Hi, as much as I love the progress of Krita over the years,

I find it extremely frustrating that there's so little focus on texture creating worflow.

https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=139&t=153968

This thread of mine has been largely ignored along with others similar,
now it seems that even that trick @TheraHedwig posted there to preserve pixel when using an alpha mask doesn't work anymore.

Nothing's been done about it It's crucial when making any masked textures. I can explain more about it if needed.

So my question is this. Will you put some more focus on texture creation workflows after receiving the Epics MegaGrant?

I mean, there's a couple of things, that really break it for me and I imagine they are really easy to implement.
Like preserving the color when alpha is used, or dealing with that another way as long as the output texture works.

Another small thing is texture dilation. I found some advice about using GMIC inpaint scripts, but they don't seem to work, with the setup I'd use normally.

All in all, I hope this Epic's money can be used to making Krita to UE4 workflow work, not towards other things.
Hope there's a discussion about that!

Sorry, but that's not likely. The plan for the grant explicitly mentioned it was meant to make our development process more dependable. We don't have a lot of texture painters in the community either, and even fewer who could help out with code.

boudewijn wrote:Sorry, but that's not likely. The plan for the grant explicitly mentioned it was meant to make our development process more dependable. We don't have a lot of texture painters in the community either, and even fewer who could help out with code.

@boudewijn
That's really extremely disappointing given that the purpose of Megagrant was to be as follows.

Epic Games has committed $100,000,000 to provide financial grants to creative, noteworthy, and innovative projects built in and around Unreal Engine or projects that enhance the open-source 3D graphics ecosystem.

I don't see how Krita enhances the 3d graphics ecosystem one iota, if you can't even fix that small issue with alpha and there's no willingness to even look into it properly.

What a waste of money.

That's an extremely... weird and confrontational way of putting things. As to why Epic has decided to give us a grant; the grant is associated with a project proposal, and apparently Epic decided that the proposal fit their criteria.

We've been working like mad, on a very, very tiny budget (even with the grant < 200,000 euros a year, which funds five people), with a very tiny team, to improve Krita's software quality over the past year, discovering more and more things that needs fixing.

Your ill-defined "alpha" problem -- is that in bugzilla? If not, it's not on the radar. If it is, it will have to wait its turn.

I don't mean to be confrontational( at least not for the sake of it), but I find it very frustrating that Epics money goes towards so broadly defined development dependability,
but not towards making Krita work with UE4 (at least in some part).
I just think it sucks, but I guess I'm in a losing position.

As to it being a bug.
Well, I'm not sure if it's a bug. I defined it very well in the original thread, this explains it all.
I think it's just a bad design, I might file a bug report though, but I really don't have very high expectations.
There's a lot of ways this could be mitigated though, so that the alpha is preserved. That's where discussion would be helpful.

I don't think it's a matter of very many manhours.

Not to end on such a negative note, I bought Affinity Photo some time ago and it's even worse than Krita when it comes to making textures.
The way alpha works there is absolutely wicked and you can't export a .tga (you can it the latest version)

For the record, the original thread is here: viewtopic.php?f=139&t=153968&p=403864#p403864

I guess it might be useful to do some investigating, since from the look of it there might be a case when something gets lost unnecessarily; but for that, we need more information (and preferably a bug report as well, if it turns out to be a bug). Let's move our discussions about this issue there, so people won't have to jump between threads.

As for the Epic, I bet such a big company knows what it's doing. Krita on its end is, I believe, going to keep promises it made in the proposal and use the money in such a way that fits the proposal. I believe it's actually a good thing: making sure Krita's releases are stable and safe to use will improve anyone's experience with Krita, both of UE4 users and everyone else. Everyone will benefit from it. Krita's team spent a lot of time making new features fast, but it leads to a lot of bugs all over the place. Ensuring that Krita's development is less prone to regressions and new bugs is something really important, even though you might not see it as such. Even this alpha bug, if it is a bug - it might've not happened if Krita had the resources to, for example, test tga export thoroughly when it was first implemented.

Fortunately for you, we're still on a bug fixing mission, so if the thing you're describing is a bug, it can be fixed.

@tymond
Thanks. Your post seems a little more encouraging, I'm just bored with explaining it over and over though,
Boudewijn's attitude's made me want to dig deeper into Affinity Photo today
and turns out they've made some updates only like 2 months ago that make it work for me.(tga support/preserving color with alpha is janky but I can get it to work)
Although not perfectly I can get the work done unlike Krita, I'm not endorsing it by any means though.

@boudewijn
So I guess I rest my case then, feel free to make all of those deviantarters happy with Epic's money or otherwise.
I don't think any 3d professionals will come to this community as it is, so it will be a self fulfilling prophecy that there's no texture painter in the community.