Howdy campers!

I just spent the last weekend at a game jam, that is an event where groups of people get together and in an intense weekend work to create an entire video game. I was working as a 2d / 3d artist to create the artwork with 2 other people.

I thought I'd use Blender for 3d and Krita for 2D and see how it rose to the task.

Overall: pretty darn good!

I managed to paint a number of textures using a borrowed wacom intuos 3 which worked out of the box the moment I plugged it in (gasp!) and gave great results, even on my slightly underpowered laptop. The various painttops, layer modes and effect layers really came into their own. The one thing that was desperately missing was the ability to paint over the edge of the canvas and have it wrap to the other side (for creating tiling textures). Using Krita with Blenders new Image Reprojection also crashed Blender, although it also did this with Gimp. Obviously, this is on Blenders side, yet I'm hopeful that eventually this feature *will* let the two apps work together really well.

Along the way, I discovered a few tricks, such as placing the "small" colour selector docker below the canvas (Inkscape style) to allow better precision of colour selection. The way that the docker expanded the content to fit the spce here really made a big difference to what colours I could choose. I'm hoping Adamc's new colour picker will be similarly flexible!

Speaking of our new GSoC projects, I remembered a conversation between boud and Pentalis on how to store the paint thickness for the impasto style stuff. At the same time, in 3d texturing you really need to access this kind of data in the form of a height / normal / bump map. What really came through for me this weekend, was how useful it would have been to be able to paint and then export an accurate greyscale height / bump map along with the standard colour map (image) rather than artists needing to recreate a separate image to mimic entirely by hand.

Overall though, I found that the tools in Krita worked really well. I made heavy use of the pop up pallete, appreciated the speed ups we've seen lately and the handy presets. The game will be publically posted on the jam's website soonish, so I'll let you all know where you can get it from when it's available. Until then, thanks everyone for all the improvements you've brought to krita. We've come a long way, baby!

Obligate question from me: Did you use some of my paintops?
If so, how they were useful to your workflow?
Any paintop feature requests?

I can't say I remember the exact list of which ones are yours and which one's aren't, but I know I used pixel brush, soft brush, distort, smudge and spray. For example in this texture (designed to give a dark green, tropical leaf feel):



This one from memory was created by using the spray brush, to get a mottled colour pattern, then the distort and smudge brush to give the lined streaks (which show up as ridges when also used as a bump and specularity map) and then spray brushing the light green spots on a new layer (set to lighten?)

Sorry I don't have more to give you at the moment Lukas. I'm not really able to create much that I'd be happy to show without a working tablet. Good news is I'm getting one for my birthday next week. When do you need the images by?

Sorry I don't have more to give you at the moment Lukas. I'm not really able to create much that I'd be happy to show without a working tablet. Good news is I'm getting one for my birthday next week. When do you need the images by?

I'm fine and done with images. The thesis is frozen. I fix bugs, and release tomorrow on Friday I'm just curious as brushes is kind a hobby for me, so I'm always glad when I find out that this or this is/was useful in brush engines. Then I can make it even better or more effective.