Tag Archives: VFX

Linux

The London Expedition

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Thursday, 21st March, David Revoy, Boudewijn Rempt and Inge Wallin took a plane to London to visit Double Negative. Double Negative is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, VFX studio in London. We were invited by Simon Legrand, who works as a technical director at Double Negative. Simon has been using Krita for his work in a previous studio on G.I. Joe 2 and other unreleased titles, and he had invited us there, to meet with him and his colleagues from the industry.

On Thursday, we sat down with Simon and looked at ways Krita can be integrated in a VFX pipeline — we’re already doing pretty good, with OpenColorIO and OpenEXR support, but things could be better, still. Deep integration with Nuke, dynamic, file-based layers, an Adobe Bridge like image manager — which made us think of Gwenview or Dolphin. In the evening, we sat down with Andrew Harvey from Reliance Mediaworks, formerly Digital Domain London where Simon made extensive use of Krita previously.

David, Boudewijn, Inge and Simon in the Double Negative lobby

Next day, Inge, as a representative of KO GmbH, started working on prices and support offerings, while Boudewijn started hacking on the file-based layers feature.

In the afternoon, Gavin Graham from Double Negative hosted a meeting in the Double Negative offices. He is a head of 3D at Double Negative. It was an awesome experience to present Krita to him and a room full of artists from different departments — matte painters, texture painters, concept artists.

David gave live demos on a big screen of the features these people were asking for — and sure, there were some wishes, like better cloning/healing, improved masking (which Dmitry Kazakov, sponsored by the Krita Foundation is already working on!), but it was great to see how well Krita already supports the needs of the VFX industry!

A great meeting was followed by an impressive tour of the Double Negative offices, room after darkened room full of people totally focused on the next blockbuster movie.

Inge, Boudewijn and David in the Double Negative Office

Inge, Boudewijn and Gavin in the Double Negative Office

Finally, on Friday night we went to a night club (first time in my life!) to meet with people from The Foundry. Nuke looks like a prime candidate to integrate with Krita, and now we only have to figure out how to do that…

…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

Linux

Krita around the web

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A quick batch of cool links while I’m in London with David Revoy and Inge Wallin, “studying the VFX industry” — learning a lot, actualy, about why Krita is awesome as part of a VFX workflow, and what can be better… And there is already work being done on features that are important for texture artists and matte painters”

Sponsored by the Krita Foundation, Dmitry Kazakov has improved the Color to Alpha filter beyond all recognition. His work was mentioned before on this website, but check out his blog to see what can be done to sweeten Tears of Steel.

Lukáš Tvrdý, a previous recipient of sponsored development, started working on improving support for texturing, implementing a layer offset tool. Read all about it on his blog and watch the cool demo video.

Two weeks ago, the Krita team assembled in the Linux Hotel in Essen-Horst. Sven Langkamp gives a report on his blog. Work on what has been discussed is already going on — though obviously, we could use more helping hands. So if you want to be part of a fun, open, welcoming project, check out the Join Krita page Valerie created!

And while I don’t think that we’re really competing with Gimp — Krita and Gimp have quite different target audiences, an article like this one by Carla Schroeder is always nice to read.

And did you know that Krita has already been used on real feature movies? I saw some actual footage yesterday. Awesome! It’s always inspiring to see work done with Krita — like David’s warm-up images, or Ramon Miranda’s landscapes.

…read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

Linux

Calligra Sprint 2013

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Last weekend I have been taking part in this years Calligra sprint, which once again was at the Linuxhotel in Essen. This year we had something special as the sprint was actually happening in two places at the same time. While one part of the team was in Essen, the other part of the team meet in Bangalore. This was simply due to the problem that we could only fly a limited number of people around the globe. Both meetings were connected via Google Hangout which worked reasonably well, except for some microphone problems.Another nice additions was that we also had a kitchen, where Thorsten and Arjen cooked lots of pasta andsauces.

Calligra track

Most of the time in the general Calligra track was spent on discussing upcoming changes and technologies. With many new upcoming Qt 5 mobile plattforms the mobile Calligra version are getting more and more important. For Calligra as a whole we have to change the way how we integrate the UI with the rest of the applications and which libraries we want to use or not use.

One of the big technologies that that KOffice 1.x was build around is KParts. It was used to embed documents into other documents, to embed the application in Konqueror and much more. Over time many of these usecases have been solved differently or are becoming far less common than they used to be while at the same time it has been making more and more trouble. So our long is to replace KParts in the future. As a one possibility to a new framework Friedrich presented his Kasten framwork.Altogether this will need a lot of time to complete, but will result in a much better architecture.

Beside these big topic there are were many smaller discussion around topics like QML user interface, more focus on testing and an a development process where we created stable snapshots of the master branch. There are also some interesting developments on things annotation and docx export.

A bit sad was the discussion around unmaintained applications. After some maintainers got busy with life recently some application are unmaintained and see no further development at the moment. This is not a very surprising development as we have been working with a bus factor of 1 for years on these applications.Affected by this are Karbon, Plan and Braindump. We decided that for now the applications will get a splashscreen that informs about the unmaintained state, but still stay as part of the official release. Unless new maintainers step up, these application look towards an uncertain future.

Krita BOF

Beside the Calligra discussion we also had a BOF with the Krita developers, which actually took place over all three days. Krita development is running really well and we are more and more popular in areas outside the usual open source community. Boud reported about presenting Krita Sketch at Mobile World Congress and some news from the VFX world. I did already know that Krita was used in visual effects, but so far didn’t know …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE

Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

Dell Brings Live Performances from The FADER FORT Presented by Converse to Fans Around the World Dur

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By Business Wirevia The Motley Fool

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Dell Brings Live Performances from The FADER FORT Presented by Converse to Fans Around the World During the SXSW Music and Media Conference

ROUND ROCK, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Dell is partnering with The FADER FORT Presented by Converse to bring live performances from the four-day event to music fans around the world via live stream during the South by Southwest (SXSW) Music and Media conference. The live streaming, powered by Dell and Intel, will broadcast performances from some of today’s most innovative and emerging artists, including Schoolboy Q, Sky Ferreira, Delorean, and more, on TheFADER.com/FORT on March 12 – 16.

“The FADER FORT is one of the hottest tickets in town this week, and Dell technology and expertise are effectively opening The FORT doors to the world,” said Fara Howard, executive director, Consumer and Small Business Marketing, Dell. “This partnership with The FADER is the perfect opportunity for us to showcase some of the innovative things we’re doingwith our products in the music, film and entertainment space, and right here in our own backyard.”

Dell is making The FORT accessible to the local community by providing technology for public viewing of The FADER FORT by Converse live stream in popular Austin hangouts, including Birds Barbershops and Jo’s Coffee.

The FADER turned to Dell because of the company’s established expertise in audio engineering and video editing, including successful live streaming of music festivals like Lollapalooza, Austin City Limits and Jazzfest; helping visual effects companies like Pixomondo, SohoVFX and Tippett Studio produce award winning VFX shots; and enabling audio professionals like Paul Oakenfold’s lead sound engineer to mix, record and produce music.

“We are excited to partner with The FADER to bring some of the hottest performances to fans around the world,” said Neil Hand, vice president, Tablet and Performance PCs, Dell. “With Dell’s high-performance Dell Precision video editing and audio engineering solutions powering the live stream, fans will have …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Linux

Krita 2.6 Released

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Today, the Krita team together with the Calligra team announces the release of Krita 2.6. Krita 2.6 is a new step in Krita’s development!

Not only are there hundreds of bug fixes and performance improvements all over the place, Krita 2.6 now incorporates support for the OpenColorIO colormanagement system which is a standard in the movie and VFX studio. This makes Krita a natural choice for 2D painting work in the movie and vfx pipeline. (Note: like OpenGL support, the Lut docker with OpenColorIO integration is only available on Linux.)

Another big improvement is in PSD support: Krita can now not only read, but also write Photoshop files!

For Krita 2.6, the splash screen was created by Enrico Guarnieri:

Read more about Krita 2.6 in the About Krita 2.6 booklet!

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE