Krita demo at Digital Domain London was a success.

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Monday 04 June 2012 Jun, Simon Legrand wrote:
> Last Friday I ran a Krita demo at Digital Domain London which went
> amazingly well.
> The feedback from the artists was along the lines of: "Wow. I didn't
> realise it was going to be THAT good".

Yay!

> It is possible that ourselves (DD london) and many others will be moving to
> centos6 in the near future. Autodesk is providing support for Maya 2013
> only for Centos6 and redhat6 and up now. So if we make sure the latest and
> greatest Krita is in the centos6 repos, it will be super easy for
> sys-admins to get it installed. Those are KDE4 distros so I think life will
> be easier.

I'll update my build environment to centos6 and check it out.
 
> The main questions I got from texture artists, matte painters and compers
> were as follows:
> 
> Q-Can we toggle the LUT display?
> A- Yes in the preferences. (I put in a request on this list today to make
> it a dockable tool)

I need to get back to you about that because I'm not yet sure of the set of requirements. 

> Q- Are there any automatic HDRI panorama creation tools
> A- No, there are other applications for this. (However the Krita project
> might be able to leverage other open source projects to implement something
> like this. http://hugin.sourceforge.net/ )

We actually had this at one point, but then decided that hugin was a much more complete solution -- and we'd never be able to keep up with them. I'm sure we could try to figure out workflow improvements.

> Q- Does Krita have a scripting language, command line interface or python
> api?
> A- I replied that I was not sure. I knew Krita had a scripting feature in
> previous version but I cannot find it in 2.4. Actions are supported so that
> can replace (partly) this function. I was not sure about any sort of python
> api or anything like this. So I replied that I was going to ask you guys.

We've had scripting in a number of guises, all with varying amounts of incompleteness. Before we start working on scripting again, we'd need to really know what it needed in practice. 

What we had could, at one point, do basic image manipulation -- filter, paint, do some conversions from Python, Javascript and Ruby. That is actually easy to resurrect, but since we had no users for it, it was allowed to bitrot.

For writing image filters, we've got OpenShiva, which is really easy to use.

Krita itself is written in C++, so unlike Python-based tools like Blender, opening up all of Krita's api's to Python takes quite a bit of work, and doing it right this time takes thinking :-)

> Q- Does Krita support 3rd party filter/plugin formats?
> A- I don't know. I will ask the team what kind of filter format Krita
> supports.

No... Not at all, and the chances are slim that we'd support, say, photoshop or gimp filters, at least not without some serious sponsorship to make it real.

> Q- Does Krita do 3D painting?
> A- No. Krita is not made to replace Mari. It is mainly a photoshop
> replacement on Linux to fill the '2D painting' gap our industry has been
> suffering from for years.

Right :-)

> Q- Is there an automatic texture tiling tool similar to gimp's
> texturize<http://gimp-texturize.sourceforge.net/>
> ?
> A- Not that I know of, I will ask the Krita team.

No -- but we have a project this summer that will create a wraparound canvas for easy texture painting. Creating a plugin like this isn't hard either, it just needs some time.

> 
> Q- Can Krita import frame sequences?
> A- Not right now. It could be an interesting Option to add. I will talk to
> the team about it.

Ok :-). 

> All of our Artists and TDs were very impressed. They would like to say a
> big thank you to the Krita team for moving in to this territory and have
> pledged to help you trouble-shoot, improve and push Krita forward with
> useful feedback and bug reports, all of which will be going through myself.

/me feels is purring like a cat.

-- 
Boudewijn Rempt
http://www.valdyas.org, http://www.krita.org, http://www.boudewijnrempt.nl