From Libre Arts: link to the original post
Once again, a very short recap. Week highlights: Blender Studio announces their next open movie project, Intel Open Image Denoise 2.0 is out with major improvements, Krita and Ardour are getting new features.
GIMP
When I posted last week that the GIMP team was meeting somewhere in the EU, I had no idea where. And now that I know, wow!
Not only Simon Budig went back to contributing, Michael Natterer is back too. There’s also Niels De Graef helping with general stuff like the build system, and Carlos Garnacho (GNOME) sending various patches.
Krita
Lots of bugfixing this week, but here are some major changes beyond that:
- Freya Lupen contributed a patch that makes the Transform tool work on multiple layers
- The Android port has been enhanced by Sharaf Zaman to build with MLT support (the recent animation player rewrite demands that)
- Rasyuqa A. H. proposed a patch adding Radiance RGBE importing/exporting
Blender
Blender Studio announced their next open movie, Project Gold.
This will be a non-photorealistic animation with an impressionistic aesthetic. The project will be directed by Jericca Cleland, who was earlier involved with big projects like Toy Story 2, Song of the Sea, Finding Nemo, and Ballerina. This definitely sets expectations!
Intel Open Image Denoise 2.0
The new release brings SYCL support for Intel Xe architecture GPUs, as well as support for CUDA (NVIDIA Volta, Turing, Ampere, Ada Lovelace and Hopper) and HIP (AMD RDNA2 and RDNA3) and interoperability API functions for both SYCL, CUDA, and HIP.
Among other features:
- New buffer API functions for specifying the storage type, copying data to/from the host, and importing external buffers from graphics APIs.
- New quality filter parameter for setting the filtering quality mode (high or balanced).
- Support for asynchronous execution.
FreeCAD
Pretty much all changes this week were bugfixing and small improvements. The v0.21 release is too close for anything else to be happening.
Yorik posted his weekly report about progress with NativeIFC. Long story short: creating windows and doors from scratch for a NativeIFC project is now possible, and so is the editing of openings.
Kdenlive
Still not a lot of major changes since the last release, but Julius Künzel started the preparation work for the KDE Frameworks 6 port, and Jean-Baptiste Mardelle rewrote the media browser.
Ardour
In Paul’s absence (who has been cycling through the USA for fun for the last two weeks), Ben Loftis resumed the effort on improving tempo maps editing, and Robin Gareus implemented support for recalling connections when switching backends.
Here’s the general idea. Let’s say you recorded some material in one location with an external audio interface, for which you needed either ALSA or JACK for a backend (talking about Linux here).
Then you hopped on a train and went home. While on the train, you want to listen to the material and maybe do some early cutting. You have Bluetooth earphones, so you need the PulseAudio backend. Once you switch to it, all your external connections are gone.
So when you show up in that other location the next day with the same session, you need to manually restore the connections to record some more material. Well, not anymore. Ardour will now restore connections when you jump between backends.
Tutorials
A very to-the-point tutorial by IniAkoo on making a cinematic shot with Eevee in Blender:
A hard surface modeling tutorial from Ponte Ryuurui:
Artworks
The Witch by Daria Sergeyeva (Krita):
An Artisan’s Haven by Ferdinand Ladera (Blender, Photoshop):
Eldoria by Sweeper3D (Blender, Photoshop):
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