Today was the first real day of the Meeting, we met again in the basement of the Church to be in a place without any possible distraction, and to discuss the vision of Krita, and what we want Krita to be.
We decided to focus on painting, sketching, comic books and texturing. As well as making an application for high-end painters. The question of how much the digital painting should mimick real-world painting, and based on our experience of watercolor in 1.6 that was so advanced that it would simulate the drying itself, we decided that real world should be an inspiration, but that there is no point to make digital painting exactly like real world, if you want real world, you can just take a real brush and paint. But it does not mean that we should take inspiration in real physics, when it makes sense, like for color mixing.
In the end, it took us more than two hours to define the following vision:
Krita is a KDE program for sketching and painting, offering an end–to–end solution for creating digital painting files from scratch by masters.
Fields of painting that Krita explicitly supports are concept art, creation of comics and textures for rendering.
Modelled on existing real-world painting materials and workflows, Krita supports creative working by getting out of the way and with snappy response.
It does not mean you cannot use Krita for something else, or develop plug-ins that solve a problem that does not fit the vision. But it means that we are going to be focused on implementing that vision, and that the default of the application will be oriented toward that vision. And when we have to make choices, we will look at the vision and see which decision makes more sense for the vision.
After the lunch, we took a digestive walk in Deventer streets:
Then we discussed about finding GSoC ideas, that would help to implement our vision, and concluded that a new transform tool and a good UI to access ressources was the two main ideas we needed. Then everybody went back to his computer, to fix bugs, to discuss UI ideas, and just to make Krita “the best application ever” (Vera’s tm).
Great vision!
Though focusing on texturing is a bit like saying focusing on everything :p. Because a texture can be made from photos, filters, or painting tools, depending of the wanted style. That also means a huge use of masks and layers, more non-destructives tools,… If that’s the case, krita will be usable for any use cases anyway ^^.
For me, the most needed features for concept-art & painted textures are :
- ability to change the diameter/scaling of bitmap brushes.
- bitmap brush tip creation (the workflow would be : paint something, select it, menu>add to brush tips).
It is refreshing to _finally_ see audience-centric design and vision in our culture.
I can only hope that you start the research, then the design as opposed to diving back immediately into code.
The few projects in our culture that make the baby steps in the right direction often just stop and start repeating the very same mistakes.
Who is a “high-end painter” as defined in the vision? Are there examples to help flesh out the vision and make it clear to involved participants?
What are the needs of the audience? Are your needs based on research across several of those artists or worse, general guesses and conjecture? Is it possible to have the team watch a selection of the artists during work?
What role does the application play in the audience’s production pipeline? What deliveriables are common? What formats require consideration? Does linear colour play a role for output? For uptake?
What is the preferred input and output context of the intended audience? If it is a tablet for input, are there design decisions that could be made that more greatly add to the workflow? What if those decisions detract from alternate forms of input such as mice?
I sincerely hope the Krita team can set a benchmark for application design. There are complex and difficult decisions to be made. May you have the strength and persistence of vision to see them through and provide a compelling choice to the intended audience.
I am afraid, I am going to disappoint you at least partially, since we are clearly diving back in code, at least in the short term. Simply, because Krita has many bugs that need to be fixed, in the back-end area. On the other hand, during this week-end we have work with an interaction architect (Peter Sikking who also work on the GIMP/OpenPrint UI) on some aspect of our UI, and we hope to keep working on that on the future. But you also have to consider that we are mostly “developers”, we are not trained in UI design, so I think we should be concentrated on what we are good at, in other word, for the research/ui design we would need people that are trained on those aspect to come and work with us.
As for the high-end question, we have a set of real artists that we want to turn into full KDE users, but when we say “high-end” we means people who work 20 to 30 hours a week with Krita. As for the research on artists, for a while we have being working with a few artists that compile Krita/trunk on a regular basis to have early feedback on our changes, we would like to have more of them, and of course to be able to observe them if possible.
When it comes to delivrable, we have decided to stop to files, so no printing (other than desktop, no industrial painting). And Krita should be able to work with mouse and tablet.
Finally, we are new to that, not trained in those area, and do not expect a revolution, but evolution.
“We decided that real world should be an inspiration, but that there is no point to make digital painting exactly like real world, if you want real world, you can just take a real brush and paint”
Yes, it’s very good statement
Best wishes
Hi Troy,
Yes, we are in contact with some artists who don’t hesitate to tell us what they need, and we’ll, for instance, visit the blender studios this Thursday to see real artists engaged in real work. Peter was insistent we shouldn’t just listen to one artist telling us what he needs, but to extrapolate to the real, underlying, shared need for particular types of work. We’ll have a lot of learning to do, but the energy this focus gives me is exhilarating!
As for the input, yes — we’re heavily focussed on tablet input. Most Krita developers have access to tablets, and for painting, it really is the way to go.