Back from the “Future Tools” LGM 2013

Posted on April 16th, 2013

I’m just back home from the Libre Graphics Meeting 2013, which was once again awesome!
It happened in Madrid this time, at the Medialab-Prado.

There were a lot of interesting talks and workshops, mixing coder and artistic topics.
All kinds of graphics-related activities were represented, including image manipulation, typography, illustration, animation, design, and more.
The Krita team was well represented with Boudewijn Rempt who presented the new Krita Foundation, David Revoy who made a workshop showing his painting workflow on Krita, Ramon Miranda who presented his DVD project, and me who made both a workshop and a talk to present Krita Sketch.

My workshop was a little hard to follow for several reasons: people had to compile Krita Sketch for linux as there aren’t any linux packages yet, which was already quite tricky, but then even more as the network there was way too slow for this big event…
Same for windows users, as the installer file which took a long time to download ended being corrupted.
So at around half of the workshop I switched to Krita desktop, and made people install it as it was easier.
The good thing in this at least is that then people already had the software installed to follow David’s workshop the next day.

krita sketch workshop

In my talk I presented quickly the story behind the Krita Sketch project, and shown the new dark-neutral-grey interface theme that replaced the colorful previous interface for next version release (it’s already pushed in Krita sketch git branch, if you want to test it…)

krita sketch talk

It was very cool to meet more people from the Synfig team this time, with Carlos Lopez (the main coder), Konstantin Dmitriev (Morevna project), and a few other users.
We could have a great brainstorming workshop together to look at how Synfig can be improved, both in terms of usability and new features. Awesome things to come!

synfig team

Also about animation, the main coder from Tupi, Gustav Gonzalez could come for the first time at LGM to present his software and discuss with other coders and users to gather ideas to improve it (including some features collaborating with Krita..). Again, promising!

Many cool people were there: the Gimp team (many thanks to them for the great party on Friday night 😉 ), the Libre-Graphics-Magazine team with a nice new 2.1 release, some people from Mypaint, Scribus, Inkscape and Libre-office teams.

Also several independants and smaller projects were present, like Tom Lechner with his always-more-crazy Laidout software, Camille Bissuel and Cedric Gémy from the to-come project of node-based image editor Mikado, PyCessing, Claudia Krummenacher who raised some interesting questions about print vs ebook and liquid layout, Dave Crossland and Ben Martin showing the great new more-than-welcome improvments of FontForge, Jakub Steiner who made an interesting use of Blender for a 2D animation work, Tavmjong Bah who presented the future of SVG features, the Piksels and lines orchestra who made a fun performance using libre graphics software to produce pictures and sound, and many, many others…
Sorry to not mention everyone, the list is too long (there were 65 talks/workshops this year, not counting all the open-podium lighting talks).

I’m very happy to can have been there this year again, so much thanks to KDE e.V. who supported me for this event!
And of course again so much thanks to Femke Snelting and the Medialab-prado team who made an awesome work organizing this event.

Photos above from Carlos Lopez and David Revoy‘s albums ; More photos of the event HERE and HERE.

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

Animation in Krita: one more step!

Posted on April 3rd, 2013

Today a new cool feature arrived in Krita development version (many thanks to Boudewijn Rempt who did it): the “LayerGroupSwitcher”.
Basically it’s just two little shortcuts (not assigned by default), that switch to next or previous group layer, hiding the previous group and showing the current one.
With this it’s much faster to work on an animation or image sequence using group layers to separate frames.

The main problem I have with this method is the lack of an automated light-table, so as a workaround for now I use a clone layer of previous/next frames inside my current group, with lower opacity and a red or blue color over it (check the screenshot for layer stack details…)

A very quick test anim to show that it works, download it here.

animation layer stack

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

First Krita Lessons and other cool things this week

Posted on March 31st, 2013

This week for the first time I’ve been teaching Krita lessons, from Monday to Wednesday, at Activ Design. This is a french school training students to graphics work using only free software. This time it was only a short training about drawing basics and how they apply using Krita features.

logo activdesign

There’s more planned for next year, so if you’re interested in some Krita training (or others libre graphics software training), contact them and maybe see you there next year! 😉

Photos of some student’s work and the classroom:

dessins

Activ Design classroom

On another topic, the next day (Thursday) I’ve been to Paris to make some Krita demo at a cool press event. It happened at the Titty-Twister, a “From Dusk Till Dawn” themed club.
I was drawing on a Vaio-Duo, with the screen mirrored to another big screen and a printer to print results, and I made quick vampire-style caricatures to fit the theme (~5 minutes/drawing).
As usual people enjoyed a lot the live drawing session, and where amazed by Krita’s features. Also it was a good occasion for me to test the latest Krita desktop and sketch installers for windows on it (win8-64bit), and the hardware compatibility.
About this, too bad the pressure stylus of this ultrabook is not wacom-based and so pressure doesn’t work in Krita, still it was more precise than drawing with capacitive/touch-screen only.

Here some of the sketches made during this night:

sketch02

sketch06

sketch14
 

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

Krita 2.6 released

Posted on February 7th, 2013

Hi,
This week the Calligra suite released version 2.6, including latest stable Krita.

Lots of cool stuff (though more cool features are already in master branch, waiting for 2.7… ).
The official announcement is here on Krita.org, including a nice presentation booklet.

new Krita icon
This release introduce the new icon I’ve made, based on the Krita Sketch icon with different colors.
I also started to redesign the other application icons from Calligra suite, starting with Sheets, Stage and Words. The rest of the suite should have new icons too for next update release.

Here is an illustration made with latest master version. The original is at big resolution (4816×7016 = A4 600DPI), so I’ve added a zoom-in part at only half resolution to get a better idea of it.
EDIT 03/08/2013: updated version.
mountains girl
mountains girl detail

You can look at the full size version HERE .

Have fun painting! 🙂

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

KXStudio, a good audio distribution using KDE

Posted on January 19th, 2013

Since a few months my main computer is running a special Ubuntu-based distribution called KXStudio.
It’s actually a set of PPAs on top of ubuntu repositories, meant to provide updated and additional audio-creation software. Also it’s using KDE Plasma as official desktop, with a very good default configuration and an up-to-date 4.9.5 version. So if you’re interested in a good audio distribution, a good KDE system or both, keep on reading…

As I said KXStudio is a set of PPA repositories, divided in categories, so when I first installed it I started from a fresh Xubuntu install, added the most important repositories on top of it (main, plugins, kernel and drivers, kxstudio, and latest) and installed “kxstudio-desktop-xfce” meta-package. I used an XFCE desktop first because I’ve always had better experience for “real-time” audio on this light desktop, but then when I saw that the officially supported desktop was KDE 4.9, I added the “KDE 4.9” PPA and installed “kxstudio-desktop-kde”, and never had to return to XFCE since then 😉
Now since ~2 weeks there’s a new .iso image to test and install it directly, so you may try it instead for a simpler installation.

The most important difference with any regular distribution is that it’s using the JACK audio server for the system by default. For those who are new to audio software on Linux, JACK is the “realtime” audio server used to run audio software with very low latency and to connect their inputs and outputs to make them work together. So here we have jack launched directly with the desktop, with some bindings for applications using only ALSA or Pulseaudio to JACK. This works very well (and, on a side note, on the KDE desktop it somehow fix the weird issue I had with phonon popping a window now and then saying it can’t find a device..)

It includes new software to make it easy:
-Cadence, a cool GUI to configure JACK, check current system status, and launch the other JACK-tools.
-Catia, a simple patchbay to check and modify audio and midi connections.
-Claudia, same thing as Catia but using LADISH sessions to save and reload settings (for advanced use)
-Carla, a great multi-plugin host for JACK
-a classic log window for troubleshooting
-a render tool to record a JACK project
-a virtual XY-controller+midi keyboard to simulate the equivalent hardware.

Cadence

Cadence tools

For a better experience, I recommend to use JACK-native software as much as possible, use the alsa-jack bridge for everything else, and really just if none of these works for the software you want to use, install and launch the pulseaudio jack-bridge (but there really is not much pulseaudio-only apps, at least I don’t use any).

For audio player, Aqualung and Clementine have good JACK support.
For video, VLC and MPlayer are JACK compatible too.
Firefox/flash is using the alsa/jack bridge.

Just give it a try when you have a moment, you’ll see by yourself…

Many thanks to the little KXstudio team for all the work!

Technical note specific to intel GPU users:
I use a laptop with intel GPU (Ivy Bridge), which requires drivers much more recent than those shipped with Ubuntu 12.04 (or even 12.10, so I’m still using a 12.04 base..) so I had to activate some more external PPAs for better up-to-date drivers:
– https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat/+archive/x-updates
– https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat/+archive/intel-graphics-updates
And I installed by hand a more recent 3.6.x kernel from http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/
With recent kernels, it’s not really necessary to have a low-latency or realtime kernel to use realtime in JACK for most cases. However if you have a very big audio workload and start to get some xruns, you may try with a less recent but low-latency or realtime kernel (all versions I’ve find of these are 3.5.x at best…)

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