If you read this, you probably know ZeMarmot. If you don’t: ZeMarmot is an animation film, in digital 2D (“old” style, i.e. with hand drawings, but done digitally directly on a computer, instead of paper and paint), which we are producing (teaser visible on the webpage).
Story in 2 words: it tells about an Alpine Marmot who travels around the world.
Artistically, Aryeom Han is the boss, film director, storyboarder, animator, designer, you name it! She is a trained animation director, graduated in Fine Arts from Samyeong university in South Korea, with animation film major. She worked several years as freelancer in Japan, Korea and New Zealand, taught and experienced with proprietary software, and now for a few years with free software.
Technically we use only Free Software, be it GIMP for all the drawing (everything digital is drawn with GIMP, which is an awesome software), Blender VSE for video editing, Ardour for sound editing, even GNOME as our desktop environment over the GNU/Linux Operating system. When we say “full-stack”, we mean it! Not easy every day, mind you, but the goal is also to improve the FOSS stack for graphics and video creation since I am myself a Free Software developer.
Right now, the team is basically Aryeom, me (Jehan) and musicians (AMMD) for original soundtracks (music also under CC by-sa/Free Art licenses).
Aryeom and I are working nearly full-time on ZeMarmot. AMMD is rather freelancing.
Originally we hoped to have more people (you can see this in our crowdfunding talks), but one of the goal of the project is to pay every contributor for their work. Now I have nothing against voluntary contribution. Hell, I do a lot myself in Free Software! And this can also be of awesome quality, sometimes better than many paid works. But for this project we really want to do a professional project in all points of view. So Aryeom and AMMD are paid. I am the only one who is not paid right now because we just don’t have the funds, and this project is dear to me.
With more funds, we wish to pay myself, better Aryeom and AMMD, and get more contributors, in particular at first probably an animator or painter to help Aryeom.
Funding the common way
Funding is the hard part. I have tried some private funding (company foundations), public ones, even a museum which has an “Art and Technology” grant. But competition is hard (hundreds of people go for the same grants), and maybe I’m just not a good pitch writer because we don’t have much success there.
Also it does take a lot of time to apply for grants, which is especially frustrating when you don’t get them.
On the other hand, several types of public grants for audiovisual and cinema works are out of reach because one of the criteria is often to be with a production company. Some things just cannot be done out of the normal process. And well actually a production company proposed us twice to discuss about funding our movie the proper way, i.e. through them. That’s good right? Well not entirely. The movie license itself, Creative Commons BY-SA, is an important piece of the project to us. And normal productions are not too fond of such “free” licensing. I know that it is possible to make quality Free/Libre Art (the kind of quality that we will go to festivals with, not only visual quality but also script and direction, i.e. all artistic qualities) and still make it professionally (paid artists and technicians). And I want to prove by doing.
This is why we are delaying any “going the usual way” change as much as possible.
Continuous crowdfunding…
Up to now, our main source of funding was the initial crowdfunding, as well as some donations from individuals (thanks everyone!), funding from the umbrella association (LILA) of the project, and personal savings.
For the last few months, we have been experimenting with periodic crowdfunding platforms, which are Patreon for USD ($) and Tipeee for EUR (€). Basically you subscribe for a monthly contribution (from which you can unsubscribe at any time). The Patreon has been stagnating at $16 a month (by 6 contributors), and the Tipeee funding is 42€ a month (by 12), which may be the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, but a meme does not feed you, right? 🙂
All the money is managed by the non-profit LILA and is used for the project. But there is barely enough to pretend being paid, right now.
What we want to do… and what we need for it…
We will anyway finish the pilote, and send everyone’s rewards (from the initial crowdfunding), even if we don’t get much more funds, because we committed on it. But if we want for the experiment to be more than just an experiment, we need to make a call here: if you can spare even 1 dollar/euro or 2 a month (or 10, 20, even why not 100 if you can afford! 😉 Yet if you can’t: 1 is better than 0), it would mean the world to us!
Also the more people are sponsoring ZeMarmot, the more it supports our idea that we are going in the right direction, but also it can help us secure some public or private grants (the kinds which won’t go against our ideals by asking re-licensing). Indeed if thousands of people are behind the project, it definitely increases the project’s credibility towards grants organizations.
With your help, I could continue improving the FOSS graphics and video stack, which means continuous contribution to GIMP (already being done, but it would be great if I could get paid to do it, right?). I am also working on an absolutely cool animation plugin for GIMP. Aryeom will safely work on this awesome animation film. AMMD can compose and record more Libre/Free Music. We all definitely want more Free Art and Free Knowledge in the world with great artists being actually paid for doing the right thing.
And we want more people joining us. Maybe some day, we could have a big animation studio doing big jobs under Free License and with Free Software! Who knows?!
This is what you helping us could accomplish!
Help us fund ZeMarmot continuously!
So we need you! You can help us achieve all this by contributing a little and showing that you care for what we do. Do you? 🙂
If so, you can click one of the logos below, whether you prefer to contribute in euro or dollar ↴
Click to sponsor us on Patreon (USD)!Click to sponsor us on Tipeee (EUR)!
We made the choice from the start about ZeMarmot animation film to not show too much during production process because we don’t want to totally spoil the fun. By the past, I already had the case where I saw a movie animatic before the finale movie, and it really spoiled some fun out of the finale artworks.
But since we realize that you’d all would like to see some of what is happening “behind the stage”, here is a small excerpt of our animatic for the pilote (about 30 secs off the first scene). As usually, whatever is digitally-drawn (some parts were pencil-drawn) was done with GIMP.
What is the animatic
So I think I may have already vaguely told about it. The animatic is basically the next step after the storyboard: you take all the images from the storyboard, and chain them with the right rhythm, as well as basic effects (pans, zooms…) to get a “feeling” of what your finale movie will look like. It still requires some imagination because that’s basically a few static image every second or so. Not enough to be called a proper animation yet!
But with the right mindset, this is enough to get an idea and also time your movie!
In animation-making, this is also the moment when you freeze your story, the script, the scene and many direction choice. Whereas feature films allow for last second camera or script changes, it would be much more costly in animation films, unless you feel OK asking your painter to redraw several times the same scenes with various perspectives and to throw away days, if not weeks of work. This is why at some point, you need to make choices and try to stick to it as much as possible (last minute changes may always happen, but you always have to weigh the pro and cons).
ZeMarmot’s animatic
We finished ours around April, and have 2 versions: one without sound, and one heavily commented by myself (in French) for the musicians to get an idea of what they have to work on. We are currently working with them on a few songs. I hope we can soon give you more feedbacks about this particular part of our production too.
Currently the full animatic for the pilote is about 7 minutes. But this is likely to change slightly.
TL;DR; if you don't care at all about how crossroad works,
and you just want to cross-build GIMP in a few commands,
see at the bottom of the article.
Over the years, I have written a tool to cross-compile software under a GNU/Linux OS for other targets: crossroad. Well to this day, the only supported targets are Windows 32/64-bit. I realized I never advertised this tool much which — even though it has been originally built to help me build and hack a specific project (GIMP) — ended up as a generic cross-compilation system for Linux.
“The crossroads” where Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the Devil, by Joe Mazzola (CC by-sa 2.0)
So today, I will explain crossroad by giving a concrete example:
Cross-compiling GIMP on GNU/Linux for Windows system
The basics
The cool stuff about crossroad is that it allows to cross-build as easily as a native build. For instance f your build system were the autotools, you would run the famous triptych ./configure && make && make install, right? Well with crossroad, you only wrap the configure step but the rest is the same! cmake is also fully supported, even though my examples below won’t show it (check out the manual for more).
All what crossroad does is preparing you a suitable environment, with the right environment variables, but also wrappers to various tools (for instance, you get the x86_64-w64-mingw32-pkg-config tool inside a crossroad environment, which is no more than a wrapper to detect packages inside the cross-built prefix only).
Enough chit-chat. Let’s install crossroad!
pip3 install crossroad
Running crossroad the first time
I will now go through a full cross-build of GIMP for Windows 64-bit, from a brand new crossroad install. It may be a little long and boring, but I want to show you a full process. So you can just run:
$ crossroad --list-targets crossroad, version 0.6 Available targets:
Uninstalled targets: w32 Windows 32-bit w64 Windows 64-bit
See details about any target with `crossroad --help <TARGET>`.
Ok so at this point, you may have no cross-compilation compiler installed. Let’s see what I need for Windows 64-bit.
$ crossroad --help w64 w64: Setups a cross-compilation environment for Microsoft Windows operating systems (64-bit).
Not available. Some requirements are missing: - x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc [package "gcc-mingw-w64-x86-64"] (missing) - x86_64-w64-mingw32-ld [package "binutils-mingw-w64-x86-64"] (missing)
The package name was actually based off a Mint or a Mageia, I think. If you use Fedora for instance, you will want to install mingw64-gcc and mingw64-binutils. Just adapt to your case.
Let’s check the output of crossroad again:
$ crossroad --help w64 w64: Setups a cross-compilation environment for Microsoft Windows operating systems (64-bit).
Installed language list: - C Uninstalled language list: - Ada Common package name providing the feature: gnat-mingw-w64-x86-64 - C++ Common package name providing the feature: g++-mingw-w64-x86-64 - OCaml Common package name providing the feature: mingw-ocaml - Objective C Common package name providing the feature: gobjc++-mingw-w64-x86-64 - fortran Common package name providing the feature: gfortran-mingw-w64-x86-64
We could stop here, but I actually know some programs make use of the C++ compiler, so let’s also install `mingw64-gcc-c++`. And now we are good to go!
I create a Windows 64-bit cross-build environment, that I will call “gimp-build”:
$ crossroad w64 gimp-build Creating project "gimp-build" for target w64... You are now at the crossroads... Your environment has been set to cross-compile the project 'gimp-build' on Windows 64-bit (w64). Use `crossroad help` to list available commands and `man crossroad` to get a full documentation of crossroad capabilities. To exit this cross-compilation environment, simply `exit` the current shell session.
Dependencies
babl
Now let’s cross-build babl! Very easy one to start with because it does not have any dependencies:
$ cd /path/to/src/of/babl/ $ crossroad configure && make && make install
Done! You’ll notice that you don’t even need to specify a prefix. crossroad is taking care of it.
GExiv2
$ cd /path/to/src/of/gexiv2 $ crossroad configure
The configure ends up with a pretty clear error:
checking for GLIB... no configure: error: GLib is required. Please install it.
Well basically you have to install glib. And then you think: the hell is starting! Do I have to build every dependency by hand? Fortunately no! crossroad relies on the OpenSUSE cross platform builds and can automatically download many dependencies for you. The reason I don’t do it for for all dependencies (babl, GEGL, libmypaint and GExiv2 in this tutorial) is when packages are either too old or non available. Install glib with:
$ crossroad install glib2-devel
That’s all! Neat right? Well you also have to install Exiv2 (trying to run the configure again, you’d see another error. I spare you the wasted time). You can run a separate command, or could have installed them both at the same time:
$ crossroad install glib2-devel libexiv2-devel
Try again:
$ crossroad configure
In the configuration summary, you’ll see that introspection and python bindings won’t be built-in. But since they are not needed for GIMP, we don’t care.
$ make && make install
And now GExiv2 has been cross-built too!
gegl
Now for gegl:
$ cd /path/to/src/of/gegl $ crossroad configure
Once again, you’ll get a few dependency errors. I spare you the try and fail process. Here are all the other mandatory libs to install:
Well there are actually more dependencies you could install or build yourself, but I don’t think they are really needed for GIMP. I’ll just leave it there. Now I build:
$ make
But then… a build error (I’ll admit: I left a dependency error on purpose!)!
In file included from /usr/include/SDL/SDL_main.h:26:0, from /usr/include/SDL/SDL.h:30, from /home/jehan/dev/src/gegl/operations/external/sdl-display.c:35: /usr/include/SDL/SDL_stdinc.h:74:20: fatal error: iconv.h: No such file or directory compilation terminated. Makefile:1277: recipe for target 'sdl_display_la-sdl-display.lo' failed make[4]: *** [sdl_display_la-sdl-display.lo] Error 1 make[4]: Leaving directory '/home/jehan/dev/crossbuild/w64/gegl/operations/external'[…]
Well that’s a good example to debug. Look well at the paths… /usr/include/[…], they are definitely for the native platform! So something is wrong.
Also I don’t even remember having installed SDL through crossroad anyway. Well if you were to check out the config.log, you would understand why the configure script found it:
configure:22069: checking for sdl-config configure:22087: found /usr/bin/sdl-config configure:22100: result: /usr/bin/sdl-config
Sometimes, some projects would use their own *-config script instead of relying on pkg-config (SDL seems to also have a pkg-config file, not sure why we’d prefer usind sdl-config, but well…). And while pkg-config allows to really separate the build and target environments, I can’t remove the current $PATH because a lot of native tools are needed in a cross-compilation. All this to say: you may encounter issues with software distributing custom *-config script. Be warned!
Anyway let’s install SDL, don’t forget to re-run configure (otherwise the native lib will still be used), then build again.
$ crossroad install libSDL-devel && crossroad configure && make && make install
Easy said, easy done.
libmypaint
Only a single dependency (json-c), then classical configure, make, make install:
$ crossroad install libjson-c2 libjson-c-devel && crossroad configure && make && make install
GIMP
And now for the main course! Once again, I spare you some of the search of dependencies. Here for mandatory deps:
I’ll skip completely Python dependencies. This is the only major part of GIMP I’m still having issues with in my cross-builds so I will run configure with --disable-python.
Note 1: libwmf-devel has the same issue as SDL, thus the configure script would see it installed if you have it on your main system because of the libwmf-config in your $PATH.
Note 2: you can use crossroad search to discover package names. Even better, sometimes you know a file name that configure is looking for (after a dependency error, check out the configure.ac file or the config.log file for this info). For instance, I can’t find a libghostcript but I see that GIMP‘s configure is looking for the file ghostscript/iapi.h to detect ghostscript:
$ crossroad search --search-files iapi.h "iapi.h" not found in any package name. The following packages have files matching the search "iapi.h": - headers - libgs-devel
Then using crossroad list-files libgs-devel, I can confirm that this is the right package (crossroad info libgs-devel also confirms this is the package for Ghostscript development files).
Back to building GIMP:
$ crossroad configure --disable-python
$ make && make install
Note that I don’t built some options in, like the Ascii Art, the help browser, or OpenEXR because I could not find prebuilt dependencies, but it should not be hard for you to build the dependencies yourself as we did for babl/GEGL/…
Running under Windows!
And now you can for instance make a zip to put on a Windows, like this:
This will just compress the whole target build, where GIMP for Windows is under bin/gimp-2.9.exe. Now this is *not* an installer or whatever finale. The target directory is full of files useful for building, yet completely useless for the finale installation. crossroad is *not* meant for making installers… to this day at least (saying that I would not be against if anyone wanted to implement something of the sort. Why not?! Send me a patch!).
Since I usually run Windows in a Virtualbox VM, rather than zipping a whole archive, I would simply share a directory and symlink the target directory like this:
$ cd /path/to/dir/shared/with/windows/vm/
$ crossroad --symlink w64 gimp
Note: in your Windows environment, you must update the PATH environment variable to add your build’s bin/ directory otherwise Windows won’t find your various built DLLs. You’ll find information on how to do so everywhere in the web.
I use crossroad as a developer, to test and sometimes patch directly GIMP for Windows, without ever getting out of my Linux OS. Well I still test under a Windows VM, which runs in Linux. But I develop and compile in my GNU/Linux shell.
Hopefully this tool can be useful to other people willing to test their program under Windows while hacking on GNU/Linux.
About having a good build system
If you followed good programming practice, and use a full-featured build system such as autotools and cmake, chances are that you can cross-build your program with barely any fix to the code. This is for instance what happened when I ported GExiv2 to autotools after we started using it in GIMP. GExiv2 maintainer would say in the blog post:
This in turn allows gexiv2 to build on Windows, something we’d not targeted at all when we began development but is obviously a hard requirement for GIMP.
Just having a good build system turn their Linux-only library into a multi-platform one. Pretty cool, no? And now libmypaint got the same fate, I autotooled it making it just so easy to cross-compile!
But if you have hand-made makefiles (like GExiv2 did), a scons build (like libmypaint did), or other build systems which don’t have a proper support for cross-building, this won’t be as easy. Think twice when you set up your software. The tool you use for builds is definitely not something to take lightly!
The one-step crossbuild script
This was all for you to see how crossroad is working. If you are only interested into building GIMP specifically, I compiled my whole tutorial below into a single build script that you are welcome to copy paste and run with crossroad like this:
crossroad install glib2-devel libexiv2-devel libjson-glib json-glib-devel \
libjpeg8-devel libpng-devel cairo-devel libtiff-devel librsvg-2-2 \
librsvg-devel pango-devel libwebp5 libwebp-devel libjasper-devel \
gdk-pixbuf-devel libSDL-devel libjson-c2 libjson-c-devel atk-devel \
gtk2-devel libbz2-1 libbz2-devel liblzma-devel liblcms2-2 \
liblcms2-devel libgs8 libgs-devel libmng1 libmng-devel \
libpoppler-glib8 libpoppler-glib-devel poppler-data \
xpm-nox-devel headers iso-codes-devel libwmf-devel headers
git clone git://git.gnome.org/babl
cd babl && crossroad configure && make && make install && cd ..
git clone git://git.gnome.org/gegl
cd gegl && crossroad configure && make && make install && cd ..
git clone git://git.gnome.org/gexiv2
cd gexiv2 && crossroad configure && make && make install && cd ..
git clone https://github.com/mypaint/libmypaint.git
cd libmypaint && crossroad configure && make && make install && cd ..
git clone git://git.gnome.org/gimp
cd gimp && crossroad configure --disable-python && make && make install
If you copy these into a file, say build-gimp.sh, you can run it at once with:
$ crossroad w64 gimp-build --run build-gimp.sh -n
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial on how to build GIMP with crossroad!
Note: if you like what I do, consider sponsoring our
animation film (CC by-sa), made with GIMP: ZeMarmot!
We fund it with Patreon (USD) and Tipeee (EUR).
While Libre Graphics Meeting 2016 barely ended, we had to say Goodbye to London. But this is not over for us since we are leaving directly to India for GNOME.Asia Summit 2016. We will be presenting both ZeMarmot, our animation film project made with Free Software, under Libre Art licenses, and the software GIMP (in particular the work in progress, not current releases), as part of the team. See the » schedule « for accurate dates and times.
GNOME.Asia is hosted in Manav Rachna International University in Delhi, India, this year. If anyone is interested to meet us as well as other awesome projects around the Free Software and in particular GNOME desktop ecosystem, we’d be happy to see you there!
GNOME Foundation is sponsoring us to travel to the event. We are very grateful for this!
P.S.: I will write a report of Libre Graphics Meeting in a few days. As you can imagine, we barely have the time to stop and breathe right now as we are taking the plane in a few hours!
