Week highlights: GIMP is getting an SVG exporter; Ton Roosendaal is stepping down as executive director of Blender Foundation; Kdenlive is planning exciting new features, FreeCAD is launching a bughunt for v1.1.
GIMP
CmykStudent started working on an SVG exporter plugin. Most of the work has been done: the plugin can export both vector, text, and bitmap layers, as well as layer groups. The merge request currently lists exporting options in the user interface and code cleanup as the missing bits. However, the exporting dialog already allows you to choose how you want to deal with bitmap layers.
Blender
The major news is that Ton is stepping down as the executive director of Blender Foundation and moving into a newly introduced advisory board.
Just as in any good organization, the transition was planned well in advance and began years prior, in 2019.
Ton was also recently interviewed by folks from the Bad Decisions Studio, check it out: https://youtu.be/hx3lnDHeqKs
On the same day, the Blender Foundation released its annual 2024 report. Financially, the foundation appears to be in a stronger position than the year before that, and judging by recent sponsorship announcements, the 2025 fiscal year will be even better.
It could be fun to slice the data over the years, but to give you an idea, the budget has grown from €958K in 2019 (the first time they published a report) to €3.1mln in 2024. That makes a solid average increase of ~26.5% year over year.
FreeCAD
The team has announced that the feature freeze for v1.1 is now on. Small UI changes are still allowed until October, but it’s basically bugfix time. As of today, there are 44 release blockers in the issue tracker.
The previous time, it took the team nearly 5 months to clean up this dreadful queue, as new blockers kept pouring in. If that’s how things will go this time, the final release is likely to happen in early 2026.
Kdenlive
The team did a development sprint in Berlin at the aKademy conference in early September and recently posted a recap and future plans. Highlights:
- Jean-Baptiste Mardelle got an NLnet grant to implement dopesheet for users who do a lot of animation.
- Ongoing and upcoming menu and terminology changes (Project Bin -> Media, Render -> export, etc.).
- Various monitor changes.
- Upcoming switch to KDDockWidgets for docking panels in the program.
- Animations for the titler (technical discussions still ongoing).
See here for details.
Artworks
Sword of the Sea - Crystal Zone by Eytan Zana, made with Blender and Photoshop:
Strong Pamukkale vibes there!
Desert Ruins Palmyra by Ahmad Al-Aliyan, made with Maya, Blender, Zbrush, and more. It’s a large project with 20 renders, including ones that apparently depict a relief of Queen Zenobia.
[ASTRAVALE] Center of Resonant Astrum by Kan Rongrueangkul, made with Blender and Photoshop:
![[ASTRAVALE] Center of Resonant Astrum by Kan Rongrueangkul](https://librearts.org/2025/09/week-recap-21-september-2025/kan-rongrueangkul-center-of-enlightment-page-2.webp)
The Monkey King by Aashutosh Patel, made with Blender:
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