Hello everyone,

I just came across this post about Blender and I think it makes sense, and somehow it can be applied to Krita.

http://www.blenderguru.com/podcast-why- ... seriously/


Let me know what you think.

I like it. Some things we have been doing -- showing off art made with Krita, interviews with users and so on, especially this summer.

For support and training, yes, we can emphasize that more. It's always tricky, though, to find the right balance. KO GmbH offers professional support and training (though we really need a pro website designer to get that message across!), but how much can we emphasize that on krita.org without alienating our current community? I don't want to trample on old friends in my haste to make new friends...

Social proof is something we need to think about -- also because it's likely to be relative small right now, though growing for sure!

I think that getting it to work properly under Windows is a pretty crucial step if you want to make it popular. The last time it almost literally fell apart when I tried to use it.

Well, I don't know when you last tried it, but I think we're making pretty good progress there with the latest builds. The X64 version is pretty stable and useful, with a number of known bugs, of course, but I'd contend that Krita on Windows is now usable, if not perfect.

Windows XP support is unlikely to return, though -- I've moved all my six build trees over to MSVC 2012 now.

There's one sure fire way to get Krita noticed and that's to create great work with it. The rest will follow. This is easier said than done of course. Sometimes programs grow over a long period of time as users get used to how to leverage the tools to best effect. In the case of Krita a lot of that is tied into creating lots of great brushes but I'm finding that some of the best commercial apps gain popularity because they have paid people to create really great content. With painting apps, that's mainly brushes. I think we need to seriously get into the texture capabilities of the brushes in Krita for example. Currently I don't think it's showcased enough. The provided textures are weak. Gimp is a classic example of apalling content. I'm not saying the default content in Krita is this bad but Gimp is truly dire. Users trying the app to begin with for any painting purposes are presented with joke brushes.

I'm wanting a small slate PC or even a smartphone for on the move. It will be Android but I was enticed by iPads. Mainly due to this program linked below. It has all the cool website, marketing etc and it is a good app. The brushes are brilliantly crafted. Krita is actually better but content such as brushes and also the way you organise them needs improving. The brushes are up to us users though.

We need artwork that looks like the stuff on this page and it is possible in Krita. That means attracting artists which means decent content to get you going. I've spent ages in Gimp on this. You can create really great brushes. I've spent time in Mypaint on this as well. Much less so in Krita but I intend to delve into it.

http://procreate.si/

I spend time looking at other apps. This is important. I've been doing 3D so not much 2D work done. More so in Gimp and Mypaint experimenting with brushes. That's because of what I've said about content lacking. Mypaint is quite good since it's got one brush engine and a simple way to organise brushes. Quite good brushes available that people have worked on. Gimp is a disaster area in this respect.

At the moment I've been looking at Procreate. I haven't got it because I have no iPad and I may not get one. Procreate is an ideas pad at the end of the day but Procreate is an example on how to draw users in. It can't do big res so is not like Krita at all and Krita does have a few other features. However look here:

http://procreate.si/forums/index.php?board=20.0

Compare to this forum.

Then watch this. I'm not saying this is what we need in Krita but it relates to previous link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMfkpwrr1_o

Now go here. In particular look at the brushes. Krita can do all of this. It's a much more comprehensive pro app.

http://savage.si/downloads/Procreate-User-Guide.pdf

We have to do this work ourselves. Lots of brushes and content. There are drawbacks in Krita's organising of brushes and in my opinion, considering how well sorted other parts of the app are, this is Krita's biggest weakness but still, we need to work on content.

At last year's LGM we hammered out a way to share brush packs between gimp, krita and mypaint. Unfortunately, nobody has had time to actually start implementing it... With 2.8, it's a bit easier than it used to be, though. There's now a menu option to open a file browser in the location where brushes etc. are stored.

Ryan wrote:We have to do this work ourselves. Lots of brushes and content. There are drawbacks in Krita's organising of brushes and in my opinion, considering how well sorted other parts of the app are, this is Krita's biggest weakness but still, we need to work on content.

In my opinion Krita has the best potential at organizing brushes, a tag system. What is laking is:
- A way to tag in bulk brush presets inside Krita.
- Krita brush presets should come already tagged (we have a color code for brushes icons but not a corresponding tag code for filtering).
- Easy import/export of brushkits with their tags, by saving/loading them in bulk to/from a zip file. Ideally every preset imported and exported in a pack should have two tags, brushkit_name and one from the tag code list.

Thoughts?
As inexperienced user it makes sense to me, but I may miss something. I'd like to hear what developers and pro users think.

Well, considering the tags are saved in an xml file, the tags-per-brushkit sounds less bothersome to implement than importing tags.

That said, I'm pretty sure that this and the other 100-few things on the krita wishlist haven't been implemented yet because project 'tablet support' is having priority right now.

Well, getting 2.8 in a releasable state...

And this year, we'll also have to start to work seriously on the Qt5 port.

@TheraHedwig & boudewijn: I know. Those where my thoughts about Krita preset organizing, not a request. I was asking if it was a good design / desirable feature / made sense for others too.

Since you both brought up the development of such features let's talk about it.
My idea, and I'm sure someone else has had it before, for easily sharing brush kits is a zip file with the following structure:

• brushes
  
  • Bruskit_Cmark.gbr
  • Bruskit_Horseshoe.gbr
  • ...
• paintoppresets
  
  • Bruskit_Sparkle.kpp
  • Bruskit_20_Percent_Cooler.kpp
  • ...
• patterns
  
  • bruskit_Apples.pat
  • bruskit_Diamonds.pat
  • ...
• tags
  
  • kis_paintoppresets_tags.xml
  • ...

The content of brushes, paintoppresets and patterns folders is extracted and moved to the user's local directories. For the tag folders add the text of the xml files at the end of the user's xml files. Do the inverse for the export. Unless Krita lacks the facilities to handle zip files it's a pretty trivial thing to implement, I could write a shell or python script that does the same things. I would try to add something like this to Krita but as I learned the hard way in Blender, even if you have working code, understanding the program architecture so you know where to put you hands is far from trivial, if you don't have a good computer science background.

I am a new Krita user. Currently busy finishing a work all made in Painter. I have been a Painter user for nearly 20 years. In the Painter Factory forum I have mentioned Krita in some discussions. So now everybody in the Painter Factory forum knows the existense of Krita. I noticed some of the members tried Krita out. Just like me.

I find Krita surprisingly good and I am sure it will be my new favourite piece of software along with Painter. Or maybe just Krita... I have to dig into it after finishing my recent illustration job....and I will spread the word.

Back on this forum again after my latest tour of software. I'm trying to find a small tablet computer for portability. A phone turned out to be best in the end! I've been through a stack of software yet again on both Android and iOS. It relates to what I mentioned here though because I've used and will be ditching Procreate. I'll probably discuss the reasons why Procreate is no good good on another thread because I want to try to find out if there is actually any tablet PC that could be great with Krita and if it's possible with Linux. This is my next investigation.

So Procreate has an awesome brush engine and one of the reasons it is so impressive when you first use it is that the default brushes are excellently made but in particular what they call "grain" which is the same as Krita internal to brush shape textures. The brush results are all beautiful right out the box.

I can tell you that having been through so much software, Krita is in fact a winner in my opinion. That's against lots of big names and some at high cost. That is quite an achievement for Krita. It is up there with Blender in this respect and in my opinion even better than Blender because there are other 3D programs that beat out Blender in features.

Also, making good brushes is almost an art form in itself. It is very time consuming and requires a lot of fine tuning, especially when you are dealing with brush shape and textures. I've been experimenting with brush engines across lots of apps for this. There isn't any fast route to building this up on Krita but it's definitely an immediate wow factor in any app where it's really well sorted.

If you're wondering why I'm obsessed with this whole idea about brushes and textures you'd probably understand if you saw my real world artwork and I spent years working in procedural texture generator apps for landscaping. Its a key as to why some painting apps are impressive from square one.

Ryan, it may be interesting to know that Boudewijn(maintainer) has been gifted a Cintiq Hybrid Companion by Wacom as sponsoring. This is android running wacom tablet pc, and the moment it was noticed it runs android the words 'Well, we have a reason to port Krita to QT5 now'(par) were typed.

In short, somewhere in the far or near future there's gonna be work on porting Krita to android, though there's no estimate yet.