Nick Porcaro sent an announcement that the New York City Ble nder User Group will have a meet up on March 7th, 2009 at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn.  The meeting will begin at 2pm in Rogers Hall Room 474.  Directions: http://www.poly.edu/directions.

Also from Nick’s email:

I plan to make a presentation on the work I’ve been doing with the Blender Game Engine and
Pure Data http://www.puredata.org in support of free improv art/music, and Daniel Houghton will
be discussing his short film called Pitch:
http://download.blender.org/demo/movies/bc08/Best_short_film/Daniel-Houghton_Pitch.avi

This gathering is for anyone interested in connecting or reconnecting to the Blender community in New York City.  We encourage presentations of recent work, future projects, and ideas for collaboration.However, if you would like to attend simply to listen, please do.

If you would like to attend please RSVP Nick via the NYC Blender User Group website here, as Polytechnic has asked him for a head count.

Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 will be held  from May 6-9 in Montreal, Canada.  From the website:

“LGM 2009 is the fourth annual worldwide meeting of teams developing open source graphics applications. Designers, graphic artists and anyone involved in print production and/or web development are cordially invited to attend and meet the developers one to one.

LGM is all about participation. Artists and developers, feel free to bring your laptops and show us what you can (and can’t yet) do. Organise a BOF about your favourite project or feature. We’re aiming for a bazaar.”

As always, LGM is free and open to the public. Registrations begin on March 2nd.

The main projects at LGM are:

• Scribus – The page layout program.
• Blender – 3D modeling and animation.
• Inkscape – Vector Drawing.
• The Gimp – Photo manipulation and raster graphics.
• Krita – painting and drawing program.

But LGM will also be an environment dedicated to dozens of other free graphics programs.  You can find more information at the website.

Jon Cruz, an Inkscape developer, recently gave an awesome presentation on the state of color management in Linux at linux.conf.au 2009.  The video, “Why Color Management matters to Open Source and to You”, is approximately 60 minutes long and gives us an overview and history of color management.  As Jon points out early in the presentation, color management should be important to everyone, not just graphic designers or print professionals.  End users, business professionals, and even the amateur photographer, should be aware of how color will be displayed from device to device.

A few interesting things, among many, that Jon talks about are: Continue reading…

Blender.org has a road map for the hotly aniticipated 2.5 release.  It looks like we can expect a release in probably August, maybe July at the earliest.  They also have a summary of some highlights that will be in the release, including the much talked about UI design.  If you can’t wait until the official release, you can download a development build from Graphicall.org.  (Just be aware that these builds should be used for testing purposes only.)

Also, Michael Fox, has been posting some really good videos explaining some of the new features in 2.5.  We blogged about them here and here.

The next release of Inkscape will be amazing.   It’s been nearly a year since the last release.  Usually when a program hasn’t been updated in that amount of time, it gets many wondering whether development has slowed or even halted.  However, this is not the case with Inkscape.  The developers have been working extremely hard since then and an impressive number of improvements and new features have been added.  I won’t list all the changes here, but you can go to the Release Notes to find a complete list with details.

Read on to find out more of the ones that I’m excited about.

Continue reading…

Ardour, a digital audio workstation for linux and mac osx, is no longer being sponsored financially by SAE.  Paul Davis, Ardour’s lead developer, is now in a position of being paid solely by the donations and subscriptions made by the Ardour community.  Since the normal amount of donations and subscriptions would be insufficient for Paul to support himself and his family, he is reaching out to the community for help.  His goal is to raise $4,500 or $54,000 for the year.

Ardour is an important project in the Open Souce community.  Please continue to support Ardour by donating what you can to this project.  Every bit counts.

Michael Fox has posted another great and informative video preview of what’s new in the upcoming Blender 2.5 release.  In this tour, he covers keying sets, threaded renderer, 4-way-split, operators and repeat last action, and menus.

We previously covered Micheal’s efforts here under January’s QuickHits.

Also, there is a lengthly forum topic over at BlenderArtists.org providing daily updates of what’s been added to the upcoming release.

And if you can’t wait for the official release, whose date is TBD, you can download nightly builds over at GraphicAll.org.  Just be forewarned that these builds should be used for testing purposes only, and are not production ready.  New features are incomplete and some old features may be broken.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a story about the efforts of Floss Manuals to print a free textbook based on open source design software.  Well, this past weekend the community event was hosted at Eyebeam in NYC and it was very successful.  I showed up on early Friday morning not really knowing what to expect.  And when I left later that night, I had a sense that I had really contributed back to the community something worthwhile.

Continue reading…

In his blog, Fading Memories, Krita developer Boudewijn Rempt looks at the new features that will be in Krita 2.0.  The next release, scheduled for early 2009, has been in development for nearly three years.

In case you don’t know, Krita is a paint and image manipulation program that likens itself more towards Corel Painter than Photoshop or The Gimp.  Although not as full featured as Painter, Krita does offer some features not present in any other programs.

There are a plethora of new and exciting stuff added to 2.0, including:

• More brush engines
• New mixer canvas like in Painter
• Action recording
• Vector layers

Go on over Boudewijn’s site for all the details and explanations.

Meet The Gimp has released episode 086 titled “A Spot of F-Spot”.  The focus of the screencast is on F-Spot, a full-featured personal photo management application for the Gnome Desktop.  The video focuses on the work flow, not just the specifics of the program.  Therefore, this should be informative for any photo management program you prefer.

Download here.

Heathenx has released episode 082.  The screencast teaches you how to make a tennis ball in Inkscape.

Download here.