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: , , , ,

Krita Sketch Release

Posted on December 14th, 2012

Today has been officially announced the release of Krita Sketch, the touch-optimised and QML-based version of Krita.
It has all the useful tools from Krita that one needs to sketch or speedpaint on the go.

Here is a quick presentation of the interface:
(note: all the drawings in these screenshots are really made inside krita sketch using a touch device and my finger 😉 )

-At launch, you can choose to open previous files or to create a new one. Also you can access the latest news from krita website on the right side

welcome to krita sketch

-On the canvas view, there are 6 options panels on the top side, plus the main menu panel on the bottom side.
The menu panel has controls, from left to right, to create, load, save and save-as files, undo, redo, zoom-in and out, reduce and close the window.

panels and menu

-The top panels can be opened in two different modes: peek and full. In peek mode, you just click the label, and you have access to the most important content of the panel. Then just click the canvas to close it. To get it in full mode, drag the label to the right or left side of the canvas and it will expand there. Then dragging another label at the same place will switch panels.

panel modes

The content of each panel is:

-Presets panel: select the brush preset to use. No preset edition yet.

-Tool panel: On the panel blue border, you can switch tool category (paint or transform), and quickly switch erase mode on/off when paint tool category is selected.
In full mode, it has a white part where you can select different tools from this category (painting: freehand, fill, gradient; transform: move, crop). Then there are the settings for the selected tool.

-Select panel: on the green border there are controls to deselect, reselect and show/hide selection. Inside the panel, the first line of controls activate the different selection tools (rectangle, polyline, area, color), the second line is to change the mode (replace, intersection, add, substract), and the rest of the controls to edit active selection.

-Layers panel: on the red border there are controls to add, edit (full mode only) and remove layers. Add layer in peek view automatically add a paint layer, in full mode you choose between paint, group or filter layers. In edit mode, you can rename layer, change blending mode, opacity, toggle visibility, lock/unlock and activate/desactivate separate color channels …

-Color panel: on the panel border there are current foreground and background colors, a color-picker tool switch, and a button to switch color-wheel and palette modes (peek mode only, as in full mode you already have access to both)

-Filter panel: on the border, one button to apply current filter, and another to switch filter preview on/off. Use the first dropdown list to select the filter category, and the second to select the filter. Then there are some controls available depending on the selected filter.

more panels

Have fun painting with Krita sketch :.)

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