Whither Krita?

[Moritz Moeller]

On 09/25/2009 03:11 PM, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> On Friday 25 September 2009, Moritz Moeller wrote:
>
>> The Eclipse 4 whitepaper contained a wole bunch of ideas on editing
>> natural media strokes that were far beyon point edting.

> Is that paper somewhere available? Googling doesn't help much :-)

Nope. Even if I had a copy (which I don't), I couldn't post it, for 
legal reasons.
Eclipse 4 never came to be. The company who bought the code of Alias 
(and whom I worked for, at the time) burned a lot of cash on 
refurbishing a fancy old villa, buying overpriced design furniture desks 
and porting Eclipse 3 from IRIX to NT.
They never got the next injection from the VC company that backed them 
as they missed milestone after milestone and never really sold that many 
seats.

I was out a year before they folded since a friend of mine was working 
in the business group at the time and the writing was on the wall -- for 
anyone with a degree in 2nd grade artithmetics[tm] that was. ;)
Your everyday dot com crash story in 1999/2000. :)

The Whitepaper shared many ideas with a whitepaper written for the Gimp 
2.0 (aka "Film Gimp") at Rythm & Hues (I believe) at the time (~97/98). 
None of the proposals in that paper ever made into an actual app as 
well. Cinepaint was the base of this (although, given the ideas in the 
paper, a total rewrite would have been required).

Among the more interesting ideas were a RenderMan shading language like 
dialect for writing image processing filters (SIMD too) and a node-based 
kernel. Of course, the whole thing was supposed to support animation too.
It was basically the draft of an OSS version of Photoshop + RenderMan 2D 
+ a Node based compositor.

None of the parties involved ever got off the ground with this. So 
today, a decade later, people still use Photoshop, RenderMan renderers 
and node based compositors (Shake, Nuke, Fusion etc.), separately.
This imho is is good proof of the old wisdom that innovation has got 
nothing to do with having an idea (and even a ready-to-cast, detailed 
concept) at all. It all depends on actually doing it. Nothing more, 
nothing less.


The fact that the Eclipse whitepaper is lost is not such a big issue. As 
its sole author, I remember most ideas I put down at the time vividly. :)

.mm