Weekly-ish recap — 30 November 2022

Wed Nov 30, 2022 by Alexandre Prokoudine

New GIMP dev release, massive open-source release party at Amazon and AMD

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GIMP 2.99.14

This is an almost too good of a release this close to v3.0: floating selections out, outlined text in, Align tool rewrite, pasting multiple layers as a single one, and more. I published a review of the most important changes the same day, and there’s official release notes that cover even more changes.

The project also recently celebrated its 27th birthday.

The latest I heard from the team is that there will probably be 2 or 3 more releases like that before v3.0 is finally out.

Upscayl is getting video support

I recently posted a quick overview of Upscayl and Upscaler — two native Linux user interfaces for Real-ESRGAN, a neural network engine for upscaling images.

To reiterate: the next version of Upscayl is getting video support. For real.

Giant open-source code drop from Amazon and AMD

Amazon released the source code of several projects under Apache License 2.0:

Krakatoa, a fast particle renderer (source code)
XMesh, a program for optimizing slow or large animated 3D geometry assets (source code)
Magma, a graphical programming language designed primarily for particle shading in Krakatoa (source code).
NodeView, a Qt component for displaying graph structures in a GUI.

Additionally, there’s a general purpose C++ library with a focus on computer graphics, a C++ library for developing Maya plugins and plugins that integrate Krakatoa and XMesh into Maya, as well as various utility CMake functions. It’s all on GitHub.

Here is a good overview of Krakatoa and XMesh by askNK:

There’s official announcement too, if that’s your kind of thing.

AMD did their thing too with the Radeon Raytracing Analyzer (RRA), although they chose the MIT License.

Brodie Robertson shot a rather opinionated piece on this release, check it out:

Not to muddle the waters, but it’s unclear how much public maintenance we are going to see. All projects haven’t been updated since the respective initial releases (16+ days).

Blender Conference 2022

The nearly annual (sans COVID-19 time) Blender conference took place a month ago. I wholeheartedly recommend this summary by Kaizen Tutorials:

There are posts on Blender’s developer blog about some of the initiatives they talked about at the conference:

BlenderBIM November release

Dion Moult changed the pace of releasing BlenderBIM updated to a much slower one, but the latest one comes with 775 new features and fixes.

IfcOpenShell, the backbone of BlenderBIM, is now available for Conda, PyPI, Docker, Apple M1, and Chocolatey.
You can now set up models to load 1GB of federated IFC data in just 10 seconds.
There are new Wall, Slab, Profile, and Stair editing tools.
The BOLTS project now has WIP support for hundreds of standard European and Australian standard steel profiles
Performance optimizations: 50% faster model loading on Blender 3.3+, twice as fast IfcDiff in comparing models.

See here for vastly more details. The project now also has an updated website.

DNG-rs release

The Apertus team recently released DNG-rs, a Rust library for reading and writing DNG files (also supports DCP). Not of much significance, unless you are an interested developer. Still, I’ve been out of the loop with all things Apertus lately and I’m happy they are very much productive.

Ardour update

There is likely to be a new release (v7.2) soon with further improvements on top of all the massive changes in 7.0/7.1. Most interestingly, MIDI learn for trigger slots is now available, and these settings are saved into sessions.

Then there’s this little thing :)

Robin Gareus recently added a tiny nostalgic feature: importing lyrics from MIDI files as region markers. The "Import MIDI markers" checkbox has to be on. You can also convert those to location markers and then clean up region markers. Coming to v7.2 pic.twitter.com/MTtzS0OIQo
— Ardour DAW (@ardourdaw) November 27, 2022