Week highlights: new major releases of Hugin and OBS Studio, new beta of Friction 1.0, FreeCAD and Audacity dev news.
Hugin 2024.1
Thomas Modes released a new version of Hugin. I haven’t shot panoramas for a long time, so I’m not a great judge of this anymore. Nevertheless, here are the main changes:
- There’s now a browser project files, with thumbnails and project details of all project files in a directory.
- Metadata is now properly read in CR3 files.
- The cpfind tool now uses multirow strategy by default.
Unfortunately, Thomas is not just sticking with SourceForge for source code hosting, he’s also sticking with Mercurial for VCS. This may be a contributing factor to how few contributions the project has been getting in recent years. On the other hand, xpano is not terribly popular among contributors so far either despite being hosted on GitHub. I guess I’m just missing the good old days when there were several regular developers and active GSoC participation.
Friction 1.0beta2
The new version comes mainly with fixes, but there are some noteworthy new features too.
Here are some of those features:
- New color picker tool: select objects, enable the tool (F9), hover something and left-click to apply to fills or right-click to apply to strokes of selected objects. The status bar now shows hover color and its RGB values.
- In/Out markers: you can create them on the timeline, there are Scene menu items for that too, and the renderer now supports the In/Out range.
- Toolbars management: you can now control what toolbars you see in the UI, dock them anywhere you like, and control the toolbars’ alignment.
- The subpath effect now has an Offset parameter (contributed by Pablo Gil), so you can animate a “trimmed” path.
- SVG export now has support for animateMotion (follow path).
- Null objects have a “crosshair” type now.
- For macOS users, there’s now an experimental build, and it comes with an extra feature—multitouch support:
- Pan: slide two fingers, alt modifier to zoom
- Zoom: pinch with two fingers
- Smart zoom: double-tap with two fingers
For details and other changes, please see release notes.
FreeCAD
Simulation finally landed on the upstream Assembly workbench. With this feature, you should be able to program the motion of multiple parts. I’m not kidding about programming the motion:
The idea is that you select a joint, program how to animate it with a formula, and set the duration of the animation and the length of steps. After that, keyframes are generated for you, and you can navigate between them.
The feature was originally developed by Dr. Aik-Siong Koh and then improved by Pierre-Louis Boyer, both Ondsel employees at the time. Simulation has a number of limitations. It’s not very fast and limited to just a few joint types. I’d expect further improvements there.
Next on the list is initial work on top-down design support in Assembly. The toolbar now has a command to insert a part in context. So you start inserting a part, select a feature of an existing part to use as a reference, and then click OK. In the example below, I selected a circular feature.
This will create a new body where the local coordinate system depends on what you selected. So when you add a sketch to that body, it will sit right where you want it to be.
When you insert a part that way, you can also tell FreeCAD to either insert that part into the document or create a new document and link it in your assembly. I’d expect further tweaks and improvements, but this already lays a good foundation for in-context design.
Moving on. The last time I mentioned that Kacper Donat got a grant to work on unifying Part and Part Design and making transparent previews. Well, this work has other outcomes too. A new patch from Kacper, currently in draft, adds a much improved Transform task panel, with further improvements planned:
This patch is waiting for another patch to land first: Kacper is introducing inter-module communication so that modules can talk to each other without direct dependence. In this particular case, the new Transform panel is supposed to be able to realign the dragger placement based on user selection, and you can’t calculate the placement without the Part module.
OBS Studio 31.0
The new version of the popular streaming and screencasting program comes with some really useful new features:
- NVIDIA Blur Filter and Background Blur
- Preview scrollbars and zoom/scale indicator
- v210 format support for AJA device capture
- Amazon IVS service integration
- QSV AV1 Screen Content Coding
- First-party YouTube Chat features enabled
The full list of changes is here.
Audacity
Martin Keary posted a new teaser for Audacity’s updated user interface based on Qt/QML.
It’s not yet what you get when you try CI builds on GitHub: it kinda looks the part, but has MuseScore’s guts all over the place and you can’t record or import any audio. Understandably, completing Audacity v4 will take time.
Ardour
I’m conflicted about reporting dev news for Ardour. The project has been going through some serious UI changes lately, but nothing is set in stone, and many things are in flux and will look different tomorrow. It looks like the goal is to make the user interface more approachable and flexible.
Artworks
Lighthouse by Viacheslav Voloshyn, made with Blender and Krita:
Viacheslav also shot a video that guides you through the creation of this artwork:
Gate to Another Realm by Max Schiller, made with Blender and Photoshop:
Canal Port Town by Nikita Gritsun, made with Blender and Photoshop:
Behind These Mountains by Klaus Pillon, made with Blender and Photoshop:
格鲁米尔 by Chen Zh, made with Blender and Photoshop:
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