Weekly highlights: new releases of Siril, Kdenlive, and Zrythm, EEVEE is getting more sky models, LibreDWG gets v0.11 release and goes beta, Inkscape’s GSoC students are having great progress.
Graphics
Dozen of bug fixes landed to Krita last week. Notable changes are further work on SeExpr support in fill layers (e.g. previewing before addition), as well as a few RAW import plugin improvements.
The Inkscape team appears to be working towards releasing v1.0.1 in September. There won’t be any new features, only bug fixes and translation updates.
Developers recently had a several days long hackfest, and one of the days was devoted to Google Summer of Code. You can watch the video, and here’s a quick overview:
- Link Mauve has some good progress with GPU-side rendering via Pathfinder. There aren’t comparison tests yet (wait for feature parity first) but the general outcome is that the more complex your drawing is, the more benefit you will get from rendering it on the GPU.
- Moazin Khatri did some initial work on porting Inkscape paths modifying code out of the aging livarot library.
- Valentin Ionita also has great progress with rewriting Inkscape’s docking system that now looks more like what you get in GIMP.
- Abhay Raj Singh implemented the command palette (it doesn’t seem to fully cover available commands yet, e.g. you can’t set a clip or use the Union boolean op on paths) and is now working on the macros recording.
There’s more news from Akira developers:
Photography
Siril 0.99.4 is out as a beta of upcoming v1.0. So Cyril and Vincent pretty much spilled the beans for the big release :)
There’s a pretty impressive list of changes there, including rewritten user interface (in a single window now), 32-bit per channel precision support, and more. Builds for multiple operating systems are available (AppImage has not been updated yet but Flathub already has the new version).
It looks like ART (the RawTherapee fork) will soon have a new release with some new features (Alberto hasn’t told much more than that yet).
Animation
If you care about Synfig and, for some reason, don’t read their weekly updates, you absolutely should :)
- Videos can now be exported with sound when a sound layer is available
- There’s a Stop button in the rendering progress window now
- Great improvements in the Lottie exporter and the new Skeleton tool (GSoC project this year)
See here for more info.
3D and VFX
Blender 2.90 will be coming with Preetham and Hosek/Wilkie sky models in the Sky Texture node (Hosek/Wilkie comes with ground albedo control).
I’m probably not going to surprise you with more great new stuff coming from Pablo Dobarro.
The Pose and Boundary brushes now support deforming the mesh using cloth simulations. This allows creating bend and compression folds without using collisions. #b3d #devfund https://t.co/MxDm5rFjTg pic.twitter.com/WXG54YGXXA
— Pablo Dobarro (@pablodp606) August 14, 2020
Meanwhile, Manuel Castilla is working on an experimental Blender branch to improve the performance of the compositor.
CAD
LibreDWG 0.11 was recently released. The library is now officially beta quality project.
The new version comes with a ton of improvements and new features (it was ever so, really). Here are some of them:
- support for writing DWG r2004+ files, including r2010, r2013, r2018, but not r2007, more work to be done there;
- support for reading material properties and revisionguid fields in 3DSOLID
- support for GeoJSON (RFC7946)
- new dwgfilter utility to use custom jq queries
- new dxfwrite utility
- support for many object/entity types (support for others is now considered stable).
On Reddit, Reini Urban pointed out a few things that needs to be improved for LibreDWG to go out of beta:
- support for writing files in more versions of DWG
- scripting bindings have to be be improved via dynapi rather than SWIG (Gambas support planned btw)
There’s some work going on to add support for LibreDWG to FreeCAD. it doesn’t work on Linux yet though (at least, if we are talking about AppImage builds).
Video
Kdenlive 20.08 is out with quite a few improvements and new features including (but not limited to) the following changes:
- Named workspaces to quickly switch between different sets of dockable dialogs depending on the task at hand (culling, editing, color-grading etc.)
- Multiple audio stream support (audio routing and channel mapping coming in 20.11 or later)
- Scrollbars in effects and the clip monitors have zoom controls on the edges now (the next release will probably have those in the timeline as well)
- Management over the size of cache and proxy files now available
Olive got Google Crashpad integration on Windows to simplify collecting crash reports. Support for macOS and Linux should come at a later time.
Music-making
Zrythm 0.8.797 was released with smaller improvements like silence insertion, volume control for metronome, and punch in/out recording.
Ayan Shafqat contributed AVX optimized routines to Ardour for things like finding and computing peaks, applying gain to a buffer, and mixing buffer with and without gain.
Tutorials
New Blender tutorial on CG Cookie: Urban Low-poly Building
Luciano Munoz released a tutorial on the basic of using Grease Pencil for 2D animation.
This is an unusual Inkscape tutorial. This guy basically uses the application to design graffiti for model railways.
Nice if slightly creepy drip portrait effect in GIMP, tutorial by Davies Media Design:
Art
Cola Corridor by arbinsidik, Blender 2.8 and Cycles.
Olivier Pautot published the second render (made with Blender) in the Crowds series.
Alan Amaya, I promise, painted with Krita.
Each of my weekly recaps involves researching, building and testing software, reporting bugs, talking to developers, actually watching videos that I recommend, and only then writing. Time-wise, that's between 10 and 20 hours. If you enjoy the work I do, you can support me on Patreon or make a one-time donation.
