Whither Krita?

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Friday 25 September 2009, Moritz Moeller wrote:

> Among the more interesting ideas were a RenderMan shading language like
> dialect for writing image processing filters (SIMD too)

Sounds like Cyrille's openctl/gtl/shiva (I never manage to remember which 
refers to what, exactly :-) can play a nice role in here.

> and a node-based
> kernel.

Oyvind Kolas told me on irc the other day that he scratched many of the 
original ideas from the film gimp ideas from gegl. Last I heard he was still 
debating whether he should get involved in this email thread :-).

> 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.

Was there ever a working prototyple?

> 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. :)

I can see two ways forward with this idea: 

* develop something like this as a separate layer type in krita (so it can be 
rendered and use the Krita gui). If it works out, start migrating the 
technologies to Krita itself. Krita is flexible enough to make this work. It 
would even be possible to develop it as a shape plugin for KOffice, so you can 
have all this in every koffice application.

* develop it in a separate little project to the proof-of-concept level & then 
see whether it can be integrated in krita. For some other ideas, I've tried 
this approach, and never managed to spend enough time on it, though. My time 
for krita is limited to 10-15 hours a week, and if I have to hack on koffice 
itself, that cuts into this time.


-- 
Boudewijn Rempt | http://www.valdyas.org