SVG) graphics, 3D meshes.

From there on, a proper roadmap should be discussed, and would probably include that famous "3D space". 3D space should not be a big thing: I think only basic functionality should be there, such as tracking cameras, reprojecting videos using a 3D mesh, rendering simple 3D objects, and it should all be done with OpenGL. Serious 3D stuff should really be done with external software (Blender, Maya...).

Alexandre: The state I left the Natron 3 codebase in is semi-stable and requires fixing in the internal scheduling and multi-threading in the internals of the renderer. Overall, Natron 3 was mainly a re-write of the internal engine (also including the file format) to make it more stable: the whole caching system was re-written as well as better architecturing choices were made to support multi-threaded and GPU rendering.

Sadly, I don’t think there’s any low-hanging fruits in this part, as this requires a quite strong understanding and study of how it works.

One could try to implement new features (e.g: a 3D space) on top of either Natron 2 or 3, but at some point they are going to be limited by the issues that have to be fixed in the internal dependency graph scheduling.

Writing a multi-threaded dependency graph scheduler that have all the constraints that a compositing software requires is challenging and requires full-time developers to maintain. This is the core to any large-scale software found in commercial-grade solutions and this is not something that can be left aside.

In a nutshell, what do you think are the crucial skills for someone working on a compositing application?

Frédéric: I just added these to the Natron's README.md:

• Git and GitHub
• C++. Natron source is still C++98, but switching to C++11 or C++14 should be straightforward if needed Design patterns
• Qt. Natron still uses Qt4 because of the lack of PySide support in Qt5, which should be integrated shortly after Qt 5.12 is released
• Basic knowledge of OpenGL
• Basic knowledge of Python

Alexandre: If the community wants to continue developing Natron, they should know that this is not a task for a developer that wants to help on lazy Sundays. This is a full-time job necessitating a lot of experience and trial & error.

The only realistic option is if they would find a financial structure that has the shoulders to support the needs of such a project, such as the Blender Foundation or any studio with an R&D department that masters C++ development.

It’s very challenging to find financial support for all the time and effort that needs to be put in this project, especially knowing that it is going to yield zero revenue. A full-time developer with taxes in France costs more than 70K€ a year.

Looking back, is there something you would absolutely do differently?

Alexandre: Well, at least now I know that it takes a lot more funding than what I thought it would when I started this project (I was still a student back then).

If I were to make it again open-source, I would try to either collaborate with a strong-standing open-source community (Blender) or with an industrial partner, and try to accommodate with their constraint. Being a team is always better than being isolated: the less dependency of the source-code to a single developer, the easier it is to bring new people aboard.

Frédéric: Get more people involved at the start of the project. A 2-people project rarely becomes a 10-people project, and often dies or stays a 2-people project. A 10-people project has more chances of becoming a stable 5-people project.

Inria's initial 12 months "Boost Your Code" funding was for a one-guy project (Alexandre) mentored by me, but I think this either leads to nothing or to a commercial project.

The other thing I would do differently — work more closely with Blender, maybe work on a Natron-inside-Blender as well as a standalone.