Week highlights: this was a pretty eventful week, with major new releases of Blender, FreeCAD, and Zrythm.
Inkscape
Rafał Siejakowski proposed an enhancement to Inkscape’s Node tool: being able to edit arcs in paths as arcs, with arc-specific controls:
You can grab a build from the merge request’s pipelines.
Blender 4.3
As usual, the new version of Blender arrived with a gazillion new features and improvements. There’s no competing against official release notes, so here are just some release highlights:
- Rendering: Light Linking and Shadow Linking in Eevee, Metallic BSDF.
- Compositing: Eevee passes are now available for interactive compositing.
- UV editing: a new iterative unwrapping method, “Minimum Stretch”, provides less distortion.
- Geometry nodes now work with Grease Pencil data smoothly.
- The Grease Pencil’s engine was rewritten for better architecture and performance.
- Over a hundred default sculpting brushes and improved user interface for working with brushes.
- Areas can now be torn out and docked back freely.
There’s a video too:
FreeCAD 1.0
This is a huge milestone for the project that has been over 20 years in the making. Frankly, I don’t know why it took the FreeCAD team this long to accept the truth that many of their users rely on the software in their daily work. Projects with fewer features and worse UI have larger version numbers, and numerology is hard and probably pointless to beat. The answer could be in the toponaming issue, though.
I already covered the news in a separate post (and completely forgot to mention the new logo), so here are some of the highlights:
- Toponaming issue largely mitigated.
- Brand-new Assembly workbench built-in, developed by the Ondsel team, with exploded. views and BOM generation (both parametric).
- New features and major quality-of-life improvements in Sketcher and TechDraw.
- The Path workbench has been renamed to CAM and now ships with a new toolpath simulator.
- The Arch, BIM, and NativeIFC workbenches have been merged into one BIM workbench and now feature direct IFC editing.
- New ways to analyze models in the FEM workbench.
PrusaSlicer becomes flatpak-only
This is only the first alpha release of PrusaSlicer v2.9.0, but Prusa announced they will only be providing Linux builds in flatpak from now on. The popular 3D printers vendor found testing AppImage builds on multiple Linux distributions challenging and supporting both libfuse2 and libfuse3 too cumbersome. Flatpak solves both issues for them.
Meanwhile, the upcoming release is full of awesome: multiple beds in the scene, Printables integration, scarf seams (masking visible seams on smooth surfaced by overlapping extrusions), fuzzy skin improvements, and more.
Zrythm 1.0.0
After 5 years of development, Alexandros Theodotou released Zrythm 1.0, a free/libre DAW that, I dare say, has some fine-tuning for electronic music production. It’s also one of those DAWs where you see more videos of playing back a real project than tutorials or reviews.
There isn’t much of a changelog to look at because Alexandros made frequent beta releases. The Features page should give you a pretty good idea about what the application is capable of, though. Just a few highlights:
- Regular audio and MIDI, as well as chord tracks
- Context-sensitive clip editor in the bottom panel
- Free stretching of audio and MIDI clips
- Bounce in place
- Support for VST2, VST3, LV2, CLAP, AU (macOS-only), and JSFX plugins, with plugin sandboxing and automation
- Automatic project backups
- Hardware-accelerated UI (GTK4)
The GTK4-based UI is not for long: Alexandros has already started porting everything to Qt6/QML (UI) and JUCE (lower-level things). Here are the details of the plan.
The monetization model is close to Ardour’s: you can either build the source code yourself or get ready-to-use builds for a small fee. The difference is that with Zrythm, you get several tiers, including a small annual subscription fee for everything included.
The downloads page is here.
Artworks
“Convoy” by Sami Dahdouh, made with Blender and Krita:
“Ghyslaine” by Blender-Fan, made with GIMP, Blender, Krita:
“Page of Swords” by Sylvia Ritter, made with Krita:
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