Week highlights: new LibrePCB release, GIMP 3.0rc2 is being delayed, FreeCAD team is hacking tirelessly at the next version, OpenSCAD team makes more integrations.
GIMP
Jehan announced on his Patreon account that the second release candidate of 3.0 is being delayed due to GNOME’s infrastructure changes. In the meantime, he started working on a new API for non-destructive filters, including adding them from scripts. At the same time, Øyvind Kolås started patching the layers blending code to use perceptual space by default for certain blending modes.
FreeCAD
Since the v1.0 release last week, maintainers have been meeting twice a week to go through the backlog of pull requests. There were over 250 of them, the list is now down to nearly 180, so there’s more work to be done.
The two sets of patches I’d like to mention here were both contributed by Pierre-Louis Boyer (ex-Ondsel).
First, Pierre-Louis has been enhancing what you can do with external geometry. Some of the patches have already landed, like being able to apply transform tools (e.g. Offset) to external geometry. Others, like creating external geometry from a face, are still being reviewed. It has already been implemented in RealThunder’s fork, but as RT indicated, the feature is hard to isolate in the code because it’s intertwined with his toponaming changes. So now we are getting an implementation from scratch in the upstream repo.
Pierre-Louis’s other work involves refactoring datums to make them more of a core feature with some enhancements.
This stems from his earlier attempt to implement markers for the Assembly workbench to aid the top-down design approach. Markers are essentially LCS, and so are the joints in assemblies. The idea was to create a part, add a marker to its feature in the Assembly branch, and then use it as a reference when you create the next part in context. Preliminary patches have been merged, a more deep change is being reviewed.
There’s some news in the grants department too. I mentioned this project at the end of the v1.0 review, but Kacper’s grant application was approved this week by the FPA General Assembly. He will work on transparent previews for various PD operations such as Pad, Loft, Fillet, and others. This will be the first stage of unifying Part and Part Design.
In the proposal, Kacper mentions further stages that are out of the scope for this grant:
- Add more multi-solid capabilities to Part Design
- Allow using features from other workbenches in the Part Design workbench
- Merging duplicated features, such as Extrude / Pad / Pocket, Chamfer, Fillet etc.
OpenSCAD
I haven’t looked at changes in the project for a long time, plus they haven’t done any releases since 2021. Most recently, Marius Kintel added support for multiple 3D printing services. Currently, the support covers PCBWay, Print A Thing, OctoPrint, and sending a file to a local slicer.
The team has been spending some time to switch to Qt6 lately, too. Among more curious things — Folkert van Heusden recently added support for exporting PovRay scripts and has PovRay animation support in the works.
LibrePCB 1.2.0
Urban Bruhin released a major new version of LibrePCB. Highlights:
- KiCad Library importing, with some limitations
- Datasheet overlay for footprints
- Opening datasheets from schematic
- Specctra DSN exporting / SES importing
- Various productivity improvements incl. mass importing of symbol pins from datasheets, moving & aligning multiple footprint objects at once, copying properties from one footprint object to other objects, and more.
- Dark theme on Windows.
You can find details in the release announcement.
Kdenlive
The team announced that the next Kdenlive Café will be on the 3rd of December at 8 PM UTC. It’s their monthly online meeting between developers and users. You can join them at Join us at: https://meet.kde.org/b/far-twm-ebr.
The next release, 24.12, is expected on the second Tuesday of December.
Artworks
3D art for the Europa game, by Jaspreet Singh. Jaspreet modeled various temples, buildings, and robotic animals. All work done in Blender.
Sin City by Sami Dahdouh, made with Blender and Krita:
Skies of Solitude by Mukitul Islam, made with Blender
The Scent of Autumn by Yao Chan, made with Blender:
Pirate Bay Fluid and Ocean simulation by BlindIllusionist (via Blendernation):
Fun stuff
Blender origin story (via Blendernation):
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