Krita 2.9 Animation Edition beta

Posted on November 24th, 2015

I’m very happy to tell you, finally, a version of Krita supporting basic animation features is released ! (Check it here)

This is still in early stage, based on latest 2.9 version, with lot of additional features to come later from version 3.

If you want to have fun with it, here is a little introduction tutorial to get started, with some text and a video to illustrate it.

-Load the animation workspace to quickly activate the timeline and animation dockers.

-The timeline only has the selected layer. To keep a layer always visible on it, click on the plus icon and select the corresponding option (Show in timeline to keep the selected layer, or Add existing layer and select one in the list …)

-To make a layer animated, create a new frame on it (with the right-click option on the timeline, or with the button on the animation docker). Now the icon to activate the onion skins on it becomes visible (the light bulb icon), activate it to can see previous and next frames.

-The content of a frame is visible in the next frames until you create a new one.

-After drawing the first frame, go further in the timeline and do any action to edit the image (draw, erase, delete all, use transform tool, …). It creates a new frame with the content corresponding to the action you made.

-If you prefer to only create new frames manually, disable the auto-frame-mode with the corresponding button in the animation docker (the film with a pen icon).

-To move a frame in time, just drag and drop it to a new time position

-To duplicate a frame, press Control while you drag and drop it to a new time position.

-In the animation docker, you can define the start and end of the animation (to define the frames to use for export, and for the playback loop). You can also define the speed of the playback with the Frame rate value (frames per second) and the Play speed (multiplier or the frame rate).

-In the Onion Skins docker, you can change the opacity for each of the 10 previous and next frames. You can also select a color overlay to distinguish previous and next frames. You can act on the global onion skins opacity with the 0 slider.

-To change the opacity of several onion skins at the same time, press Shift while clicking across the sliders.

-To export your animation, use the menu entry File – Export animation, and select the image format you want for the image sequence.

Have fun animating in Krita, and don’t forget to report any issue you find to help improve the final version 😉

Posted in Animations, FLOSS | Tagged as: , , ,

Report from Akademy 2015

Posted on August 5th, 2015

A week has passed since I’ve been back from Akademy, so it’s more than time to make a little report.

I’ve enjoyed a lot meeting old and new friends from KDE. Lot of good times shared 🙂

akademy2015-people(photo by Alex Merry ; you can find lot of ther cool photos on this link)

This year I made a quick little talk presenting the result of my work on GCompris. You can find it with all other talks recorded on this page, if you didn’t watch them already.

 

Also I could discuss some ideas for next things to come, so stay tuned 😉

Thanks a lot to KDE e.V for the support, that was another awesome experience.

Posted in FLOSS | Tagged as: , , , ,

Result of the work on GCompris is ready..

Posted on May 15th, 2015

As I finished the work for the time allocated by this campaign, here is a video showing the result:

Of course being only 15% funded, I couldn’t complete the relooking for everything. But at least, I could update all the core components, all the main menu with all activities icons, and a good bunch of activities.

Thanks again to everyone who helped making this possible; more updates about it later…

Posted in FLOSS, Misc. | Tagged as: , , , ,

GCompris: crowdfunding campaign is over, time to start the work

Posted on February 3rd, 2015

Hi,

The crowdfunding campaign we ran on IndieGoGo to support the work on new unified graphics for GCompris finished yesterday. We didn’t reach the goal set to complete the whole new graphics, but thanks to 94 generous contributors, we collected 3642$. Also we got 260€ directly from the Hackadon 2014, many thanks to those contributors too! Thanks again to everyone who contributed and helped to spread the word!

Now after deducing the fees from IndieGoGo, converting to euros and making the sum, the total should be around 3150€, which is enough to cover 25 days of work. This is way less than the full goal, so I have to adapt the plan. Of course I won’t be able to make new artwork for all activities in these 25 days of work, but I’ll make as much as possible to establish good bases for the new design transition. Also I’ll have to rely as much as possible on some of the existing artwork that is already good enough and only adapt the style and do a some edits instead of starting from scratch as much as possible.

I have published the initial proposal for the new artwork guidelines. I will start the work on February 16th, in 13 days, so this should leave enough time for people to review the guidelines and send their opinion and comments (please use the contact form on my main website, or any other way that you’re used to contact me..). I’ll read carefully every comment and apply needed edits to the guidelines. The guidelines proposal is here.

(Edit 02/11/2015: guidelines and examples updated according to reviews)

Then I’ll fulfil these 25 days of work between February and April. Let’s see how much activities I can update in this time 😉

Posted in FLOSS, Illustrations | Tagged as: , , ,

A modular manual to guide new krita users

Posted on January 4th, 2015

First post of the year, so I can start wishing you all an awesome and happy new year!

As part of my work with Activ Design, I need to prepare some new training material to teach digital painting with Krita. Part of this material will be some kind of software manual. As we don’t have an up to date manual and the booksprint project we started to discuss is on stand-by for now, I started to write a modular manual to guide new Krita users. I call it modular because I want to split each aspect of the software to its own chapter, in separate pdf files (for convenience I’ll also make a version with all chapters in one file at the end). I’m writing both english and french versions: english as it’s the best base for everyone to read and translate, and french because our current students at Activ Design are french 😉

To follow the good old rule “release early, release often”, the first files are already available. This is just the beginning, I’ll add the next chapters in the coming days. Next topics will be the layer stack, the brush editor, and one chapter for each group of tools.

English files:

French files:

If you want to add some translations, the sources are in a git repository: https://gitorious.org/krita-guide

 

A little side note on another topic: if you’ve followed our fundraising campaign for GCompris, you may have noticed we extended the deadline to February 1st. We really need more budget to be able to complete new illustrations for all the different activities, which is needed to reach unified graphics. Please support this project if you can!

Posted in FLOSS, Misc. | Tagged as: , , ,