The Second Installment;
Hello, this is the second installment of the Community Report;
It’s quite a busy month in Krita Community, from the release of Krita 5.1.0 to the influx of users, new and coming back who are trying Krita out.
Last month was highlighted by the publication of the New Development Update by Krita Maintainer @halla on Aug 7. I will go over some key points later. These are for those who has joined us after the change in the payment model of one of the other alternative art programs. To give them idea to the direction of Krita’s Development.
The Release of Krita 5.1.0 and 5.1.1
Mid August has been a hectic week for the community, for starter Krita 5.1.0 has been released on the 18th of August. A regression bug has been reported by Axolotl right after that causes an increase in boot up time, a fix has been merged per the latest Krita Weekly Update (Sep 2022 Week 36) , a bug fix update [5.1.1] has been released.
An Increase in Artists Checking out Krita
Days after the Krita community celebrated the release of version 5.1.0, the art community has since received the news that one of its beloved art program (CSP) has changed its business model. As such we have seen a number of artists checking Krita out, both new and those are checking back again after some time.
A number of users have put in effort to make the transition easier, freyalupen implemented a request by rexelbartolome to create a CSP compatible keymap. Liam_Smyth has opened a discussion thread for CSP users to put in their list of features they wish Krita has and on the resource side SchrodingerCat published a CSP like inking pen.
Development and Feature Request Discussion
Development for the Forum
First off a new feature in our community home base has been added by raghukamath, users can now follow other users. If you are interested in following developments, or new plugins from some of the more prominent plugin developers it might be good to utilize this feature. For those who wish not to be followed, this feature can be op out to, as addressed in the thread.
There is also a discussion on whether to join the Krita Weekly Update Summary and Krita Weekly Commit Report, the former presented in a more layman’s term while the later is more technical. Grum999 made a proposal for Tags in the Feature Request section.
Krita Development and Feature Discussion
Now for the heft of development discussion;
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tiar has since updated her thread in where they report on the addition of perspective Ellipse Tool [F51], she also has since opened a new thread, this time asking users to vote and discuss which approach the Assistant Layer/Mask/Tree will take and how it will be presented.
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Deif_Lou has shown interest in implementing the improvements in Alpha Inheritance and the potential introduction of Clipping Mask and is targeting 5.2 for it. The implementation it will take has seemed to be at this point resolved, and the main discussion thread of this feature has been closed. On the other hand the discussion regarding alpha inheritance and clipping mask user interface and user experience implementation, including ways to toggle it and icons have been forked into a separate thread where you can contribute your own mockups and thoughts.
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- He also continue to improve fill tool, in addition to the commits seen in the August (Week 36) weekly summary including the new grow selection filter, he has also taken initiative in the potential implementation of Close Gap in Fill Tool feature.
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On the android front sh-zam have been busy hunting down bugs like the one affecting Samsung tablets running Android 12. In addition to this they have since fix a gesture bug in MacOs.
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_Despair has developed a blending mode with the ability to fake PBR. It can simulate light and shadow to a painting at different points, you should check it out. I’m hoping to see it merge soon.
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nickgeneratorfailed has started discussion threads about 3d poser feature, taking in suggestions, and wishes for the said feature. There is also a voting thread of which one is the preferred way of implementing it, by plugin or native. They also made a proposal for Plugin Updater.
Resources, Tutorial and Plugins
There are a couple of new plugins and a few plugin updates to report on.
First Jade12 had created a proof of concept showing the possibility of scriptable brushes with Lua script. imperator has introduced a plugin that allows stable diffusion to work within krita and freyalupen has created an improved version of the much missed reference docker.
EyeOdin made a small update on his Imagine Board plugin, so is nickgeneratorfailed for the Pie Menu v.0.4.
Onto the tutorials, CelticCoco added a new one to her series, Krita 5.0 Quick tip , Unlocking and Locking dockers.
Highlight of Developers General Plans and Vision Update
As there seems to be an increase in the number of artist checking out Krita that happened a few days after the release of this update. There’s a chase they missed this important update regarding the direction of Krita.
I’ll summarize here the important points underlined by Krita maintainer Halla.
Summary : Click me
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As bug fixing, triaging, and engaging in feature requests discussion takes time. It is hard for the developers to regularly engage with the community without hampering Krita’s development itself.
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Clip Studio Paint (CSP) is considered by the dev team as Krita’s primary competitor.
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Halla and Wolthera have documented their investigation of CSP in this link.
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The team held a virtual meeting to discuss what they wanted to do as documented here.
Special points to the following;
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Wolthera is working on the rendering engine for the text object. It is planned to merge after the new dependencies get sorted out.
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Text on canvas text tool is something the team [specially Wolthera] wanted to work out but currently out of scope of the project mentioned above. Wolthera has this to say regarding plans and the difficulties of implementing Text on Canvas.
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emmetpdx and eoinoneill are working on improving audio in animation and animation in krita in general. These can be tracked in Krita’s weekly report if you read their name there and the work being described is quite technical; it’s most likely an improvement being made for animation. They’ve documented their vision for Krita Animation in this document.
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dkazakov is working on refactoring the complicated, error prone architecture of the brush preset editor. This refactoring will open up possibilities for tool preset and multiple instances.
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sh-zam is working on bringing back the mobile friendly UX Krita 4 used to have.
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tiar is working on painting assistants, krita artist community is helping out with its development.
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amyspark worked on the brand new jpeg-xml file format that is now already merged.
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Freyalupen has improved the layer docker display.
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Deif_Lou, too many to list from fill tool improvement to new filters but the highlight i think, for 5.1 is his addition of the enclose and fill tool.
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Alvin Wong has worked on updating krita to use the latest angle wrapper.
so i just highlighted the names. Lastly, I want to say Thank you to everyone who help and contributed in Krita and the community.