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Krita’s animation branch just hit public beta. You should definitely check it out.

Krita is a free/open source bitmap paint program – think SAI or openCanvas, maybe even Photoshop. Recently the Krita guys did a crowdfund to add new features like the ability to animate on multiple layers. It’s already a super-capable painting program, but this new feature makes it something like the open source answer to TV Paint – not as spiffy or fully featured as TV Paint, but still.. 

The Krita devs very kindly helped me optimise
Krita’s settings for my particular setup so it runs noticeably
faster. Here are tips which apply to the beta:

  • For AMD CPUs, go to Settings > Configure Krita > Performance and make sure “Disable vector optimisations” is checked.
  • Certain
    NVidia graphics cards are slow to convert between float and int. If
    your card is affected, set your colour space to a float format (16 bit
    float or 32 bit float) and not an int format like 8-bit or 16-bit. You
    can use Image > Convert Color Space to go between colour spaces.
  • View > Instant Preview mode speeds up drawing to screen.

Hope you enjoy these two little loops of Pointy and Gronky. Gronky seems especially excited while Pointy appears to be doing the Hertzfeldt Wiggle. 🙂

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So, uh, turns out digital painting is a whole barrel of fun that I had no idea about. Big ups to Krita and their MUSES training DVD. Well worth getting your hands on. Suddenly I’m way less bothered by the idea of texturing.

It’s the Easter long weekend coming up. I’m thinking I might bang out a short tutorial about drivers and expressions after a Twitter conversation I had today.

A short film from the universe of “The Quiet One” could soon be on the cards. Plotwise it’s the oldest story in human history – protagonist must overcome obstacle, failure to do so means grave consequences. Not that original maybe but I want to keep this brief. No more accidental feature-length projects. Learnt my lesson.

I’m still drawing cartoon hands. I tried some figure drawing again for variety and noted that my observation and anatomy skills are much stronger than before. The old art skills are coming together – very slowly, but perceivably. Improvement is nice to see, but I’ve got a long way to go before I’m where I want to be. Also getting more comfortable with that whole overhand pencil grip would be good too.