Week highlights: no huge releases, and yet, more work on CMYK support in babl/GEGL, stalled development of Natron gets prime-time attention, LibreCAD 3 is being worked on again, new module for the VCV Rack synth arrives.

Graphics

Jehan Pagès added a new 'Maximum growing size' option to the new Smart Colorization option of the Bucket Fill tool to avoid overflooding enclosed area when using 'Sample merge'. If you feel adventurous enough to build GIMP from the master branch in git and check it out, the Smart Colorization option is hidden as a "Fill by: Line Art" option.

Meanwhile, Øyvind Kolås merged his work on CMYK in babl into the main development branch. Essentially, babl can now use LittleCMS2 to create a babl space from a CMYK ICC profile of an image, then let GEGL composite RGB images on top of CMYK images and output a CMYK image in the original color space. Both CMYK JPEG and CMYK TIFF are supported. See his most recent post on Patreon for details, and updated babl docs for even more details. Getting all this into GIMP might take a while.

Dmitry Kazakov wrote a detailed technical post that provides an insight into his recent work on better HDR support in Krita. What you need to know right now is that due to limitations of video systems on Linux and macOS, all his work related to GDR displays currently applies only to Windows 10.

The G'MIC team is working on a new style transfer function. Looking at preliminary results, people have been wondering if AI is involved. But in mere 69 lines of GMIC code... Probably not!

The Inkscape team did mostly plumbing work, and Jabier Arraiza continued his quest for multi-threaded canvas. In the main development branch, Tavmong Bah added a few more command line options for exporting (e.g. plain SVG is accessible now).

Photography

Aurélien Pierre introduced some improvements to his recently developed 'filmic' module for darktable. He also co-authored documentation on this module with Andreas Schneider. For nitty-gritty implementation details, check out this discussion on Pixls.

As for RawTherapee, the team mostly fixed bugs, improved performance of some operations, and improved UI of Profiled Lens Correction tool and Crop tool. They also added mask blur and ASC-CDL controls to the "Lab* regions" color toning tool.

3D and VFX

Not to steal the thunder from Blender, but the most discussed topic this past week was the situation with Natron, a free/libre compositing application for Linux, Windows, and macOS.

In a nutshell, both original developers left the project. The community is now discussing options to make Natron's development and maintenance sustainable. It looks like they will need to find a new developer first though, as any money they collect have to go somewhere, and it better be pockets of an actual programmer. See our interview with former Natron developers for details.

For Blender, the hottest topic (other than upcoming 2.80 beta, of course) seems to be using NVidia's OptiX AI Denoiser in Blender. There are two add-ons available, one by Maxime Casas and another by Grant Wilk (not yet piblic). And 3DLuver is trying to integrate OptiX support directly into main Blender code. ‏

Jayanam published his Python UI widgets addon that makes it possible to render widgets (a button for now) to the 3D view and bind Python functions to it.

Simon Thommes released his procedural texturing tool called SCATTr for Blender 2.8. You can download it freely at Gumroad, although tipping the developer would be nice indeed.

Andreas Esau released new version of Asset Sketcher, his Blender add-on for painting objects directly into a scene.

Adding new asset distance type for #AssetSketcher line mode. You can place objects by distance or count now. Also improved the visualization of how many assets are projected. Will be released on #BlackFriday on the @blendermarket #b3d pic.twitter.com/WZyRvwbegC

— Andreas Esau (@ndee85) November 20, 2018

Video

The Kdenlive team is planning a bug hunting day for December 2 as part of the work on upcoming release scheduled for April 2019. If you are willing to get cracking with minor Kdenlive development and you know some C++, Qt, QML or KDE Frameworks, this sounds like a great incentive to join.

Tintwotin and samytichadou moved from discussion of possible improvements in Blender VSE to writing some Python code. For now, the changes in his GitHub repo boil down to exposing all VSE functions in the menu and writing some new stuff like Ripple Delete and Toggle All Modifiers.

The #VSE menu of the day! I hope all native VSE functions now have menu entry including reverse, flip x/y. When the patch is accepted, you can download it here: https://t.co/Z0peeSCOAN #b3d pic.twitter.com/lugevwvw0Y

— tintwotin (@tintwotin) November 22, 2018

Finally, the Axiom team started showing first screenshots of the AXIOM WebRemote desktop app that controls their open source modular movie camera. For detailed specs for the app see this page.

CAD

The FreeCAD team announced that v0.18 is so close it now makes sense updating translations for the release.

LibreCAD is seeing some development again, thanks to Florian Roméo, Rupak Bajgain, and Alexander Pravdin. Armin Stebich carries on with his role of the new project maintainer.

Thankfully, development is happening in both the stable branch and LibreCAD_3. The latter is getting UI changes, has spline and ellipse intersection, snapping to the circle center etc.

Reini Urban recently made two updates for LibreDWG 0.6, fixing a number of bugs. Unfortunately, he is still the only active contributor to this project.

Finally, the first stable release of LibrePCB (surprisingly versioned as v0.1.0) is out for the masses. Urban Bruhin encourages everyone to start making PCBs with it and report bugs.

Music-making

VCV Rack, an open source virtual 'eurorack' synthesizer by Andrew Belt et al., is celebrating the first release of VCV Host, a paid module that allows loading VST plug-ins into the rack and controlling them with CV. You don't have to be using proprietary synths like Arturia in the next video, a free/libre synth like Helm or Dexed on Linux will do just fine.

And if you feel bad about having to buy a proprietary module for a free/libre rack from the same developer, know that 80% of Audible Instruments Preview sales between July and September went to the Direct Relief charity.

Paul Davis continues working on beatbox / step sequencer for Ardour 6. There's more progress, but it's still early stages of the groovy thing. Meanwhile, Robin Gareus refactored Ardour to support external encoders for exporting projects. For now, Ardour allows exporting to MP3 and Ogg Vorbis, with configurable settings and export presets, including session metadata. Robin also made the audition synth of choice to load on demand (the process involves loading a 30MB large soundfont into memory).

Ardour now also has the beginnings of support for an experimental LV2 extension called 'Request Parameter' (which is temporarily in a dedicated branch). The idea is that plug-ins should be able to request the host for a file dialog. That is, if your plug-in is written with a UI toolkit that has no file dialog, an LV2 host would provide it.

Tutorials and education

GarageFarm.NET continue their Blender loft interior tutorial series. The 4th episode is modeling the bed.

It's arguable, but timelapses have a certain educational value. Here is one of speed painting in Krita, posted by Johan Brits.

Zulfikar Wakang published a short timelapse of drawing a simple good looking logo with Inkscape (muting the background music much recommended).

Art and showcases

Daniel Bystedt published the breakdown for 'Goodnight Claire', a short animated film created as a test of Blender 2.80.

EriS made a fun demo of procedural ink wear paint in Blender.

Procedural ink wear paint.#indiedev #gamedev #b3d #blender pic.twitter.com/HKe9ZY0Oo5

— EriS (@Erisdraw3D) November 23, 2018

New 'Ariel' render by Pablo Dobarro, with some use of polypaint.

Sylvia Ritter published a new animal-themed tarot card painted with Krita.

David Revoy published the cover for the upcoming third volume of the 'Pepper & Carrot' comic series (all made with Krita and Inkscape) published by Glénat.

And if you haven't seen it yet, check out the new artist showcase we published, with Yaroslav Chyzhevskyi using both MyPaint, GIMP, and Krita!

Today, we are talking to Martin Trokenheim, an illustrator from Sweden. Martin worked as a professional illustrator, abandoned and then rediscovered drawing, and started rocking with MyPaint and then with Krita.

Martin, how did you start drawing?

I started drawing as soon as I could hold a crayon in my hand. It has always been one of my interests. As a 70s-80s kid, I read a lot of comics and saw many cartoons. This inspired me much, and drawing was a way to expand those worlds to make my own interpretations. Early fan art I guess you could call it!

"Ronja, the Robber's Daughter, a couple of years after the events in the book by Astrid Lindgren."

I never really drew any comics myself, I’m not a storyteller, but my illustrations are clearly inspired by comics. Other inspirations were science fiction and role playing. And to be honest, not much has changed since then.

"Roleplaying game Mutant inspired lynx."

A lot of artists I've seen work in more or less same style. You seem to jump between different styles quite a bit :) How does it help you as an artist?

I variate my style because I easily get inspired by other illustrators. There are simply so many fun ways of drawing, and it is worthwhile to explore art. Also, sometimes all I need is to discover a new brush to drive me to do something I haven’t tried before. Or maybe it comes down to that I haven’t settled with my skill. I'm driven by getting better and it includes exploring styles.

"Helping a friend with a thing."

Who are some of the artists you follow and look up to?

Some of my all time favorite artists are Tove Jansson (who created Moomin and made all illustrations), Moebius, and Pierre Christin. But since I started using Instagram, I'm amazed by all talented artists there — both amateurs and professionals. Some of these new acquaintances are CreatureBox, Matías Bergara, and Craig Thompson.

"Practicing some things on Friday night."

Do you do commissioned artwork?

My previous occupation was illustrator, and I worked as that for many years. Unfortunately, my pleasure to draw declined, I stopped draw what I like, I ceased to be inspired. Realizing the unhealthy connection between drawing and working made me stop doing commissions.

"A dear friend of mine @amilcar.ok is an music artist in Argentina. I've illustrated one of his album before and he asked me to help him again with the new one."

Later on, during my career, I started working with other things and suddenly I started drawing again on my spare time. With no one controlling my drawing anymore, the fun reappeared and now I want to reclaim all those missing years I did not draw. Thanks to this, my skills have improved and it’s pleasant again.

"A fake comic cover about Jones after #aliens, hunting bugs with his Android friend."

What has led you to Krita?

Being introduced to digital drawing, I tried every possible software I could find. For a time I used Photoshop and Painter. But I’m also a big fan of free and open source software, which eventually made me a Linux user (I use Ubuntu today).

"Swimmers."

It didn’t take much time to find Krita, and I haven’t looked back since then. Krita is perfect. I'm a former Photoshop user, and Krita felt comfortable to take the step, the user interface is intuitive, and the brushes are a delight to use. Not only that, the regular releases and the responsive developers makes Krita future proof and constantly intriguing.

"Rogen Brigge was one of the most famous Zone scavengers of Hindenburg."

But you've also used MyPaint a lot in the past, right?

I truly love Mypaint, I think their brush engine is superior and drawing is a charm. But I have abandoned MyPaint mainly because of two reasons:

• There are not many brushes to choose from. They are now old and would need a update, just like Krita did this year. And there are no good downloadable ones either.
• I often need to adjust details during my work, move a hand, scale a head, or skew something. Or do some color adjustments. There are no such things in Mypaint.

So everything feels with MyPaint feels like a standstill in 2018. I hope they will develop some day.

"Solar eclipse in Sweden today, but what did we get? Fifty shades of grey, boooh!!! Next opportunity 2039!"

What's your favorite thing in Krita?

It’s fast brushes, even in big sizes. Blending is fast and smooth. Delay is a rare thing, I can concentrate on drawing and wont get stressed by hardware limits. But a new favorite I discovered recently are the guides. They have helped me a lot when drawing regular shapes like cylinders and straight lines.

"I redrew an old futuristic amazon design from 2001."

If there was one single thing you would want Krita developers to do, what would it be?

I often use many layers so naturally the interface is important to work fluent and fuss-free. I think that there are small things and glitches in the layer window that could be improved. But I must say, during the years Krita has improved to an very impressive piece of software, and bugs I’ve found disappear in every new release. So it is probably only a matter of time until this will be resolved.

Some futuristic Valkyrie.

You can follow Martin Trokenheim on Instagram.

Highlights: Blender 2.80 reaches beta status, first beta of Dust3D v1.0 gets released, Krita gets HiDPI support enabled by default, smart colorization in GIMP gets further improvements, first release candidate of darktable 2.6.0 arrives, HISE 2.0.0 lands to let anyone create sample-based virtual instruments.

Graphics

Krita developers launched their own little StackExchange called Krita Q&A. Code-wise, they added an ability to import more than one file at a time, and enabled HiDPI support by default following an earlier fix by Dmitry Kazakov for setting a correct physical resolution to the canvas. Anna Medonosova carried on cleaning up various parts of UI (mostly layers-related).

https://www.patreon.com/zemarmot/Jehan Pagès continues working on the smart colorization feature in GIMP. The Bucket Fill tool where Smart Colorization is a 'Fill by' option, now allows easy color picking just like in painting tools, with Ctrl+click.

News on @GIMP_Official side: the bucket fill tool now allows easy color picking (similar to all painting tools with ctrl-click). This will be available for GIMP 2.10.10.
Here demonstrating with the new smart colorization (notice how the shape is not-closed). pic.twitter.com/rjf52iDDID

— ZeMarmot (@zemarmot) November 28, 2018

Jehan also added two new options, "Maximum curved closing length" and "Maximum straight closing length" which typically should be set to higher values when filling regions on larger images.

Most of Ell's contributions to both GIMP and GEGL last week was about cleaning up the Bucket Fill tool code, making filling/clearing entire layers much faster, especially on huge images, and killing some lag when starting/finishing a stroke in large images.

He also introduced more performance improvements. This time, he changed the way layer groups are rendered. The old tile-by-tile approach was effectively making multi-threading unusable, so now GIMP uses bigger chunks instead. Additionally, he added a very fast allocator for small amounts of memory — basically, a replacement for allocating small buffers on the stack, which is not always safe. This made some blend modes less prone to crashing.

Øyvind Kolås continued his work towards making CMYK a first-class citizen in GEGL and babl. The babl library now supports more CMYK pixel formats (both 8-bit and 16-bit), and in GEGL, linear and bilinear samplers, as well as the Gaussian Blur operation now support CMYK data. He also introduced initial version of a metadata API for color spaces that should simplify overhead code.

The Inkscape team did the first episode of Inkscape Podcast, a multi-person video chat on the progress of Inkscape development.

The team called for community's input on how users make use of Inkscape's command line. Following that, they started adding more actions, including 90° CW/CCW rotation.

Jabier Arraiza also continues his work on multi-threaded canvas rendering. And the 'Split Canvas; feature he worked on in November is now merged into the main development branch and has a few visual updates like a helper widget for swapping before/after views and toggling horizontal/vertical split modes.

Photography

The darktable team made the first release candidate of upcoming v2.6.0 (they usually release around Winter holidays time). If you haven't tracked their progress over the past year, some of the major changes are:

• new module called 'retouch' that makes use of image frequency layers
• new module called 'filmic' which can work as a replacement for both the 'base curve' and 'shadows and highlights' modules
• mask preview to adjust size and hardness before placing the mask
• UI tweaks on the lighttable mode
• more metadata support in the Adobe Lightroom importing feature
• enhanced TurboPrint support
• new sorting filters

This is pretty much a preview, but it's very close to the final version.

3D

The Blender team finally announced the 2.80 beta. There is no actually tarball with 'beta' in its name. Rather, they called whatever they have a beta and continued publishing nightly builds. Pablo made a new video demonstrating major changes between 2.7x and 2.80.

Also, if you are just switching to 2.80 from 2.79, check out this guide by Metin Seven, where UI/UX changes are listed.

Blender 2.80 now defaults to left-click for selection, which is easier for newly arrived users and people who use tablets. People who already got used to right-click, can revert the change in the Preferences dialog.

Text objects now have enhanced overflow control. New options are: Truncate, Scale to fit, and Overflow.

Soft8Soft released Verge3D v2.9 with support for Blender 2.80 and Eevee, an HDR rendering pipeline and radiance HDR textures, new post-processing effects such as bloom, brightness-contrast, and DOF, and more new features.

Arnold Couturier released SceneCity 1.3, a new version of the paid Blender add-on to procedurally generate cities. The new release introduces the concept of non-overlapping items, limited to buildings and roads for now, with more options to be added later. For the documentation and the full list of changes, see this page.

Wybren van Keulen released The Grove 7 beta add-on for generating trees. The new version supports Blender 2.80 beta and comes with lots of improvements like higher-quality wind animation, collections support, prune tool, and much more. Wybren also notes that he helped fixing Alembic support in Blender and contributed to the Code Quest (he encourages others to do so as well). There are no videos for new features yet, but this old demo should give you a general idea what the add-on is capable of:

Another project you might want checking out is Dust3D, another open source (MIT License) 3D modeling software that is now in v1.0 beta phase.

The project seems to be finetuned for game assets creation. probably the most interesting feature is modeling an object from image references in two planes, where the modeler "autocompletes" missing bits of the mesh, as demonstrated in the next video.

CAD

Yorik van Havre posted his monthly update on BIM development in FreeCAD. While we recommend reading the entire post, here is the gist of it.

While improving UX of the BIM workbench, Yorik started revising what dialogs should go to the sidebar and what dialogs should block the 3D view. Another UI change is newly added unit chooser in the top right corner of the main window (works just like the one in GIMP).

The program now also comes with a BIM tutorial. Essentially, FreeCAD reads a certain wiki page from the website that explains creating a BIM project step by step, so you can follow the tutorial while working on a project. The concept should be somewhat familiar to Inkscape users, where tutorials are SVG documents you can draw on.

On top of that, Yorik improved compatibility with Revit. You should now be able to create a project with FreeCAD, export it as IFC, and then open it correctly with Revit.

Also, a new video by Yorik now available, covering how expressions work in FreeCAD, and how you can bind any numerical value to just about anything else.

Video

Tintwotin moved the discussion of his changes in VSE over to devtalk.blender.org, and some changes are now happening in the main development branch of Blender. William Reynish and Julian Eisel note, however, that a larger VSE rewrite still needs to happen to improve both performance and UX (a rewrite attempt was started a few years ago as a GSoC project, but the student failed to deliver).

Dan Dennedy released a new version of MLT Framework, used by project like his very own Shotcut. The changes are pretty much what you already found in the latets release of Shotcut: several new filters and VA-API encoding, plus improved WebP support and bugfixes.

Music-making

One very interesting release we missed last week is HISE 2.0.0 by Christoph Hart. It's an open source framework for creating sample-based instruments on Windows, Linux, and macOS. In a nutshell, you can use this framework to create your own virtual instruments out of samples and use a variety of effects (HISE comes with a fast convolution engine and some FX).

The framework has a fast disk streaming playback engine and allows importing SFZ files. You can generate both VST/AU plug-ins and standalone applications. The new version comes with a new, faster modulation system, MPE support, lots of improvements and bugfixes.

Tutorials and education

Moses Sunny posted a video explainer how to set up studio lihgting when using Eevee in Blender 2.80.

Grant Abbitt shot a new video tutorial on modeling, unwrapping, and texturing to create a basic medieval house.

The second part of that video by Grant focuses on baking multiple textures onto one map.

Pietro Chiovaro shared a timelapse of creating a render of an African village. Most of the time is spent of modeling and texturing the huts.

Nathan Lovato published a beginners' tutorial on using code reference in Godot, integrated into the editor.

Another tutorial from Nathan covers the basics of using darktable.

New timelapse from grafikwork on drawing a carnivorous plant with Inkscape...

...and a new digital painting with Krita timelapse.

Art and showcases

'Isometropolis PD' is a short animation by Louis du Mont — a collection of 3D scenes inspired by TV cop dramas. Some 'making of' is on BlenderArtists. Louis says he's also working on an article that covers more details.

Kenji Aito posted a case study for hard surface modeling in Blender:

The concept of this robot was made "on the fly". Started from a bad draft in a morning : spherical bot... Then added some ideas and functions... The arms were added last for instance. I guess it's some sort of "probe droid" of some sort. The arms and legs can fit inside the main shell for "idle mode". High poly model (for sure) : might go to low poly later for Sketchfab! Most of the pieces were rendered with modifiers (booleans, etc. : non-destructive workflow) : not much issue on the shading anyway, i guess!

Vadim Ignatiev aka James O'Brien posted his new beautiful urban render.

Jetbro-Tull writes:

This is something that started by learning Retopoflow 2. I realized that it is pretty useful for making brand new shapes and meshes from the high poly geometry, and decided to try some different stuff with. Started with a sculpt of a whole fish. I used an old scientific drawing of a barracuda as a reference, but it deviated quite a bit beyond the general shape.

Lee Rosario posted renders of a new concept car), using techniques he learn from the Master Car Creation course on CG Masters. Lee has a thing for concept vehicles, do check out his other work.

Mclelun posted a test render with Eevee, and you know the kind of tests he does: absolutely gorgeous and finished works.

Martin Trokenheim recently posted a new work made with Krita, featuring Astrid Lindgren's Ronja character. For more art, see our artist profile of Martin published earlier that week.

Fun stuff

MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab published their new project called GANpaint. It's essentially an online image editor streamlined to painting or removing several types of objects using a deep network. The paper is available for studying, and source code is up on GitHub.

And yes, apparently, GANs are all the rage now!

Exploring new data painting ideas with GANs and Optical Flow. pic.twitter.com/pn6c1eTPnT

— Refik Anadol (@refikanadol) November 28, 2018

Highlights: NVidia publishes PhysX SDK physics engine as an open source project, GEGL starts converting RGB to CMYK, LibreDWG gets a new release, new versions of Qtractor, QSampler, QSynth, and MuseScore are out.

Graphics

The GIMP team continues adding improvements and working on performance (both on GIMP's and GEGL's side). Michael Natterer added the possibility to disable the embedding of color profiles when exporting to PNG, JPEG, TIFF, and PSD. The relevant exporting options dialogs have a checkbox for that now, enabled by default.

He also cleaned up and merged the patch by Richard McLean, that adds a preference for the default exporting file format. If you only ever export to JPEG and you don't like changing PNG to JPG in every new GIMP session, this option is for you.

Jehan Pagès reorganized the smart colorization code in a way that would make it possible to use the bounded area detection elsewhere, e.g. in the Fuzzy Select tool.

And thanks to Øyvind Kolås, GEGL can now be used as a simple RGB-to-CMYK converter, provided you have a target ICC profile. See this git commit for an example.

David Tschumperlé et al. released G'MIC 2.4.2 with the new Stylize filter that's been getting so much attention lately.

The Krita team updated the code ot use newer version of OCIO (1.1.0, see the changelog here).

Dmitry Kazakov keeps working on proper HDR support in Krita, the dedicated branch now features an experimental way to activate the HDR mode, which only works on Windows for now. Before creating a new document, you need to choose the Direct3D renderer via Angle (Microsoft's API to translate OpenGL ES into DirectX 11), set the display profile to 'sRGB-srgbtrc'. then disable OCIO. Meanwhile, Boudewijn Rempt continues working on centralized resources management.

The Inkscape team was mostly busy with refactoring, but Jabier Arraiza added an X-Ray mode. Essentially, you can look through full-color illustration at the wireframe "beneath", as demonstrated in this short demo we shot for you.

3D and compositing

NVidia Corp. announced that their PhysX SDK physics engine is now released as an open source project (BSD clause 3 license). The source code is already available on GitHub.

They also listed changes in the upcoming v4.0 on December 20. The new version is coming with better overall stability, increased scalability, and the Temporal Gauss-Seidel Solver (TGS), which makes machinery, characters, and anything else that is jointed or articulated much more robust.

Pablo Vazquez posted a new weekly Blender update, this time covering recent changes with studio lights in 2.80 and other tweaks.

Grant Wilk finally released D-NOISE, a denoiser for Blender, powered by NVIDIA’s OptiX AI-accelerated denoiser.

Julius Harling is teasing people with upcoming Graswald update featuring Blender 2.80 and Eevee support.

1, 2, 3 - EEVEE:

Wind animation already coming to #Graswald with v1.15 this year! pic.twitter.com/YdzI6G3Rbt

— Julius Harling (@julius_harling) December 9, 2018

Finally, there is an update of sorts about the situation with Natron. Omar Brown, who maintains project's Facebook group, had a conversation with Frederic Devernay who agreed to agreed to provide some mentorship for new developers willing to take over the project.

CAD

LibrePCB teamed up with Aisler, which means now you can upload and review LibrePCB projects directly on their website and order PCBs and stencils online.

Reini Urban released LibreDWG 0.7. There are no fancy new stuff, the release mostly features API changes and bugfixes, including fixes for memory leaks contributed by DenisPryt. For the full list of changes, see the release announcement.

Video

November update by Apertus is up. Developers of Axiom, a modular open source digital camera for film-makers, report that the initial development of the AXIOM WebRemote app is almost done, AXIOM PhotonSDI plugin module’s printed circuit boards have been received from OSHPark and part-populated, and the team continues prototyping the remote control device. They also built a remotely accessed dark box for Magic Lantern developers.

For details, please read the full report on project's website.

Music-making

MuseScore developers announced a new v3.0 beta release of the famous free/libre score editor. They fixed over 100 issues since the first beta release and improved the importing of v2.3.2 scores.

MuseScore 3.0 will be shipping with an impressive amount of changes, including:

• Better automatic placement of elements, avoiding collisions
• Text styles and more control over text properties
• Temporary staves that appears on certain systems only
• New Implode tool to merges notes in different voices into chords (works diffrently depending on single/multiple staves selection)
• Easy splitting and joining of measures
• Score comparison tool

Rui Nuno Capela released Qtractor 0.9.3. The new version of the audio/MIDI sequencer comes with minor improvements such as wider range for time-stretching and pitch-shifting, auto-backward command skipping the end-od-session marker etc.

Rui also released minor updates of QSampler (LinuxSampler front-end) and QSynth (FluidSynth front-end). Both feature minor tweaks and removal of Qt4 support.

As for Ardour, it's now entirely possible that the team will drop the step sequencer from Ardour 6 (it's being developed in a separate branch anyway).

It's been over a year since v5.12, some known bugs have only been fixed in the master branch (that will become Ardour 6), and while the updated project file format is more or less settled (no guarantee on that though), more internal changes need to be completed. So developers might have to refocus on that and resume working on groove features once A6 is out of the door. This is all yet to be decided upon.

Tutorials

Andrew Price started a new video series on Blender 2.80, beginning with UI changes. Further chapters (so far) cover the viewport and realtime rendering with Eevee.

Texture Haven posted a 50 minutes long workshop on creating a cave design in Blender 2.80.

Mohamed Shahin posted a behind-the-scene article at BlenderNation on his Northern Lights render

If you are interested in archiviz, here is a new each loft modeling timelapse from Victor Duarte Ruiz.

The next episode of "Let's Animate" series by Ed Tadeo features Krita again.

Another Krita timelapse, 'Quiet street', comes from grafikwork.

Nick Saporito posted a tutorial on using Inkscape to create a pattern for, arguably, the most feared winter holiday gift ever — a sweater.

New silent (well, with music) tutorial from MyGimpTutorialChannel covers the topic of creating a double exposure effect with GIMP.

Art and showcases

Skinnyhouse posted on Gimplearn.net about the making of a stained glass panel designed with GIMP.

Atypique Studio published a trailer of the game 'Noara', rendered with Eevee. For more details on the trailer and the project itself, see the post at Blendernation.

Sylvia Ritter painted a new tarot card with Krita.

Iszczygiel shared his showcase of using FreeCAD of modeling and then building a two-cylinder internal combustion engine.

Fun stuff

Optical illusions are as fun as ever.

Stop moving ! You're just a jpg, for X's sake ! pic.twitter.com/HtZoWV8o9p

— Nikos Priniotakis (@nikos_prinio) December 8, 2018

If you follow conversations around the voting for an Adobe Premiere port to Linux, you might have felt some frustration. Indeed, so far, very little focus has been given to supporting free/libre projects instead. But that bears another question: how can we actually support them?

There seems to be a popular notion that you can throw money at a free/libre software project, and that will do miracles. In the recent case of Natron, it's supposed to do miracles even in the total absence of developers (irony intended).

So maybe what we are looking for in a project to support is sustainability? Here are some questions that can help us identify a sustainable project.

Does it have a financial plan? Would it use community's recurring donations or fund itself through education or sales in Windows Store? Does it even accept money through any channel?

Does it scale in terms of human resources by growing a contributive community, or does it have a bus factor of one?

Does it a have an established practice of helping people to do non-coding contributions?

This is something we set out to find out about free/libre non-linear video editors. Please note that we are intentionally leaving out quite a few projects, because no, hell, no.

The many flavors of Cinelerra

The history of Cinelerra and its forks is so convoluted that, recently, it took Igor Vladimirsky 4,742 words to summarize it. (Igor, being a Cinelerra-CV contributor, was also most helpful when answering extra questions for this article.)

A much shorter version looks like this.

Cinelerra-HV is the original project by Adam Williams, started in 2000 on top of an earlier project called Broadcast 2000. He works on it in his spare time. Although Michael Collins, co-founder of the project, tried to get this work sponsored, there is little-to-no information if he ever managed to do that. In fact, back in 2008, Adam stated:

Cinelerra is a lousy program to commercialize. It takes so many codecs depending on so many GPL libraries & it's so heavily dependent on really flaky niche hardware, the support & licensing would be impossible. Good commercial software has few hardware dependencies & can interact with the outside world without requiring massive 3rd party libraries.

When asked, whether the development of Cinelerra was ever funded by any entity, Michael responded:

The credit for the financing of the development of Cinelerra should go entirely to Adam Williams. Trust me, Adam is the hero and everyone else is just hanging on hoping for a better tomorrow, including me. He could have shut it down years ago and no one would be talking about it.

Adam, in return, provided this statement:

Nothing has ever been funded. Video editing on a computer would have to be as big a breakthrough again as it was in 1998. Adobe themselves conceded their last major PC program was Creative Suite in 2010. There's a lot of demand to add cloud services, mobile apps, and new standards, but it's not the enabling technology those of us working on the problem 20 years ago were creating.

Adam is pretty much the only developer of Cinelerra-HV, who only merges patches for features/improvements that he personally likes. He also doesn't have an open source code repository and only publishes changes once a year, as part of a new release. Thus sustainability of Cinelerra-HV remains largely limited.

Cinelerra-GG is a fork by Phyllis Smith and William Morrow aka GoodGuy who initially collaborated with Michael Collins on a Cinelerra-HV based commercial project, but left to work in a more community-focused environment. While earlier Cinelerra-CV project aimed to sync their version to the upstream HV project and thus maintain compatibility, the GG version contains changes that are incompatible with the original HV version. Basically, William rewrites any original code by Adam that prevents new features from being added.

Update (15.12.2018): Phyllis Smith provided this insight:

We are not interested in paid development, but we can assist new developers, and there are programming tasks in our bug tracker which could be done by C programmers.

We think Cinelerra-GG is sustainable, although it is difficult to predict the future. Bill has been working consistently on Cinelerra for 12 years now — the first 8 years for his own personal use, the last 4 trying to get all the mods merged in to a single place with the place being the best version available.

Things could be improved with more help and we have never turned any person or any good mods/patches away. With the advent of the cinelerra-gg.org website, I believe there is now more interest in helping.

The Cinelerra-CVE branch of Cinelerra-CV (where most developments happen) by Einar Rünkaru takes this approach even further by only merging features from HV that he considers interesting:

There shold not be promises about porting something from HV — we port something feature by feature. If feature is interesting, we port. Codebases of the forks are developed too far away from each other — the formal copying from HV does not work any more.

One might say, the three versions of the whole thing are mutually incompatible forks by now.

The Cinelerra-GG website doesn't mention donations at all, and the Cinelerra-CV website only mentions donations in terms of supporting the expenses of running a private server hosting the website and the git repository.

Neither William, nor Einar have expressed interest in sponsored development, they are more interested in patches and new contributors and seem to be willing to help newly arrived developers. Einar, in particular, stated in a private conversation:

Other people who contributed some code to Cinelerra have probably found other tasks. I am left alone maintaining 2 forks [stable Cinelerra-CV branch and unstable Cinelerra-CVE branch]. As there are no new developers or contributors, we can't have any established practice [of mentoring] for them. In the short term, I will continue experimenting with CVE and hope that some new developer who has interest to work on Cinelerra appears.

Lumiera

This semi-forgotten NLE was started as a rewrite of Cinelerra-HV with an intention to remove various limitations that prevented Cinelerra-CV developers from extending the original feature set beyond what Adam Williams deemed useful.

Developers ended up designing everything from scratch, so now there is probably not a single line of original Cinelerra code in Lumiera. Sadly, they also got focused on writing specs and the back-end so much that 11 years later, there is still no usable version of Lumiera.

Much like with Cinelerra, developers are not publicly looking for sponsorship, but encourage developers and non-coding contributors to join.

Blender VSE

Blender's Video Sequencer (VSE for short) has a long track record of being the non-linear video editor of choice even for people who have no use for other Blender's features like 3D modeling, sculpting, texturing, and animation. This is mostly because VSE is extremely dependable in terms of stability — so much that people learn to adapt to its rather unusual UX (slightly less unusual with 2.80, thanks to left-click selection and Spacebar for playback).

There have been multiple projects to improve VSE outside of Blender Foundation, including Blender Velvets by Flavio Soares, Blender Power Sequencer by Nathan Lovato et al., all recent work by tintowtin et al. However, none of them deal with how VSE works internally, and therein lies the problem.

In terms of internal design, VSE is substantially outdated and out of sync with what's going on with the rest of Blender. There was an attempt to modernize it in 2013 as part of a Google Summer of Code project, but it was never completed to a point where merging results would be a sensible idea, and by now one would probably have to start it all over again.

We asked Ton Roosendaal, what it would take, financially and organizationally, to get someone to work on VSE fulltime. This is his response:

We calculate average costs of a developer to be 4-5K [euro] per month, that includes overhead (work space, computer, travel, insurances, taxes, etc).

While at that, Ton also suggests that there are a couple of independent open source video editor projects that would deserve support from video editing enthusiasts much more than Blender.

Update (14.12.2018): Richard Antalík becomes VSE maintainer. This part of Blender hasn't had one in years.

Novacut

This isn't an actively developed project (latest source code changes are from 2016), but it's worth mentioning because the history of Novacut provides an insight into the complexity of creating an actually useful NLE.

Jason Gerard DeRose, Tara Oldfield, and Jeffrey Ballagh started this project around 2009-2010 and used ca. $100K of their personal savings to put into development, then raised another 28K+ via Kickstarter from 802 backers (their first campaign in September 2010 wasn't successful).

Most of the development was happening in dmedia, a distributed object store, because the project was built with the idea that developing a visual story would happen collaboratively over the network, in the real time.

Eventually, the Novacut team ran out of money, significantly cut down on their development time, then ceased development. The front-end never got much further than a prototype with very basic video cutting (without audio support).

It would be easy to call this a death by the back-end overdesign, but the reality is that the back-end does matter and it does take away a lot of time and effort. So much, that today, both Kdenlive, Flowblade, and Shotcut use the same framework, MLT. (So did OpenShot before moving to its own back-end between versions 1.5 and 2.0).

Let's be realistic: $128K is peanuts for a team of several people working full-time, it could only last for a year or two at best. Most NLE projects on Linux are at least a decade old, and even now they are considered not stable or sophisticated enough by quite a few users.

So Novacut team arguably delivered what they promised in the campaign:

If we meet our funding goal, we're confident we can deliver ground breaking collaborative editing, although likely with just a few of our planned editing features implemented.

They just didn't manage to do the rest.

Kdenlive

Kdenlive is often called #1 alternative to proprietary options like Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas Pro etc. (that is, among people who are not die-hard fans of other free/libre NLEs).

In 2012, the team attempted to do 2 months of paid development and raised $7,419 from 230 backers on Indiegogo to fund a major refactoring work by Till Theato. Merging the changes didn't exactly go as planned, and changes started sipping in only in 2015.

Currently, the project is actively maintained, and upcoming 19.04 release is going to be a major milestone, bringing more stability and new editing features. Since moving to KDE's infrastructure a few years ago, Kdenlive follows KDE's release schedule, which means three updates a year with bugfix follow-ups.

The team participates at KDE's annual hacking sprints in Randa (Switzerland) which are sponsored by KDE e.V. Beyond that, there is no direct sponsorship for the project presently, and no one in the team is ready to do paid development. Here is what Vincent Pinon stated last year [2017]:

Getting money is one problem, but spending it is another ;) We don't have anyone who already masters Kdenlive code, and would have available time to work on it for a paid job. This is a thing to think of and discuss with other KDE projects who do so...

Flowblade

Flowblade is one of the more recent projects (if 9 years can be considered recent). It's a rather capable tool, however, Janne Liljeblad is pretty much the only developer. Most other contributions are translations and fixes to accommodate for translations.

When asked about accepting donations in the bug tracker earlier this year [2018], Janne replied:

This has been a task on my private todo list forever, but I have not been interested in pursuing it so far, basically it has been my view that the money received will not be enough to justify the effort. The one time campaigns by OpenShot, Pitivi and that one third thing were all disappointments and have probably shut down that road, but the PayPal button could produce some revenue.

Shotcut

Dan Dennedy (re)started the Shotcut project in 2011 as a complete rewrite of an earlier project by Charlie Yates, having already created Kino (with Arne Schirmacher), MLT (with Charlie), as well as having contributed to Kdenlive. Back when we interviewed him in 2012, he said:

Basically, I missed the type of work I did with Kino (GUI app, not just libs), and I want to give the world an open-source, cross-platform video editor.

Shotcut looked a lot like somewhat modernized Kino in the beginning but gained multitrack support, video and audio effects, more editing features etc. The software is actively maintained and gets monthly releases. We spoke to Dan about the sustainability of the project, and here is what he had to say:

I now make enough money from advertisement on the web site, forum, and YouTube to work on MLT and Shotcut full time. It is not making me rich, but it is close enough to my day job salary. My day job had become a lot of work, and Shotcut was facing some neglect a few years prior as a result. Unfortunately, it does not get much contribution even though I publish SDKs and instructions on the web site. There is one other person who contributes quite a bit, and he receives donations made using the donate link on the Shotcut downloads page.

I believe the revenue is sustainable for the near future. However, I am not confident long term. Since going full time May 2018, I have given Shotcut my full attention to resurrect it from neglect, to keep it thriving while only casually exploring future options. Maybe I can hire someone in 2020 to help with Shotcut while I try to expand in new directions.

OpenShot

OpenShot was the third NLE project to use Kickstarter for funding its development. In March 2013, Jonathan Thomas raised $45K from 1,463 backers to do a complete back-end and UI rewrite. Being the sole developer in the project, he managed to release the first beta only in early 2016, as opposed to estimated time of arrival in Nov/Dec 2013.

Jonathan runs a small business, OpenShot Studios LLC, where he creates custom websites and Android apps for clients (OpenShot is advertized in the portfolio). He also created OpenShot Video Editing Cloud API and put it on AWS Marketplace (we don't know how much revenue it generates for him yet).

Finally, Jonathan receives between $800 and $900 monthly in donations via Paypal and is, with less success so far, on Patreon.

Update (15.12.2018): Jonathan clarified on his future plans for the project:

We have a few consistent developers and contributors, but I am going to spend a lot of energy in 2019 around formalizing our process and team workflow, with the goal of making it easier to contribute. 2019 will also be the first year where I am 100% full time working on OpenShot, so hold on tight! I have a ton of big things planned!

Pitivi

Pitivi is one of the oldest NLE projects on Linux. Started in 2004, it's older than both Kdenlive and OpenShot, both of which feel like they've been around since the dawn of times.

The team is currently working towards v1.0 that's likely to be out early next year. Most of the paid development in the project happened thanks to participation at the Google Summer of Code project (the current most active developer is a former student).

In 2014, the team tried to raise €100K euro to sponsor completion of Pitivi 1.0 and development of new features. They only managed to collect a little over €25K despite providing estimation for various goals. They were supported by 889 users.

Today, Pitivi developers confirm that they could use donations to organize hackfest and even hire interns, but they don't seem to have a plan for paid development.

Update (15.12.2018): Alexandru Băluț  and Thibault Sanier responded that the team is looking into improving the sustainability of the project:

Besides wrapping up Pitivi 1.0, sustainability is the next important thing for us, as it turned out of the discussions at the recent GStreamer conference. Medium term we're doing things that work but will probably not make a huge difference, to keep the buzz going. We'll try our luck with donations, recurrent donations, small fundraisers for specific features. GSoC mentor stipends also add up, but they are a side-effect. Long term is of course what matters. We are working on finding business leads through an investment. We can't give more details for now

In conclusion

So what can you do with all this information? It really depends on where you stand with regards to taking action.

If your view is that only a business-like entity can survive, then we are talking about OpenShot, Shotcut, and Blender being the fittest in the game of evolution. All of them are likely to continue existing and evolving one way or another.

If you are of an opinion that throwing money into development on a regular basis is the way to ensure the future of a project, OpenShot, Pitivi, and Blender are where your dimes will be used most efficiently.

Do note, please, that in both scenarios above you should keep in mind that VSE will always come second as a development priority in Blender.

Finally, if you think you should ensure the prosperity of free/libre NLEs on Linux by rolling up your sleeves and contributing by submitting patches or being helpful in any other way, pretty much any video editor project out there will greet you with arms wide open — just pick your preferred NLE.

Of course, there's the easy way too: just pay for either DaVinci Resolve or Lightworks for Linux and be done with free/libre NLEs on a free/libre platform.

This leaves a few conversations open. One of them is how long other projects can exist and evolve at a perceivably fast pace without donations or a solid plan for paid/sponsored development. So far, it looks like once you've been in this game for at least a few years, you stay there and even manage to get work done. But nothing is ever guaranteed.

And the other conversation is whether funding development of any free/libre NLE is realistic at all. Consider this. The most any crowdfunding effort got in terms of the number of supporters is OpenShot and its 1,463 backers. However, at the minute of publishing this article, 6,148 people voted for the Adobe Premiere port to Linux (voted, not paid for, mind you).

Essentially, we are looking at a tiny fraction of the overall market. But it's up to us to take action and figure out how far we can actually go.

Today we are talking to Ngan Pham, a young artist residing in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. Ngan extensively uses Krita as a freelance concept artist and illustrator.

Hello, could you please tell a little bit about yourself and your background in art?

My name is Ngan Pham, and I'm from Vietnam. I've been working in the art industry for 5 years. Right now, I'm a fulltime freelance artist working on concept art and illustration. Most of the things I've learned through the years are from either self-taught or through older artist friends of mine.

Submission to the Feudal Japan challenge at Artstation

What were your main sources of inspiration while working on the submission to the recent Feudal Japan challenge where you got the honorable mention?

So lucky for me that I got a trip to Japan right before the challenge started. So while I was in Japan, I gathered a lot of photo references, and I bought some books about samurais there too. So when I got home and started on the project, I had a full image of what I want to provoke and the story behind it.

Submission to the Feudal Japan challenge at Artstation

Regarding the Environment series, how often do you participate in art workshops? What are some of the best insights you got from various workshops you attended?

I've come to some life drawing classes near my location and also participated in some flower workshops, ceramic workshops etc. From which I gathered a lot of information about how things work and also gave me a lot of creative inspiration. Besides that, I also tried my best to reach out more to nature and see the beautiful things around as they say "nature is the best teacher".

The long journey project

If you have artists you look up to, who would you mention in the first place?

Hm, this is definitely a really hard question since I have so many artist heroes. But one of the artists whom I look up to the most is Xavier Houssin (a.k.a xa-xa-xa on Deviantart). He was one of the first artists that I discovered, his works have influenced me a lot since then.

Alice in Wonderland, CDC submission

When and how did you discover Krita?

I discovered Krita for the first time in 2015. Before that, I used another program, but then I decided to look for something new to try, I tried so many art programs that are recommended online, but I stopped at Krita.

Fanart for Aria

What do you like about Krita most?

One of the things I like most about Krita is the Freehand Path tool, honestly, I really am addicted to that tool. I use it to fill my selections and sometimes use it for coloring, it helps a lot in the process.

The autosave of Krita saved me many times also. And I'm also hoping for an improvement in animation since I'm into that too!

Space Pirate, CDC submission

Is there something in particular that you think Krita could improve?

I'm wondering if this is my PC's problem or not, but I encountered Krita being laggy when drawing in big size, and sometimes the program crashes.

Don't worry kid. 'Tis but a flesh wound!

You can follow Ngan Pham on Artstation.

Highlights: a new Kdenlive release, new maintainer for Blender's video sequencer, lots of Blender add-ons updated, a new release of Krita, new features in darktable and GIMP, first public release of the reference AV1 decoder.

Graphics

GIMP got a usability improvement from Ell, that deals with common cases like "Why can't I paint on a layer?" and "Why can't I move my layer?". In other words, if you forgot that you locked a layer (or channel, or path) from changes, GIMP will now blink around the row of lock buttons, as well as around the status bar with a warning message, drawing your attention towards the area of interest.

Similarly, if you switched to moving selections, forgot about it, and now can't move a layer, GIMP will blink around the row of buttons where you choose what you move: layers, selections, or paths.

Krita developers released a bugfix update as v4.1.7. It also comes with HiDPI support enabled by default, improved Layer Styles user interface, and more. In development news, they now have the first HDR-enabled build of Krita working. For now, it's only supported on Windows 10.

Photography

The darktable team published another v2.6.0 release candidate. The final release usually happens around Xmas time. Meanwhile, Aurélien Pierre is still busy adding new stuff. The first recent change is adjusting the color balance tool to make it work even more like a traditional color grading tool in video production (it already operated on lift/gamma/gain and slope/offset/power from Color Decision List). See this discussion for more details.

Aurélien also added a new experimental tool called tone equalizer, currently available in his own branch. Tone equalizer allows doing selective exposure adjustments in linear RGB for blacks, shadows, midtones, highlights, and whites. The current implementation is simplistic and unoptimized and takes quite a while to compute every change (using it on an i5 right now will probably frustrate you). This will be taken care of in due time.

Ingo Weyrich contributed a bunch of improvements to LuminanceHDR: speed-ups for several tonemapping operators and fixes for working on large images (e.g. 100Mpx).

Andrea Ferrero introduced basic OCIO infrastructure to PhotoFlow. It's now possible to insert the "Filmic Blender" OCIO transform between the output of the processing pipeline and the conversion to the display device. For more information, see the related thread at Pixls.

3D

The Blender Development Fund welcomed the 1000th backer and is now at almost $23K a month from almost 1,100 supporters.

Grease Pencil in Blender got a new Curve tool that you might find quite useful for inking. Here is a quick demo cooked up by Antonio:

Gottfried Hofmann shot a video explaining some new features in 2.80: "visual alerts when changing a keyframed property, the hostname of a machine as metadata in rendered images, access to material settings from the node editor and a new primitive for the Grease Pencil: The Arc!". ‏

Last but not least, during a discussion in the main developers' list regarding OpenGL in future versions of macOS, Ton Roosendaal pointed outhttps://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2018-December/049718.html) that Vulkan is likely to be future for Blender.

Mikhail Rachinskiy released a new version of Commotion, a motion graphics add-on for Blender. This version features a proximity effector, a complete rework of the animation offset algorithm, new offset methods (Random and Multi-Offset by proximity), Animation Link/Copy (copying all properties for NLA strips),
Complete rework of the offset algorithm. Jimmy Gunawan did a long-ish review of Commotion just a few days ago.

User animate1978 on GitHub started a fork of Manuel Bastion Lab, called MB-Lab. The fork has had three releases so far, including changes such as:

• More layers of SSS for skin shader changes and subdermal tissue simulation
• Shader nodes are now grouped into easy-to-edit skin and eye shaders
• Newly added basic procedural pore and skin cell bump map
• Newly added Freckles generator with a basic feature set

Developers are welcome to join the project.

Marco and Joseph from 3D Wolf released a new version of their add-on called Real Camera that provides a high-level control over camera settings, operating on Aperture, Shutter Speed, and ISO. Version 2.2 allows animating values in real-time and features newly added Autoexposure button. Here is an older video of the project.

CAD

Reini Urban who works on LibreDWG and other projects like cperl and parrot is now on Patreon.

Video

Last week started with somewhat blown out of proportions news that you can now vote for a port of Adobe Premiere for Linux, retaining proprietary status. Basically, Adobe said they won't do it, but you can still give your vote to this idea if it's important for you, and then maybe they'll eventually consider it.

The idea of giving money to Adobe rather than supporting existing free/libre projects didn't sit well with us, so we researched the topic of free/libre non-linear video editors sustainability and posted our results in a long read.

Meanwhile, Kdenlive 18.12 was released with bugfixes. The team also reminded that results of refactoring are expected in April 2019 and revealed ongoing work on UI redesign.

Blender's Video Sequencer finally has a new maintainer, Richard Antalík. He already started working on internals, implementing frame prefetching. One test shows patched version of 2.79 going at full 25 fps for a FullHD ProRes video as opposed to 5 fps in the unpatched version of Blender.

Meanwhile, Peter Fog (tintwotin) and samytichadou continue making VSE more usable. There's more menu rework, a Jog/Shuttle command ported from KinoRaw (an early VSE add-on from friends of Apertus), and Extend to Fill command, and more.

'Extend to Fill'- New function in VSE Reworked. Get it here:https://t.co/vWGdni4HzX #b3d #vse #Bender3d pic.twitter.com/89DEDfeMdu

— tintwotin (@tintwotin) December 10, 2018

And if you just can't get enough of VSE extensions, Morevna Project reposted the add-ons list made by the VSE group on Facebook, and it looks like a very nearly complete one.

Jean-Baptiste Kempf (VideoLAN) announced the first release of dav1d, a reference AV1 decoder. The project now covers all of the specification and features of AV1, including 12-bit precision and chroma subsampling.

Tutorials and education

MyGimpTutorialChannel posted a new video that shows how to make dodging and burning with blending modes and painting on masks. As is usual for that channel, the video displays GIMP's user interface in English and has no narration, but it's not a timelapse, so it's very easy to follow.

Davies Media Design explains in detail the use of the Text tool in GIMP.

This is, strictly speaking, not just an Inkscape tutorial. Patty Anne details her trip from vectorizing a bitmap logo with Inkscape to cutting it on vinyl to sticking the resulted sticker on a piece of jeans fabric with an iron.

New timelapse from grafikwork is up, showing how to draw a glass of wine, for your Santa doing B&E.

If you are on Twitter, follow Jan van den Hemel who posts daily Blender tips.

The Chocofur team started a Blender 2.8 Absolute Beginners Course, freely available on YouTube and currently including 10 videos.

Blendernation posted an interesting article by Isabelle Grandguillot, covering the creation of stylized Jamie Fraser character from the Outlander series (Isabelle participated in the Outlander project).

Paul Caggegi, who is on Patreon for funding his Blender tutorials, explains using the Grease Pencil tool while creating a character turnaround sheet.

GarageFarm.NET Academy posted a new Blender video about modeling a rusty lamp. It's part of a step-by-step guide to creating an industrial-styled loft.

Nathan Lovato and his GDquest team continue publishing Godot tutorials. In the new one, Guilherme runs you through the party, enemy formation, and select system in their turn-based RPG.

Tux Designer posted a tutorial explaining how to reverse a video clip in Shotcut.

Art and showcases

VFX Geek did a video overview of Blender being used in the production of feature films and animations such as Walking Dead, The Man in the High Castle, Hardcore Henry, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Terminator Genisys, Warcraft, Next Gen.

Vasyl Pidgirskiy posted a render of different seasons for one rural environment, with a short animation.

Rebecca shared a painting of David Suchet's Poirot made with Krita using Ramon Miranda's Digital Atelier pack.

Ewerton Ruth uploaded his vision of Cthulhu, realized with Krita as well.

Just a day or two after posting the story on the sustainability of free/libre non-linear video editors, I ran into a new project called Olive, by MattKC. It's not like we didn't already have enough NLEs to choose from. But here is why I think it's worth looking at.

First of all, I wholeheartedly admit I was very much skeptic about Olive, because I already know it takes years to make a usable video editor. And I was double-skeptic, because Matt targets pro users (he specifically mentions a few commercial products), which is a bold move.

Let's be honest: noone will judge you (much), if you provide a basic feature set and target the iMovie demographic. OpenShot did just that, and for that user base, it's a fantastic piece of software. I've heard parents lamenting on other NLEs while commending Jonathan Thomas on his project because their kids grasped the basics of using OpenShot in no time and could get school projects done easily.

However, as soon as you try to play in the pro (or even prosumer) field, every single feature that is missing, or isn't complete, or doesn't work exactly as in other apps is a Major Issue That Should Not Be Neglected.

My use for NLEs is fairly simplistic: a few intro clips with basic animation, crossfades, cutting, exporting. I don't do color grading (at least, yet), so I've no use for 3D LUT or ASC CDL (both currently missing in Olive), and I don't record myself doing crazy stunts, so I don't need stabilization (Olive builds with libvidstab, but doesn't seem to use it yet).

So I expect an NLE to be stable, provide sensible cutting tools and basic FX animation, have working snapping between clips, and export files that open just fine. I don't even expect an NLE to have advanced audio features, because I have Ardour for that (Resolve users can start laughing now).

To figure out if Olive is any good for me, I just tried to build a simple project: a few intro/outro clips with basic animation, several screencast records, an audio voiceover. Here is what I found out.

The good

Olive is geared towards users who rely on shortcuts: all editing tools and common operations have them, and you can configure your own shortcuts (UI for that could do with more work though). This is great because it's a huge productivity booster.

For intro/outro sequences, it has solid color and title generators. For cutting, it has tools like Razor, Ripple, Slide, and Slip.

Snapping is excellent: the visualization is completely obvious, and it just works between clips, playhead line, and markers (more on that below).

Need a picture-in-picture? No problem: place a video clip on the timeline, scale it down and move it where you need it (you can even do it directly on the preview). Need two side-by-side clips? Just use the clip effect.

More than that, effects are mostly hardware-accelerated (GLSL) and have animatable properties (and you can toggle between linear and smooth interpolation, though no F-Curves yet). The video monitor is hardware-accelerated as well. This means you get very reasonable fps at video playback in realtime even with several effects applied.

Olive also supports images such as JPEG and PNG. If you do watermarking of your clips, this is a no-brainer: import a PNG file of your logo and put it on top of all video clips, alpha channel will be taken care of automatically. You can also control opacity and choose between several blending modes (Normal, Overlay, Screen, Multiply).

The bad

Olive has named markers that I could see myself using for planning/structuring a video, but the feature is somewhat limited. Basically, you create a marker on the ruler, you give a name you won't see again (not visible on the ruler), you can move it around, and then you can snap clips to it. That's it for now.

The program doesn't crash all the time. In fact, I've only seen 4 or 5 crashes for overall ca. 8 hours of use. It's a bit of bummer, though for alpha-quality software, that's not too bad. And it has functional autosaving and crash recovery, although out of two times I tried it, it segfaulted once. Oops.

The ugly

There are quite a few sorely missing things that range from basic to advanced. Most of that is the direct outcome of being alpha-quality software that's merely a year in development.

• Proxies. Olive doesn't do that yet. Given that a lot of app's features are hardware-accelerated, this is no biggie for small projects. You will totally need this for large projects though. Matt says he's in the middle of designing proxy support at the moment.
• Thumbnails for video clips. If you have human-readable names for every file, a list will work. But most of the time you will have footage directly from the camera, which means files with names like MVI_6059.MOV. So you would need previews for quicker navigation. This isn't available yet. Feature request filed.
• Dependable FX rendering. Effects in the video monitor mostly work fine, but the rendering of blurs is currently badly broken (at least, on my simplistic Intel 620). Bug report filed.

That said, my short history of communicating reports to Matt suggests the last two issues will be taken care of very fast.

In conclusion

At this very early stage of development, Olive doesn't do anything other video editors don't do. And it has a few stubs in the user interface where features will show up eventually (masks and audio recording are the ones I noticed, there may be more).

Olive also doesn't depend on any established backend like MLT and, as far as I can tell from squinting at the code, doesn't seem to have one of its own. This may be a limiting factor for future development.

In a conversation, Matt confirmed that pro-oriented features like CDL, rec2020 support, control surfaces support etc. are all acknowledged and planned features. He also mentioned that his focus is currently on things like masks, effects, stabilizers, which, he thinks, would likely cater to a more prosumer crowd like indie filmmakers and YouTubers.

You can easily build a case against the project (if that's the kind of thing you do) by saying you can get the same (and more) from Kdenlive or FlowBlade or any other NLE of your choice.

And yet, it has a bit of an early darktable's vibe. See, back in 2009, even before the version 0.2 release (the first public one), darktable had a tiny code base and very few tools, some of which looked non-traditional as hell. But you could import your raw files, do basic editing, and output files you could open with something like GIMP for further editing. It looked like it was designed to get stuff done from the get-go. That's the impression that Olive gives me right now.

If you are interested to take it for a spin, I recommend building it from source code rather than using the first official build from late November '18. Thanks to the low base effect, Matt is adding new stuff and fixing bad stuff fast enough for you to be relying on builds from Git. While at that, make sure you switched to the 'alpha' branch to get the latest and greatest.

Oh, and Matt is on Patreon, so if you like Olive enough, you know what to do.

Given the holiday season, this is a somewhat shorter recap. Highlights: Inkscape gets fallback for SVG2 features, GIMP team merges smart colorization for the next stable release, Manuel Bastioni Lab add-on for Blender gets a community fork, Shotcut and Olive video editors get respective updates.

Graphics

New smart colorization feature in GIMP, aimed at cartoonists and illustrators, is now part of upcoming GIMP 2.10.10, currently expected early next year. This is a new option of the Bucket Fill tool, developed by Jehan Pagès based on the original algorithm by David Tschumperlé for G'MIC. The idea is to be able to fill areas that are not completely closed.

Kevin Stoffler contributed a patch that works around the design decision of GTK+ developers regarding drop-down lists. Instead of always showing the currently selected item of a drop-down list under the cursor (at the cost of showing a lot of blank space above), GIMP now renders the whole list in a much nicer way (while losing the item selection). The patch was applied to both unit selection and blend mode selection. Smaller UX changes involve things like keeping aspect by default when scaling with the Unified Transform tool.

Most of the work on Krita this past week was bugfixing and fixes in the HDR support code (a separate development branch for now). On top of that, Eoin O'Neill simplified changing the background color in newly created documents by making it possible to create the background layer as a fill layer from the ground up. This is a new option in the New Document dialog on the Content tab.

Kenneth Evans published KritaBrushInfo, a C# application for Windows that reads Krita brush configurations and displays them in a readable form. For more infor, see the project's page.

Inkscape is GTK3-based in the development branch, so it's possible to add some features specific to touch screen displays. Thomas Holder did just that: he implemented pinch zoom gesture support.

Most important changes, however, are coming from Tavmjong Bah who landed his SVG 2 fallback code that makes SVG2 feature supported in browsers that only understand SVG 1.1. These features are related to markers (there is infamously no color auto-update in 1.1), auto-wrapped text (will be broken into pieces for SVG 1.1), mesh gradients (will use polyfill javascript code). For details, see Tav's post on Patreon.

Raph Levien published new prototype code based on his earlier Spiro splines work (currently used in Inkscape and FontForge and available in GIMP's GEGL library). The new spline solver is more robust, as in not using every opportunity to make crazy abstract art patterns, and it makes a lot more smoother transitions from smooth to curved sections. Raph says the inspiration comes from κ-Curves by Zhipei Yan et al., currently used in Adobe Illustrator's Curvature tool. You can find out more in his detailed post on this new project.

Photography

RawTherapee 5.5 was released with heaps and heaps of new features and improvements: New Shadows/Highlights, Haze Removal, and Soft Light tools, contrast threshold mask that divides an image into areas of high and low detail and is available for sharpening and microcontrast tools, new color toning methods, and a lot more. See the release announcement for the complete list of changes.

Meanwhile, the darktable team is finalizing version 2.6 and is likely to make the release on Christmas Eve. The list of changes is shaping up to be no less impressive than that of RawTherapee.

3D

All main Blender 2.80 development is now happening in the 'master' git branch. This is another milestone towards the final 2.80 release, although there's still so much to do.

MB-Lab (a community fork of Manuel Bastioni Lab) got yet another release. The new version introduced a shading network based on Principled BSDF for skin, eyes, and teeth. Skin editor has been updated accordingly.

Jacques Lucke released test builds of his Animation Nodes 2.1 add-on for Blender 2.80, and Gottfried Hofmann shot a video explaining how to install the add-on and make a quick animation project.

Video

Dan Dennedy released Shotcut 18.12 with newly added video histogram scope, new Levels video filter, three specialized masking filters instead of one old filter, other improvements and bugfixes. See release announcement for more details.

MattKC made another alpha release of Olive, new non-linear video editor we covered last week in a dedicated post. Changes from the first public release include (but are not limited to): faster exporting, zooming and scrolling in the viewer, fixes for Unicode filenames support, rendering blurs on Intel GPUs, and more.

As for Blender VSE, Richard Antalik, the new maintainer, is getting really busy. Last week, he fixed the FPS meter not showing in VSE and started going through patches submitted by Olly Funkster and Justin Moore in the past: font selection to VSE text strips, Ken Burns effect (panning and zooming), VSE playback rate control, and others. He also started collecting ideas for a new timeline manipulation API (reusing OpenTimelineIO is one of the ideas).

Meanwhile, Peter "tintwotin" Fog reworked the Razor tool.

New VSE Reworked Feature: Split Mode... which works a bit like Razor mode in other NLEs. Get the latest here: https://t.co/vWGdni4HzX #b3d #vse #blender3d pic.twitter.com/tFKxguhd1L

— tintwotin (@tintwotin) December 17, 2018

Music-making

The VCV Rack team posted project news about future development plans. Essentially, they are stopping VCV Bridge development and refocusing on the VST version of VCV Rack, which will be paid-for software (ca. $99). It's worth noting that we are talking about the VST2 version here, so Ardour users will be able to enjoy using the synth. Development might take another year.

VCV Rack will continue existing as free (BSD/LGPL) software, and the team doubled-down on an assumption that this will not be the case, by referring to the mission statement that boils down to this: no one should be excluded from learning a musical instrument, having a virtual eurorack synth instead of a hardware one removes a huge chunk of the price tag, free/open source model ultimately benefits both consumers and the Rack platform, so the team is committed to keeping it open but needs to raise funds to continue development, hence the paid version.

The Ardour team seems to have refocused on the master branch. They've been mostly doing further cleanup and fixing bugs, but there's time for little new features. LV2 plug-ins' presets can now have descriptions/comments, and Ardour now has a new LV2 option/extension. The extension allows plugins that need threads to process data to configure their thread priority to not interfere with the host's process threads. Additionally, pitch-shifting quality was slightly increased.

Tutorials

Martin Klekner started a new series of Blender tutorials with one on making an ancient Greek lamp asset (texturing is done in Substance Painter though).

Pratik Solanki et al. wrote a 'Behind the scenes' post for Blendernation explaining some aspects of creating the 'Hooka-pooka' short animated movie.

New GIMP tutorial from Nick Saporito explaining how to wrap text around circle.

This is 'Mountain village', a new timelapse from grafikwork.

Open Source Bug explains using proxies in Shotcut.

Art and showcases

George Kim wrote a post for Blendernation introducing CEREBRUM, a sci-fi animated web series made with Blender, World Machine, and Adobe After Effects.

Rizky Djati Munggaran posted his wedding invitation made entirely with Inkscape.

New animal-themed tarot card by Sylvia Ritter:

Rytelier, known is in the Krita community for his Shapesia brush pack (among other things), posted a new painting frorm his fantasy world building project.

Assets

Developers of iA Writer released the iA Writer Duospace variable typeface under SIL OFL 1.1. The typeface is a modification of IBM Plex. See their detailed post for more info on design considerations.

Holiday warning

We are heading to winter holidays and will return to you in January.

The winter break highlights: MuseScore 3.0 release, Blender turned 25 years old, Google joined the Blender Development Fund, lots of improvements in FreeCAD, GIMP, and Olive, annual reports from a variety of projects.

Graphics

The GIMP team made a quite good use of their winter break (if non-stop coding is your idea of a good time).

Jehan Pages made some improvements in the smart colorization code and added a new feature that uses Alt + middle click combination to switch to a layer by clicking on its pixels and cycles through layers in Z-order while doing so.

Ell introduced quite a few performance improvements that speed-up things like the anchoring of floating selections, the split preview, and the Warp Transform tool. The general idea is to reduce the cached area to just the region of interest (it's more than that though). Another improvement, this time in GEGL, speeds up the selection inversion.

Michael Natterer added basic on-canvas GUI for GEGL-based circular, linear, and zoom motion blur filters to simplify tweaking settings.

The DDS plug-in is now in both development branches, so GIMP 2.10.10 will be shipping with initial DDS support. The team insists, however, that this is done to encourage future contributions from people who are particularly interested in this feature. There are still no game designers in the team presently, and a recent discussion on Twitter suggests that DDS gets abused by different applications and use scenarios.

Finally, the team released its annual project report covering changes in both GIMP, GEGL, and babl.

Most of the work on Krita during the winter break was bugfixing. On the HDR front, a dedicated branch of Krita now supports the loading and saving of HDR PNG files (automatically converted to Rec. 2020 linear on loading, and to p2020-pq 16-bit space on saving). Also, this:

We've just been watching a HDR animation made in Krita, in Krita. The animation was made when we only had HDR painting, not display. The difference is huge! But there's no way we can actually make a screenshot or a photo that shows the difference :-(

— Krita Painting App (@Krita_Painting) 2. Januar 2019

Alexey Kapustin resurrected his patch from 2017 adding equiprobable dithering for gradients (basically, adding noise to suppress visible banding) and started building more features around that. This is currently in a dedicated branch.

There hasn't been any interesting user-visible changes in Inkscape over the past couple of weeks. Most of changes are plumbing work, bugfixes, refactoring and suchlike.

Annual project report for Krita was published at Christmas time. Also, check out new Krita themes by David Revoy. While at that, have a look at Enrico Guarnieri's "Expansion" Brush Pack for Krita— it's getting regular updates, with more presets, brush tips etc.

Alessandro Rimoldi also posted an annual report for the Scribus project, highlighting v1.5.4 release, new Scribus book in French by Cédric Gémy, new Scribus Templates website etc.

Synfig developers keep posting weekly updates on Patreon. Some of the recent changes are: render progress bar, drop-down list without the blank space (initially done in GIMP), settings for default background color for projects and transparency color for the Preview window.

Photography

Since releasing v2.6.0 on the Christmas Eve, darktable developers didn't really have to pick up the pace again, they barely stopped programming at all. Pascal Obry introduced a lot of improvements to the Piwigo online albums support. And there have been quite a few bugfixes and overall improvements, including these:

• More colors customizable through CSS
• The ability to specify a style to be applied on export
• Varios filmic module improvements

And then there are always a few interesting new pull requests. One, also by Pascal, makes the lighttable faster on HiDPI displays. Another one, by Rikard Öxler, adds a Survey/Exposé lighttable layout where you can view just the image selected in the filmstrip.

And yet another one, by Aurélien Pierre, adds film emulation presets (generic film, Kodachrome, Kodak Portra NC, Kodak Ektar) to the filmic module.

Development of RawTherapee is now mostly in the bugfix mode since the major update in December, but there's ongoing work in a dedicated git branch to improve HiDPI support.

Franco Comida added a new tonemapping operator to LuminanceHDR. This time it's an implementation of Dani Lischinski's 2006 paper called Interactive Local Adjustment of Tonal Values. Original code comes from the Piccante project by Francesco Banterle.

The implementation is rather simplistic since LuminanceHDR does not allow localized editing—which is the whole point of the original research. For instance, the demo application the researchers created allowed localized tonemapping by painting over the region of interest (the software would then build an exposure map based on that). Localized blurring and white balance correction (think fixing natural and artificial lighting on one photo separately) were interesting byproducts.

3D

Last week, Blender turned 25 years old. Here is a video of Ton Roosendaal talking about it.

And you can think of his 'Blender top 15 highlights of 2018' list as of a kind of an annual report too!

Blender Foundation announced projects sponsored by the Blender Development Fund. And Google signed up for Corporate 'Silver' membership of the Development Fund.

So, full-time core Blender developers: Bastien Montagne, Brecht Van Lommel, Campbell Barton, Clement Foucault, Jacques Lucke, Sergey Sharybin. Part-time developers: Dalai Felinto, and Philipp Oeser.

The plan so far is to finalize the release of 2.80 some time during Spring 2019. Possible work for Q2 2019 includes overrides and asset management, better support for large scenes or complex environments, modifier nodes, physics & real-time mode (for designing simulation and baking), more work on Cycles.

MB-Lab, the fork of Manuel Bastioni Lab (Blender add-on for procedural characters generation), got a new release. Version 1.7.0 has initial support for Blender 2.80, scalable SSS in the shader network, new eye texture map for all realistic characters, new bump map for female and male characters.

Kjartan Tysdal also updated his KnockOff add-on for Blender 2.80. The add-on provides an easy and straightforward control over the bevel modifier, works in both Object and Edit modes, and supports multiple objects.

Lorenz attractor is getting some interest:

The Lorenz Attractor looks like a Chinese whip master ❤️

The wiki : https://t.co/c2ZR2ofBJJ
The blend /script is here : https://t.co/CyRqOXWXi3#b3d #python #whipmaster pic.twitter.com/7cFZhjOZDp

— Nikos Priniotakis (@nikos_prinio) January 5, 2019

CAD

LibreCAD is now in an interesting situation where the development of the v2 and v3 branches (separate git repositories inside the same project) is done by almost entirely different groups of people.

For the past several weeks, most work in the v2 repository was done by Alexander Pravdin and Armin Stebich, who fixed various bugs.

Meanwhile, Florian Roméo, Rupak Bajgain, and Guruprasad Rane did the majority of the work on LibreCAD 3, where essential foundation work is still being done (hence you shouldn't be expecting a release any time soon). So there's both "boring" low-level development and user-visible changes, the latter being 2-points and 3-points creation methods for circle.

Yorik van Havre posted a new monthly report on his contribution to FreeCAD. Notable changes:

• Support for IFC and SAT (via CadExchanger) in the BIM Library tool
• New, easier-to-use material tool for the BIM workbench
• Improvements in the BIM Views tool
• Custom sketching tool in the BUIM workbench (used to reuse Sketcher)
• Coin-based 2D view to produce things like construction documents (experimental)

Some of the other changes in FreeCAD over the past few weeks:

• New Explode Compound and Slice Apart tools in the Part workbench, by DeepSOIC
• Cleanup of the FEM workbench, by Bernd Hahnebach
• A lot of bugfixing and general cleanup

The team is planning a new release of FreeCAD later this year. For now, you can fetch daily builds from GitHub.

Video

There's a lot going on with Olive since our article from December '18.

The project bin now has an initial icon view mode with multiselect enabled. The viewers now have a right-click menu with zoom presets and fullscreen toggle. Keyframing has been enhanced with a graph editor where you can tweak transitions (Linear, Hold, Bezier).

Matt added a new Hand tool for navigating the project (H for shortcut), and the community contributed a bunch of improvements for better desktop integration on Linux.

More work has been done on the audio side of things, with audio recording fixed and audio source now selectable when multiple streams are available. Moreover, there's now a new branch where support for VST is being worked on (to be frank, by the time you read this, it will probably be in the master branch already).

On top of that, you can now search for shortcuts in the Preferences dialog to speed up assigning your own ones, and due to certain contemporary expectations (Blender, GIMP, Photoshop), Olive now features menu search:

Jonathan Thomas didn't waste his time during the winter break either. OpenShot improved various operations on tracks (inserting, adding, deleting) and added a more dynamic numbering system. He also made the timeline widget dockable and enhanced the Properties panel to work in the pillar mode.

Developers of Kdenlive were mostly busy fixing bugs and improving AppImage and Flatpak packaging, preparing for another update.

Things are interesting in the Blender's VSE department as well. The patch adding font selection to VSE text strips is now considered ready for merging, this might happen any day now. There's more progress on the frame prefetching patch too.

Among ongoing discussions regarding the future of the video sequencer, the 'VSE timeline manipulation API' thread is probably of most interest.

Cumulative VSE changes from tintwotin et al. are being proposed on devtalk, with per-feature videos. Check it out, it's full of awesome.

Finally, Nathan Lovato et al. officially announced the Power Sequencer 1.2.0 add-on for VSE. Here is the video, and you here you can grab the add-on.

Music-making

The major release here during the winter break was much anticipated MuseScore 3.0 that had been a few years in development.

We recommend going through the entirety of the release notes, here are just some of the highlights:

• Tours to provide instant help for newly arrived users
• Single Page mode, where you just keep scrolling vertically to view all of the score
• Timeline dock that provides an overview of your score, with rehearsal marks, tempo, key, and time signature changes etc.
• The Score Comparison Tool that displays differences between two versions of a score
• New MuseJazz font for a handwritten look of your score
• New Mixer and Piano Roll

All the downloading options are here.

The Ardour team have been fixing bugs and making various improvements, same as usual. Robin Gareus introduced a number of improvements into Lua scripting support, including new API to access per-channel gain and delay in the convolver.

While the Lua scripting support might not sound like your thing, it's actually of general use. E.g. there's a new Lua script now available in the master branch to list all plug-ins used in a project.

Moreover, according to developers, some of Mixbus 5.2 built-in features are implemented as Lua scripts (for the uninitiated, Mixbus is a commercial DAW based on Ardour, whose developers contribute to development of Ardour a lot).

And if you own a Yamaha MX 49/61/88, there's now a midnam for it.

Tutorials

Grease Pencil toon laser-blast effect, by Paul O Caggegi.

Verge3D started a series of beginner-level tutorials on using Verge3D and Blender 2.80 for creating interactive web applications. So far 12 videos have already been published. You can start with this one.

Raspberry drawing tutorial for Inkscape, by grafikwork.

Inkscape Tutorial: Draw City, by UkrArtDesign.

Turn Photos Into Logos with GIMP, by Nick Saporito.

Old house. Speed painting with Krita, by grafikwork.

Color grading with Blender VSE, by Nathan Lovato:

Another video from Nathan and his team: 'Drawing in viewport in Godot: a plugin tutorial'.

Art

Emocado, by Juan Carlos Montes. ‏

Eevee's rendering quality is insane, as demonstrated by CG Geek.

PlayStation 2, by Mohamed Chahin.

High priestess Tarot card, by Sylvia Ritter.

There are many reasons one could wish for a simple general image editor on Linux. Maybe you just want to crop a photo, and GIMP is a bit too much. Or you want to scribble over an image, and Krita is an overkill. Whatever your reason is, with Pinta gone (or dormant) there haven't been too many options left around. PhotoFlare is one of them.

The project has been around for ca. 10 years (most of them, under the name of PhotoFiltre LX), but never got as much mainstream interest as some of the more complex projects.

Since releasing version 1.5 a year ago, Dylan Coakley has been focusing on the next big update for which he has some serious plans: layers support, shape tool, MyPaint brush tool, text effects, and more.

(PhotoFlare 1.5.x main window)

It's time we talked to Dylan about project's background and future plans.

We first spoke in early 2010, just few days after the new year. What kind of person does it take to be working on your own thing while most everybody else is chilling out, and then continue doing that while not getting as much attention as some bigger projects do? :)

It takes a very passionate person, someone who finds enjoyment in seeing what can they create. I give everything 100 percent in life and my personal projects are no different. I want to push the boundaries to see the levels my own programming and creativity can reach.

When I'm not working on PhotoFlare, I'm working a full time job as a web developer. In my personal life I also work on other smaller hobby projects like 2D games in Love2D or PhaserJS. Recently I started helping out with the Openshot project to give back to the community, since I did use it to create all of my own project videos.

I do a bit of graphic design, video creation and I play games on my PS4 during my downtime. I enjoy running outdoors for training during the week and I participate in races around all of Ireland. Running is a great way to keep fit, de-stress and allows me to unleash my competitive side in races.

You started this project as PhotoFiltre LX, with permission from original PhotoFiltre developer(s). How did that happen?

This project started by an initial effort to port the PhotoFiltre Delphi code to Linux. This port was not going to be possible, it was recommended by Lazarus developers that I start from scratch instead. I had already been in contact with the original PhotoFiltre author, so I simply asked the original author for permission to use the PhotoFiltre LX name.

What made you change the project's name in 2017?

There were two main reasons.

First of all, I got tired of people making a straight 1:1 comparison of features between PhotoFiltre LX v1 to PhotoFiltre v7.x.x. People expected my project to be a straight clone and when anything was implemented differently to PhotoFiltre I was getting complaints. PhotoFiltre LX v1 didn't have as much features either but it also did not have more than 10 years of development behind it.

Secondly, I wanted the project to have its own identity. I didn't like being so bound to another name, feeling like I couldn't do anything different in my project. Apart from that I also didn't feel PhotoFiltre LX sounded like a good name at all from a branding point of view.

(Scale Image dialog)

The project appears to be funded by Blue System Ltd. and in partnership with ICS, and you also spent your own savings on development of PhotoFlare. What's the story?

This started back when I was in college studying Software Development. I would have been working on the Gtkmm version of PhotoFiltre LX back then. Initially I was getting small donations but one person in particular was giving me a regular donation of €50 which to me as a young student was mind blowing. I got in touch with him via e-mail to thank him and we got talking about the project. He claimed to be from a company called Blue Systems and wanted to help the project succeed in a financial manner.

He recommended to develop the software in Qt rather than Gtkmm. At around the same time I had multiple recommendations from Ubuntu forum contributors who declared my project would be much more successful written in Qt. I started working on my very first prototype of PhotoFiltre LX in Qt5.

After some months I had a working prototype but I felt I was only just beginning to catch up to the features of my Gtkmm version, so I needed to ramp up development to implement features faster. I began my research on Qt development companies online. Soon I discovered ICS, who seemed to be right at the helm of Qt development and on top of the frameworks latest developments after every new Qt release. I was convinced this was the best company to partner with at the time.

The development with a company of this nature would not be cheap, so I did have to combine some personal savings with the sponsorship money to cover the overall development fee. This development would only get me to the initial Demo release (v0.3). I needed this demo to have something for users to try and at the same time I could gauge the level of public interest in the project.

(Batch processing options)

In other words, your work on PhotoFlare is a part-time job?

Yes, I work on it part-time currently. I have always worked on PhotoFlare part-time throughout my college education and since I got my first career job. Working on a project in this way means hours spent on the project vary to a large degree week to week.

Around version 1.0, you had PhotoFlare (well, PhotoFiltre LX) Studio, a commercial version with latest features. But you don't seem to be doing this anymore. Why didn't it fly?

Studio did work really well for me as a source of funding. I just didn't see the point of selling it anymore when I had merged almost everything from Studio into GitHub for the Community Edition. I decided it would be more worth my while to engage with the community and improve the community edition first.

What's your plan for funding your work on PhotoFlare in the future?

My current plan is to release PhotoFlare v2.0 as the new Studio version initially. I have been thinking about ideas around regular income for the project and feel maybe selling a support/subscription package may be the best way forward.

The software industry as a whole seems to be moving away from the idea of registering a serial key for a version of software and instead most people prefer to sign up to an online portal which allows access to the latest versions of that application.

(Hue Variation dialog)

So there could be paid subscription with access to latest features and the existing community (GPLv3+) version at the same time?

Yes, that is the current plan, but I'm open-minded about my funding model going forward. Whatever I find works best for the project, I will stick with it.

Hopefully I could be funded enough regularly to work on the project at least one day a week. This could be a dedicated development day without any distractions.

At some point, projects like PhotoFiltre started sacrificing their simplicity in favor of power that comes with layers support. What is your drive to implement this for 2.0?

It feels a little bare to not have it yet and I think its a feature expected almost by default these days. I have been getting dozens of feature requests for Layer support. It would be a natural progression for the project right now.

Although looking back I do wish I had implemented layer support right from the start. Layer support will have a big impact on current PhotoFlare features.

Layers and OpenRaster support in the v2.0 roadmap — that makes sense. Will you go as far as layer groups, masks, blending modes, re-editable text layers etc.?

I'm still exploring what OpenRaster has to offer. I did consider rolling my own special JSON style file format but if OpenRaster supports everything I want implemented I will use that file format as the default.

Layer groups are planned and masks. PhotoFlare already supports editing text (before you anchor it), so it would make sense to support editing text with layers too. Initially Layer support will be quite basic but as soon as I have a foundation in place I intend to build upon it.

Once you add layers support, do you expect to make effects non-destructive, e.g. as layer filters or adjustment layers, if that's possible with GraphicsMagick at all?

I do like the idea of non-destructive editing, it just depends on how our tech stack could handle it. Much like any software development, I need to have the time and resources to implement it. However, I need to take into account that this is a relatively simple editor and I should try to walk that thin line between simplicity and powerful features. It should always keep that balance intact as a core principle of the project.

(MyPaint brushes support preview in v2 alpha)

Let's talk about technology. One of the most interesting topics lately is editing in the linear scene-referred space in general and the use of OCIO in particular (e.g. see this discussion on Pixls). This has already resulted in OCIO support in Krita and "filmic" transforms in darktable and PhotoFlow, as well as in the ACES RRT diplay filter in GIMP's master branch. What's your take on that?

I'm not always up to date on the happenings in the graphics world. I'm a developer first and graphics designer/editor second. Reading up on OCIO, it does sound like a great technology. It gets me thinking should PhotoFlare support such a framework in future revisions. I will put the question out to PhotoFlare users and see what the level of interest is like.

What is the image processing pipeline in 2.0 going to look like, deep inside? How much of GraphicsMagick will you continue using?

In 2.0, much of the main project structure will be the same for the pipeline. I hope to get rid of certain processing aspects such as the conversion between QImage and MagickImage. This used to be a very big burden to the project and I feel even though the performance is much improved I wish to only use one data type to store the image.

Also needed will be the optimization of filters to use multiple cores and send those resources into libgraphicsmagick too. Mostly I used Graphicsmagick for the filters, although later on I started swapping out some graphicsmagick filters in favour of the faster Qt methods to achieve the same result.

For now I think GraphicsMagick will stay for just the filters, but I hope to further improve the performance to use many more cores available on your system. I will need to reintroduce certain features like RAW support at some point. PhotoFlare supported RAW on Linux previously but users will need this feature implemented in a cross platform manner.

Week highlights: improved performance in GIMP, better smudging and initial filmic support in MyPaint, more HDR work in Krita, various improvements in many NLEs, stereoscopy rendering is back to Blender's viewport.

Graphics

David Tschumperlé published another G'MIC update with bugfixes and took a break to focus on his scientific work. Development will be resumed in a few months.

The GIMP/GEGL team has been doing mostly low-level work, e.g. most recently, Ell rewrote the part of GIMP that divides a drawable surface into chunks and made the new code align the chunks to the tile grid better, which is good for performance. The chunk sizing is now dynamic and takes processing speed into consideration to make sensible trade-offs.

The Krita team mostly did bugfixing. Dmitry Kazakov continues his work on HDR support. Most recently, he added support for p2020-pq color space in the color selectors.

Brien Dieterle recently resumed his work on spectral blending in MyPaint and extended the RGBA model to include a Volume channel that can affect the ratios used when calculating alpha and smudge mix.

He then simplified the code and dropped the number of wavelength channels from 36 to 10, which, he says, allowed him to greatly speed up the upsampling. It also allowed extending the technique to the OVER operation for the entire brush dab and the smudge collecting.

Brien also says he added rudimentary OpenColorIO support and a partially implemented Filmic configuration (the git log suggests, however, he started OCIO-related work back in 2017).

There were no fancy new features in Inkscape last week, the team is currently focused on bugfixing and refactoring the code. The only user-visible change is a new About screen for version 1.0 alpha pre-release (no ETA yet). The final version is expected later this year.

Photography

Among notable new features in darktable last week is the newly added support for importing and loading presets in the Preferences dialog, which simplifies sharing presets among users. An upcoming change, currently available as a pull request, is support for 8/16-bit TIFF files with CIELAB/ICCLAB photometric (currently, darktable converts such files to sRGB).

Desmis continues his work on the Local Lab tool in RawTherapee. For instance, he improved shape detection, added Chroma and Luma masking and the CL=f(H) curve to Color and Light, masking to Exposure etc.

3D

Dalai Felinto restored stereoscopic rendering in Blender 2.80's viewport, thus the stereo 3D support elements (cameras, convergence plane, stereoscopy volume) are back.

The Blender Fund is slowly moving towards the $28K goal that will allow keeping 5 developers working full-time on Blender. Currently, it's at ca. $26.7K.

Video

Quite a few changes in Olive last week focused on in/out points. You can now reset them, toggle them, and easily go to either in our out point via shortcuts (or the Playback menu).

It's now also possible to import and export shortcuts. As Olive pretty much reuses Premiere's shortcuts, people might end up creating shortcuts schemes for other applications, and that's where this new feature might come in handy.

The text effect now has a simple dialog for more convenient text editing, which you can access via right-click on the text entry field. Additionally, parts of the source code have been fixed to mark user-visible messages for translation. Which suggests we are going to see Olive translated into other languages pretty soon.

One notable thing about Olive development is that it is rapidly becoming a community effort. People don't yet contribute major new features, but they do send a lot of small fixes and do code refactoring. Linux users who want to test the latest and greatest from Matt et al. can enjoy regular AppImage builds.

The Kdenlive team is currently focused on bugfixing, but Jean-Baptiste Mardelle is doing quite impressive work in the branch where he works on the timeline refactoring.

Apart from applying various fixes to Shotcut, Dan Dennedy recently improved the Color Grading filter's user interface.

Jonathan Thomas called for translations update for the next release of OpenShot. Typically, this means a new release within a few weeks.

Finally, the Screencast Keys add-on for Blender now supports version 2.80. You can grab it on GitHub.

Tutorials

Martin Klekner published the next Blender tutorial in the Architectural Asset series.

GDQuest posted the next Godot tutorial in the Save Game series, focusing on saving and loading game resources.

Lettier posted a GIMP and G'MIC tutorial on hand-painted textures without actual painting.

0xconfiog published a tutorial that explains the basics of using AzPainter for character painting.

There's a new speed painting with Krita from grafikwork: "A little trip to the city".

Irfan Prastiyanto posted an Inkscape tutorial on YouTube, that explains how to do a Slice text effect.

Art and showcases

0xconfig also posted new artwork made with AzPainter.

Some Eevee porn from Vertex Polyfort:

working on some more stuff atm! #eevee is the best! #b3d #wip #b280 #3dModeling #blender pic.twitter.com/VnRCnt1AhE

— Vertex Polyfort (@VertexPolyFort) January 13, 2019

Rio Suryonugroho posted some interior design renders he did with Cycles.

Assets

The GQuest team released a new version of their paid pack of Krita brushes for game artists, with contributions from Živko Kondić and Joshua Grier.

While GIMP is undergoing major refactoring and UI update with GTK+3, it's fun watching one of very few successful GIMP semi-forks rise from the ashes again. And this one is interesting because Seashore is a native Cocoa app for macOS and it has just landed to Apple's App Store, while being GNU GPL v2 licensed.

Seashore (GitHub) was designed to provide basic image editing tools for non-professional users. The project was started by Mark Pazolli in 2003, "borrowing some ideas, resources and source code [from GNU Image Manipulation Program]", as the developer originally put it. Seashore has also been using the version of the XCF file format from ca. 2003 as its native one.

Mark pulled out from the project in 2009, but there were more developers to pick up development until there were none left. Which is where we meet Robert Engels who CPRed the project in 2017 and has been maintaining and improving it ever since.

Robert, first of all, I don't have a Mac in my household, so please bear with me! Could you please briefly outline the history of your involvement with Seashore?

In my previous job, I would often create icons as placeholders until a “real” graphic designer could get to them. Seashore stopped working for versions of OSX starting with 10.11 (El Capitan) released in 2015. I used Linux at work with GIMP, and I could use GIMP on OSX at home, as well. But I really missed the simplicity and native feel of Seashore.

So at the end of 2017, I made the decision I would try and get it to work. My company was acquired in mid-2017, and I decided to leave so I had some extra time to devote to the project during the past year.

(Seashore 2.1.9, featuring a Parrot Tulip photo by Thomas_Do)

I believe I got it “working” in a couple of weeks, but I had no previous experience with Objective-C, so it was a learning process.

By far the most difficult aspect was getting in touch with the original authors to get permission to fix the distributions on Sourceforge, which is where most people landed.

What did you start with?

The main source of the “crashing” was the removal of ColorSync Manager support from the OS. Even though it was just deprecated, valid usages no longer worked. So all of the color management needed to be fixed. I also simplified the code in the process.

I’ve since gone through and refactored a LOT more code, probably reducing the LOC in the effects area by greater than 80%, simplifying the plugins/effects immensely and adding new ones — using CoreImage — for things like auto image correction, red-eye removal, etc. CoreImage has a well-defined interface and decent documentation, so it was fairly straightforward.

Some of the internal constructs needed improvement. There’s a lot more that could be done, but I’ve probably taken that effort as far as I’m going to unless I get bored...

I reworked the code base to use automatic reference counting — to make life easier to future maintainers — SO MUCH EASIER. Manual memory management is so…ancient. That was a big change, and fairly tedious, but the built-in conversion process in XCode helped.

The last big effort was getting it to work under the sandbox and “hardened runtime” in order to distribute through the App Store.

One thing I find particularly interesting about Seashore is that it's one of very few GIMP forks that actually survived. My gut feeling is that it has a lot to do with severing the ties with the original project and rewriting very nearly all of it, for technical and/or other reasons. What's your take on that?

I don’t know if I’m in the position to comment on other endeavors, but Seashore has less than 0.1% code from the GIMP project now. I don’t think it ever had a lot — it was a native Cocoa app from the start, but I’ve since removed even more of the GIMP code and replaced it with CoreGraphics or CoreImage. The remaining GIMP code is primarily used in the advanced gradients that are not supported natively in CoreGraphics.

As you've just explained, it's unlikely you can pull any code from newer GIMP releases without rewriting all of it. But do you follow any free/libre infrastructure projects such as OpenColorIO, OpenImageIO, MyPaint brush engine, GEGL, and others that could have some potential for you?

I’m sorry but I do not. It took me long enough to figure out how Seashore worked :) I did do a bit of imaging work in a previous job, so I understood the concepts, but as I stated I had zero experience writing Mac software. As expected though, the native graphics/imaging capabilities of OSX are extensive.

Did you end up switching Seashore to its own file format?

No, it still uses GIMP v2.0 XCF.

How much support for XCF files are you willing to provide, given the amount of changes in that respect between GIMP 2.0 and GIMP 2.10?

I am planning to support XCF 2.10 if it is not too difficult. At least the ability to read them, and possibly write 2.0 if needed. Up until a recent release of GIMP it still read & wrote GIMP files successfully. I tested this many times. The metadata handling was broken in Seashore, so I fixed that as well.

What's your goal for publishing Seashore on the App Store? Financing further development?

The only goal is to continue the life of Seashore. I honestly believe that at some point only applications provided through the App Store are going to be acceptable for installation — for security reasons.

Also, although it is doubtful, there’s a possibility that being on the App Store will expose a whole new audience to Seashore. It would be awesomeif it was featured, but it probably needs a UI refresher by a graphic designer.

I derive no economic benefit from Seashore — on the App Store or anywhere else. I was debating putting up a ‘Donate’ button in order to buy a more modern machine. My Mac cannot run the latest Mojave, so I can’t develop for some of the Mojave features like “dark mode.” Any donations would help in updating the documentation, and possibly a new icon set as well.

Speaking of which, do you have any interest in bringing in more people to work on the project, whether writing code or designing UI or writing tutorials or creating new website etc.?

Absolutely.

What's the best way to contact you? Via Issues / PR sections on GitHub?

Via github issues seems to be working.

When you say you were debating putting up a ‘Donate’ button, do you mean you decided against it, or is it still under consideration?

Still under consideration.

Seashore started out as a lite version of GIMP when the market on OSX wasn't nearly as saturated as today. But the landscape on macOS has changed a lot since then. First, Pixelmator, Acorn, and a few more similar applications arrived. Then Adobe moved to subscription-based licensing, which gave rise to even more popular projects such as Affinity Photo. Has any of that affected your vision of Seashore?

It was a personal learning project for me, so I’ve already benefitted a lot. It was not my vision either — it was Mark Pazolli's. I used a lot of imaging programs, including Photoshop, and I still think Seashore has a great balance of features vs. complexity. It’s more a labor of love for me.

What would you say are the big things you want to work on in Seashore next? What are the most annoying itches that you want to scratch?

There are a few things on my radar. As I already stated, I’d like to support the Gimp 2.10 file format.

I’ll probably also do a few more of the latest CoreImage effects and maybe enhance the current ones where appropriate to give more manual control.

I have been debating bringing back the ‘detached’ windows. The current setup is easier to work with, but for certain editing chores the floating detached (tools, layers, etc) makes some operations easier.

What about better PSD support? And OpenRaster, for even better interoperability with other free/libre image editors?

That may be a better solution. I wasn’t aware of those initiatives, but if I undertake the file format changes I will look into it. I still think being able to open the latest GIMP files in at least some fashion would be beneficial.

It looks like file formats support is currently restricted to GIF, JPEG, JPEG2000, PNG, TIFF, and XCF. Any idea if the rest was lost during the initial rewrite?

Nothing was changed. Still, it should be able to handle any native Cocoa format, but the way the file handling was implemented gets in the way. I may look at fixing that. It also supports importing SVG but this requires an external helper program — not easy via App Store due to sandboxing. Similarly, I've just rewritten the brush/texture code to allow the creation of both textures and brushes from within the application — it used to be done via external helper programs as well.

Do you see masks and layer groups as too advanced features to support (masks were originally available in GIMP, layer groups were only added to v2.8 in 2012)?

You can kind of do masks now by setting the layers modification to ‘primary only’ and editing the mask using ‘alpha only.’ The groups are probably too advanced.

I think most forthcoming changes would be in the UX/UI area, and not as feature oriented. I’d like to improve the scaling/rotation to not require the key mods (use more advanced handles) and show the image while performing the action, etc.

Week highlights: new Inkscape releases, new features in GIMP, Krita, and MyPaint, various Blender add-ons' updates, bugfix updates for MuseScore and Sonic Visualiser, new features in Olive and OpenShot.

Graphics

Largest news last week: Inkscape 0.92.4 and 1.0 alpha releases.

Version 0.92.4 is an update to the stable series, mostly featuring bugfixes and a number of new features such as:

• Improved saving and filter rendering speed
• New 'Treat selection as group' option for the Align/Distribute dialog
• Ctrl now works as a constraint for color sliders (a step of 10 for 0..100 ranges, and a step of 16 for 0..255 ranges)
• Inkscape is now able to read and write Unix pipes, so you can combine it with other tools in a command line interface

This version also drops Windows XP support (most likely due to respective changes in GTK+ and glib). For more information on changes in this version, see full release notes. All downloading options are listed here.

Inkscape 1.0 alpha is essentially a technical preview of what's coming later this year (in May, if all goes according to the plan). It comes with better theming support, long overdue option for coordinates origin in the top left the corner, canvas rotation and mirroring, more live path effects, variable fonts support etc. Preliminary release notes are available in project's wiki.

For GIMP, last week's focus was clearly on the Sample Merged option. Michael Natterer fixed its work for the Heal tool and added it to the Smudge tool. Which means that you can now heal and smudge non-destructively on a transparent layer above the source layer. GIMP will render all your strokes only on that new transparent layer, so you can keep the original and your changes separately.

Jehan went a little further than that in the Bucket Fill tool. He added a drop-down list that allows choosing the source layer when Fill by line art detection is enabled. Choosing the layer above or below rather than using all active layers for merging samples across the full layer stack will come in handy. First of all, when you have a ton of layers and you want to fill against just one of them, you probably don't want to make computations too slow. And then, you probably don't want manually disabling the visibility of layers you don't want to be detected for line art.

Thanks to Ell, the Select By Color tool is now parallelized by distributing the processed area over multiple threads. Ell is currently working on Ellipse Select tool which, he says, is ridiculously slow with antialiasing for big images. And he plans to give some love to other selection features too.

While Boudewijn Rempt continues hacking on resources management in Krita and reviewing incoming patches, and Dmitry Kazakov works on HDR support, there are some interesting contributions from other people, now available in the master branch.

Pavel Belski added a Copy Translate mode to the Multibrush tool. Here is a video demonstrating this feature.

Rebecca Breu implemented a Python plugin importer which works pretty much like the one in Blender: import a ZIP file, and all data get automatically installed to the right system location.

Brien Dieterle continues his experiments with spectral color mixing in MyPaint. There is now a new "Paint" layer mode to complement the paintbrush mode. Brien also shot a video to demonstrate the effect of compositing on different backgrounds. Pay close attention to the edges where the paint blends with the canvas. If you are keen to check it out, you want the 'smudge_tweaks' branch of his GitHub repository.

Good news for pixel art enthusiasts: GrafX2 2.6 by PulkoMandy et al. is now available. There is a wide range of improvements all around, including long overdue clipboard support, much better support for C64 file formats, Thomson MO/TO pictures loading/saving, loading WIN and SCR files from Amstrad CPC, and loading Apple II HGR and DHGR files, as well as loading and saving TIFF files. For a full list of changes, please see the changelog.

Meanwhile, Thomas Bernard announced that 24-bit/32-bit color display is planned for version 3.0. GrafX2 2.x will stay a 256 color application, so it could run on an Amiga 1200, an Atari Falcon, etc.

There have been a few Birdfont releases lately, with both bugfixes and new features. The latter includes support for adjusting line gap, cutting paths with Ctrl+X, setting the width for all glyphs at the same time, adding new Unicode points etc.

There has been an interesting ongoing thread at Pixls regarding full-screen color management in Wayland/Weston.

Photography

Remote capturing application Entangle 2.0 (Linux) is out. Not a lot of new features apart from an option to highlight overexposed pixels in red, but enough bugfixes to upgrade.

The slideshow mode in darktable got more control over the delay, and the program now uses the Rec2020 color space for intermediate conversion of CIELAB/ICCLAB TIFF files. Among notable pull requests, there is a patch by Philippe Weyland that adds an LCh mode to the tonecurve.

3D

Mikhail Rachinskiy made an initial port of his Booltron add-on for Blender 2.80, with new icons for both dark and light UI themes (there's an add-on preferences option for that). It doesn't yet support local view yet due to 2.80 Python API limitation though.

Eric Gentry released Mesh Align Plus v.0.5.0 add-on for Blender, featuring Blender 2.80 compatibility and a new face-alignment option for "Align Planes".

And there is more teasing from Pablo Dobarro.

I tweaked the normal sampling code and I added conditional smooth updates to the flatten plane. Now the brush behaves similarly to Trim Dynamic from ZBrush. #b3d pic.twitter.com/Uxizb5pml6

— Pablo Dobarro (@pablodp606) January 20, 2019

CAD

Normand Chamberland mentions on Mastodon that FreeCAD recently got new dimetric and trimetric views, while the existing axonometric view was renamed to isometric. they are all available in 'View -> Standard views' submenu now.

Dion Moult published an article on viewing BIM IFC files on Linux. It covers both FreeCAD, Blender + IfcOpenShell plug-in, IfcConvert + IfcPlus + IfcOpenShell Viewer.

Video

MattKC did quite a bit of work on separating various Olive features into their own threads. As a result, both GL rendering and exporting happen in separate threads now. Media viewers now feature options to disable full-screen mode. And, most noticeably, the video editor now supports frei0r effects.

Jonathan Thomas started using the resvg library by Evgeniy Reizner for rendering SVG documents in OpenShot (for reasons to developer resvg, please see our previous coverage of that project).

Blender now ships with custom fonts support in VSE's text strips.

Finally, Dan Dennedy created a page explaining many ways people can contribute to Shotcut.

Music-making, sound

MuseScore 3.0.1 is now available for downloading with bugfixes and a handful new features. For instance, the team redesigned the New Score wizard to make it easier to find a template, provide better score previews and improves accessibility for blind users (MuseScore has a very good track record in that regard).

Developers also improved automatic placement of hairpins and dynamics, as well as the importing of v2.x scores, and reworked Mixer's interface to make it dockable. See full release notes for more details.

Over the past few weeks, Chris Cannam released Sonic Visualiser 3.2 and then a bugfix update. Most important changes are:

• Various rendering improvements, including spectrum rendering at high resolutions
• Oversampling control in the spectrogram and spectrum layers
• Zooming closer than one sample per pixel is now possible to see the interpolated signal level between samples
• Ability to highlight and label frequency peaks in the spectrum on mouse hover
• Conversion and importing of audio from CSV data files
• New color maps (the old Blue on Black one was reintroiduced too)

Hermann Meyer released a new version of GxPLugins.lv2, a pack of guitar amp and pedal simulations available as LV2 plug-ins, apart from bugfixes, this version includes the following new plug-ins:

• GxCreamMachine, a tube power amp simulation
• GxValveCaster, a tube boost pedal simulation, adding overdrive and tube compression along with boosting the signal
• GxBoobTube, a variation of GxValveCaster

We've only noticed that now, but Staffan Melin announced taking a break from maintaining Libre Music Production website dedicated to free/libre software for musicians. He's also willing to pass the ownership of the project to someone else.

There are some exciting news from the VCV Rack department:

Coming in Rack 1.0: Core CV-MIDI sends virtual CV from Rack to MIDI output hardware, such as desktop synthesizers or Eurorack MIDI interfaces. Supports Rack's new polyphonic cables with up to 16 channels. Core CV-CC and CV-Gate send MIDI CC and note on/off commands to hardware. pic.twitter.com/M7FNKyEhJe

— VCV Rack (@vcvrack) January 19, 2019

Most interestingly, MIDI 2.0 is finally in the making!

The MIDI 2.0 initiative updates MIDI with auto-configuration, new DAW/web integrations, extended resolution, increased expressiveness, and tighter timing -- all while maintaining a high priority on backward compatibility. This major update of MIDI paves the way for a new generation of advanced interconnected MIDI devices, while still preserving interoperability with the millions of existing MIDI 1.0 devices. One of the core goals of the MIDI 2.0 initiative is to also enhance the MIDI 1.0 feature set whenever possible.

Also, I highly recommend reading this thread on Hackernews on the subject.

Tutorials

First and foremost, GDQuest launched a new campaign on Kickstarter to fund their new Godot corse for game developers and artists. You will learn to create a 2D platform-adventure demo and its 3D counterpart.

Draw Simple Thing channel on YouTube posted a new Inkscape tutorial: "Using Inkscape Interpolate Feature - Beautiful Sunset Vector Design".

If you can't get enough of double exposure tutorials, here is one for GIMP 2.10 users.

And here is a nice quick tutorial by Jayanam on transparent texture painting in Blender 2.80.

Art

Ozant Liuky, 'Traditional house of minangkabau, Indonesia', Inkscape:

Sven Ebert, new work after a short hiatus, Inkscape:

Aryeom Han published a new still from the upcoming 'ZeMarmot' short animated movie, where GIMP developer Jehan Pages improves the program for the needs of the artist.

Pavel Suschenko, 'Winter morning in an unknown city', Blender:

Paul Chambers, 'Castle', Blender:

User 'roerich_64' on FreeCAD forum is showing the housing for his CNC router he designed with FreeCAD. The workflow includes using KiCad's StepUp exporter for importing the electronics into FreeCAD.

Earlier this week, Google Cloud and Sony Pictures Imageworks announced immediate availability of OpenCue, an open source render manager for media and entertainment.

Here is the official list of features of OpenCue:

• Highly-scalable architecture supporting numerous concurrent machines.
• Tagging systems allow you to allocate specific jobs to specific machine types.
• Jobs are processed on a central render farm and don't rely on the artist's workstation.
• Native multi-threading that supports Katana, RenderMan, and Arnold.
• Support for multi-facility, on-premise, cloud, and hybrid deployments.
• You can split a host into a large number of procs, each with their own reserved core and memory requirements.
• Integrated automated booking.
• No limit on the number of procs a job can have.

There have been two releases so far, and there's some initial documentation available in the wiki.

First of all, this isn't the first project of the kind available as either open source or free/libre software (OpenCue has been published under the terms of Apache License 2.0).

Blender Institute created Flamenco to handle their open movies production. There is Puli, originally developed by Mikros Image. And, of course, there is Afanasy (CGRU) created by Timur Hairulin and used mostly in a bunch of Russian action and sci-fi movies.

OpenCue, however, is an evolution of Cue, an in-house render manager used by Sony for the past 15 years on over a hundred feature films. Developers claim that, at Sony, the system has been scaled to over 150,000 cores shared between Sony’s own on-premise data center and Google Cloud Platform for recent projects.

At some point, Google Cloud Platform got involved, "adapted and developed Cue 3", then renamed it as OpenCue and released the source code. Curiously enough, on GitHub, it's still in the Imageworks directory. Google Cloud is now an Academy Software Foundation member too.

If you wonder why this makes sense to Google, consider this. In 2014, the company acquired Zync, developers of homonymous cloud-based rendering platform, and migrated the service from Amazon Web Services to Google Cloud Platform (they too have open source projects on GitHub, mostly Zync plug-ins for proprietary 3D suites). Brian Cipriano, who is the lead architect and developer of Zync, moved with the company is now also one of the people behind OpenCue.

So yes, it makes a perfect sense for Google to release an open source render manager. It's good for their relationships with studios and, further down the line, it's money.

Week highlights: first MyPaint 2.0 alpha release, new tools In Blender's Grease Pencil, more add-ons ported to Blender 2.80, new features in various video editors, first full sequence screenshot of Spring animated movie in Blender VSE, upcoming IFC diffing in FreeCAD.

Graphics

Perhaps the best news of the week here is the much anticipated and long overdue alpha release of MyPaint 2.0 (both AppImage and two Windows builds available). There are quite a few changes there (named views for layers are great!), but the game changer, of course, is the simulation of spectral pigment mixing.

There are some easily understandable performance concerns, especially since Brien has already simplified computations to make them faster. Painting with a large brush is very noticeably slower indeed, so we'll see how far this can be improved.

There is an ongoing discussion about the slider widget on GIMP's IRC channel, with some UX/UI research now happening in the wiki. It's yet unclear what kind of action will be taken (if any). For now, Jehan changed the brush settings sliders to always increment on integers. That is, you can still use a 217,56px large brush if you absolutely want to, but you'll need numeric input for that. This change might be extended to some other settings as well (opacity sounds like a good candidate).

Elad Shahar rewrote his Spyrogimp script for GIMP in Python, with some automatic preview (by drawing directly on a temporary layer, not as a GEGL preview), and using the current tool options (current brush, etc.).

Ell improved adaptive supersampling in the Gradient tool by making it render the gradient tile-by-tile instead of row-by-row, which now should improve performance a lot.

Last week marked a very much welcome return of Wolthera to hacking on Krita. She did some work on color space handling in masks and transparency masks. Two more user-visible changes come from Kuntal Majumder and Noemie Scherer: adjusting the granularity preview while doing cage transforms, and newly added direction choice in the Image Split plugin.

There's also an interesting discussion on improving how Krita handles brush opacity. The first fix that the community produced was applied and then reverted. The team is looking into a cleaner solution and figuring out how do deal with tons of existing brush, since any fix is likely to dramatically change brushes' behavior.

Inkscape developers are still mostly busy with code refactoring, but Jabier Arraiza is also working on a new fancy gallery-like selector for live path effects.

3D

In terms of 3D, last week kicked of with the announcement that Adobe is acquiring Allegorithmic, developer of Substance Painter and Substance Designer.

Naturally, the community rushed to point out that supporting either Blender development via Blender Fund, or Armory and its ArmorPaint program via Gumroad would benefit game artists a lot more in the long run. Which Ton Roosendaal confirmed:

Obviously we are already eyeing much better procedural texture tools in Blender for a while - we know how to do it, but we need to wrap up 2.80 targets first. Just help us doubling the fund! Deal?https://t.co/ILYhIfEZbJ #b3d

— Ton Roosendaal (@tonroosendaal) January 23, 2019

And then Lubos Lenco pointed out he's releasing Armory 0.6 the next week (it's this week now) and expecting to kick off new ArmorPaint release in February.

If you are eyeing a 3D painting software, ArmorPaint just happens to have another big upgrade around the corner. Humbled by the enormous support! pic.twitter.com/6pA7yohTq2

— Lubos (@luboslenco) January 25, 2019

And then this happened:

So heartwarming to see my favorite apps @GIMP_Official, @Krita_Painting & @Inkscape supporting @blender_org after @Adobe @Allegorithmic news.

Good times ahead for open source! Together we strive.

Paint+Sculpt Quest 2019 anyone? Make it happen at https://t.co/BDkeg1jbgw #b3d pic.twitter.com/0UDcAbYAdz

— Pablo Vazquez (@PabloVazquez_) January 24, 2019

But it's been an interesting week for Blender regardless. Clément Foucault added initial support for depth of field in the workbench, which "makes it possible to have a decent blur for foreground over defocused background in one pass only".

Sculpting toolbox got Topology Rake to align edges along brush while painting.

"Topology rake" (new feature in Sculpt Mode?). Edges are aligned following the brush. This means cleaner and sharper details with less polys. So cooooool!!! https://t.co/Ctaj0hP2Sf #blender #b3d pic.twitter.com/60jjKyDuIi

— Lowpolysaac (@lowpolysaac) January 23, 2019

Meanwhile, Antonio Vazquez has been a busy bee again. First of all, he added two new features to the Grease Pencil. The first one, Cutter, is a tool that's great for cleaning up sketches by cutting off parts of strokes. The other new feature is Guidelines that work somewhat similarly to painting assistants in Krita: your strokes get "gravitated" towards a certain shape/pattern like circles or grids.

And now Antonio has been porting his Archimesh add-on to Blender 2.80.

Jeroen Bakker released a new version of his commercial crowd simulator CrowdSim3D which now can simulate larger crowds faster and with smoother motion. He also released a beta version available for Blender 2.80 that makes use of collection management and Eeevee.

Google and Sony Pictures Imageworks announced the release of OpenCue, an open source render manager. See our earlier post about it for details.

CAD

One thing we completely missed earlier this month is OpenSCAD 2019 Release Candidate 1. There are no builds, just the source code though, and by now, building from the master branch would be advisable. Still, it's a good sign that the release is not too far off.

Meanwhile, Yorik van Havre has been teasing people with IFC diffing in FreeCAD:

Video

The reality show that is development of Olive gives us this week:

• Complete implementation of VST2 support on Linux, Windows, and macOS
• A much wider choice of blending modes (all GLSL-based)
• Various optimization
• The timeline toolbar now supports flow layout (buttons will regroup into multiple columns, if you squeeze timeline's height hard enough)
• A new Tile effect (mirror symmetry)
• Right-click menu for effects now has copy/paste items (you can still cleck on the effect's header to select, then Ctrl+C to copy and Ctrl+V to past on a different clip)
• J, K, and L keys now control direction and speed of playback (also see the Playback menu).

Shotcut 19.01.24 is out with a new Swirl filter and a new Chroma Hold filter (for the latter, scroll to 3:55 in the video below).

Jonathan Thomas enhanced OpenShot by adding support for constant rate factor to the exporting dialog and added a preset for lossless encoding in VP9.

The Kdenlive team is mostly busy in the 'refactoring_timeline' branch where all sorts of optimizations are being applied to the timeline code.

Music-making

Development branch of VCV Rack got multithreading support. Andrew Belt (lead developer) says best results are achieved when the thread count is set to the number of physical cores in the CPU. If you are really curious, all the development is happening publicly in the 'v1' branch on GitHub.

Recently, Andrew also published a short technical article explaining how polyphonic cables will work in Rack v1.

Tutorials

A very cool new Blender tutorial from Grant Abbitt: how to make ornaments really quickly using radial sculpt tools.

Kent Tramell (CG Cookie) explains in great many details how to build a DIY renderfarm for distributed Blender Rendering.

Olga Bikmullina published a text version of her "Inkscape: workflow optimization recipes" talk that she gave at CG Event 2018 conference in Moscow last December.

Jagvinder Singh posted a video tutorial explaining how to draw Google Photos logo.

Pixovert published a quick tutorial explaining the use of the Mono Mixer filter in GIMP to create a black-and-white image (basically, a standalone version of the old Color Mixer filter in Mono mode).

Flare Strikes31 posted a Krita tutorial on painting clouds.

And for youtubers, here is a design tutorial from GDquest explaining how to create a YouTube thumbnail from scratch with Krita.

Nathan Lovato and his team keep producing tons of Godot tutorials. One of the new ones covers the topic of pathfinding in Godot 3.1.

Art and showcases

David Revoy posted a new episode of Pepper & Carrot comics that he produces with Krita and Inkscape (this time, Blender was used too).

New Krita-powered artwork, 'Old Ruins', from Nikolai Mamashev (Morevna Project):

Here is a neat little animation made with Blender by Louis du Mont. He also wrote 'the making of' post about it.

Made a little song in #flstudiomobile. Thought I'd create a 3D character for it. #b3d #eevee #dance pic.twitter.com/AXKLc0orCV

— Louis du Mont (@louisdumont) January 22, 2019

Scott Reinhard used QGIS and Blender to make a cool render of Death Valley (California) using 3D elevation data and a 1956 army topographic map.

Finally, if you are into the bizarre art of Avid Media Composer timeline screenshots, you will definitely appreciate this timeline screenshot of Blender VSE featuring the entire Spring animated movie sequence, as taken by Andy Goralczyk.

The range of topics I cover at Libre Graphics World tends to unevenly stretch in all directions. One interesting project that caught my attention (and was further reinforced there by a few passionate readers over the last weekend) is a Kickstarter campaign to fund development of Akira, a free/libre application streamlined for making UI mockups.

Judging by questions in a dedicated Reddit thread, one common misunderstanding about Akira is why it was needed to write a whole new application when there already is Inkscape that is a) SVG-based, b) vector graphics editor. After all, isn't a mockup application essentially a specialized vector graphics editor? I think I can cover that part at least.

The difference is in the workflow. It's how fast you can go from A to B and how many extra steps you need to take just because a more generic tool was never designed with certain requirements and use cases in mind. (In a live stream at Kickstarter, developers also covered the dreaded topic of technical debt when patching a huge and old project like Inkscape.)

It's why almost everyone stopped using Illustrator and Photoshop for prototyping and switched to the likes of Sketch and Figma. E.g. see this guy explaining in a great many details why Sketch helps him get things done faster than with Photoshop or Illustrator, then see him a year later still not going back, because the issues with Sketch he learned to deal with aren't as bad as going back and losing on the turnover.

So there was no dedicated UI mockup tool for Linux, and Akira is intended to fill this gaping hole.

The project has a little over a month to successfully raise funds on Kickstarter, but it's not going easy so far. After all, Akira is a) a tool for makers rather than users (much smaller audience), b) intentionally limited to just Linux users. LGW spoke to Alessandro Castellani, lead developer of the project.

First of all, I'm sorry, if my questions seem harsh. I've watched many FOSS projects try crowdfunding and fail — for a variety of reasons. So I'd really like to know how much you think you have already taken care of.

Don't worry, I like talking about Akira and I'm more than open to discuss pros and cons, pain points, and possible mistakes. Bring it on :D

Please tell me about your background leading up to starting the Akira project. How much and how exactly has your work on Elementary OS affected your work on Akira?

I started using elementary OS full-time as my main distro almost 2 years ago. I've been on and off Linux for almost 10 years now. I immediately started coding native applications in Vala and GTK to replace the tools I was used to having on macOS. I already released Sequeler, an SQL client, and Taxi, an FTP client, which I actively maintain and keep pushing new features and bug fixes.

As a developer, I find Linux to be a far superior platform compared to MacOS and Windows, but still, every digital agency out there runs on MacOS, and that's just because of a couple of apps.

I always wanted to have a proper UX design tool on Linux, but the currently available apps are outdated, with a non-intuitive interface, and completely out of scope compared to proprietary alternatives like Sketch, Figma, or Adobe XD.

As far as I can tell, most users of free/libre applications for creative professionals are not on Linux. This tends to have a rather huge impact on sustainability. E.g. in case of Ardour, the lead developer was finally able to pay his bills through subscriptions only after he had started making supported Windows builds. But you seem to be focusing on just Linux — at least, for now. Why?

Users go where it's convenient. Up until a few years ago, Windows and MacOS were convenient systems. Apple products were solid and reliable, capable of running for decades without an itch. Windows was available anywhere out of the box and everyone was able to use it. The scenario is drastically changed today.

Windows turned into a giant spyware OS with apps crashing constantly, and the Adobe suite is becoming unreliable at every update. Apple keeps releasing outdated hardware at a higher price, with more and more issues and roadblocks.

Betting 100% on Linux is a gamble, I'm aware of that, but the user feedback is overwhelming. More and more designers are saying "I just wish Adobe was available on Linux". We want to offer the same modern, slick, and convenient type of design tool that will allow users to switch to Linux.

Releasing only on Linux gives us also the advantage of having almost zero competition. There are many free or freeware design apps on MacOS and Windows that would be pretty hard to chip away a piece of that market share. Linux is almost like the wild west for UX design tools, and that's where we want to focus our attention.

In 2017, your choice for UI toolkit was Qt. Since then, you switched to Vala and GTK+ which is, again, not the most popular option for cross-platform applications (as opposed to Qt). What made you switch?

The first reason was the coding language itself. Qt is not the most intuitive one, while Vala is way cleaner, less verbose, and way easier to learn and use.

Vala and GTK is a match made in heaven. Native bindings are available out of the box, the documentation is clear and thorough, and hundreds of examples and working open source apps are available on GitHub.

Vala is also actively maintained and supported by GNOME, which actively maintains and supports also GTK. The development of the 2 goes hand in hand and compatibility issues are pretty much non-existent.

When you say "[Qt] coding language is not the most intuitive one", are you referring to C++ or QML?

I'm referring to both actually. QML is good to design interfaces but it was really strict and hard for me to handle the various signals, slots, and C++ integration. I tried to use C++ for a year and I couldn't remember a thing. It took me 2 months to learn Vala and release my first app.

In fact, why a desktop application rather than a web service?

I would never build something like that. Other than for the same reasons behind the choice of not doing an Electron app (resources, performance, etc), not everyone is always connected and online while working.

A local and native app is always the best choice when handling big files and fast design iterations.

Professional designers work and handle extremely large files on a daily basis. It's impossible to run smoothly a web app while working on multiple artboards, handling shared assets, and importing big images. We can't pretend to ask users to have 32GB of RAM and an i9 processor for that. It's neither sustainable nor reliable.

You are building your own SVG-based canvas library from scratch. What I know from the past is that there is a graveyard full of free/libre projects where developers started designing their own backends and burnt out without making any actual usable releases. What's your plan for avoiding that scenario? At what stage is that development at the moment?

We're absolutely aware of that, that's why I'm asking for money. Building a solid and scalable canvas library is the core of a successful design application, and I can't build it alone. That's why I'm hiring other 3 developers full time to work on this.

Most of these projects fail because the developers are not aware of the technical challenges and possible roadblocks they will encounter. We're 100% aware of that.

The other 3 developers have many years of experience in building GUI apps, and one of them is an active maintainer of Glade. We already have 2 dedicated repositories where we're currently testing the pros and cons of using GSVGTK and GooCanvas. Both libraries can generate simple SVG shapes and handle simple transformations.

Before proceeding with one or another, we want to be sure about the extensibility and modularity of those base libraries and how easy is to implement more advanced features, and how good they handle complex shapes. We're gonna soon release an in-depth blog post about our final decision with working examples that users can download and run locally.

The header bar mockups for Akira look rather macOS-inspired. Is that intentional? Why?

We follow the elementary OS HIG, which at first glance resembles the macOS interface.

Those guidelines come from 10 years of iterations and experience in building a full desktop environment.

I'm the first to admit that lots of interface decisions for Akira come from my previous experience with tools on macOS, but it's not just a simple "let's make it identical" tantrum. I'm a UX Architect myself, and I deeply understand when and why an interface is successful or a failure.

Learning from others and using those working examples to create something usable, accessible, and easy to learn, is my main goal. That's a header bar that works out of the box.

Your pre-tax and no-hardware budget (without Kickstarter fee and transaction fee) is $50K. That means you need another $100K+ later this year to stay afloat till 2020. What's your plan for after you've completed the goals defined in the fundraiser (first release)? How do you expect to make this project financially sustainable? Will you be relying solely on your Patreon campaign and your PayPal account for one-time donations?

Patreon and PayPal will be up and running for sure, but they will not be the main source of income to sustain Akira. The amount asked during the campaign is to hire the other 3 devs full time for a 3 months boost. After that, we will start working on Akira part-time and slowly implement new features without the rush of needing a stable first release.

A pay-what-you-want model will be implemented where possible, emulating the elementary OS model which is proven to work and has allowed them to have a team working full time on it.

We also have partnerships ready to happen once the first version is out of the door.

Are you at liberty to elaborate on partnerships at this point?

Unfortunately, I can't disclose any of this info for now.

The other goal for the end of 2019, however, is to release a cloud client to offer cloud syncing and remote sharing. We will release the client as an open source package anyone can install on their own server, but we will also offer a subscription-based cloud platform to access those services.

So you would develop your own cloud solution rather than plug to something like NextCloud?

Nothing is off the table. As a web developer, I know I can deliver a simple standalone NodeJS client in a few weeks which can be installed via a simple npm install on a server. Implementing a plug for NextCloud or OpenCloud can be definitely added.

And to conclude, dedicated learning courses will be sold as downloadable content as well as merchandise.

Just to be clear and avoid confusions, the subscription will only be related to the cloud sharing platform. The app itself is and always be free and open source. No features will be hidden behind a paywall.

The campaign is still early on, so it's hard to say how this will play out. My gut feeling says, however, that you would have a better shot at successfully funding Akira development if there was at least an alpha release that did a few basic things — e.g. drag a bunch of rectangular frames (thus no need to extend SVG yet) into the canvas, then save and reopen a project. Based on the feedback so far, do you see this as a limiting factor?

That's definitely a mistake I'm learning to deal with, and launching the campaign without a usable alpha was a tough choice.

I didn't want to create a half hacked alpha and spend valuable dev time just to release an MVP that will then be scrapped and wouldn't be usable. I opted to launch the campaign and give the freedom to the other devs to keep experimenting and testing with the canvas in order to be sure which stack to use.

We're planning to release a somewhat usable canvas example in a couple of weeks.

What's your plan for failing to raise funds via Kickstarter?

Crawl under a rock and cry.

No, I'm kidding.

A failing campaign is a very real possibility, and actually is what I prepared for before even launching it. The team of developers is passionate about the project and they will keep working like we're doing right now, part-time, overnights, and during weekends.

Meanwhile, we will open a dedicated Patreon account and try to sustain a higher development rate through that. Akira will happen, no matter if we're successful or not, we will keep coding Akira. The main difference is that we will release the first version in a year or two, instead of 4 months.

For people who want to participate in the project in any role, what/where is the starting point? Where do they go? What do they read? Who do they talk to?

Great questions.

First of all, we follow the elementary HIG and coding standards, so it's better to read those documents before jumping on the project: Human Interface Guidelines, Reference.

The project is developed all on GitHub. and we will use the wiki as a visual and technical reference to what we want to achieve and how things will work. I'm slowly filling up those sections to cover the entirety of v1.

We're also currently testing 2 canvas libraries in these repos: canvas and libgtkcanvas. Felipe Escoto and Alberto Fanjul are the developers in charge and can better speak about that.

For anything else, users can contact me on Twitter, YouTube, or through the Kickstarter page.

Highlights of the week: Blender Fund now raises 25K euro a month, Ton Roosendal received Ub Iwerks Award, OpenToonz 1.3 has been released, Intel published open source projects for AV1 encoding and image denoising, FreeCAD got a ton of new features for architects, more new features in Olive.

Graphics

It was a slower-than-usual week for GIMP. Jehan Pages made opacity slider changes constrain to integers so that you would never get something like 66,7% by dragging the slider, only 66% or 67% (numeric input still allows fractional values). Ell fixed the cursor precision of the Cage Transform, Foreground Select, N-Point Deformation (the tool is still disabled by default), and Warp Transform tools.

Krita got its fair share of fixes and improvements. Eoin O'Neill added the real-time preview for changes in generator layers' properties. William Brown updated the Alpha Darken composite operation to use flow more reasonably, and Dmitry Kazakov introduced a global switch for the flow mode, either Creamy (new) or Hard (old), to 'Preferences > General > Tools'. For background on these changes, see this thread in the Krita forum.

Meanwhile, Boudewijn Rempt added undo support to the polygonal selection tool and continued his work on resources management (in a dedicated git branch).

The GDquest team released a Krita add-on to batch-export sprites, assets, and any layers (similar to Adobe Generator in Photoshop and the Export Layers plug-in for GIMP).

Brien Dieterle started writing some initial documentation on his spectral-to-RGB conversion approach in MyPaint and began plahying with compiler optimizations to make painting faster.

Inkscape developers received a 2018 Bronze OSBAR award at Univention Summit in Bremen. The team was represented by Maren Hachmann, a long-time contributor to the project, who you might know from inkscapeforum.com.

Animation

News of the week here is the release of OpenToonz 1.3. Quite a few useful imporovements landed to the final release, including Mypaint brushes support and a new FX for text rendering. For a full list, see the release notes.

There's a general review of the new version by Darren T available.

You can also watch an earlier video by Jeremy Bullock who focused on MyPaint brushes and explained both benefits and limitations of the current implementation.

Sadly, there is no official build for Linux again, although Konstantin Dmitriev of Morevna Project says they will create an AppImage build soon, although it will be the one of their friendly fork (his team participated in the development of v1.3 by fixing anti-aliasing for strokes and improving the sound quality for playback and scrubbing on Linux).

3D

The Blender Development Fund is now raising 25K euro per month, which allows paying five core members of the 2.8 Code Quest. The foundation then published a simple infographic to explain in simple terms how the funding works in the project.

The next goal is 50K per month, which translates into 10 full-time developers.

And on Sunday, Ton Roosendaal receives the Ub Iwerks Award for technical achievement at the 46th Annie Awards, at the UCLA’s Royce Hall in Los Angeles on 2 February 2019.

The Ub Iwerks Award for Technical Achievement, named after the legendary artist Ub Iwerks (creator of Mickey Mouse), is given to individuals or companies for technical advancements that make a significant impact on the art or industry of animation.

(c) https://annieawards.org/juried-awards/ub-iwerks

Mikhail Rachinskiy released messythings, a Blender 2.80 add-on that you might find useful for upgrading your 2.7x projects.

Lucas Veber released Auto-Rig Pro 3.41. All features from previous versions are 2.80-ready, the FBX exporter and Remap tools are complete. The whole add-on uses all the new stuff like collections and view layers, and there's a number of new features and UI improvements available as well. For more information, see the release notes.

Attila Áfra of Intel announced immediate availability of Intel Open Image Denoise, a new open source (Apache License 2.0) deep-learning based denoising library for images produced by raytracing. For a gallery, plese see this page.

According to Attila, for interactive performance, you need at least an AVX-512 capable, high core count Core i9 or Xeon. It will work on older CPUs even without SSE 4.2 support though.

Stefan Werner hooked it up as a compositing node to Blender almost immediately. He stated though that his build "is a one trick pony, no denoising for F12 renders, GPU viewport renders crash". He expects proper integration to be done by somebody soon enough. You can also follow the relevant thread on BlenderArtists.

CAD

Yorik van Havre published his monthly report once again detailing his work on the Draft workbench and the BIM-related feature set in FreeCAD.

Notable changes:

• New Arc by 3 points tool in the Draft workbench
• Bulk classification of all BIM objects is now possible in the Classification Manager
• Revit-like Nudge tool with two modes, fixed (shifts objects by the same distance) and automatic (zoom-dependent)
• New Unclone tool to turn a cloned object into an independent copy
• New Re-extrude tool to recreate an object as an extrusion (structure or wall) of the selected face
• New IFC Preflight tool to perform various tests on a model for IFC compatibility

That's really only about half the actual changes. Check the full monthly report for details.

On top of that, Dion Moult added a new Join tool (Draft workbench) that allows joining multiple wires all at once, and its counterpart called Split. In addition, the FEM workbench was given some love by Bernd Hahnebach again.

Video

Probably the most important change in Olive last week was the newly added initial support for proxies. That's one ugly bit stroked right out for good, as per original review.

The program got a few more settings in the Preferences dialog: input/output audio devices, waveform/thumbnail resolution, UI language. That's right: Olive now ships with several UI translations, including German, Czech, and Russian.

Another new feature is clip markers. Select a clip, place the playhead where you want a marker to appear, press M. If you want a global marker instead, deselect all clips, then press M.

You can locate markers (as well as clips) in the project dock which now features a search field.

Finally, Luma Key and Color Selector effects were contributed by oc1024.

Most other non-linear video editors had a number of worthwhile updates. Here are some of them.

Jonathan Thomas added a ChangeLog window to OpenShot, accessible from the About dialog. The point is to list the latest changes in git repositories of OpenShot and both project's libraries it depends on. This might come in handy, if you run daily builds available from the respective section at OpenShot's website.

Brian Matherly contributed a few improvements to the Timer filter in Shotcut, while Dan Dennedy added a bunch of file format filters to improve the file-saving experience and fixed several bugs.

Last news in this section: Intel published yet another open source (BSD-2-Clause-Patent) project, Scalable Video Technology for AV1 Encoder. If you are thinking of trying it on your desktop computer, be warned:

In order to run the highest resolution supported by the SVT-AV1 Encoder, at least 48GB of RAM is required to run a 4K 10-bit stream multi-threading on a 112 logical core system.

It also currently supports only the x86 architecture.

Music-making

The MuseScore team released version 3.0.2, mostly with bugfixes. For details, see the original news post. If you missed the v3.0 release announcement, here are the detailed release notes.

Further planned work includes bringing back parts playback (regression from 2.x), porting most plugins to MuseScore 3, handling various performance and playback issues, and writing plugins API documentation.

Meanwhile, the development version of VCV Rack got support for oversampling:

Another new feature is a VCV Poly plug-in for handling polyphonic cables:

Convert between mono and poly cables with Merge and Split, mix down all channels in a poly cable with Sum, and inspect channel levels with Viz.

In a conversation on Twitter, Andrew stated that the completion of version 1.0 is likely to take 2+ months.

Tutorials

Joakim Tornhill (Blender Insight):

I will in this tutorial go through all the basic things like using masks, distort texture map, mixing colors, adding noise in to other textures and so on. Simply a crash course in to how you work with procedural textures!

Graphic Design Studio channel published an Inkscape tutorial on drawing an Aero infographic.

The GDquest team, who are now going for the 3rd stretch goal on Kickstarter, released quite a few Godot tutorials last week. Here is one of them, explaining how to code a camera to zoom in and out to keep all players on the screen in a fighting scene.

Art and showcases

Simon Thommes used the acquisition of Allegorithmic by Adobe as an incentive to publish his showcase of using procedural textures in Blender. Some of the procedural shaders are available on Gumroad.

BlenderNation published a behind the scenes article on interior design renders by Rio Suryonugroho.

A new render with Eevee by tomket7 is devoted to the upcoming 50th anniversary of the moon landing.

Assets and resources

Pierre Mervaillie released a new version of his Grease Pencil Character Rig Pack, now featuring a woman model and a new horse model.

Week highlights: GEGL is getting its own compositing tool, pre-release of G'MIC 2.5.0 now available, a new development snapshot of Synfig released, new node brush prototype for Blender 2.80 available.

Graphics

Most interesting yet not quite user-visible work in GIMP last week was Ell's hacking on the internals of painting tools and mask components. Some of the net effects boil down to better performance when painting, others mean overall cleaner compositing logic.

Øyvind Kolås refocused on improving the GEGL application to make it a full-fledged viewer and a compositing environment that can be enhanced with scripts in Lua (luajit is now a requirement for that). Quite a few things are now possible for live-editing with Lua, like Bezier curves:

Debarshi Ray posted an article explaining how he uses GEGL mipmaps in GNOME Photos to achieve fast and smooth zooming of large images.

Brien Dieterle merged his older barrel rotation support code to MyPaint and added a fake pressure/rotation controller so that people who don't own a graphic tablet could still have advanced use for the program.

Paint expressively with just a mouse and keyboard w/ @MyPaintApp! Now you can adjust pressure and twist your brush with just a few key presses. Who needs @GTKtoolkit tablet support anyway ;-) @lgworld @Krita_Painting pic.twitter.com/3lYq91FpxD

— Brien Dieterle (@BrienDieterle) February 13, 2019

A pre-release of G'MIC 2.5.0 is now available for downloading, with some new filters such as Color Grading / Creative Pack.

Animation

Konstantin Dmitriev et al. announced the release of Synfig 1.3.11, a new development snapshot leading up to version 1.4.0 that will be the next stable one. For this new version, the team focused on performance issues in various ways.

First of all, the render engine now uses downsampling for image layers scaled to a smaller size. Then there has been major optimization of parsing scenes with many layers, as well as optimizations for Outline Layer, Region Layer, Checkerboard Layer, SuperSample Layer. Synfig also has a playback cache and does background rendering now.

For more information on these and other improvements, see the release announcement.

3D

Pablo Dobarro posted a teaser of node brush prototype in Blender 2.80.

This the first prototype of the Node Brush. It runs a node network to calculate the displacement on each vertex so it can produce all kinds of deformations with unlimited parameters. Based on a WIP branch by @JacquesLucke #b3d pic.twitter.com/JHe9PNGkXV

— Pablo Dobarro (@pablodp606) February 13, 2019

Martin Klekner pointed out that all shortcuts changes in Blender 2.80 are being documented here.

The Blender 2.8 Fast Carve add-on for hard surface modeling and Boolean operations has been updated to version 0.9.0.5 (see the 'fast-carve-2-8' git branch). The new features are extruded primitives and snapping of those to faces of the mesh.

A new version of the Boxcutter add-on is out, with Edit Mode live support, live blue box w/selection support, redesigned top bar, redesigned behavior panel, and more. See the release notes for more information, or watch this video.

Andrew Price did a great detailed interview with Colin Levy, "From Blender to Pixar":

Speaking of which, Pixar made a new release of Universal Scene Description. See here for the full changelog (hint: quite a few OpenColorIO changes there).

Attila Áfra announced that the Intel team updated the Open Image Denoise documentation with details on how the albedo and normal buffers should look like to maximize quality, supported pixel reconstruction filters, and more.

CAD

Dion Moult wrote a small introduction to parsing IFC 2X3 files with Python via IfcOpenShell.

Video

Development of Olive got slightly calmer last week, with mostly fixes, small improvements, and documentation landing to the source code, as well as newly added Bosnian and Serbian translations of the user interface.

Alexandru Băluț wrote a blog post detailing recent steps to polish the project viewer in Pitivi. Meanwhile, Thibault Sanier contributed GStreamer Editing Services XML adapter to OpenTimelineIO. That's the first free video NLE for Linux to do so.

Dan Dennedy updated Shotcut to use vertical HD at 30fps and 60fps.

Flowblade got several new filters added by Janne Liljeblad: Vignette Advanced, File Luma to Alpha, Normalize (audio),

Music-making

There's not a single sign of Andrew Belt getting tired of hacking on upcoming VCV Rack 1.0. Most recently, he added polyphonic and MPE support to MIDI-CV, and implemented a MIDI map to map MIDI CC parameters directly to knobs, switches, and sliders in Rack.

Another new feature is available in the right-click menu: easily accessible info about the plugin, including links to its website, manual, source code, etc. (clicking will open those in a web browser).

Tutorials and education

New Inkscape timelapse from grafikwork: Stone Axe.

And a Krita painting timelapse from the same author:

Non-photorealistic tree with Krita and Blender, by Mandala Motion:

A tutorial on creating realistic grass with Blender 2.8 in 15 minutes, by CG Geek:

Also, check out this behind-the-scenes post at BlenderNation about a Corvette C7 Stingray render made with Blender.

Art and showcases

K.L. Turner aka "Eclectixx" reposted his old art made with GIMP, a program he uses for digital painting to this day.

Fed up with the stigma that you must pay for expensive subscription-based software to get professional results. I made this image using an old version of GIMP, 7 years ago!

Mohamed Chahin too reposted his older lowpoly art made with Blender.

Paweł Pęcherzewski did this render of Antelope canyon (Arizona) as part of an eroded sandstone material study. See this BlenderArtists thread for discussion.

Omri Cohen released an ambient album "Cosmic Foundry" composed and produced entirely in VCV Rack.

Interesting

Luca Rood came up with General Asset License for distribution of digital assets meant for use in larger works. He mostly had 3D assets in mind when drafting the license text.

Despite all the existing free/open licenses around, I've always felt that there is a gap when it comes to assets. The @creativecommons licenses do a great job for final artworks, but can be less attractive for assets. This is my attempt at filling the gap.

See generalassetlicense.org for more information.

Week highlights: new features in Krita, GEGL, MyPaint, and Inkscape, new major digiKam release, a week-long workshop in Amsterdam for Blender developers announced, a monthly update from Apertus project on their Axiom camera, official YouTube channel for Ardour available now.

Graphics

Michael Natterer continued merging the code of GIMP plug-ins handling various resources (brushes, patterns etc.) into the core of the program. Meanwhile, Ell carried on working on the performance of painting tools, the Smudge tool in particular. Also, an experimental appimage of GIMP's GTK3-based version is now available thanks to Andrea Ferrero.

As for GIMP's engine, GEGL, Øyvind Kolås is hacking on the built-in graph editor like there is no tomorrow. Most recently he added a basic PDF loader (with support for password-protected files and going through pages), video playback controls, on-UI for rotation, and a scaffold UI for GEGL operations that take a radius parameter. He also reused code from GNOME Photos that boosts 90° rotation and flips for JPEG files embedded ICC profiles. Finally, he added a Preferences screen (Ctrl+p) that allows toggling mipmap support, OpenCL, and the use of display ICC profiles. Ell implemented an improved, more sophisticated cache policy to GEGL.

Wolthera van Hövell tot Westerflier contributed two user-visible improvements to Krita. Her first patch adds a rotation slider and a mirror button to the Overview docker:

Her other patch adds a visual indicator to memory use reporting in the status bar. Instead of a button it now looks like a slider that changes color based on how much memory the application uses, with the slider color changing from the regular one used in a theme (up to 20$ of memory use) towards red (over 80%).

Boudewijn Rempt made all aspects of autosaving and creating backup files configurable. Here is the new Preferences page:

Brien Dieterle continues playing with keyboard modifiers in MyPaint:

Put your color schemes to work with lazy incremental palette shifting based on dynamic keystroke intervals. I mean mash the buttons to shift your color in big steps, or take your time and create seamless gradients. Pigment model, naturally. Coming soon @MyPaintApp @lgworld pic.twitter.com/fw6puKajbX

— Brien Dieterle (@BrienDieterle) February 22, 2019

While at that, he started revisiting CIECAM color adjusters and pickers that he wrote in 2017:

Use CIECAM dimensions for adjusting and picking colors. Adjustable Illuminant to simulate various lighting conditions. Pick any CIECAM dimension from canvas, including custom illuminant.

That code is currently in his personal fork ('HCYtools' branch).

As for Inkscape, Jabier Arraiza finally merged his work on the new live path effect selector to the main development branch. The new dialog substitutes the old plain list with icons (contributed by Ramon Miranda) and allows marking particular effects as the favorite ones, then easily show only them.

Martin Owens resurrected his old on-canvas alignment feature from 2013 and built the switch to enable it into the Align/Distribute dialog. Once enabled, press Shift+S to cycle through size handles, rotation/skew handles, and alignment handles.

Photography

Gilles Caulier et al. released a major update of digiKam, a photo management application. Among changes: full support for video files management, simplified web service authentication, revamped Time Adjust tool, Pinterest exporting, and more. See the release announcement for more details.

3D

Blender Foundation announced 2.8 Homestretch Workshop week in Amsterdam, where core team developers will meet to work on leftover 2.80 design issues, collect feedback from users and the Blender studio team, plan their work on the 2.80 release, and schedule targets for 2.81 and 2.82.

Speaking of which, the London Blender Users Group announced the first full day Blender event in London on June 22. London Blender Day will have talks and workshops. The program is not yet available, organizers are currently accepting proposals.

Lewis released SimpleBake 2.0, "a one-click solution for baking PBR maps from materials created in Blender 2.8". The new version is a full rewrite of the add-on and only supports 2.80.

The BlenderKit team updated their add-on that provides access to their free online database of materials, brushes and 3D models accessible directly from Blender. The add-on supports both 2.79 and 2.80. You can read more about changes in the release announcement.

Appleseed team posted a teaser of an upcoming feature, heterogeneous volumes and OpenVDB support, added by their former GSoC student Artem Bishev.

Video

Matt introduced a few improvements to Olive, including an almost full transition tool rewrite and a new text filter option for drop shadow. He says he's going to move drop shadow into a separate filter though.

The Apertus project posted new main board photos for their modular Axiom camera.

They also published a new development update, covering a new 20Mpx full-frame curved image sensor from Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille, future mass production of Axiom beta, and application submission for GSoC2019.

Music-making

Tobiasz “unfa” Karon now maintains a newly created official Ardour's channel on YouTube. He made quite a few Ardour videos in the past, so the team decided to get him on board as the official educator. Unfa started the new channel with an Ardour intro:

Ardour developers continue doing the boring under-the-hood work, but there are some user-visible changes again. First off, Alby M. contributed a MIDI Remap plugin in Lua. Then, Robin Gareus rewrote some of the latency compensation code to reduce a processor's latency to zero and prepare for a global switch to use zero latency throughout the whole session.

Andrew Belt continues hacking on VCV Rack 1.0. Some of the latest changes are a headless mode and various clean-ups. Peter Kirn of CDM fame wrote a quick overview of upcoming changes.

Tutorials and education

Another timelapse from grafikwork:

Ilker Beşken posted an Inkscape timelapse about drawing an Alps barn, based on a pencil sketch.

Bruce Williams posted a tutorial explaining how to use the local contrast module in darktable (a a substitude for the Clarity slider in Lightroom).

GDquest posted a new Godot tutorial explaining how to block attacks with a shield as in Zelda.

Art

Sylvia Ritter posted some new artwork made with Krita, including Disco Dingo for the upcoming Ubuntu 19.04 release:

A Mexican game studio Bad Tomato Games published some new concept art made with Krita for their upcoming title 'Balam and the Spirit Within'.

You can also watch them live-painting some other NPCs:

BD3D posted a new render made with Cycles, called 'Dead Wood Cabin'.