Week highlights: new release of darktable and Zrythm, new WIP features in Krita, new AVL drumkit, Blender changes release schedule with the 4.x. series. Less software news, more artworks this time.
GIMP
Not much going on in the main development branch, but CmykStudent is as active as ever in Git branches and the merge requests section. They rewrote old GIMP’s code to import ACO palette files to use babl. As the result, GIMP can now handle ACO file where colors are defined in CIE LAB. There’s also further progress with importing SwatchBooker files.
Krita
Agata Cacko and Amy Spark fixed a bunch of bugs this week. Additionally, Amy Spark continued working on improving the layout of various UI parts of Krita, this time — Color Selector Settings and the Preferences dialog. Emmet O’Neill and Eoin O’Neill made further progress with their work on animation.
For the fun part, Przemysław Gołąb started working on new “wet” blending modes that “blend strokes Alpha channel with existing strokes nicely, but still allow layering of color channels”.
You can also checkout the related discussion on Krita Artists.
darktable 4.2.1
This is a bugfix follow-up to the release from last December. Notably, Fuji files decompressing is now up to 25% faster. There’s base support for 9 more camera models/files, new noise profiles etc. Unfortunately, support for a little over 20 camera models was suspended, because there are no test files on raw.pixls.us to verify if it works. If your camera is in that list, please submit a test file.
Blender
Blender developers announced that they are planning to switch from 4 to 3 major updates a year. The intention is to reduce the overhead with updating documentation, coordinating builds and testing, as well as to reduce the overlap of development phases.
As you can see on the chart above, the 3.x series will follow the old schedule, while the 4.x series will follow the new one later this year already.
Ardour
Not a lot of changes last week: there have been fixes for MIDI clock syncing and a new option to quantize MIDI clock resolution.
On a related note, Paul Davis has just released the third episode of the Audio Developers Chats podcast. His new guest is Tero Parviainen (Counterpoint) who makes interesting web audio projects like the Music Mouse and Euclidean Rhythm Explorer.
Zrythm v1.0.0-beta.4.6.3
Alex makes frequent releases of this DAW, this one comes with a spectrum analyzer and vertical zoom buttons in the editor. The user manual got a few updates including a newly added FAQ section.
New AVL Drumkit
Blonde Bop drumkit is now available as part of the AVL Drumkit family. It comes with a variation where drums are played with rute sticks. The LV2 version is provided by Robin Gareus (Ardour/Mixbus team), but you can also get the SFZ library for your SFZ-capable sampler.
Here is ’the making of’ video by Glen MacArthur:
Tutorials
Vinters 3D explains how to an isometric render of a street in Blender:
New Krita painting timelapse from grafikwork:
Artworks
Some new paleoart from Paweł Palenica:
#blender #b3d pic.twitter.com/MtQmcXeFCx
— Pawel Palenica (@Palenica1) February 25, 2023
Presences of the night by bdec (Blender)
Multicomplex by DCUB3 (Blender)
Fun with clouds by Philipp Urlich (Krita)
Speedpainting 15012023 by Sylvia Ritter (Krita)
César (Simple Character Design) by MauFlores (Krita)
More character design, this time by Nhaul (Krita)
Unnamed work by sonny (Krita)
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