Week highlights: new version of CadQuery, new features in Krita, Inkscape, Kdenlive, Olive.
Krita
For Krita, the merge requests section is probably a little more interesting than what’s going on in the main development branch right now. There’s a node editor for vector layers proposed, as well as various UX/UI improvements and minor features for the bundle and resource manager. All that coming to version 5.2 later on.
Inkscape
The most important change this week is the major update of PDF importing by Martin Owens. Not only he redesigned the dialog and added displaying the list of fonts:
He also added PDF layer support, improved font name detection, made it possible to keep margins, bleeds and page sizes, added ICC profiles support, and more.
There are some interesting merge requests too. For instance, Mike Kowalski proposed displaying image properties in the Fill’n’Stroke dialog:
The exact location of image properties is being debated, but it’s easy to see why this is a huge improvement.
CadQuery 2.2.0
CadQuery is an interesting parametric modeling CAD (with Python scripts) that recently got a major update.
The new version comes with a new Sketch API for 2D planar operations, 2D
fillet and chamfer functions, and new constraint types for the Assembly
solver, namely InPlane, PointOnLine, FixedPoint, FixedAxis, and
FixedRotation. The team say that constraint-based sketches are not
production-ready yet though. Here’s the full list of
changes.
And here is an older video that serves as an introduction to modeling with CadQuery.
Along with Godot, CadQuery is also the foundation for another free/libre (LGPL 2.1) CAD project, Semblage, that is written mostly in GDScript.
Kdenlive
A bugfix release was published earlier this week. Meanwhile, nested sequences are finally in alpha and ready for testing. For now, an AppImage build is available.
There are some glitches as you can see from the screenshot, but it already works, at least for displaying nested sequences in the project monitor.
Olive
Two major changes landed earlier this week. First of all, Olive can now encode AV1 when exporting to WebM:
Secondly, opening multiple projects in a single window is now gone. It messed up the layout badly, was hard to maintain, and you can achieve more or less the same by just opening two instances of Olive. Therefore, all “Close” actions in the File menu are now gone. Just creating a new project or opening an existing one will be sufficient.
There will be another major refactoring effort, but one that reportedly shouldn’t delay 0.2.0. Essentially, Matt is planning to modularize the codebase to make it easier to maintain it as well as for new contributors to get started.
Ardour
This is likely the last week before v7.3 is out. The team fixed some issues, made control points snap to grid, and merged a patch from Ayan Shafqat that adds AVX-512 instructions to DSP code (there isn’t much of it in Ardour, but it’s still nice).
Tutorials
Davide Crivelli shot a cool introduction to his parametric FEA library based on FreeCAD:
Ducky 3D explains how to use geometry nodes in Blender for a simple abstract animation:
Dimitar Pouchnikov compares creating attractor-based tessellation variations with geometry nodes in Blender and with the Rhino+Grasshopper combination:
This is something you don’t often see these days: a real-time drawing session in Krita. Feel free to use ×2 speed though! :)
Artworks
Hard to get tired of dioramas! This is a Harmonious Street Corner by Mehdy 3dee (Blender)
Here is another fun take at isometry: Karieryn’s Teapot House by Curzio Ferrara (Blender)
Color study of flowers by Wenentro (Krita):
Mountain side by Philipp Urlich [(Krita), only round hard brushes used.
Patreon subscribers get early access to my posts. If you are feeling generous, you can also make a one-time donation on BuyMeACoffee.
