We were asked a few times about trying out Liberapay. It is different from other recurring funding platforms (such as Patreon and Tipeee) that it is managed by a non-profit and have lesser fees (from what I understand, there are payment processing fees, but they don’t add their own fees) since they fund themselves on their own platform (also the website itself is Free Software).
Though we liked the concept, until now we were a bit reluctant for a single reason: ZeMarmot is already on 2 platforms (we started before even knowing Liberapay), and more platforms mean more time spent to manage them all, time we prefer using to hack Free Software and draw/animate Libre Animation.
Nevertheless recently Patreon made fee policy changes which seem to anger the web (just search for it on your favorite web search engine, there are dozens of articles on the topic) and as most Patreon projects, we lost many patrons (at time of writing, 20 patrons for $80.63 of pledge left in 4 days, more than 10% the patronage received from this platform!).
So we decided to give Liberapay a try. If you like ZeMarmot project, and our contributions to GIMP, then feel free to fund us at:
both EUR (€) and USD ($) donations are accepted, which is cool;
there are no news system so one has to get them oneself (for instance reading the project blog or twitter);
all patrons are fully anonymous (which means they won’t appear in credits of the movie);
localization is supported (right now our page is only in English, but we will make a French version soon!).
Now this is just another platform, we are not abandoning Patreon and Tipeee. Don’t feel like you have to move your patronage to Liberapay if you don’t want to. From now on, this will just be one more option.
Finally we remind that ZeMarmot project is fully managed by a non-profit registered in France, LILA. This means there are also other means to support the project, for instance with direct bank transfers (most European banks allow monthly bank transfers without any fees, so if you are in the EU, this may be the best solution), or Paypal (though for very small amounts, fees are quite expensive, they are quite ok for most donations), etc. To see the full list of ways to fund LILA, hence ZeMarmot and GIMP: https://libreart.info/en/donate
Too long, didn’t read? In a few words: our GIMP development + ZeMarmot production is currently funded barely above 400 € per month, this doesn’t pay the bills, my main computer broke today and Aryeom’s graphics tablet has been working badly for some time now. We are a bit bummed out.
So we call for your help!
You can fund GIMP development and ZeMarmot production on Patreon or Tipeee! Read below for more.
If you read us regularly, you know that I am hacking GIMP a lot. We are just a handful of regular developers in GIMP, I am one of them. My contributions go from regular bug fixes to bigger features, maintenance of several pieces of code as well as regular code review from contributed patches. I do this in the context of ZeMarmot project, with Aryeom Han, director and animator. We draw on and hack GIMP because we believe in Free Software.
On the side, I also contribute to a lot of other Free Software.
Our absolutely-not-hidden goal is to be able, one day, to live from hacking Free Software and creating Libre Art. But clearly there is no denying that we are currently failing. With about 400€ a month for 2 people, association LILA can barely pay a few days a month (by the rules, which means a good part of the sum even goes to non-wage labour costs). These 400€ are not even the monthly rent we pay for our 1-room flat (31 m², in the far suburb of Paris); so you would assume well that we don’t live from it. We mostly live off savings and other things to pay the bills. These “other things” also use time we would rather spend on drawing and coding.
We would indeed enjoy working full-time on ZeMarmot, creating Free Software and Libre Art for everyone to enjoy. But we are very far from this point.
The main reason why we have not stopped the project already is that we promised we’d release the pilot. Funders are counting on us. Of course the other reason is that we still hope things will work out and that we will be able to live from what we love. Still the project is done at slow pace because we can’t afford to starve, right? So we are at times demoralized.
This is why I am doing this call. If you can afford it and believe that improving GIMP is important, then I would propose to fund ZeMarmot which supports paid development.
Similarly if you want to see more Libre Art, and in particular cool animation films, and maybe later other movies under Libre licenses in professional quality, then I again propose to support ZeMarmot.
And so why is this post released today? The situation has been hard for months now, but today it is dire: my laptop just broke. It just won’t turn on. All my data are safe since I do regular backups (and I think the hard drive is still ok anyway), but I don’t have a computer anymore to work on (I am writing this on a 8-year old 32-bit netbook which barely stands opening a few browser tabs!).
On her side, Aryeom’s graphics tablet has had issues for months. As you may remember, we partly dealt with them, but the tablet regularly shuts down for no reason, we have to remove and put back the battery or similar annoying “workarounds”. And we fear that we have to buy a new one soon.
So that’s what triggered this blog post because I realize how precarious is our situation. We barely get funding for living bills, we eat our savings and now we have (expensive) material issues. So we are calling you all who like Free Software and Libre Art. Do you believe ZeMarmot is a good thing? Do you believe our project has any meaning and that it should continue for years and years? We believe this, and have believed it for the last 2 years where we have been trying. If you do too, maybe help us a bit, relatively to your means. If you really can’t afford it, at least you can spread the word.
ZeMarmot is a wonderful experience for us, and we really don’t want it to have a bitter end (though we won’t regret a second of it).
This is the second video to present GIMP Motion, our plug-in to create animations of professional quality in GIMP. As previously written, the code is pretty much work-in-progress, has its share of bugs and issues, and I am regularly reviewing some of the concepts as we experiment them on ZeMarmot. You are still welcome to play with the code, available on GIMP official source code repository under the same Free Software license (GPL v3 and over). Hopefully it will be at some point, not too far away, released with GIMP itself when I will deem it stable and good enough. The more funding (see in the end of the article for our crowdfunding links) we get, the faster it will happen.
Whereas the previous video was introducing “simple animations”, which are mostly animations where each layer is used as a different finale frame, this second video shows you how the plug-in handles animations where every frame can be composited from any number of layers. For instance a single layer for the background used throughout the whole animation, and separate layers for a character, other layers for a second character, and layers for other effects or objects (for instance the snow tracks in the example in the end of the video).
It also shows how we can “play” with the camera, for instance with a full cut larger than the scene where you “pan” while following the characters. In the end, we should be able to animate any effect (GEGL operations) as well. This could be to blur the background or foreground, adding light effects (lens flares for instance), or just artistic effects, even motion graphics…
All this is still very much work-in-progress.
One of the most difficult part is to find how to get the smoother experience. Rendering dozens of frames, each of these composited from several high resolution images and complex mathematical effects, takes time; yet one does not want to freeze the GUI, and the animation preview needs to be as smooth as possible as well. These are topics I worked on and experimented a lot too because these are some of the most painful aspect of working with Blender where we constantly had to render pieces of animation to see the real thing (the preview is terribly slow and we never found the right settings even with a good graphics card, 32GB of memory, a good processor, and SSD hard drives).
One of the results of my work in GIMP core should be to make libgimp finally thread-safe (my patch is still holding for review, yet it works very well for us already as you can see if you check out our branch). So it should be a very good step for all plug-ins, not only for animation only.
This allowed me to work more easily with multi-threading in my plug-in and I am pretty happy of the result so far (though I still plan a lot more work).
Another big workfield is to have a GUI as easy to use, yet powerful, as possible. We have so many issues with other software where the powerful options are just so complicated to use that we end up using them badly. That’s obviously a very difficult part (which is why it is so bad in so many software; I was not saying that’s because they are badly done: the solution is just never as easy as one can think of at first) and hopefully we will get something not too bad in the end. Aryeom is constantly reminding me and complaining of the bugs and GUI or experience issues in my software, so I have no other choices than do my best. 😉
You’ll note also that we work on very short animations. We actually only draw a single cut at a time in a given XCF file. From GIMP Motion, we will then export images and will work on cut/scene transitions and other forms of compositing in another software (usually Blender VSE, but we hear a lot more good of Kdenlive lately, so we may give it a shot again; actually these 2 introduction videos were made in Kdenlive as a test). Since 2 cuts are a totally different viewpoint (per definition), there is not much interest on drawing them in the same file anyway. The other reasons is that GIMP is not made to work with thousands of high-definition layers. Even though GEGL allows GIMP to work on images bigger than memory size in theory, this may not be the best idea in practice, in particular if you want fast renders (some people tried and were not too happy, so I tested for debugging sake: that’s definitely not day-to-day workable). As long as GIMP core is made to work on images, it could be argued that it is acceptable. Maybe if animations were to make it to core one day, we could start thinking about how to be smarter on memory usage.
On the other hand, cuts are usually just a few seconds long which makes a single cut data pretty reasonable in memory. Also note that working and drawing animation films one cut at a time is a pretty standard workflow and makes complete sense (this is of course a whole different deal with live-action or 3D animation; I am really discussing the pure drawn animation style here), so this is actually not that huge of a deal for the time being.
To conclude, maybe you are wondering a bit about the term “cel animation”. Someday I guess I should explain more what was cel animation, also often called simply “traditional animation” and how our workflow is inspired by it. For now, just check Wikipedia, and you’ll see already how animation cels really fit well the concept of “layers” in GIMP. 🙂
Have a fun viewing!
ZeMarmot team
Reminder: my Free Software coding can be supported in
USD on Patreon or in EUR on Tipeee. The more we get
funding, the faster we will be able to have animation
capabilities in GIMP, along with a lot of other nice
features I work on in the same time. :-)
Mid-July, we finally published publicly the code of GIMP Motion, our software for animations in GIMP. It is available on GIMP official source code repository under the same Free Software license (GPL v3 and over).
We don’t have a public GIMP release containing this plugin yet. Hopefully it should happen soon, but the code is still much too experimental and incomplete. We are using it daily internally and you are welcome to do so as well, but the released version will be much better. 🙂
So it means that for the time being, if you want to play with it, you will have to build it yourself from source, or wait for someone to make a build (we may provide one at some point).
The video above describes some of the base features for simple animations, such as storyboards/animatics and most common needs for animated images (GIF, Webp…). What we call “simple animations” is when you mostly have several images which you want to succeed at one another. No complex composition with background and character layers for instance. New features will still happen, for instance for panning/tilting/zooming on bigger panels (very common on storyboards as well), and adding various effects (a keyframed blur for instance would be a common movie effect).
We will soon publish a second part video where we will describe the more advanced features for complex animation (the ones with layered background/foreground/characters). Because we just scratched the surface of what we will be able to do with this plugin. 🙂
(just search for it on your favorite web search engine, there are dozens of articles on the topic) and as most Patreon projects, we lost many patrons (at time of writing, 20 patrons for $80.63 of pledge left in 4 days, more than 10% the patronage received from this platform!).
