LGM 2012: a crazy week in Vienna!

Back from the Libre Graphics Meeting, it’s been a crazy week with tons of cool people.
The event was happening in parallel with the Linuxwochen one in the FH Technikum, so the place was really filled with cool geeks, lots of good vibes in the place… :.)

Very interesting talks and workshops:
°Regarding color management I now want to get a ColorHug device, and I’m very happy and gratful to Kai-Uwe for helping me on getting his powerful Oyranos CMS software working right on Kubuntu 12.04. Complete tutorial to come next blog post 😉

°Ricardo and Ana made a great presentation on fonts improvements for the web using some magic scripts, I’ll have to give a try and experiment with this.
And I’ve been happy they brought some Libre Graphics Magazine 1.3 and latest 1.4, so I could complete my collection 😀

°Ramon Miranda made a nice show with his impressing painting work, showing the power inside the tools we have in free software, and giving his vision for the future of floss painting tools.. So cool I finally met him in real life, and we spent a lot of time talking about digital paiting tools and other things… Lot of fun!

°Martin Renold made an interesting talk about “predictable painting” related to his work on the mypaint brush, as if you don’t know he’s the original creator of mypaint… Now I see where the original coolness of mypaint comes from… With Jon Nordby (another important mypaint coder) also being there this year again, that was more representation of the mypaint team than last year and I’m sure it’ll help them to get things impoving fast in their cool painting software… Very cool people 😀

°Tom Lechner made a talk about his software Laidout, an experimental publishing tool that is very interesting, I should dig in when I’ve some time… As his soft, his artistic work is crazy, very good work. Much respect! So I’ve been glad to meet him this year again.

°The Scribus Team had an official workshop and some ponctual group-talk about how to improve scribus… Things are likely to evolve quicker than before, I’ve good hopes from what I’ve heard. Definitely the free software tool for traditional publishing work 😉

°Mairin Duffy and Emily Dirsh made some clever work on collaboration tools for free minded designers ;.)
Very interesting talk, I’m sure I’ll use these tools at some point…
A few interesting links to explore the subject HERE, HERE and HERE.

°Johan Engelen presented his work on Powerstroke, that is an awesome line width system for the vector graphics editor Inkscape. This kind of system already existed since a long time in synfig studio in a more simple way (but since a recent update came almost like this powerstroke feature with the “advanced outlines”), so I see how this will improve greatly the possibilities to use inkscape and synfig together when the conversion will be possible in the .sifz export from inkscape… Awesome things to come!

°CONGRATS TO THE GIMP TEAM for the 2.8 release, that happened right during LGM! The Goats are invading the place, and things are getting awesome with EXR support, opencl acceleration, gimp is here to stay the best floss image manipulation software … Also GEGL power is jumping beyond the barriers of Gimp and is already invading mypaint, and even some could go in exotic lands of Synfig, and who knows, maybe some could reach to pass the wall of Krita 😉 (as pippin told me, to make it short, that it can now be used as a kind of bindings without replacing another current system)

°Femke Snelting and Marcos Garcia talked about their activities for the Libre Graphics Reasearch Units that is a collaboration between four european Media-labs associations involved in free graphics artistic creation culture. It’s good to see such serious work on creating structures to develop such things. And of course this can be a big help to other libre graphics projects.

°A surprising “Remote talk” of Bassam Kurdali, director of the “Tube” Open Movie using Blender 3D for animation in a distributed pipeline. Crazy demo shots of rendering, making-of… at least one representation of Blender at LGM for this year, even if remote, is better than nothing. video available here.

And many other good talks, sorry for those I missed… This year’s program was so huge it was anyway impossible for 1 person to see everything :.D

Then the last day morning was busy for me:
-It started with the collaborative talk I did with Lukas Tvrdy, where he presented what happened since last year in Krita while I illustrated his words showing the features on the software.
-I made a talk/demo about synfig studio to introduce the basic history, concept and features. I prepared a (too big) demo that I had to fast-forward a bit, so I’ll convert it in an online tutorial soon.
-Two more talks related to synfig studio: first Konstantin Dmitriev (aka Zelgadis) presented the Morevna project and more precisely the Remake tool, that is a valuable little software that make workflow on a big-scaled project using Synfig and/or blender (and/or any software having a CLI available for rendering) much easier.
Third synfig studio talk was by Diego (aka eldruin), a coder from synfig team, presenting the possibilities to enhance synfig studio in the current state, sending a message to all potentially interested coders to join the fun!
-Then I made the Krita workshop about drawing comics-style illustration. For me it’s been a success as the room was filled, and mostly with great people whose I love the work, so it was an honor for me to have so much attention. We discovered some issues in Krita 2.4 packaging on Fedora that’s missing some features… But globally everyone learned a lot and was happy… It last almost 2 hours… mission complete!

Also many other surprises, like discovering the Vienna metalab, an impressive hackerspace where the community is really great and friendly. Knowledge-sharing power! Thanks to Pepi for the tour and for introducing me to Kallaballa, who showed me his work on a hack to make Gimp play sound/noise/music, called SoundFumble (thank you for uploading it so fast! ;)). It was so impressive that he managed to have a quick demo/live show with it at the LGM before the end. Everyone there was amazed 😀

Too bad the Tupi talk was cancelled, I didn’t have news about this but I’m a little sad the Tupi maintainer couldn’t make it happen…

Now I’m waiting for the cool photos taken there to spread all over the web. Too bad almost all the talks have not been recorded, but I’m lucky there was a video camera running the saturday morning, so my talks should be online some day soon.

Again many thanks to everyone who came to participate in any way and made this wonderful event happen…

See you next year… (in Madrid so !?!)