GIMP Motion: part 2 — complex animations

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. :-)

Crossroad 0.7 released and future…

Crossroad 0.7

Last month, I released Crossroad 0.7. Do you remember Crossroad? My tool to cross-compile for Windows from a Linux platform, which I told about a year ago. Well there is not much to say: small release with bug fixes, minor improvements, update of the third-party pre-built Windows package repository (thanks OpenSUSE!), and so on.
Also there used to be a bug in pip, so any crossroad installed through pip was broken (I had a quick look at the time, and I think it was because it would break the install prefix). Fortunately this bug is apparently fixed so getting crossroad through pip is again the recommended installation:

pip3 install crossroad

The example from last year is still mostly valid so have a look if you want to see better what crossroad can do.

Future: Android, ARM, MIPS…

Though I historically started this project to build GIMP for Windows (when debugging for this platform), I had wanted to go further for some time now. Android cross-compilation, or even bare-metal builds come to mind.

10 days ago, I have started to work on the support for more cross-compilers. It’s not available in 0.7, but it should be in 0.8! I have successfully cross-built glib, babl, GEGL (and half a dozen other dependencies for these) for Android quite easily, in barely a few dozen of minutes (for Android ARM, x86, MIPS, etc.). Crossroad really makes cross-compilation just as easy as native compilation. 🙂

I will make a blog post with examples on cross-compiling Glib and GEGL for Android when Crossroad 0.8 will be out (not now since I may change a few things before the release). But really… if you already know how to use crossroad for building for Windows, then it’s exactly the same for Android (except there is no pre-built package installer; does anyone know if such a repository exist somewhere?). Just give a go to the git version if you can’t wait.

Going to mobile? Wait… is that… GIMP for tablets?

As always, I never develop just for the sake of it: I code because I want this for a longer term project. And I have grown interested in small devices, even though I resisted for a long time (I still barely use my phone other than for calling, and I don’t even call much). I don’t think small devices will just replace full-grown desktops and laptops any time soon (oppositely to what some would tell you), but they are definitely funny devices. So let’s have some fun in building Android (or other small devices) programs! 🙂

Now I know that a lot of people have asked for a GIMP on Android. Let me tell you I’m not sure it will happen just now. Not that it can’t. I don’t see why we could not build it on this platform (I will probably do a cross-build at some point, just for the sake of trying) but I believe it would be utter-crap as-is. GIMP has not been thought for small devices at all (I even have sometimes GUI size issues on my laptop display!) and therefore we should either heavily modify its GUI with conditional code for small touch devices,  or simply create a brand new GUI, which is probably a much better idea anyway, with such different usage paradigms. Maybe we could create a new Free Software adapted for smaller devices? If other devs are interested to make one as a continuation of the GIMP project, this could be interesting.
This said, having the main GIMP also more touch-aware would be a very good thing (for screen-tablet users), so who knows how things will evolve…

My first GEGL-powered Android “App”

Now I really wanted to have a go at this so I developed my first application to apply GEGL filters on images. This was also my first Android application, period, so I discovered a lot more than just using native libraries on Android.

I know, there are thousands of these “image effects” applications. Sorry! 😛
Really I just wanted a small and easy stuff based on GEGL, and that popped in my mind. For now, it’s called with the stupid name “Robogoat”, and you are free to look at the code under GPLv3. Current version only applies a Sepia effect (“gegl:sepia” operation) to test that the cross-compiled libgegl works well inside Android (it does!). When it will be ready, we should be able to select any effect from a wide range of GEGL operations. 🙂

Robogoat screenshot: applying a gegl:sepia effect in Android
Robogoat screenshot: applying a gegl:sepia effect in Android

If anyone wants to have fun with it, build it and even provide patches, you are more than welcome!


As a conclusion, I would like to remind that I am trying to make a living by developing Free Software, and for the time being, it doesn’t work that well. All my coding is supported through ZeMarmot project, which funds us for making an animation film while contributing to Free Software, in particular GIMP, but others too. For instance, while working on this Android stuff in the previous week, I improved Crossroad, contributed patches and a bug report to meson (and I may have discovered a bug in json-glib but I must check to be sure, before filling a new bug report) and to gradle, and also I have a few commits pending for babl (for Android support)…

So if you want to support me, you can fund my FLOSS development in US dollar (on Patreon) or in euro (on Tipeee). Thanks! 😀


P.S.: by the way, thanks to Free Electrons (a company for embedded Linux development, which contributes back quite a lot to the kernel; I like this, so here is for my minor help by citing them, even though I was not required to!) for having offered me a training in Android system development, a year ago. This is not the reason I first got interested into hand-held devices (rather the opposite, I went there because I had the interest), nor has it been that much help to what I did above, but that sure showed me how easy it indeed was and gave me a preview of the world of embedded Linux.

Wilber week 2017: our report

Wilber Week 2017: the hacking place
ZeMarmot reached Bacelona airport!
ZeMarmot reached Barcelona airport!

Last week, the core GIMP team has been meeting for Wilber Week, a week-long meeting to work on GIMP 2.10 release and discuss the future of GIMP.  The meeting place was an Art Residency in the countryside, ~50km from Barcelona, Spain, with pretty much nothing but an internet access and a fire place for heating. Of course, both Aryeom and I were part of this hacking week. I personally think this has been a very exciting and productive time. Here is our personal report (it does not include the full result for everyone, only the part we have been a part of).

Software Hacking, by Jehan

GIMP on Flatpak

I’ve wanted to work on an official Flatpak build for at least 6 months, did some early tests already back in September, but could finally make the full time only this week. The build is feature-complete (this was not the case of the original nightly builds of GIMP, used as tests by Flatpak’s main developer, back when it was still called xdg-app; also these incomplete builds seem to have not been available anymore for a few months now), or nearly (since some features are still missing in Flatpak).

I’ll talk more on this later in a dedicated post, detailing what is there or not, and why, with feedback on the Flatpak project.
Bottom line: GIMP will have an official Flatpak, at least starting GIMP 2.10!

Heavy coding and arting going on at #WilberWeek
“Heavy coding and arting going on at #WilberWeek” (photo by Mitch, GIMP maintainer)

Working on the help system, Windows build, and more…

I’ve also worked in parallel on some other topics. For instance I’ve made a new Windows build of GIMP to test a few bugs (with my cross-build tool, crossroad, which I hadn’t used for a few months!), fixed a few bugs here and there, and also spent a good amount of time working on improving language detection for the help system (in particular some broken cases when you don’t have exactly the same interface language as the help you downloaded, since we don’t have documentations for as many languages as we have GUI translations). This part is mostly not merged in our code yet because unfinished. But it should be soon.
All in all, that was 26 commits in GIMP (and 1 minor commit in babl) last week, and a lot more things started.

Art hacking, by Aryeom

Aryeom, ZeMarmot director, contributed a lot of smiles (as always), art and design. Since Mitch forgot our usual “Wilber Flag”, she quickly scribbled one on a big sheet of paper (see in video).

Apart from playing with Wilber stamps, created by Antenne Springborn, Aryeom also spent many hours discussing t-shirt and patch designs with Simon Budig. Here is one of her nice attempts for a very classy outlined-Wilber design:

Outlined-Wilber design by Aryeom
Outlined-Wilber design by Aryeom

Funny story: she chose as a base a font called montserrat, without realizing that the region we were in at the time was called Montserrat as well. Total coincidence!

She has also been working on some missing icons in GIMP, for instance the Import/Export preferences icon.

And with time permitting, she scribbled various drawings on paper, because digital painting doesn’t mean you should forget analog techniques, right?

Social hacking: interviews and merchandise

Developer interviews

I have been wanting to bring a little more life to our communication ever since we got a new website for GIMP. We already produce more regular news. I wish we had even more. I also think we should even extend to community news. So if you’ve got cool events around the world involving GIMP, do not hesitate to tell us about them. We may be able to make it a gimp.org news when time permits.

Something else I wanted is showing the people behind GIMP: developers and contributors, but even the artists, designers and other creators making usage of GIMP as a tool in their daily creative process. I have talked about these interviews for a few months now, and Wilber Week was my first attempt to make them a reality. I interviewed Mitch, GIMP maintainer, Pippin, GEGL maintainer, Schumaml, GIMP administrator, Simon, a very early GIMP developer and Rishi, GNOME Photos maintainer and GEGL contributor.
All these interviews soon to be featured on gimp.org!

And that’s only a start! I am planning on interviewing even more contributors (developers and non-developers) and also artists. 🙂

Merchandising

We regularly have requests about t-shirts or other merchandising featuring Wilber/GIMP. So we sat down and discussed on what should be exactly GIMP’s official position on this topic. As you know, I, personally, am all for Libre Art, so this was my stance. And I am happy that we are currently willing to be quite liberal.

Yet we have a lot of values and that was our main concern: how nice is your design? Is your merchandising using good material? Is it produced with ecologically-conscious techniques? Do you give back to the community?… So many questions and this is why Simon Budig will work on a ruleset of what will be acceptable GIMP merchandising that we will “endorse”. Endorsement from the GIMP project will mean that we will feature your selling page link on gimp.org and also that you will be allowed to feature on your own page some “endorsed by GIMP” text or logo. I’ve been quite inspired by this system which Nina Paley uses for Sita Sings the Blues movie.

Well that’s the current status, but don’t take it as an official position and wait for an official news or page on gimp.org (as a general rule, nothing I write is in any way an official GIMP statement unless confirmed on the main website by text validated by peers).

Release hacking!

The one you’ve all been waiting for, so I kept it for the end, or close: what about GIMP 2.10 release? We finally decided that it is time to get 2.10 going. We still have a few things that we absolutely need to fix before the release, but the main decision is that we should stop being blocked by unfinished cool features.

We have got many very awesome features which are “nearly there”, but mostly untouched for years. Usually it means that it globally works but is either extremely slow (like the Seamless Clone or n-point deformation tools), or that it is much too instable (up to the crash), often also with unfinished GUI…
Well we will have to do a pass through our feature list and will simply disable whatever is deemed non-releasable. The code will still be here for anyone to fix, but we just can’t release half-finished unstable features. Sorry.
The good news is that it suddenly divides our blocker list by 10 or so! And that should make GIMP 2.10 coming along pretty soon.

But so what of all these cool features? Will we have to wait until GIMP 3 now? Not necessarily! We decided to relax the release rules, which come from a time where all free software released major versions with new features and minor versions with bug fixes only (some kind of semantic versioning applied to end software). So now, if any cool new feature comes along or if the currently deactivated features get finished, we are willing to make minor releases with them! Yes you read it well. This makes it much more exciting for developers since it means you won’t have to wait for years to see your changes in GIMP. But it also means that our contribution process gets much more robust to the unfinished-patch-dropping issue. Of course the libgimp API (used by plugins) still stays stable. Changes does not mean breaking stability!
This was also summed-up in an official gimp.org news recently.

I am so happy about this because I have been pushing for this change in our release process for years. Actually the first time I proposed this was in Libre Graphics Meeting 2014, Leipzig (as I explained in my report back then). I call it a rolling release, where we can release very regularly new stuff, even if just a little. This time though, the topic was brought up by Mitch himself.

People hacking

The conclusion of this week is that it was very nice. As Simon Budig put it in his interview: I mostly stay for the people. I think this is the same for us, and these kind of social events are the proof of it. The GIMP project is ­ — before all — made of people, and not just any people, even nice people! Such event is a good occasion for meeting physically, from time to time, and not just with pixels and bits exchanged through the internet.
We also spent a few hours visiting Barcelona, in particular Sagrada Familia, and doing a few hikes in Montserrat.

Awesome panorama shot showing several members of GIMP and GEGL (photo by Aryeom)
Panorama shot featuring several members of GIMP and GEGL (photo by Aryeom)

Financial hacking: ZeMarmot

As a conclusion, we remind you that ZeMarmot would be the way for me to work full-time on GIMP software development! We could do nearly as much every week if our project had the funding which allowed us to sustain ourselves while hacking Free Software. So if you wish to see GIMP be released faster with many cool features, don’t hesitate to click our Patreon links (for USD funding) or the Tipeee one (EUR funding).

See you soon!

Don’t be a stranger to GIMP, be GIMP…

I can try and do more coding, more code reviewing, revive designing discussions… that’s cool, yet never enough. GIMP needs more people, developers, designers, community people, writers for the website or the documentation, tutorial makers… everyone is welcome in my grand scheme!

Many of my actions lately have been towards gathering more people, so when I heard about the GNOME newcomers initiative during GUADEC, I thought that could be a good fit. Thus a few days ago, I had GIMP added in the list of newcomer-friendly GNOME projects, with me as the newcomers mentor. I’ll catch this occasion to remind you all the ways you can contribute to GIMP, and not necessarily as a developer.

Coding for GIMP

GIMP is not your random small project. It is a huge project, with too much code for any sane person to know it all. It is used by dozen of thousands of people, Linux users of course, but also on Windows, OSX, BSDs… A flagship for Free Software, some would say. So clearly coding for GIMP can be scary and exciting in the same time. It won’t be the same as contributing to most smaller programs. But we are lucky: GIMP has a very sane and good quality code. Now let’s be clear: we have a lot of crappy pieces of code here and there, some untouched for years, some we hate to touch but have to sometimes. That will happen with any project this size. But overall, I really enjoy the quality of the code and it makes coding in GIMP somewhat a lot more enjoyable than in some less-cared projects I had to hack on in my life. This is also thanks to the maintainer, Mitch, who will bore you with syntax, spaces, tabs, but also by his deep knowledge of GIMP architecture. And I love this.

On the other hand, it also means that getting your patch into GIMP can be a littler more complicated than in some other projects. I saw a lot of projects which would accept patches in any state as long as it does more or less what it says it does. But nope, not in GIMP. It has to work, of course, but it also has to follow strict code quality, syntax-wise, but also architecture-wise. Also if your code touches the public API or the GUI, be ready for some lengthy discussions. But this is all worth it. Whether you are looking for improving an already awesome software, adding lines to your resume, improving your knowledge or experience on programming, learning, you will get something meaningful out of it. GIMP is not your random project and you will have reasons to be proud to be part of it.

How to choose a first bug?

Interested already? Have a look at bugs that we think are a good fit for newcomers! Now don’t feel obligated to start there. If you use GIMP and are annoyed by specific bugs or issues, this may well be a much better entrance. Personally I never contributed to fix a random bug as first patch. Every single first patch I did for Free Software was for an issue I experienced. And that’s even more rewarding!

Oh and if you happen to be a Windows or OSX developer, you will have an even bigger collection of bugs to look into. We are even more needing developer on non-Linux platforms, and that means we have a lot more bugs there, but also most likely a good half of these are probably easy to handle even for new developers.

Finally crashes and bugs which output warnings are often pretty easy since you can usually directly investigate them in a debugger (gdb for instance), which is also a good tool to learn if you never used. Bugs related to a graphical element, especially with text, are a good fit for new developers too since you can easily grep texts to search through the code.

Infrastructure

Now there are whole other areas where you could contribute. These are unloved area and less visible, which is sad. And I wish to change this. One of these is infrastructure! GIMP, as many big projects, have a website, build and continuous integration servers, wikis, mailing lists… These are time-consuming and have few contributors.

So we definitely welcome administrators. Our continuous integration regularly encounters issue. Well as we speak, the build fails, not because of GIMP, instead because minimum requirements for our dev environment are not met. At times, we have had a failing continuous integration for months. The problem is easy: we need more contributors to share the workload. Currently Sam Gleske is our only server administrator but as a volunteer, he has only limited time. We want to step up to next level with new people to co-administrate the servers!

Writers

While we got a new website recently (thanks to Patrick David especially!), more frequent news (here I feel we have to cite Alexandre Prokoudine too), we’d still welcome new hands. That could be yours!

We need documentation for GIMP 2.10 coming release, but also real good quality tutorials under Free/Libre licenses. The state of our tutorials on gimp.org were pretty sad before the new website, to say the least. Well now that’s pretty empty.

Of course translations are also a constant need too. GIMP is not doing too bad here, but if that’s what you like, we could do even better! For this, you will want to contact directly the GNOME translation team for your target language.

Designers

And finally my pet project, I repeat this often, but I think a lot of GIMP workflow would benefit from some designer view. If you are a UX designer and interested, be welcome to the team too!

So here it is. All the things which you could do with us. Don’t be scared. Don’t be a stranger. Instead of being this awesome project you use, it could be your awesome project. Make GIMP! 🙂