Weekly-ish recap — 22 October 2023

Libre Arts
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Week highlights: new releases of LightZone, OSPRay, and Ardour, exciting changes coming to Krita.

Inkscape

A huge amount of changes lately come from Daniel Boles and Tavmjong Bah, both working on the GTK4 port of the program. Meanwhile the rest of the team is getting ready to release 1.3.1 with bugfixes.

Krita

Dmitry Kazakov started redesigning transform masks so that animation keyframes for them wouldn’t be deleted on undo. This bug made animated transform masks pretty much unusable, so this is a kind of a big deal.

Isaac Fleetwood is implementing a curvilinear perspective assistant that should make it possible using 4-, 5-, and 6-point perspectives (essentially, fish-eye-looking perspectives). If you are not familiar with the concept, here is a quick video:

But the most interesting bit of news here is that Wolthera is actively hacking on the PSD loader to support vector objects, text layers, and guides (grid can also be parsed but won’t be used). In particular:

Text support is now decent, we can now read direction, writing mode, text-on-path, text-in-shape, fonts, colors and many properties.

Wojciech Trybus updated his Shortcuts Composer add-on to work with Krita 5.2.0. You can grab the download here. There was no overview of changes in 1.4.0, so here is the latest video from half a year ago:

LightZone

Some time last year, Masahiro Kitagawa picked up LightZone and started hacking on it. He switched it to a much newer version of LibRaw, which brings support to many newer camera models and file formats (including CR3). But also, he updated it to use FlatLaf, which means more modern look-and-feel as well as HiDPI support (some issues are still present).

The 5.0beta2 release from September is available on GitHub, with Windows and macOS builds. There’s also a PPA for Ubuntu and a flatpak build.

OSPRay 3.0.0

Intel’s open-source scalable ray-tracing engine is out with beta support for Intel Xe GPUs, implicit indexing for mesh geometry, various improvements and fixes. Builds and source code are here.

There isn’t much coverage of this release, so here is a project overview from a year ago:

FreeCAD

David Carter keeps hacking on the new Materials editor. The most recently submitted pull request makes it possible to edit, save, and restore 2D and 3D array properties. A couple of weeks ago, David did an open Zoom call to do an introduction and update of the project. You can watch it on YT:

The FPA Project Association launched a survey for educators who use FreeCAD in curriculum or tried and failed. The point is to find out more about the use of FreeCAD in academia and elsewhere in education and possibly build a network of educators.

Ardour 8.1

The team released a hotfix update for Ardour 8. Apart from bugfixes, this version arrived with a few improvements:

Connecting to Novation Launchpad Pro Mk3 devices has been fixed. The problem was with MIDI port names. Paul also got hold of recent Launchpad X and Launchpad Mini, so we are likely to see some action there soon.

You can now set Varispeed rate in percentages, and the shuttle control has been patched to remain in sync with the actual transport speed.

The velocity lane for MIDI tracks has been patched to apply changes only to selected notes when there are any notes selected. There have been reports that this still affects notes that are at the position when you start drawing free or straight lines, this is likely to be fixed for the next update.

Paul published a non-roadmap providing insights into team’s plans for Ardour’s future. There’s a lot of great ideas there, and some of those things are long overdue too.

Please note that he team opposes the idea that “finishing what we’ve started” are higher-priority tasks. It seems like a sensible idea that those would things they would do first, but that is not necessarily the case.

Audacity

The team seems to be getting ready to release v3.4.0 (the branch has already been created in Git). Meanwhile, work on the facelift is ongoing, here is the latest screenshot (not all code is in Git yet).

The team also started collecting information from users who are interested in a cloud service with tighter integration into Audacity (which will be audio.com most likely). You can take the survey here.

Artworks

Candy Road by Julia Gorokhova (Blender, Photoshop, Quixel Bridge) doesn’t look too spooky until you look at the close-ups. That’s not a gingerbread house you see there, but the rest looks disturbingly authentic.

Winter’s Last Sight by Soheil Mahmoudi (Blender):

Mountain by Philipp Urlich (Krita) from a recent live stream:

Stream of Fireflies by David Ashby (Blender):

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://librearts.org/2023/10/week-recap-22-oct-2023/
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