Ubisoft joins Blender Development Fund to support open-source animation(news.ubisoft.com) |
Ubisoft joins Blender Development Fund to support open-source animation(news.ubisoft.com) |
[1] https://krita.org/en/support-us/donations/
There's some good stuff on the roadmap for 3.0 and 3.2 as well: https://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Roadmap
It's getting harder to get modern quality images out of GIMP.
Also some tools that are available in Photoshop, like the many ways to smart select, or to crisp up a selection.
I almost only use GIMP any more for cropping and scaling, anything else, even if the feature is available simply lacks in quality of result.
I used to think the curve bend effect was pretty neat, to do certain types of distortions. But it doesn't do subpixel/anti-aliasing. Then WHY is it still even in there? It's not really that useful and it uses an ancient processing technique that really leaves wanting a lot in image quality.
I haven't tried the other tools mentioned in this thread, but I'm going to give them a try, hopefully they are better.
For examples of 2D games with great graphics, take a look at: Mark of The Ninja, Hollow Knight, Limbo, Stardew Valley, Rayman Legends.
This seams like a really big deal. It's one thing to try to create a desert of profitability around yourself, which a lot of huge companies giving money to tangential FOSS projects could be construed as. It is quite another to have them commit to use the software internally.
Are there any other large multimedia companies that are known to primarily use FOSS media production programs?
Well it depends how much those developers will actually contribute, but it's still very good news.
But on the other hand they just got 1.2 million from Epic Games for 3 years ... to me this seems to be a much bigger contribution: https://www.blender.org/press/epic-games-supports-blender-fo...?
I suspect Epic obviously fell into that category.
Here is the press release from Blender: https://www.blender.org/press/ubisoft-joins-blender-developm...
Edit: It's now there on the news home page without having to click "Latest", but it still 404's.
"We decided to transform a workflow centered on in-house software to a more agile development environment supported by open source and inner source solutions. This way, our research and development and pipeline teams could focus their energy on bringing innovative ideas to the table, while working closely with the creatives.
In that new workflow, Blender is replacing our in-house digital content creation tool."
The influx of money/talent from Epic and Ubisoft is great though. Blender was, from what I've seen from the outside, looked on affectionately as being a good tool, but maybe this leads to them being a consideration for primary tool (beyond just free) in the way the commercial tools have been.
Otherwise this just feels like previous broken promises: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/125952/Ubisofts_Ancel_Pl...
Anyway, I wish more FOSS projects could copy blenders way of working. They start a very big and ambitious project then update the code to support it. For example Elephants Dream gave them character animation. Big Buck Bunny gave them hair rendering & animation.
https://www.geek.com/chips/new-firefox-rendering-engine-serv...
"A new rendering engine for Firefox is being developed by Mozilla, and it’s being built from the ground up for multi-core computing environments. Mozilla has delivered some pretty major performance improvements to Firefox over the last few versions. The IonMonkey JavaScript engine is firing on all cylinders, and now it looks as though the Gecko engine may soon be replaced by something much more modern."
If this wasn't Mozilla's intention from the beginning, they certainly didn't do much to temper this enthusiasm or clear up the misunderstanding.
“Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement”
I'm really impressed by the quality of the UI design in the update
Community funded projects will never match the salaries that companies like AutoDesk pay their developers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJEWOTZnFeg (jump to 1h mark)
1. Set spacebar to "Search". A number of features either don't have keybinding anymore or it's hidden in an obscure menu. Search makes things easier like typing Spacebar > "Walk" > enter to WASD the scene (before it was just Shift-F).
2. Set "F" to focus (like any other 3D tool), in Blender it's still the Numpad . (dot)... never understood this decision. You probably want to change this.
3. Get used to the most used transform keybindings: Move (G), Rotate (R), Scale (S). You can type: `R, X, 45` if you want to Rotate in X 45 deg. This is one of the reasons I like to do basic modeling in Blender and not in Maya. If you need to bring the manipulator like in other 3D software tools, you can right click the manipulators on the left and add them to Quick Favorites (I prefer) or assign them new shortcuts.
Alternatively, you can just change your keyboard bindings to the "Industry compatible" preset in preferences, although I don't recommend this as you lose some of the good keybindings from blender.
My only small beef is I wish they'd use system dialog boxes for save/load, and texture painting still feels a little clunky.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF1qEhBSfq4&list=PLa1F2ddGya...
Same here, but while that turned out to be a hoop I could go through eventually, the seemingly random API changes from version to version and associated backwards incompatibility of user scripts were not.
Do not expect to master it by just clicking around. It's more like CAD you can do nothing without book/tutorials.
There are plenty of high-caliber developers working on commercial products
There a bunch of really interesting examples just using Ubisoft's UbiArt framework such as Rayman Legends, Child of Light, and Valiant Hearts.
Speaking of Ubisoft and open source, Ubisoft originally announced UbiArt as an engine/framework intended to be open sourced. It's a shame that Ubisoft never followed up on that promise.
Supposedly it hasn't been used for a game since 2015 because it was "hard to use", but that seems more of a reason to open source it, perhaps to see if community interest could help where internal-only work struggled. A lot of open source starts hard to use and takes a village to make it better. (Blender, also mentioned here, might just be a poster child of that, too.)
And yes, speaking of Ubisoft and open source - Sharpmake is a build management solution used by a lot of projects within Ubisoft and it was open sourced some time ago. Worth having a look.
I know Hollow Knight is fantastic, but it reminds my brain far too much of amateurish flash games.
I wouldn't say Krita is not suitable for general editing, because Photoshop is also dual purpose tool - it is an industry standard both for digital artists and general photo manipulation.
Gimp starts off as an emergency last minute replacement project for two undergrads at Berkeley that does basically the same thing as Photoshop. It wasn't ever anything like Microsoft's Paint.
My argument still stays, gimp never was and still nowhere is near the Photoshop level. Krita excels both as painting and photo tool.
- The orientation controls
- poke faces (Alt-p) doesn't exist
- the selection behaviour (A doesn't seem to deselect any more) - shift-G doesn't work
- W doesn't open a menu any more.
- Shift-tab doesn't change vertex/face/line selection mode any more.
Enough changed that I ended up clicking around the UI a lot. The orientation controls, and stuff starting with W were things I used to use a lot. I think when I get back into it, I'll spend a bit of time figuring it all out and learning the new conventions. I generally like the pie menu thing, and I like the move towards consistency (even if I think mnemonic keybindings are generally better), and Eevee is amazing for composing scenes (I used to hate trying to do lighting and having to wait for a half hour just to see the effect of moving a light a tiny bit).
Old Photoshop from that era defaults to a single RGB layer. To turn it into an RGBA layer (e.g. for drawing objects with a transparent background) you need to rename the layer. Not very intuitive but Photoshop users learned to do it. In early Gimp 0.x releases how do you turn the initial single RGB layer into an RGBA layer? You rename it. This is not a coincidence.
In contrast in mspaint there are no layers, there is no RGBA mode.
Gimp is a classic old open source project in it's bad and good. It has a preset for toilet paper rolls, but it took it like a decade to support a single window mode, it has an option to rename a layer to switch to rgba mode but there is still no support for generic keyboard layouts from other software other than importing configs and resolving to third party tools (something that krita and most modern IDE routinely do)
Gimp is an emacs of photo editing that stuck in old conventions and never wants to really move forward, I could not use it a decade ago and still can't use nowadays.
- poke faces (Alt-p) doesn't exist
You can also just right click on the "Poke Faces" menu item, click "Assign Shortcut" and press Alt-P.
- the selection behaviour (A doesn't seem to deselect any more)
- shift-G doesn't work
- W doesn't open a menu any more.
- Shift-tab doesn't change vertex/face/line selection mode any more.
The shortcut for poke faces seems to be removed. There have been a few irritating removals, definitely.
By default A selects, double-A deselects. You can revert it to the original behavior in the preferences under the keymaps tab.
The specials menu is now essentially the context menus, they can be opened with right click in left-click mode, or W in right-click mode.
Shift-tab used to toggle snapping and it still does...
Anyway, about the shift-tab thing - I mixed it up. It's ctrl-tab I meant.