 Do you mind if I share a brief story with you before we begin? Do you mind? It says that I am a new photographer and I am and One way I can prove that I am a new photographer is that my cell phone takes better pictures than me Who any anyone has the same problem to me? Jenny and I spent last night trying to get a nice picture of the Pasadena City Hall. It's a beautiful building and I spent like one hour trying to get a Right exposure trying to get a good framing. I also thought to today We're going to have a hugging presentation I don't know what time but I tried to take several pictures to stage a panorama and we spent more more than an hour Then I took my cell phone and when one click I Got I'm not sure what what I'm going to donate and I got this one with With a single click on my phone and that's I'm glad that I that I have a phone that takes good picture But it it really pissed me off, you know, but I spent a lot of hours trying to learn how to take photography And this thing does it with one click That's not fair so we're Three minutes away to start the presentation Yeah, I think I have it. I'm not sure but the the images are still on my camera and each Each photo it's like 19 I think my camera. It's 19 megapixels and I took like no Since I was using a 15 mils. I had to teach like eight columns and four rows Ah Yeah, I Haven't tried to don them to do the panorama yet I'm just going to wait till I have it on my computer and and test but till now I Haven't been able to do a nice panorama and My only approach to hugging was to play with the interface by myself I haven't ever seen a tutorial or YouTube or anything So I'm really excited to get to the talk today two minutes Okay, the the form that I'm using it's a highway P 20 P 20 pro the night mode It's incredible, but I feel like dirty. It's like shitting. No, I can interest myself. Oh No, but actually this is right now, this is your room. So I think you show Okay You guys all the way at the back and don't be shy come forward There's all these open seats Sit sit in the front. Oh, don't go. I'll be locking the doors after this Thank you everyone for coming to the second annual Libra graphics track here at scale Very happy that we got the time and space to put this on So thank you to Elon and all the volunteers here at scale It's awesome to be here and organizing this kind of thing kind of from top is very difficult If you've ever tried to organize a lug meeting getting space for things is usually super expensive and time consuming So all I do is send an email every year and say like hey, I want to do this and they just say yes And there's there's no haggle. It's great and This is one of the cheaper conferences to attend as far as I know. So that's that's awesome. Thank you all for coming Don't be shy come to the front Don't leave that applause means we're ready to go Without further ado here is Gabrielle. Thank you. Okay, so my name is Gabrielle and We will be talking about my photography workflow with free and open source software using Linux Okay I am from Mexico. So I think you have noticed my tick accent and I'm going to mispronounce a lot of words. So if you don't understand something that I said just ask me I'll be not bothered to do that. I am a newbie photographer I have already explained why I feel newbie my cell phone takes better picture than me I love to do speaks six years ago I started on Local groups in in my city in Tijuana and I have been to some Congress And this is something that I really love to do. Although I am a newbie also doing speaks and I started using links like 16 years ago for my work, I am cis admin and I I will say that I born to be rude, but just as an advice don't don't use the root user You don't have you don't supposed to use that root user use pseudo. Okay? We all have a story with okay so Linux users love to do this talking about their hopping path between distros and This is mine. I started with Mandrake 16 years ago then college linux. Have someone heard about college linux? Now neither me, but the problem was my old PC Didn't handle Mandrake very well. So I found this Weird distro. It was vast based on slacker. So I moved to a slacker then again to arch Linux I love large arch Linux But it break like every two weeks so I decided to go for a more stable and the open source for five years and A friend of mine five years ago convinced me to get into devian and I love it. I'm currently running devian Maybe my biggest sin is that all these years I have been using KDA and I'm good with it, but many people tell me I shouldn't Anyway, and Who's a photographer here? Can you raise your hand? Who? Okay, about that the half so I'm a new photographer. So I have new gear my Canon 60d. It's like 10 years old or something like that and my lenses and regarding my talks For most of the slides you're going to see on the footer the link where you can get this presentation and if you can Pick for some of my other percent they are all in Spanish actually this is my first talk in English So I am a little bit more nervous than usual, but you can check all my talk And actually I think this is the One of the few places on art where I can Where can we do in the treat things that that I love and it's speaking about Linux and photography So it's awesome to have the Libre Libre graphics track here on scale Okay does How many of you know what it's a photography workflow? Okay They're just a few so I'm glad because now my talk is not useless. I can explain it to you so When When I go and usually most of the people when when go out and take pictures there is a lot of things that you have to take care of and The first one of the more obvious is the photo session where you go add the location and shoot but after that You have to download the pictures to your laptop or desktop or whatever You have to review and rate your photos because Unless you are very very good Most of your picture are going to get blurry out of focus miss-exposed for me if I If I want to do a headshot for a friend for example, it takes me to 150 to get like five or six good shots. So the other 140 There is useless to me. So Going through this process to review and rate your photos is is a good part of the workflow and Once you have the photos that you choose you have to edit and retouch them Finally you will want to publish it either if you want to publish on your website or to publish on on your social media or On on a magazine or something, but you you want to publish your your work and Finally and I think a very very important one is to back up Have any of you have lost your pictures in any way? maybe but hard drive maybe Yeah You should have more backup Okay So this is what motivated to give this talk and is when I started taking pictures two years ago Someone's helped me. Oh, but you use Linux. I Want to see you to moving to Mac or to Windows because you cannot use Photoshop or Lightroom on Linux and They tell me this Photographers should use Mac or Windows And I was not going to I haven't touched a Windows computer in 12 years Literally my my brother just asked me to move something on on his I'm not even know what is the current Windows version But I wasn't able to use that that computer So I was not moving away from Linux. So I started looking and I found this This Workflow that That I made from different tutorials. Nothing is from my authority Maybe a couple of batch scripts that I have done, but everything is someone else work so I Was saying this is the traditional workflow with proprietary software They do a lot of things on Lightroom. They use it as a catalog as a router editor And after that, they just do the the processing and on Photoshop and That's does any of you use Lightroom? Yeah Do you import your photos with Lightroom also? I mean to download it from your Okay, yeah, that's that's what I guess most of the process is done in Lightroom, but here's the deal This is a max my my dog and he's not very impressed with the traditional proprietary workflow so Let's get down to business Here is what I propose or were many Linux users are proposed as a workflow You have to use more tools, but I think this are more powerful tools Instead of just using Lightroom and Photoshop I suggest you'd wrap it photo downloader for that to get your Pictures into the computer dark table as a route editor gimp to edit your photos and a little bit of bash Just because for the fun Okay, so now my dog Max is it's good. He likes to use the free open-source software workflow Okay, does Your file management for any of you look like this having new new final new final file Raise your hand just one. You're kidding. No, I know you better. I know you have this on your computer Yeah, yeah, don't be shy Okay So this is a way this is a way to manage your photos the Linux way. I'm not sure if you can You guys on the back. Can you read this? Well Does anyone know what these photos are about I bet you don't Yeah, and This is basically because the only thing that you can see it that they belong to to me They are JPEGs mostly and in a video and maybe the date where where they were taken there But I think this this is much better You Can see a code there for all the pictures So if one of the pictures get into any other folder on my system, I know exactly where they belong This are raw files and I start with the date so every time that I want to download The pictures to my camera, I treat them as if they were film rolls Okay And I just rapid photo downloaded for for this. I'm going to show you Yep, no time. Let me get my SD card. Okay These are pictures from from my stage here in the LA area this week I haven't seen this picture. This is the first time that I'm going to download the pictures It's risky to do this kind of demo because I don't know if there is going to be any compromising photos here or Or if my workflow is going to fail on me, I hope it doesn't Okay, so the first thing it happens when when I Get my SD card into my computer It gets me to the storage manager and I'll use This download photos and videos with rapid photo don't louder. This is this is what I love about this this tool, okay, I have some videos of Mexican Salsa, I don't know why But this is the thing Rapid photo downloader is going to create a custom folder You can You can customize it Here in destination right here Custom so you can see I asked to create a folder with the date of the when the picture was taken a job code and Then an inner folder that says zero one Underscore row and that's where I want to store all the row files. Okay, and this is for the location Location, okay, and for the images itself I'm using also the image date when the image was taken the job code and A session number for four digits So I'm sure that when I export a film world into my computer It is going to be all all the images under zero one row of the film world that that I created and They're going to have a unique session number from one to 9099 yeah, you know Okay, so Okay, it is failing on me I'm not going to take all the pictures because if I do that What it's going to happen is that Even it it's going to create different Folders because of they were taken on different days, but I want to have the same code for I'm sorry. I don't want them to have the same code job So I don't want to have a picture that was taken yesterday with the code And any any code is cal for example and a picture taken three days ago from my trip to Universal Studios because they're two different job codes so I'm just taking I didn't expect to be that this much pictures Yeah, so 304 photos download it asked me for a code T does And any of you have visited medieval times in Buena Park Yeah, it is a it. It's a good show and it is it was for me a good opportunity for for photos so I recommend you and I'm sorry. I forgot to plug my Mouse be hard presentation, but I went to this really really quickly now Okay, I'll almost zone so you can see on on my pet that I have a fixed location for my pictures home Gabriel pictures DSLR and then the the folder that photo rapid downloader photo have created and Another folder that says zero one underscore row, okay now after this I like to use a little bit of bash and This is a small Piece of code it only create directories But basically it helped me to have the same skeleton for all my film roles So I have a zero two for JPEG zero three for game files zero five for What I'm saying it's done, but it basically mean it is ready to publish on my social media or somewhere else Did this is a typo on the presentation, this is zero six gallery which used a gallery export of dark table and zero nine for my thumbnails and It it creates A layout like this Okay, I'm guessing that Most of you know what's the difference between row and JPEG, but can you raise your hand if if you know what's the difference? So the the other half doesn't know so Basically a row file Contained much more information Then a JPEG that the JPEG is a file that has been already processed and the right file has all the information that Hits the the sensor of the of the camera so you can You have more options to manipulate the file, but the thing is it's going to be a huge file for my camera there are like 30 30 max per file, but my camera it's all a Current camera with raw files can be like 60 or 70 max per file So that that's that's a lot in in file size Okay after I have the The files on my computer. I use dark table, which is a catalog it's a raw editor and Pretty much I drew in dark table most of the things that the people who use Properly workflow does in Lightroom Okay, yeah, okay, so I have a batch scripts. That's called PWF and With the PWF list film rolls It shows me all the film rolls that that I have created so For the film roll that that I have just create Scale and now you can see that it have created all the all the folders that I need for me So I don't have to be creating one by one every time that that I need them But now I have to import these photos into dark table Import folder Yes, a lot. Okay. So now it is importing all the photos to to dark table and What I have to do As you said before as you see see before There are like 300 pictures and I'm not going to publish all of them. Maybe I'm going to pick eight or 12 because Even on your social media, trust me. No one wants to see a 100 Pictures of the same event. So you do have to pick the the ones that that you like most and For this dark table has rating with with stars where Where I like to do is Blurring pictures and that time I immediately deleted or Markets are not usable. Just pressing R on my on my keyboard and I assigned the number from one to five to the images and and I can run through all the 300 images very very quickly This this is something that on like room that you can also do but many people told me that There was no any tool to do the same on Linux and and this is a tool that that I'm using It's a little bit awkward to have to use a microphone like this in my computer, but Okay, just by pressing the letter C. I can't pronounce that word that is C as in C brown Yeah, not C as in Charlie. Oh, okay It's weird Can you hear me? Yeah, great. It's a very outward precision Okay, so this picture is a little bit dark to me it wasn't what's exposed Maybe I can get it a tree so I can be Giving a rate from one to five. I'm not going to I'm not going to do it right now because I don't want to spend The whole talk doing this You any I'm sorry. I didn't know there was that many picture of you Okay, most of the picture this one. I like it. I know there there are a few pictures that I really like This was our night. We were chanting him. He was very handsome Embraved and I don't want to spoil you the whole show but at the end. He's the bat He's a billion. Oh, I like this picture Mm-hmm Well, this is the idea that you can get through all your pictures very quickly and just Set a rating from one to one to five. I just want to find one one to find a picture that Wards a little bit of editing. I'm not going to I'm not good at editing. I'm not going to to do it During the talk mmm too bad this picture is not on focus Maybe we can do something with it later. This picture. I like it Okay, okay This picture I like so I didn't go through the whole 300 pictures. I maybe I did like 100 but After that I can filter them by the rating that that I Give to them So I'm going to work with with this one if I want to like Adjust the exposure of the feature crop it. I just have to press D and it will get me to the dark room and Basically the I never did a film photography But they are using an analogy between the process back then using a light table where you have to see all the negatives and just pick your your charts and Here is the the dark table where on the on the film You had to actually expose your your picture. I don't have to do that on Because I'm not sure and I'm feeling but you can adjust a lot of things I Want to show this first, okay This is not like This is not not like a tutorial, but This is a general things that you have to do when you are editing your route pictures And you have to crop your image. Yeah, you have to use noise reduction You have to do exposure adjustment Clipping your blacks clipping your white points Adjusting the whites the color temperature some clarity and saturation adjustment and that's Maybe the most basic things things you have to do when you are editing an image So I'm going to do that right away I want to crop my my picture Yeah, he is facing Excuse me Yes 35 okay Like this. Oh, no, I don't like it. Mm-hmm. I Think I'm not giving justice to this handsome knight, but The excuse me all the Yeah, let's let's try that awesome. Thank you. I'm also getting Composition lessons from the audience. Thank you very much Yeah, it is a much better picture. Thank you. So I already crop it Noise reduction. I like to do this at the at the end And Exposure I like to clip the blacks, but that that's what I what I like, but this is really a I think like an artistic decision. So let's see how it works with Yeah, I like this one better the highlights are okay to me and Let's see Okay, this gives to me a better look I'm not going to change the colors or anything But basically this is what you can do on on dark table. I want to take a very bad picture so It's not going to be very hard to take a bad picture from my shots. Oh The ones The ones that that were Very dark So this is something that you can you can do with a with a raw file if your picture is Under exposed you can bring back some light to the image, but at a cost of adding a lot of noise so Exposure If I want to get it With more light This is not something that you can do with the jpeg or at least not having Great results, but this is this is not something that you want to do with their images You want to try to get it on good exposure in camera, but if for some reason that You get a black feature and you really like it. This is something that you can do with raw files Okay, so One of the options that dark table has and and I really and I really love Is the export to gallery? Export to gallery. I'm just going to take some random pictures I wear precision again. Let's say I selected six images and I want them to be exported to my gallery and I should have already a gallery gallery right here select and Export It is already exporting those six images to my to my gallery folder It's here. What is it what it is going to do? It is going to export the images into JPEGs It is going to create thumbnails and it is going to create No, I'm sorry. I didn't choose I Didn't choose the gallery on this here Website gallery. What am I doing? So now I Have selected Website gallery here the six images the right pat and I hit the export so now I should have the that gallery here please Okay, so this will create this web gallery where I Can share I can share the picture right away to to friends by using by using this script here and basically is just an r-sync from my gallery to my to my server and I can just share the link to my to my friends it's Very basic, but it does save me a lot of time and what my friends are going to To see is something something like this. They just go to galleries The gary all that photo is slash the name of my film draw and They can see the picture that I have taken of them or for a specific event or something like that. It's for me very very Simple but useful Okay Sometimes I need to get to editing photos I'm not going to do it right now because it it's very time-consuming But I don't use gimped the current version of gimped is two point ten dot eight I don't have that installed because I'm I use Debian and There are like I don't know the the word but They're very cautious on what packages they they put in it usually takes like one year or two to get the the latest packages But I'm not that bad. I'm already using two point ten, but the version is It does two point ten dot eight It makes me It makes me a liar Anyway, excuse me No, I only have I used to I used to I recently format my my computer and I used to have two point eight, but after I format install all the packages from reposert 30 So I I'm glad that they are on the on the latest version Yeah, I use sit but even even on sit the packages are not that up to date Okay, so I Totally escaped a part of editing because as I said, it's very time-consuming But maybe this is the part where I focus the most my my efforts In in bash and he's a backup and storage. Okay, as I said before raw files On my camera are about 30 mix, but easily you can find 80 mix Files so having to a story and backup that it can be very painful if you have a lot of money, but You can just get a lot of cloud services. You can How many of you has a NAS on your house? Most of you Are any of you from Mexico? No in Mexico, we are poor people we can't afford a NAS on our house so my Not my solution, but what I have done it worked the best for me is to use S3 services you can get like two pennies for one gig on regular S3, but you can get down Till less than a half a penny per gig using last year Just for the the ones that you're not familiar with glacier the catch is you cannot Recover your files right away there. This is not like Yeah, they get frosted there But it usually takes less than 24 hours to get your files But it's very very cheap But what you're about to see now it Will prove how cheap I am because I Need to create thumbnails Because since my raw files are going to be frozen, I will not be able to see any preview of it So I'm going to create thumbnails and the thumbnails. I am going to store them on Regular S3 storage, but a thumbnail is going to wait like 660k something like that. It's it's very very small file but even further Amazon's charge you per Transaction, so if I have to a store Like 300 thumbnails, they're going to charge me a transaction fee for every file so instead of Starring each thumbnail what I do I create a negative and a negative is a single file with all my thumbnails and as you had a roll that the negatives on the films and I only have one file Yeah, I compress my film roll so all my Row files are going to be compressed into one file all my thumbnails are going to be stuck onto a single images with 300 thumbnails it it doesn't Care for me I have two ways of doing this sent to S3 a sent to S3 paranoid and usually I do paranoid and basically it as The compression with with a level of encryption and having my password it suppose that all the All the data you send to Amazon should be already Encrypted, but I don't trust them. So I encrypted by myself first and Also that negative is compressed into a seven zip with password and And Yeah, I start doing this because a friend of mine has a very very I Don't know the word but it was shameful her for him He took some pictures of me and he sent pictures using Google Drive and he showed the folder with me and Like three years after that. I was reviewing all my Files on on my Google Drive and I start finding pictures of a woman that I didn't know and That woman was naked and That woman was my friend's wife And I was like what's going on? So I had to do the call and tell him what's going on and he said some some kind of Malware got on on his laptop and it's crumbled all the files and somehow that files got on my share folder so If he have done something like that, even if the file get into my folder by mistake It will be with password and it will be encrypted and that's why I am I am always using Sent to S3 paranoid Does someone encrypt your files before backing up? Yeah, you know Everyone else just start doing that kind of tough Okay, and Basically, this is What it takes to me the the send to S3 It's just a call to the AWS click To copy the the files to S3 even the the raw files are Going to be copied to a regular S3 and this is a trick you can copy directly to Glacier, but it it's very painful to manage Glacier files directly to through the Through the console so if instead you use S3 and Set a rule that after three days, they're going to become A glacier file you're going to have like like a ghost you can see your file as as a ghost and You can call that file from there, but if you don't do that if you go directly to glacier There is no name of your file There is only like a token that you have to store somewhere and when you want to call your file You have to retire with with that token. I didn't know and I lost like Maybe ten gigs of photos because I started directly to Glacier and I never stored the token So after that I started using S3 with the S3 I can manage my file as they were on a folder even though they're not really on a folder It's just like a ghost file and you can retrieve it using that that file and basically, this is I send All the files to S3 and with the rule after three days it will become a glacier file regarding to my script there there are some things that I still have to do is Currently I'm archiving on 10 terabytes hard drive USB hard drive and But I use it by our sync I would like to get on my script something that that can start to remove all Devices I'd like to upload my final JPEGs to Google photos. I know This is not very on the tune of free open source software But Google photos are is great to to store your final JPEGs. You can Get the photo of someone just by clicking on their face You can just type an object and it it's it's really great I haven't found an open source Solution that does this kind of things so in the meanwhile, I will be keeping using Google photos And I would like to have my script to upload the photos to to Google photos. I'd like to purge my route files Currently if in dark table I mark with an R Rejected it's just a tag the file itself is not deleted so I'd like to get my script to read on the dark table database and purge all the Route file that I have rejected and save space on on my computer I'd like to protect the galleries with user and password and I'd like to have code names in in my photos in galleries so if I send a gallery to a friend and they have to pick two or three Photos, they can just tell me the code instead of having to Do a lot of tell me a lot of details on the photos like I want the one behind the tree with the black flag So if I have a code, they just can give me the code and I will I will know what picture they're talking about and Maybe this is my favorite favorite picture. I have taken. It's my brother with with his little baby No text here. I just want to show off the photo that I like and We have time for questions We have any question. Yes But I'm not cashing the the name. Oh get attic. Okay. Oh nice Sure, I can repeat the question, but I read I didn't get the question Yeah Yes, it does support he asked if dark table to part folder hierarchy Yeah, the part of moving the photos to to my computer I do it with rapid photo downloader and that take care of creating a file a folder hierarchy and on dark table I just Select the the main folder of the film roll and I select an option that says skip JPEX because I don't want any JPEX on it and it will Check for all the raw files on on on that film roll usually they are only on my 0 1 rock and That's that's how it is going to be imported on to dark table and it is going to create a database where with with all the photos on on it and Also, I didn't mention this before but dark table is a non-destructive editor. So It creates a side card for all your edits. So Ten minutes. Yeah And yes, sir Yeah, I have tried raw therapy it. It's very good. I didn't Really stuck with with it because I love to use the the mask on dark table the mask At least when I use raw therapy, it didn't has any that powerful masking tool but The overall results were very to me on on on raw therapy in in regards of how it managed that the colors how it gets the I Don't I don't know how to say that but when I take a picture on my on my camera It shows me like a preview and in dark table that preview It doesn't look anything like in dark table, but in in raw therapy. It does it's really It's really very good at that kind of color matching or I don't know how to say it But it it's a very very good option That's a reading option yeah, not on the real world because Usually I shoot on parks on a beach, but I just create like a small studio on at my house and I I Not even remembered to use tethering I have tested and and it's work I mean it worked in the in the sense that I take a picture and it gets to dark table But I haven't used it on a real scenario to tell you if if it really works out. It's supposed to Any other question? Well, if we don't have any any more question. I just want to Invite you to the birds of the feather We're going to have tomorrow in this hall room at seven and It will be nice to to share experience with with you all of you Thank you very much and thank you for your patience All right everyone up next we have Scott with the critter project and he's gonna talk about how they run their project After Scott's talk we're going to break for lunch for an hour and then we will be back after that Thanks so The reason I kind of thought this would be an interesting talk was I Spend a lot of time looking at projects and how they run I feel like with a lot of open-source projects that are out there They pretty much all have the same problem. They all don't have enough people to do it There's like one person doing a giant amount of work So I just I Like to spend a lot of time just analyzing projects and I thought it would be really helpful to I guess share how we do things I'm sure there's some things that if any of you guys have open-source projects that you manage or work with That there might be some ways that you can use some of the tools that we have Most of the tools that we have are all open-source and free as well But it I think it can help manage your project and sometimes Be more productive with the limited resources with people and time that you might have So I'm kind of just gonna kind of go over some different areas So what is Krita if you've never heard of the projects? It is an open-source free drawing and painting application geared more towards Artists and concept artists and people that like to draw and paint It's similar Functionally and from like a usability standpoint probably closer to Photoshop than something like GIMP would be It started about 10 or maybe 15 years ago As kind of a GIMP clone using a different type of technology called Qt, which is a C++ framework About maybe five or six years ago It started to kind of get more of an emphasis and kind of a niche focus on drawing and painting tools So that's kind of the focus. It's been kind of in kind of the road. It's been going down ever since then in terms of the Growth I do all of the website stuff as well. So I just pulled this from our stats We use a Web analytics thing called PiWik, which I think it's now called Matomo For a little while we used Google Analytics maybe in 2013 and then even before a lot of the GDPR stuff and privacy stuff a lot of the people that were working with credit and things were very They're very nervous about just sending anything to Google or working with Google So instead what we did was we just were like, okay We need to find some other self-hosted thing that we can have the data and then we're not sharing it with any other corporations or companies So but yeah, look story the so the data select. Yeah, so I think we started using it 2016 I think that's as far back as I can go with this thing But yeah, we're and then up till now we probably about doubled in three years And I feel like with a lot of projects you almost have to go by percentages more than big numbers I feel like with any project it's pretty hard just to have to expect a project to just exist and then just like spike and then you're super popular it takes a lot of time to build kind of brand awareness and Slowly just have people know about your project and trust it and start using it Either as an amateur or hobbyist projects or professionals using it for a professional capacity So who am I I am my name Scott I Started helping with the critter in 2013. I originally started with the website I'm kind of more traditionally trained in website design and user interface design and development So I actually started helping with it because they had a call for help for the website The website needed help they whoever was doing their website before that left it and so I started with that After I got done with that I Thought it would be really fun to kind of get in with the application user interface Design and direction and learn more of that so then I started kind of taking over all of the user interface for the application as well as Doing a lot of the programming for adding features and things like that I wrote a book a couple years ago on critter that you can find on Amazon And I'm also still just a volunteer for it I mean, I've made a little bit of money from my book and things like that But for the most part, this is kind of just a passion project that I love helping out with and I think kind of with the without how critter operates I think kind of the central backbone with how everything works is really KDE So critter is part of kind of the KDE organization, which is it's it's more of a year Like it's probably more of a European. I feel like organization where there's More most of the most of a lot of the library graphics and things It seems like there's a lot of there's a ton of people in Europe with everything So this is kind of start. This was kind of that type of thing But yeah, they kind of we'll go and so a little bit more detail about it But yeah, they kind of manage the infrastructure. They get repositories the website hosting The domain name all the credit order works and if there's any new technologies we want to add they take care of that as well as any security and Really any type of need we need they pretty much take care of and they were not charged anything so About maybe three months ago, I'll we have a current way of doing things that I'm going to go over but About three months ago. There's been this talk of switching to get lab for a lot of things So there's maybe about seven or eight tools right now that we use for doing things But get lab is going to probably consolidate all of that into maybe like one or two of them Just to help the infrastructure team and all the networking people manage everything So we're it seems like we're getting pretty close to that. There's there's a couple tools that get lab doesn't seem to have That doesn't seem to be very strong with right now But yeah, what I'm saying now it could that could change again in another two or three months So yeah, the website hosting and get and downloads Right now you use a program called get a light for managing all of the get repositories We kind of have a viewer in this program called fabricator So fabricator is kind of a project management tool that takes care a lot of Different parts to managing a project. It does everything from get stuff to like code revisions and You'll see later. It does mock-ups and things like that for different design decisions And for real-time communication, we still use IRC quite a bit We have weekly meetings about once once a week just to kind of give the status We usually have a Google Docs Document with kind of like what we're what we did maybe last week and what we're currently working on and then there's usually some type of Agenda with other like larger type projects that are going on just to give status updates And things that we do that. I'm not I'm not sure I've thought this the weekly meetings were posted somewhere But I'm not I'm not sure exactly where they're posted to but yeah, we do pretty much all of we do most of our Talking probably on IRC with everything Another thing that I really like about IRC is it doesn't need you don't need an account for it I feel like a lot of these new things like slack and discord and a lot of these like they require You to have an account with them, which I feel like is good for some things But one thing I don't like about it is user support So if somebody a lot of times people that use this program are artists and a lot of artists that when they're first starting out They might only be 12 years old or 10 years old and like they don't they don't want to be told oh, you're gonna have to make an account and sign up with an email address you may or may not even have and Sign up for this service and log in so if they need help with something all they would need to do is kind of get on this Embedded IRC program, which I don't even kind of like calling it IRC When we communicate it out because I feel like that's even kind of a technical jargon So I just usually just call it a chat room type of thing just to talk with people So yeah, all they have to do is just enter what they want to be called by it automatically has the channel listed in And then I give out a little bit of instructions about hey like saying Like hey, like this is like a real-time chat like if you if you ask a question That doesn't mean somebody's gonna respond to you in like 15 seconds like we're not a company support We're just a bunch of people or volunteers just trying to help this project out So so yeah, this is a thing called Kiwi IRC That it's on there. It's super easy to embed It's pretty much just like an iframe type of thing to go on there on the website, but uh Yeah, this this is really useful. We probably get maybe like maybe 10 or 15 people at least today probably more than that Usually either wanting some help or sometimes depending on where I'm at It's just easier to get on this thing and log in then trying to worry about needing an IRC client and then Making sure I have my nickname. I'm logged in with my nickname and then going from there So yeah, that's that's really good with that So mailing lists We use mailman which I feel like I don't know a ton about all the different open source projects with what they use But I feel like this is a pretty common Solution so mailing lists are pretty much just anything with general communication you need with groups of people so KDE there's just a lot of them that are in KDE so like there's there's a list of some of the projects that KDE he KDE has But yeah, there's a lot of I think it might have maybe 200 different ones and Krita has a few of them But it's it's really nice that anytime there's any bigger decisions that People want input on that there's kind of just a mailing list for everything to go out for Like here's one from the sysadmin I guess if they're effect if they're changing a bunch of servers that might affect different products It's just kind of a heads up like hey if you have any of these things on these domains Or the forum or the wikis and then it kind of lifts out sometimes the domain names It's like hey, these are changing and there might be downtime and then whenever they change them if there are issues We usually all know how to get in contact with them, and then there's a there. We have a sysadmin ticket request thing For any problems that might come up So mailing lists are really good for discussions like that. I think the other I think the thing that is also really good about Like mailman using mailing lists is it keeps a history of all of the communication that goes on So if you weren't subscribed to the mailing list for whatever reason say if you like signed up to help help for a project and It's like oh we had a discussion about this Thing we wanted to add, but we had the discussion two years ago You can go back through the history and you can see you can see exactly what was in that discussion two years ago So that's one of the things I think that's really nice while a lot of open-source projects use this mailman the only the other thing I do with the Email like distribution list is I kind of have an email marketing Thing that goes with it. So on the bottom of credit org and a few other places I kind of have a like a release notification So this is just kind of a more of a public really a non-technical type of thing Anyone that wants to know about any future releases that we do I usually send it out on like major versions like version 3 version 4 and Minor release versions so like 4.1 4.2 and It's a it's a pretty low barrier entry way of people signing up for things and then communicating and then constantly being able to stay in touch So I think last time I checked a few weeks ago I mean it doesn't have a ton of people it has maybe like 13 or 15,000 people in it and I think Probably I think with how many people actually open whenever we like the last one of that we sent out Because I think was 4.1 the last time I sent this out And then I kind of checked to see how many people came from mail clients And it was probably about a thousand like maybe like 1500 people which is about a 10% Kind of a click-through rate and email marketing terms, which that's actually pretty good You might think like well 13,000 people signed up for this But only 1500 people actually click and went to it But like in most email marketing like if you get above like three or four percent Click-through rate with your marketing email marketing. That's actually pretty good So but yeah, I think that kind of that Communication is a pretty good thing in terms of user interface and UI design related stuff We also use fabricator for it. It has a pretty cool system So whenever I'm working on anything like this is a user interface design I did for some of the animation features. There's an animation curve where you can Animate tweens right now. I think you can only animate the opacity or the transparency For certain frames, but this was kind of the original idea whenever we were coming up with it What it might look like and how it might function a lot of features in general it's like people don't necessarily know how something needs to work they just want X feature and Sometimes that feature might be How maybe how photoshop might do it and other times it might be how gimp might do it But one thing I tried to be careful of is just trying not to do And I think all of the people in credit try to try to be careful Of is not trying to do just too much copy and paste features that I call them I Feel like a lot of this copy paste features if you do something exactly like another program does I mean you're you might be copying some of the good parts of that application But I think a lot of times especially in terms of usability. You're also copying the bad parts as well So I think sometimes other applications and how they do it It's a good starting point to get an idea or a general direction of how a design or a workflow might need to be for usability, but I think it's good to have discussions and things like that around it and Usually how the discussions go is I would I would post a wireframe like this and then maybe some notes on how it would work and Then there's kind of you can kind of later have some discussion below it where different people Kind of chime in and say what they like about it and what they don't like about it Like I started this up and Demetri who's probably I think yeah, I think he's one of the programmers for it Sometimes he has questions with technical stuff or scope Because it's really easy with any feature That's kind of vague like animation tweening or things like that in terms of like what that exactly means and how much we want to Do so sometimes he has questions on that For a lot of the features too we have about three or four artists that are like usually like professional type artists That have a lot of experience in multiple programs So we try to get a lot of feedback from them about how they how their current workflows are and what they do Like for example for the animation feature what one of the main animators Balabib Which is the thing is the real name is Stefan, but Yeah, he actually knows like four or five different animation tools and he knows what's good in some tools and bad and other tools So a lot of times I kind of rely on him to be like hey We need to get we need to get your input on how this needs to work and how it doesn't need to work And he can yeah You can get a lot of really great insight on making things that are usable and easy to use for that And outside of application stuff I mean we also do just normal like website design stuff like I did this one about maybe three three days Three four days ago And this is just some website stuff or post download stuff So I mean sometimes it's application stuff, but it's sometimes it's just more simple graphic designy type stuff But yeah, it's it's kind of a nice tool to have something to be able to share designs and Get feedback on them before anybody starts coding it Oh and in terms of usability I think like kind of a hidden trick that I use for usability testing is like YouTube and I Really like using tutorials with people trying to teach other people how to use programs I find that sometimes people are pretty useful in how they teach things, but I think there's a lot of QQ's people Give whenever they're making a tutorial on something that you can tell that they don't really understand what they're talking about For example, like maybe they'll be something they'll be talking about the layers system And they'll say there's like three buttons that do different things They might say something like oh, yeah this feature this this say this transparency settings really great I use it to do x y and z and then maybe they just really briefly gloss over Maybe one or two features without like explaining it or anything like that And then then then then maybe they they talk about another feature and then they start going in depth more about that So I think one of the this like glossing over Q I think is a kind of a usability indicator that there's a good chance. They they don't know it either because Potentially the documentation isn't that great with it or maybe though sometimes the wording isn't very good with them I think when we add new features sometimes I Think it's important to have a distinction between what they're technically called in the back end versus what They're gonna be called to the user because I think sometimes the technical what what's going on in the back end is good But it's also can be very confusing For example, there was there's one feature that we have in here. It's called instant preview right now but we had a lot of discussion on what it what it should be called because in Some applications like 3d games and things like that and how it's technically implemented. It's called level of detail Which is kind of how the canvas renders So whenever like you're drawing and painting on something if you're resumed really far out and drawing You're not actually painting on a full-size canvas. You're actually painting on a tiny canvas and What that allows to happen is you can pretty much paint on like a fifty thousand by fifty thousand pixel canvas And it's gonna it's gonna instantly get feedback And then you're gonna see that right there on like you're maybe twenty five percent scale But then kind of in the back in the background. There's all this other work going on Filling up filling everything else in kind of in the background But yeah, like calling it level of detail we thought was gonna be kind of confusing for people if we called it that So we settled on this instant preview kind Idea which maybe is good. Maybe it could be better, but There's I think there's a lot of features like that that I think that are important to think about in terms of kind of how we do qa testing and We do releases So I think qa testing is probably the most It's really difficult to do. I think with open source projects I think the thing that makes it hard is a lot of people Unless they really need a new feature like they really don't care that much about like testing your stuff It's gonna be like they usually say things like well like I can wait like I don't need that feature that bad I'll just wait till it gets stable and then I'll start then I'll start using the new version Which I guess it's good that they have the patience to wait for that But it also means you don't have nearly as many people testing it So when it is so when these applications are in beta and release candidate or alpha or things like that Yeah, there's just not as much testing. So Yeah, when they get released they're probably gonna still have bugs and crashes because it ends up having the developers end up doing They pretty much end up doing a lot of the qa testing type of stuff So we try to help with that one thing we try to do is we try to have nightly builds The one that we probably try to use the most is we have a crit a plus version Which is kind of like the stable version of the program with additional bug fixes in it And then we also have one that I kind of call crit a crit a next which that's kind of our master branch that that usually has a lot of the breaking changes of things that have changed quite a bit and I think the the windows stuff is I think having windows nightly builds is pretty big Because I would probably say out of all of the traffic and downloads we get we I would right now It's about 90 percent windows Users for our user base for everything. I mean so I crit a right now. I think last I checked I don't know. We usually get about a hundred and sixty thousand downloads ish a month of the program so Figure 90 percent of that if we can get that many more potential testers doing things like That that's helpful And then for when we do releases The main goal is to kind of do releases once a month Obviously because of like personal circumstances and whatever happens sometimes like it's hard to do that. I Do try to start a release notes pretty early like pretty far before When before we even do a release and I think creating a release a pretty comprehensive release notes documents early And then like making that public is pretty important for a few different reasons So if you don't know what a release notes thing is it's pretty much just all the features and bug fixes that are going in for a version of a program but one of the one of the pros of Doing something like this is for one for testers if someone wants to test your program But one of the things they're going to ask is like well, what am I supposed to test like what changed and like What might break type of thing? So like if you can point them directly to this page without any type of login or anything like that they can just quickly download a Development version of it and then they can kind of just start running through some of these features or bug fixes and see What's what's there or not or how stable it is? Another thing that's important is for doing a I guess like little videos like for this one There was a there's a girl girl that Made this little feature video that was kind of highlighting all these different features and she kind of had the same thing She's like I want to do this video Kind of showcasing these new features that you guys have But it's like I I need a list of all of the new features and kind of what they do and maybe even some documentation So I even know what to show off So I think being able to share one of these type of pages is really helpful for someone like that Mmm So reporting bugs and features We use a program called bugzilla right now For doing all of that. There's really not a ton to say. I mean it's just bug tracking. I Do think bug tracking. It's it's kind of it's an odd term because I feel like it's much more encompassing Than just like bugs I feel like there's kind of really a bug tracker to me does three things and there's three potential Situations that happen with bug trackers. It's when someone issues a bug. It's like one. Yes, it may be a bug You might you might test it and it's like, oh, yeah, this is a regression. This was supposed to be working and now it doesn't Another case that comes up pretty often is someone adds a bug and it's like you might look at it And you're like, well, you know like this feature just it's not a bug This feature just doesn't exist like it just it's not designed to work that way and then things like that So in those cases we we have a tag called a wish list item So that's one way how we mark things is kind of a new feature Going forward. So we kind of keep all of our bugs and our kind of our new feature requests All kind of together and then it's easy to sort them and then the third thing that comes up with bug trackers pretty Frequently is just like basic like user like support type things So someone might say hey this thing doesn't work and then you look at it and it's like, you know what like this does work You just don't know how to use it and then you can give like give them a link to the documentation Or you can say that oh, you're using it this way, but you're supposed to be using that way and Eventually those can get closed. So I think being able to take care of I think I think if a bug tracker can take care Of bug fixes new features and be able to have a pretty quick communication mechanism For doing user support type stuff. I think that's pretty important So managing volunteers I Think violent volunteers are always pretty hard because they're pretty much since they're not paid you have to really kind of try to make sure that they can stay engaged and Keep them interested in things that they're Interest interested in I think it's also important not to overwhelm them sometimes with things a lot of programmers we get that come in Have our a lot of times they're in college or university and I guess I think I feel like sometimes in university setting They work on very small projects. I guess just to get the basics down to figure things out So their mindset when they come up to a project like this is they're like I want to I want to do this But at first I want to like learn your code base like that's their goal Just tell me how the whole program works in general and then I'll spend some time studying it and then I'll work on my thing So I think it's important to communicate really early that hey like this isn't like a school project like this project is like a million lines of code So like if you have to try to learn everything like you're never going to be able to actually do anything and I feel like this I feel like even like like corporate applications and more like real-world applications are like this We're like you don't have time to Know an entire code base. You just have to pick something that you kind of want to do And then just focus on that and then as you get good with that you can kind of expand out To other areas and you can be kind of become more well-rounded as time goes on So I think being able to kind of to set expectations on like what's needed and how hard something is is pretty important and then I think you can kind of go Along with that is just don't rely too heavily on them I mean a lot of people start out really passionately about things when they want to help volunteer and then things come up or they get They get frustrated with something and they leave So even if they get kind of close to getting it done I think it's important not to communicate out to people like hey We're we have this person the super cool program are working on this thing and it's going to be great Because you just don't know if that's actually going to be in something so We don't really send out anything until it's Approved and it's it's pretty much put in like our master branch or it's it's actually in a bug fix release So like we're certain that it's going to be going out for the next release Documentation we use a program called Sphinx for doing everything Previous to this about maybe about a year ago. We used another program called media wiki Which is another similar documentation platform media wiki was pretty good for doing things I don't know if any of you have ever used it The one thing we ran into a lot of problems and frustrations with is localization into other languages It does pretty well with just the normal content But we were at the time we were we had a Japanese Translator that was doing things and he was having a rough time with a lot of the navigation and media wiki and Just a lot of the other parts of the website that it was just making it really difficult to localize the entire website in general So Sphinx kind of has a little bit better of a system. So it's a lot more of a full translation of Everything so I think it's just a little bit better of an experience with everything And then if you're not familiar familiar with how this this Sphinx works It's kind of a static site generator. So you pretty much have these like base They're not HTML files. I think they're called RST files But they kind of have this like simple markdown language on them So you don't really even need to know code. You just need to know a little bit of syntax with how it works and then You you put a Python command in and it kind of auto generates all the HTML So the way the way we do it with this one We kind of been worked we worked with some of the KDE sysadmin people and they pretty much have a build script So every time we do a commit it'll pretty much automatically auto generate the website and all the different localizations That we that we have with it and then since we can put it in source control We have different draft branches for like next features or things like that that can be reviewed It would be kind of nice to have a development version of the support site or something if if we needed other people to review it That maybe don't want to mess with get or things like that But that's currently where we're at We we I mean most most of this is done pretty much by one person like one and a half people that do the documentation Stuff I think I went to another talk with a lube lube into Documentation and it seems like they kind of have a similar issue It's like there's just there's very few people that work on documentation with this stuff and as important as it is it is it's just Sometimes it's really hard to get that done So marketing and fundraising kind of how we do that So I think I kind of have like a very philosophical approach I think some marketing and just creating brand awareness and slowly kind of building up and making your product more visible and I guess appealing to people I really think developers are probably like the most important like Peace to the marketing puzzle because I feel like anything a developer really does is like very marketable Like every bug fix like people love bug fix releases like if if you have a release and then you have like 85 bug fixes Like people people want that We had we pretty much had a Kickstarter a while ago and that was pretty much the thing like have are the the goal of it was to have like zero bugs Type of thing and like people that seem to resonate with people So I mean while features are good sometimes and I think you can show those off. I think yeah bug fixes are good as well Animated gifts people love animated gifts. It seems like on the internet especially on things like Twitter I think I use a program sometimes called peak which is which is on Linux called PEK And you can kind of just it's a little program. You can set the size of your window You hit the go button and then you do your thing and then you hit stop and then you can kind of Change how long you want it to be and then you can just post that out on a website but Yeah, I think people get really excited about stuff like that with especially with new features and Especially with graphics applications where they're very visual You tube I think is is a pretty good. I think thing At least with credit. We have a lot of reviews and tutorials and things like that We have a few of them that we get we get quite a few people from and I think YouTube is a pretty big platform with I mean just in general so I I feel like there's There's a lot that you can do with that either with working with streamers or tutorial makers or things To bring stuff in another thing. I think that's Interesting that I think in terms of kind of out grew I guess it's kind of an outreach way to think about marketing is just think beyond your application like like one example would be you could just have a Tutorial on Krita showing how to use a new paintbrush But you could you could extend that and get into a different audience where you could start with Krita and then maybe you could Show how that funnels in the blender creating a 3d model in a 3d scene and animating it So if you kind of have the two tools together, not only are you getting your audience or the people that like Krita You're also now getting the blender community, which is all which is also they have a very big community as well And I think sometimes if you can do that. I think your brand awareness can kind of I Don't know I think grow at a better rate and just kind of get get outside of your echo chamber of just the same people That are already using your program So I think doing things like that are good There's another thing we kind of do. I mean it's kind of marketing But it's it's kind of like an internship thing. It's called Google summer of code I'm not sure if any of you are familiar with it but it's Google's initiative to try to promote people being involved into open source projects and We kind of promote that as people Working on Cool new projects or different they can submit their own projects and we try to create just a kind of awareness that hey If you're a programmer in your university Student you can kind of get involved and help on this cool project in the summer you get you get paid doing it It's gonna be usually your stuff's gonna be used by a ton of people. So I and I think yeah things like that are also really good Fundraising I mean even if fundraising I think fails. I think it is good marketing I feel like anytime you can get your brand or your logo or just your effort Go like you just trying to do something I think people appreciate that as opposed to projects where it's like you don't hear anything from them in like months Or years, or you just have no idea what they're doing I Think credit credit has been pretty successful with their different funding campaigns I think one of the things that helps them be more successful is Since we've done four or five of them We have a pretty good gauge on what's realistic with how much money a product the project or the the funding campaign can bring in and The the types of things people get excited over I mean we spent a lot of time on all the forums and bug trackers and just talking to people So we kind of get we have a pretty good feel with what people want and what people don't don't want and Yeah, what what they might? Get more money with but yeah, I mean fundraisers are good whether they whether they're really successful or not In terms of finances money I mean that we really don't have too many people working on critter like making money doing it We have the maintainer who's like bowed win that does everything and he team makes she makes He can continue working on it pretty much from the windows store and the steam store sales So the only difference really between the windows store and the steam store sales is I think because the platforms allow automatic updates So like if you would get the if you would get critter from the steam steam store and then we would later like release a new version Next time you would start up steam it would be like hey, there's a new version and it kind of has an auto update process built into their platform Where then the critter code base we don't actually have an auto update process or coding built into it So it's kind of a feature if you use those programs But it's a feature we're kind of leveraging to actually I guess kind of charge a little bit of money As well, so like each one of them is $10 But yeah, just between those two that that brings in enough money to pay Bowed win everything and other than that. We pretty much just have one other developer Dmitry who's from Russia that Gets is from the donations and then any fundraiser stuff we do I mean from the monthly donations we get probably about maybe about 2,000 ish euros per month And then yeah, the fundraisers We kind of just do them as we as we need to and then we just make sure before we do another fundraiser that Hey, we just look to see what what did we do our last fundraiser? What did we promise people and like we have to make sure we we deliver some of that stuff? Otherwise we can't do another fundraiser without not delivering a lot of the stuff that we already Promised on the last one so I think just being kind of like reliable and Yeah, people kind of relying on you to Kind of produce things I think is really important to continue if you want to do fundraisers And then the last thing with fun Financing and monies we sometimes do have contracts with Intel Intel really likes like pushing Or kind of showing off some of the new technology they're in Recently we just finished up a project with some high dynamic range painting features so instead of just painting with Colors you can also set kind of the knits or kind of the brightness levels With it so you can kind of like more or less paint with light So not just paint white, but you can almost like paint the Sun so it's almost like kind of illuminating which I Feel like is a it's something that I don't know if you know much about HDR monitors But it seems like brightness and more colors is kind of one of the focus so that was one project We just did another project That we did a little while ago is getting stuff to work on one of their Multicore processors and it was kind of just to show the performance increase that you can get with an Intel Processor if you use a bunch of different cores with it So occasionally there's things like that that bring in money as well And then kind of like the future in general with things I think that I Think is going to be important going on I mean there's the features and bug fixes and things like that, but really kind of outside of that I think one thing that's going to be more important is just the international community in the open-source world So this is kind of a chart of just the percentage of a population per country that has internet access So you can see obviously around like the mid 90s is kind of when consumer the consumer internet kind of started kind of taking off Type of thing and like everybody's kind of going up. It's kind of getting like lost in the fray But like the United States is kind of just right here type of thing So I mean it's this isn't The website this is taken from it's called gapminder.org But they have a lot of really interesting statistics on either internet usage or poverty levels or income levels and things like that so I think sometimes you can I think a lot of books and Research stuff is kind of old in terms of usage and where like the current state of the world is I feel like at least with me being living in the United States I feel like I was taught something and it's unless someone teaches me otherwise with things like this It's difficult to see the changing landscape with how much technology in the internet or like changing kind of the world the way It's adoptions being changed, but yeah, you can see there's there's a lot of countries that have a Lot higher percentage of internet users than the United States has so we're definitely not like the most I don't know literate internet literate Company probably when it comes to internet usage, but uh, yeah, I think along with this there's good There's also going to be a pretty growing demand for internet sites and applications and communities that Where people maybe English isn't their primary language I feel like English is kind of the main business International language in general I feel like most like Europeans I know it seems like they most of them know English pretty well, especially in the more urban areas But like yeah, they once you get to more rural areas or you like And I'm sure places like China there's going to be a lot more places where they're not they might not know English So I think I think there's going to be a pretty growing demand in better ways that we can try to Help people in other countries that might not know English So that's kind of something I'm probably going to be trying to work on and do more in the future So that's kind of that's more or less it. I hope you kind of just see some of the tools We use for doing some different things and kind of why we kind of pick them and Yeah, maybe hopefully you learned a little bit and if there's anything that we're doing that's bad That you that maybe we could do better. You could definitely talk to me afterwards I'm always interested in learning what other projects are doing So that's pretty much it any questions Yeah, so I guess like the question was kind of if people you just Admiring I don't know the right word, but I use this kind of the saying that like we use some of the older tools Like such as mailman for the mailing lists and things like that And I think some of that has to do with I think KDE in general. I I know they they KDE did some Report in a survey with just all of their users and all the developers and they pretty much found out that the majority of people are Middle-aged Europeans that were doing things So I have a feeling like the tools that they've just been using is like they've just been using those because that's what that's what They've been using for so long and they're comfortable and familiar with it and then like they don't have to think about it So I have a feeling that's probably some other reason why those tools are being used as opposed to some of the like The younger generation technologies That are that are coming around like the get hubs and get labs and things like that So all right. Thanks for the question. Anything else? Yes. Oh, well so the question was if we're doing much with the brush engines and Every time he comes back to the brush engines. He has to relearn it and I'm probably gonna say that's my fault for doing it because I Feel like the brush editor is a it's probably one of the most complicated complex areas in Krita Just because there's so many different engines. There's really no other programs that have probably as much I Don't know as many options in terms of how you can customize a brush so it makes it difficult to manage and I think for four in terms of like when it's going to Maybe like solidify and kind of like take more of a definite form One thing I'm kind of trying to do is trying to isolate more of the sections in terms of how they're actually used Like originally when I started like it was pretty much you selected a brush was on the same screen as editing the brush And then which was like kind of in the same area as like saving it and editing it As well as there was another area where you can test stuff in the scratch pad area Which that was also an air that was like inside of that area was the same way you would save your thumbnail That would get associated with the brush, which I feel like from a From trying to like teach people with what things are it was it was parts of it We're good because you could kind of do everything on one screen But I guess the the harder things with that would be if you're just trying to like tweak some settings You had to see a lot of stuff just to tweak some settings So I think long-term. I think what we're trying to do is Right now there's a resource rewrite going on with pretty much how all of the brushes are managed And the patterns and everything like that. So once that's done The big request right now is just to completely make it separate as a docker and then I want to make it so you can really shrink up shrink the brush editor down a lot so you could just find exactly maybe a few settings you want to tweak and You could it's just a lot more custom make it a lot more customizable and flexible and resizable So I think once it kind of gets to that point where it's much more configurable I think that's that's probably when there's gonna be less changes or less dramatic changes going on because yeah I mean right now we get a lot of Complaints with people wanting to do certain things they want it to be way smaller They they only they just they want a shortcut or a faster way to tweak one setting that they want and Everybody who has a different setting that they want to tweak type of thing like I want to change the rotation on the mask brush I want to change the brush pattern Blending mode to something else and I but I want to quickly change it like opening up the editor and changing it from there Isn't fast enough for me So I think once we can do that. I think it'll it should be stabilized more with the interface. So alright, thanks Is there anything else? And also if you have any other questions, I I have a booth On the expo hall at 431. It's not actually mentioned in the The sheet thing but uh, yeah, you should find me I'm pretty much all the way kind of in the back in the middle So if you want to talk about any graphic stuff or drawing or painting or whatever else I'll be there pretty much the rest of the weekend. So alright, thanks. Thanks everyone For those of you that are still left, we will reconvene at one o'clock after lunch For a talk about hugging or Hugen depending on how you want to pronounce it and then another Karita talk at two Greetings, everybody. Welcome back from lunch. I hope it was very nice Up next we have Brian Kluff giving a talk on Panorama stitching with hugging Thank you for that So like I said, I am going to be covering hugging. This is mainly for sticking images together in a rather Complex way, but it can be easy You're probably asking why should I even use this my cell phone does panoramas? Well, this does a much much better job and It it leaves you a lot more versatility you can stop and make sure people get out of your way and We'll get into other stuff. So That's right out of hugging welcome to planet scale that Shot that yesterday We're using ultra wide lens so This here is produced from 74 images. It's a full 360 degree panorama the Little planet as people like to call them as a stereographic view and both of these panoramas are generated off the exact same images and Once you've got the bulk of the computing power done going from one to the other is rather trivial The bottom one is a cylindrical panorama so So getting very high resolution images is probably my primary use for it you can Get a zoom lens like so and zoom way in And so my camera is 21 megapixel and this is 40 images I did about a 40 50 percent overlap of my images and the ending result is I have a 207.9 megapixel image and So you can pull a lot of detail out of that You know that's With my setup is about two minutes and I had to pick about almost 2,000 control points to get that so Dimension you can go really high res I found this image off of you anyone watch smarter every day They they covered an entire show on taking this particular image. This is a 19 giga pixel picture It's consisting of 1,920 images. It's 297 500 by 87 500 tall. It's a six point nine gigabytes If you look at that the the final little window on that thing I don't even think that's a single picture pixel and what would cover your screen on there So what do you need for huggin? Well huggin uses a lot of processing power and it's you're chucking around a lot of pixels So you're gonna need a lot of RAM And you need a very very fast processor and I would highly recommend the GPU I Tend to go with my video cards and it just choose true pictures really quick compared to the processor although CPUs have caught up in speed when I first started doing this it wasn't uncommon to spend 45 minutes stitching Images together in these days. I would say I'm getting the same thing done in a couple of minutes So it worked really well It's a checkbox in the settings. Yeah And I believe it's off by default, so it'd be highly recommend turn that off But yeah, I don't have that in your own front apologize for that So the process for doing the stitching is And this can be they're manually done or automatically done for the most part Is is that you put in however many images you want and then you you have to pick common points between them So it knows how to put them together Then the system will go through You know change the perspective in the way it needs to you kind of have to think about this is a little bit like cartography you know like when you see maps the of you know, we live on a spherical planet and When you see maps, they're a flat version of the sphere and so you have to warp them to get that flat image and Huggin has to do the exact same thing. You'll see images I've had images that had a little thin part and then it came swooping around and bent all the way around a sphere Just to be able to stitch it correctly so Anyway after it's warping the images of stuff You do exposure correction and it'll actually go and kind of compare the images together and see if you can It'll try to line up the exposure levels and stuff and so you have a nice consistent picture when you get done and Then it warps them together Together and then finally once it's remapped all these individual images It runs them through a program called and blend that tries to intelligently blend stuff together So you you don't have problems, which we'll cover in the future so in 2014 they split the interface in half and you end up with a simple Advanced an expert and the advanced an expert are almost identical, so I didn't put the advanced up there That for the most part if all you want to do is stitch together panorama like you get out your cell phone You can sit in a simple interface all day long and then you can even do some relatively advanced stuff in there But if you want to get in and stitch together something like a hand-drawn image and a live image or maybe an Antique image and a modern image and stitch them together. You're gonna probably have to get into expert mode so you can start picking individual points and Get them together so I've demo here. This is gonna be interesting. I'm Whoops, I have it on the wrong screen So I'm running notes on this side and so I need to be able to mirror it so I'm having to use KMAG to mirror my display So No, I'm okay Yeah, I'm fine. Thank you though So anyway This is the not the one I want to show first so when you first run hugging you get a this is their simple display and It is just a matter of if you look at here You'll see a load images button It has a one on it and then if you go a little farther has two and then three It's literally a one two three process Click on one See that's the wrong one Okay, so now I've got the images loaded, but they're not aligned so Second step press align and this is where you start to use some CPU and Now you got your panorama. That's all three images and We can prove that by clicking identify and there's our three images and If we click on this edit control points You can see why all the little X's down here Oops, I covered it up that those are all the common points that it automatically picked and So to get this out in a format that we like we go back to the assistant and say create panorama and Then you just pick the particular settings you want you probably want this on JPEG And I'm not going to write this out because I don't need to And as I mentioned before it has an advanced interface and The advanced interface is kind of odd because you kind of end up bouncing between the simple interface and the advanced interface and in fact now the advanced interface is open the simple interface can actually be closed and reopened and It doesn't affect anything so For this particular interface you would right-click and say add individual images in this window and See and Once those are in there, then you would come down to this great control points and that's the step two and Once you've done that if you you'd expect You know step two gave me a panorama, but this step two doesn't this just finds the points But it still doesn't know what to do with it. So if you go down to this Where it says optimize? You know there's a bunch of settings under this Depending by default just positions all it'll do is line the images up it won't try to Correct anything on them and so ideally you want to take really good quality images so you can get down to everything And so you'll give you the smoothest thing ever but That you click calculate and it'll it already has them so it didn't take too long and Then once you've done the calculate on the geometric optimization now you have a panorama But if you've taken if you haven't had the best settings on your camera, you'll see problems with it so if you go down the photometric that's where it'll finally go through and compare the Exposures of your your shots and try to line them up. Yes It does not import raws. It does TIFFs and it does some HDR formats I've never done it. I would suspect Probably convert them to a high bit depth TIFF it would or an HDR file probably I Think I pulled in and let it do this exposure correction Yeah, there is high dynamic range stuff in there. It works on photo stacks And so for HDR stuff see I'd say stack one sec two sec three on this image It would have if it would be stacked zero zero zero and so I know they're all in the same stack Okay, that was for high dynamic range for people home Sorry, like I said once you've calculated this Photometric then you're ideally if you've got good control points if your control points are off And so they're they're not lining up correctly It can completely mess up your image and at that point you have to go back start cleaning up your control points and make sure everything's good So that's as much of that is I want to cover right this second and give the presentation back up Hey, okay. Oops mine size missing Oops, I just like come back to that So I keep talking about high quality control points which are You don't strictly need them depending on what you're doing, but What you what you ideally want is perfect pictures coming in so obviously you're gonna need to use a tripod and You're gonna want your You have to think about the distance you're taking your pictures of so Like first is if I were to take a panorama of this room, I would definitely need a Very stable head or some other way to make sure I'm lining this camera up perfectly because Parallax distortion is gonna get in the way if you're taking pictures of Landscapes and stuff way on the distance you can do those handheld for the most part You do have to keep in mind stuff in the foreground because a little bit of a shift is gonna mess things up over there You have to make sure you overlap your images when I first started doing this I was you know, I knew I need to overlap them But I don't only overlap them five percent and that really doesn't give you enough stuff to line up and get you enough control points between your images and Then if you can set your camera to manual mode Like I said, it does have an exposure correction stuff But ideally you want to not rely on that, you know Make sure that all the images are taken at the exact same speed and so it's consistent all the way around Otherwise, you end up with skies that just look strange, you know stuff. That's bright. That shouldn't be And then, you know, obviously avoid some moving objects You know, you can't find common points between moving objects but as I'll show you later on you can plan for them and get some interesting results and You know, like I said, just avoid parallax distortion So lenses I've used just about most of the lenses you can use out there You would think that You go like all I want is a panorama of everything around me. I'll just get a fisheye, you know That covers 180 degrees. I'll take three pictures and I can move on The problem is is the fisheye everything's kind of bending and So you take a picture where everything's bent on this side and then in the next one over here everything's bent this way and it's lining up at almost a 90 degree angle and Can you stitch them together? Absolutely, but you're gonna have to hand pick every single point and it is a nightmare So I Tell me if you want to get the fewest number of images spend some money That's not the limit the lens I meant to have on there get an ultra wide angle lens That is not a fisheye can get one that keeps the straight line and straight and That'll get you the fewest number of images. I think with mine It's a 14 millimeter lens and I've been able to take a full sphere and as little as 16 images I if I remember right so What's the parallax distortion? so We've been talking about that a lot So it's basically you know the trick if you hold your finger out and you cycle your eyes back and forth You can see that the background of foreground jumping back and forth. Well, that's parallax distortion And you're trying to avoid that. So the what I've got a drawing of here is What the natural person does, you know, you're gonna take pictures and you're gonna stand in one spot and spin on That the problem is is your lens is out here and it's moving back and forth, you know sometimes a couple of feet and especially stuff in the foreground is also going to be jumping back and forth and You can save the images sometimes, but that's going to ruin your your image so what you want is you need to Spin on the focal point of the camera Which a lot of people would think the focal points gonna be on the front of the glass or on the image sensor But it's not it's somewhere in the middle of your lens where all the light comes converges to a point and then flips over on the backside and To get that you'll have to if you if you want to do like a spherical pattern You get a rig like that and you'll have to play with it and and shoot back and forth and compare the images and and adjust accordingly and So you'll end up With something like that where you end up taking the same picture and and the stuff lines up in and the pictures Even though it's on opposite sides of the frame So I said I brought a prop that's my This is my smaller lighter rig That I recommend this one. This is a nodal ninja. It's a lot less expensive than the one in the picture here This one's about $200 that one's about $800 and it's really heavy and bulky and unless you have Extremely heavy camera. I wouldn't use that particular Manfrotto 303 SPH So But oh, yeah So anyway, I this one and that one on the screen there are these are spherical panorama heads These are made for taking a picture in every single direction possible including straight up and straight down There are other heads out there. There's just cylindrical heads that just Go back and forth without padding up and down. There's motorized heads. Those are great If you you can tell it how it's a basically a robot and you tell it how much to move And up and down and how many pictures to take and you press go and walk away And it just goes click click click and and you end up with a bunch of images at the end That's how that 19 gigapixel picture was taken. I can't even imagine trying to take something like that That's it up so What's parallax this session actually look like in images? So this is out looking down in my front yard and if you look they're just small differences if you look out from the distance there There's a recycling can and it's a little bit away from one of the branches but it's almost being covered completely by the other branch and When you get down to the final image, it's a little bit blurry and you just want to avoid that if possible you know the thing about it is is Huggins awesome So there's the actual image that other one was faked so this is the actual output from a huggin and The in blood software actually is really good at going through and trying to avoid those blurry lines But you do see that there's a the stuff I've got circled there the branch is a little bit thick There's some tearing going on. It's not perfect. It's probably Still better than what you get on your cell phone, but you know you're looking at that So this is a fun example. I remember I had and I had this last night This is an extreme example of parallax distortion This is what you get if you put your cell phone in Panorama mode and then hold it steady against the window while you're driving So you can see the the middle of the image is actually a panorama But the back of the image because it's because of the parallax Isn't moving as much and so it has no choice but to repeat it and then the front part is moving so fast that it's It doesn't know what to do with it. And so it's just got snippets in there. I Thought that's a fun image and now that's If you ever have a cell phone you want to take it if you're in Europe where they have a lot of buildings all attached together That's a great way to get a Strip of building, you know if there's no cars or people in the way You can just essentially get a scan of it since the cell phone panorama is essentially treating the world like a flatbed scanner so Let's talk about the exposure This was an image. I tried to ruin on purpose using bracketing and You can see the The stitched image there just doesn't look very good. It's It's too dark on one side a little bit too bright on the other and so you want to get your camera in the manual mode wherever possible to avoid that But again, hug is awesome And that's the final stitched image from those actual images. It did a very good job and part of that interface that you're looking at there's a an anchor point for both the exposure level and the the center of the panorama and So I just picked the the middle image and said that's my anchor make sure everything matches to that and You you get a nice good image at the end so masking and cropping I briefly mentioned this earlier but This is you can then use this both creatively and to fix stuff So Let me get into Again Okay, so this is a project all ready to go so the masking is simply You go through so I had my friend stand out and put purposely photo bomb my images And you can see I had to move around and I took three images But you know say I didn't want them in any of them well I can go through and create an exclude mask, but you just click add new mask here and by default exclude and just draw a little line around him and that'll basically punch us a Transparency out of that particular image. So when it goes back in it has forced to use some of the other data and When you get done I have an image without him in there at all Conversely So this is literally the exact same product But you can see the images are green now and I've purposely included them in it. So now he shows up three times and I Do a lot of data centers for kids or have in the past and I've literally used this to go through and I set up a Computer lab with 40 computers and I would sit in every single chair and get a panorama with me as the user of every single computer Let's get back to Okay, so now on to the other tricks. So I shopped this in believe Tyler, Texas I was doing a photo shoot for this church and they didn't ask me to get this But I saw this old sign on the corner and it was surrounded by bushes And I wanted to get some straight-on images of this plaque But I would had to stand in the bush to get it so I just ended up taking one image and what you do in hugging is You in when in the manual point picker it also you can give it representations of what is a line and I would pick one side and and draw lines down the The what is horizontal then you know converging on that one side and then represent the vertical and then to have it go through and Just warp the image in such a way that it brings that to a perfect flat and yeah, you could do that in GIMP But this Guarantees that everything stays perfectly like it's supposed to be that that sign is that big It's not I don't have to worry about like I was a little bit too wide I just did that for both sides You know do the same thing here. I do a little bit of stuff in blender and I like to get Textures and stuff, but you can't always get them perfectly straight on so I use the same technique on you know purposely took this non Flat just to get it and then used hugging to warp it so that it would be flat and now I got something that I could Work on a little bit more and use as a texture and blender so Those previous ones were setting both the horizontal and vertical Well this you can do an architectural projection, you know basically make it so that it's like to a two-point perspective And with this you just set just the vertical lines and then let it work warp on just the vertical And then you end up with something you would normally have to use a tilt shift shift lens to get And so if you know if that's a look you want to go for You can also use it just to keep things perfectly straight up in line down so So here's an extreme example of that you got the believe that's Empire State Building And I found this picture online of you know someone just shooting up and I was like well could hug and Warp that thing back into a straight-on view absolutely can So I did the exact same thing as I did for the previous image and let it go The only downside is is that it it's Really warping the image so the final image to ended up at 614 megapixel and it took a long time to to get there But it was fun So oh, sorry, I actually meant to do that nice gift. It's oh, yeah, you asked if I could show the interface So what you have is the control points is this is what it's talking about You know picked so you pick Get that on the screen so When you're picking control points you put You go on to the control points area and you put one image on the left and one image on the right and of course ones that have an overlap and You don't and the overlap doesn't necessarily have to be just between two images. You can have it between dozens of images if they're overlapping but What he was asking for is but I'll cover this first So this is these are the pit the points that got automatically picked and you can see they go through So if I wanted to pick another point, I could just say okay. Well, this little corner here looks good I'll click on that And see we'll adjust it here right into the corner. So I have a good thing and And it was already comfortable enough with how many control points it had so it was able to go Oh, I know exactly where it's at and it automatically picked the other one if it hadn't done that I would have had to pick roughly where it was at and It will generally put a box that will they can put over and then it'll guess from there And then of course you can further refine it from there but for the the architectural projections and other stuff we were talking about is You would have to go down and let's see it's been a while since I've done this Yeah, you had a point. Let's see what another point Okay, I remember now. So what you do is you purposely put the points in different places So we got the one in the corner there, but I could take and put the other one right here and Say add and see mode is Vertical so now it knows that's a line So and because two points don't really make a line if you want to represent a line within hug and You need to actually put multiple overlapping points across that line To get to that to answer your question Okay, so So say you you you're a fan of graffiti art or something like that you want to take a picture of a flat wall You know, I've gone Beat the thing to death about you know, make sure you're in the same point and everything like that But for graffiti art you actually purposely go out of your way Sure, you can take it with this But the what happens is is you you lose resolution off to the sides because it has to shoot further So since you have zero parallax distortion, they're gonna happen Just make sure you're the same distance from the wall and take pictures Down the wall and they'll stitch together just fine So actually meant to take a picture of that roof for this, but I didn't get it in there so part of What hug and does to help warp your images in is it understands what lens you're using and It actually pulls out from a big database of lenses by default your lens is probably already in there But if it's not you can add it to the collection and even submit it but what you need is an image with a lot of horizontal and vertical lines and You just set you do just like the previous images just even more so make sure it's perfect and It will then be able to infer how your particular lens Is warped and you need to do this per if it's a zoom lens you have to do it per zoom level on the lens But once you've got that information you can save that out and then in the future You don't have to worry about it calculating it. You can just load it in or ideally you ideally you submit it to the master database and Then it's just taken care of from then on so High-diamond range like we were talking earlier, so I got three bracketed images here It is just no way. I was gonna get a good image from this So, you know the I was either gonna have to blow it out too much and then I lose my sky or It's gonna be too dark So I just literally took three pictures and if you got people in them You're gonna have to take them really fast because they move But you throw that into blender and let it chew on it and then tell it to write out and then fused image instead of Just give me the regular image and that will blend together I'm calling it HDR, but it's it's Actually tone mapped image in this case although hugging will write a true HDR image that you can use So and that comes to the end of my slides any questions. Thank you Yeah, that was good. I was a guest, but I was assuming that it could be a high If you're gonna generate into like a EXR file, I don't think it's gonna tone map it back down It'll spit out an EXR file and you open that back in something else to do your Yeah I've had really good results from HDR merge and raw therapy We don't want that here So as a good follow-on, thank you, Brian. That was excellent The Upstream project that actually provides all of the lens corrections to applications like huggin and raw therapy and dark table It's called lens fun And They are losing basically their only developer. We're transitioning that project under the pixels dot us Community we're gonna try and recruit some new developers It's definitely Not super exciting work, but if you know anyone who is a developer who wants to contribute this would be a great way There is all kinds of projects that is actually using lens fun for their lens correction a Lot of the not lightroom commercial applications are actually using lens fun in the background as well It ties into huggin you use huggin to generate all your distortion correction for your lens if you do Do that? Please please submit it back upstream You can do that on github the actual code for lens fun is still on source forage We're gonna we're gonna move to github or github, but you can submit all the corrections Which is a separate database from the actual code to process it on github That's useful for everybody everybody likes lens corrections you can Are still issues we're not about rules here, so welcome For our next presentation we will find out what is thelio and how do we get there with Ryan goreley? Um, I know it's bad for him, but I'm gonna start with a disclaimer My presentation is not saved. I cannot save it And so if it crashes and I start crying in front of you Well, you'll know why and you'll know why I'll just switch to watching random cat videos on YouTube for the duration of the presentation So I don't know depending on what you want to see you should either Be rooting for my computer to crash or to not crash So let's see how we can get this going here Okay, so by a quick show of hands Who here knows what thelio is all right only one person are you the Okay, we've got okay. We've got a couple people Are any of our system 76 people here, are they all are you sit with system 76? I'll be you have a system 76 computer. Okay. I don't know if they're all Running their booth right now. They could tell you so the free hive is a creative agency that I started Now I'm gonna tell I'm gonna tell you a story And it'll make more sense in the long long haul of this When I was in high school my high school art teacher Invested his own money To buy a copy of Photoshop. This was in the mid 90s. I think it was like Photoshop 2 or Photoshop 3 It was way back in the day The school didn't buy it he bought it with his own money. He put it on a terrible computer It was just powerful enough to do grades but because he did that I was personally introduced to the world of computer graphics and Long story short through a few turns in my life. I ended up starting free hive which is a Creative agency, which is just a fancy word for a company that makes pretty things So my name is Ryan Gorley Some of the work that we've done. I'll just go through this quick. He didn't come to hear about free hive We do some graphic design work. This was a recent Giveaway that we did with for system 76 This is some product packaging and marketing collateral We do some product visualization And that kind of thing We're a little bit different kind of company I Would kind of describe what makes us different into three kind of categories place people values a Traditional creative agency marketing agency is Design studio would be rooted into some at some physical location And for a long time Company is almost nine years old for a long time. That's how we were. We had a studio in Salt Lake Recruited people locally in Salt Lake and we just did what most agencies do we don't do that anymore We're a completely online collaborative company I get to work in my pajamas And so does everyone else we don't have a physical studio anymore. Our studio is in the internet Our people are all independent artists designers from around the world We've got people on every continent on the planet. Okay, almost every continent on the planet And the thing that really probably would be a most of most interest to you is that What binds us together is a common some common values Not the least of which being that we all Use and advocate and try to contribute back to free and open source software So we're kind of an unusual creative agencies agency. We're not running around with shiny max and in green In black berets and adobe Tattoos on our necks or wherever We're a little bit different we use free and open source software and So That's kind of where this story Begins we were approached by somebody from system 76 Louisa Who's in charge of their marketing because she was doing some research and Stumbled upon a presentation that I did I did here last year. How many of you saw that I recognized some faces sweet, all right It was a presentation about getting creatives using open source software and some of the hurdles They also saw this project that we did and it's you can't really see it on this lovely screen This is a Sometime you can go there at space Dot did not digit dot co. You'll have to look at the slide because it's spelled funny Dijt.co That is a web GL Solar system You can kind of zoom in on the different planets and it looks really cool. You can see it in a web browser So they saw that and were kind of intrigued by that The premise is that they were launching the product They were launching this it's their Thalia desktop computer This is actually a Rendering of that computer that we did Later but just ignore ignore the time difference. In fact when we started it was still being designed a lot was changing but that's how it ended up and so They needed to promote this new computer now every year. They had they do some kind of fun marketing campaign and They wanted to do something because this was a really big deal for them It's a largely open-source computer open source There are parts that aren't open source yet But it's really their first step into trying to create a completely open source desktop so the designs for the enclosure some of the Components within it are open source so it's a big deal for them a big step in the direction They've been trying to go for a long time so they wanted to do something cool and Really who we needed to reach there, you know kind of their audience is You know they have their there are existing customers that people that are already brand advocates for them. They have Potential open-source enthusiasts and just basically people that are indifferent that are using Linux because I don't know their University uses it or something So that was kind of our objective and the idea was well, we want them to be talking about this new thing But we also want them to understand how important open-source is Now we had a little bit to start with These are some images from an installer for pop OS, which is their customized build of Ubuntu And so they had kind of this Canon this history of these kind of robots and you know, it was never really explicitly spelled out to the world, but internally the these things had names this is Zoe and So we had some of this to work with Okay So we jumped in and with kind of those loose ideas and we started coming up with this idea that we would do this We'd have these different worlds that were either part of the failure system or something like that We knew that we would have, you know, maybe some like comic because like these WebGL worlds, you know We didn't have the time. We only had about eight weeks to do everything We didn't have the time to do something super interactive. So we'd like augment the worlds these WebGL worlds with comics and so on now Part of this presentation, I'll just point out that and you may have discovered this in your life Nothing works out the way you imagined it You start out kind of Planning things and then it changes. So, you know, for example here On the left is what we had Planned, you know, we're gonna build a website that would be kind of the backbone of the story Some still comics for four different worlds for interactive worlds and then for like Kind of background music tracks What ended up happening is this on the right. We had a website. We had nine Animated comics comics. We still had our four worlds and four ambient tracks But we started doing voiceover in all the worlds We needed to do voiceover on all the videos and then we needed to also do soundtracks for all of the now Animated comic videos. So it really grew. It really grew. It wasn't their fault per se It was this is what happens when you get artists excited about something Scope creep happens from within and we're like, oh, we could do this we could do that and why don't we do this? And it it got out of hand. So what started out at about a six six hundred hour project ended up and I stopped counting But I think it ended up about Well over a thousand hours So the other trick with projects like this is in a perfect world We kind of follow a linear path. So we scope this thing out. We know what we're building Then we'd work on the story, you know, and they buy into the story They like it and then we go to concept artwork and then we turn that concept artwork into 2d assets and video And then we from there with all the 2d assets We'd build our 3d assets and then when everything's all done We get music written to the exact length of our videos Voiceover done to the exact dialogue It would be perfect Unfortunately, you can't do this in eight weeks. So what ended up happening is something more that looked like this Now you can't read that obviously but the different colors represent these different planets and the different Rows of this are different people's involvement So you can tell it was a mess Because we were still figuring out what we were doing, but we couldn't wait to be done with that to start doing other elements of it so The way I show this present this to you is not how it actually took place I'm kind of making it easier to understand what happened because the reality is, you know, we were You know, I can point you know while we're Trying to finish up our our prologue video We're already we're about one third of the one third of the way into our first world We've already started the second world and our story should be finished for the third world So that's kind of the mess And it doesn't leave a lot of room for Mistakes, so maybe that's why it took over a thousand hours instead of 600. I Don't know if somebody that was better at this than me came up here. Maybe theirs would be all pretty and linear Okay the tools These are the primary tools we used You may not recognize the icons blender Greta Natron Inkscape and GIMP I would say that the vast majority of the work was done with the first two blender and creta Natron was Played an important part and then Inkscape was largely for the website and to some extent GIMP There were some other supporting actors in this Obviously Linux not everyone was using Linux, but I was and You know most of what we used was cross-platform So half the team was using Linux and half wasn't Next cloud was a hero. I love it. We used rocket chat, which is a Chat if you didn't guess we can which is a Project management platform Cloud Run which is a cool tool if you if you're like me and you don't want to be a system administrator when you grow up Cloud Run makes it really easy to install a lot of these applications and others on just a stock Ubuntu server and they make it they manage all the Docker containers and Anyhow, they just make life easier and then Unity, which is not one of the non open-source Tools we ended up using and if you're curious why we use Unity over something else you can ask later I'm gonna because time's not going Because I'm running out of time. I want to show you the cool stuff I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on this. We had seven people From free hive working on this and then there were three people at system 76 that were Involved on a regular basis in addition to their CEO who came in at different points So a lot of people working at the same time over a very compressed schedule Really cool people So let me see if I crash and burn here, but I want to show you a video This is actually a video put together by one of those people Shandar Ruzi And it doesn't show all the pieces, but the pieces it does show look cool. So You know cool video Let's see if this works. That was amazing. Wasn't it? Just kidding. Let me try this again. Thank you. Okay, so All right So you might have got a glimpse of it the journey to Thalio was The idea that we came up with which was that this character would The story changed a little bit basically the story starts out with this character Receiving a friend back with a lot of anticipation the robot the robot comes back barely alive In our story robots die So the robots just in pieces and he's all distraught doesn't really know what happened this robot was sent out to find the source of this advanced technology that And how it fits into kind of their overall story It and I'll make a note here. Unfortunately. I didn't put the URL on The presentation, but if you want to actually go through and read this and interact with it fully as Thalio Which is thel.io is the website anyhow the character starts out finding his friend In pieces and he decides I'm gonna go figure out what's going on now And he can only really go backwards in this robots journey one planet at a time and the next three planets he goes to are kind of these Anti It's maybe not the right term But they're the antithesis to open source in each world kind of manifest a different facet of why people don't use open source Or why frankly people should use open source and so they're kind of in this kind of sci-fi environment. We are having a little fun and So I'm gonna actually skip the first video. There's a prologue video here. You'll get a kind of a screenshot of it Now I mentioned earlier. There's a website. This was an earlier concept drawing done in the inkscape We needed something to tie as a thread to tie through these different stories that would be released weeks apart And so the website kind of deserved that eventually the website started also house other information Like these journey logs and content that we there was a really rich story And you there's only so much you could tell in a little animated video or even the 3d world so Here's an example of one of the Concept drawings now There there are really two three main parts. There's the website and There is an animated video and then there's an interactive web GL based world Then at the end of that world, there's another animated video So kind of lead in Set up the environment let somebody poke around. It's kind of like an early 90s style Lucas arts video game where you're just clicking around and learning the story by interacting with the characters There are it's very loosely a game. My kids call it a game I don't know what they call it, but they think it's cool. So You click around and after a certain number of interactions, it'll trigger a particular What we called like a hero interaction Something would make it reveal itself that would then trigger the closing animations. So Here's one of the concept artwork items You know some little spoilers here, you know this this guy that in the Cape here. He's in the prologue video You never find out who he is He's he was a character that got written out He probably like went to jail for something and he just had to pretend he wasn't in the series no Again, I was mentioning before the story was be written around while we were doing a lot of this So that's the director that like the director and he was going to be a little bit of an antagonistic character But we killed him so you never see the director again You'll have to watch the video now the funny thing is the prologue was the first thing we launched it launched on July 4th and It is the most technically Primitive of all the components of this while we're writing the story while we're figuring out what we're doing We started getting better at Kind of the storytelling and so they get the animations get better progressively Until the end where you're actually getting these cool 3d elements So I'm just going to pretend that that was on purpose It was on purpose, but it was just kind of a cool side effect of getting more comfortable with where we're going with this And so I told you the story the robot gets home It's there now this first world. Let me keep track of the time here All right, this first world is called lack me now lack me is basically a world that where People are hoarding because they have the sense of scarcity scarcity of a resource that's not actually scarce and So it's a little bit more aggressive Little bit people are just a little bit more hostile But if you were just to say if everything is absolutely scarce, what would that be? Now that's the fallacy and we know that with open source Knowledge isn't a material that runs out Right when you publish something and give it away. It's you're not losing anything And while you can be a little bit worried that people use it against you It actually you benefit much more than you lose and so through the story. That's kind of what comes out so Here these cool. I don't know. I think they're cool The robots from this planet. I've got like the you know, you have like these elite kind of You can tell which one's elite, right? And then you have like the big thugs that are around and and then you have like the poor oppressed robots in varying stages of You know dying because they're they're they're starving for a resource and they don't trust each other and they're not getting the Light resource they need. This is kind of some concept artwork of their city. That's been in the storm for a long time You know and here's a little bit more developed our piece. That's you know they're all kind of rising up with these beams of light coming through the dome and You know and you can see these hovercraft up high kind of absorbing all this light Before I can get down to the people down at the bottom So it's kind of this cool rich, you know science fiction environment This is a sketch of the on-world experience We had to there are a lot of technical reasons. This was all delivered via the web Using a technology it just renders 3d on the web But we had to you always have to be mindful of how large the files are You know it the delivery you can never escape Just the constraints of the internet The reason we ended up using unity over a couple open source Tools that are comparable It was really just a function of how much how little time we had and How much trust we had that people would actually be able to Experience the world on any browser so In a perfect world if I went back we'd use a different engine, but in this case we use unity Let's see I Am going to say let's show you I'm going to show you the The first world the animation the 3d experience we might skip a little bit ahead in that in the closing animation That'll give you some context Let's do that There you are and the the whole thing has original music So Kevin Jackson is the one that wrote that he did an amazing job So that was the 2d video that would on the website that would launch this as a in browser interactive experience What you're seeing is just a recording I don't know if you'll be able to see those captions from the back, but These are Easter eggs for those failure desktop I'm gonna skip ahead you can go on the website and go through all these interactions. They're pretty cool So you can see the bot down at the bottom after a certain number of interactions that bot rolls over and you can see this glowing thing now hopefully What we discovered after we launched this is not everyone actually picked up on this So if you if you didn't this might be the first time you realize there's a video afterward All right, I forgot to mention there was an artifact. There's an artifact It's just a storytelling device is some mysterious thing that she has with her that you're trying to That exhibits these manifestations of power as you're going back and it's kind of It's kind of supposed to represent the essence of Thalia, which is where we're going to end up Okay, so we get this hand to build or Now but the door is a one of my favorite planets because there's like it's kind of this creepy eerie planet where The creatures there have basically surrendered They're they're basically their personal liberties because it's convenient and because they're scared and Open source as kind of the counter to that provides us visibility and the Visibility into our technology into what our technology is doing and maybe the motives behind people that are giving us the technology It also provides us a means for community defense that we don't have to hand off our personal liberties in order to Protect ourselves But anyhow in this world they didn't do that oops Okay, so here's a little screenshot of Krita now This next sequence will give you a kind of an idea of a little bit of the workflow So we do some of these concepts catches and Krita They get painted in Then this is Okay, this is Blender You can see on here. He's got some zigzags on his face Most of the animations were what we've called two and a half D 2.5 D. It's basically two-dimensional frames that have been rigged as if they're three-dimensional It's kind of a quick gish way to animate Without doing a bunch of 3d work in retrospect I Might have done it all in 3d or a lot more of it in 3d earlier on but but it worked out and it kind of turned out cool this next shot is Neutron Which is basically a? compositing tool for video it's kind of It's kind of like a gem for video, but it's all node-based. It's really cool since we launched this project has been having a little bit to turmoil, but Very a very powerful tool so you can see here down at the bottom These are nodes of different elements that are in this animation, and then we're applying different color effects visual effects otherwise And then in the end you end up with this you got It's kind of mood on these little glowing orb things that came out of blender He's gonna be animated. I think you saw a clip of this in that earlier video. We showed I'm gonna make you go to the website to watch that one Okay, so they go to that world some stuff happens and spoiler alert Zoe dies and She just she loses all of her power and she's gone and so in kind of a Kind of feeling like hey, you know I I'm gonna see this through for her sake kind of losing hope I'm gonna continue on just to figure out what happened Our main character Tenzin moves on to this planet called Clollew now Clollew is Basically to describe it if I don't know if I should say this in a recording If Apple were to have a world it would be Clollew The idea with this world is that it's a beautiful world At first glance there's some of the creatures It's kind of pristine Carefully crafted beautiful world But you kind of get a glimpse here something's just not right here and On that far left you have what are what are called the innovators? So basically in this world the idea is that You shouldn't have the power to create in fact you don't have the power to create the bots have their arms taken off Because they'll mess things up and In only the power to create belongs to these big kind of monstrous things that going around and ripping arms off we had to kind of We have to dumb this down a little bit. We didn't want to give any kids nightmares But it is one of my favorite. It's actually like they're all my favorite now It's one of my favorite worlds because you end up there and then in the background you have these I don't know if you can tell in this resolution, but you know in the background It's all first the foreground is all pristine their butterflies and but you have these like big monstrous multi-arum things in the background like reaching down and you don't really know what's going on We kind of start picking up on it when you start talking to the different characters that are floating around and It turns out that they're ripping off people's arms robots arms. There's no blood Okay Tenzin finds out on this planet and again, we'll watch let you can watch the video on the website and do the interactive stuff but he finds out that Zoe has been on this planet and that when she was on the planet She told one of the bots there where Thalia was and Then right when he finds that out one of these big innovator bots shows up on the horizon Ready to rip off his arms Yeah, that one would have been a little bit too graphic But fortunately they run and escape Now I'm gonna breeze through these and we'll show that video because that video is pretty cool. So the last world is Thalia We had a hard time with this world There was a lot of anticipation getting to the end. They had to be like amazing and And And we were so busy that we really just couldn't put a lot of resources into figuring out where we were taking people It's kind of like the that television series lost after like seven or eight seasons eventually they had to Explain all the weirdness and that got really tricky for them. Thalia was a little tricky for us These were some early concepts. We couldn't like we presented that and they're like, oh We're like, well, what if it looks like rainbow bright? Like no What it ended up being was more like this And Thalia Anyhow Thalia could have taken a lot of forms, but this is the form it took on Now if I mentioned Thalia had some 3d elements to it. This is a character that Exists on some of systems envy six other artwork it It's a robot called Melvin So this is a 3d version of Melvin and I'll let you I'll let you see this So it's gonna start up with him like running away Trying to not be caught. This is my favorite heart. He's like, oh man. I just wanted to hug So I'm gonna skip ahead you haven't met these characters yet, but when you go through and do it for yourself There's a lot there's kind of a resolution here with each of the different worlds characters from these different worlds And kind of how Thalia is the balm The remedy and I'm just gonna skip to the end here. Oh And at some point here Melvin walks in Okay, so the question at this point is So what? There are a couple so what's The reason I tell that story earlier about me being a high school student and my art teacher Buying a license of Photoshop so that Miss students could experience computer graphics I'm not that story may very well have never happened could have never may have not happened if he hadn't had the means to buy that and I had a Huge impact on my personal life My career My the way I provide for my own family you really stemmed from that moment and that decision Now again per creta most of these applications didn't exist back then but There are millions of people like me around the world just young and excited slightly creative people who We can actually give the gift of being able to see their own vision through through open source The reason I love open source is that it costs me nothing. I serve myself. I Make the world better for myself and mine so doing I make the better world better for anyone else I help them Have that tool that will introduce them into the thing that they love and they can go and make something like this There's nothing in that this whole production that we created that anybody with the time and ideas and Develop skill sets couldn't create anywhere There's no real barrier except I guess a hardware barrier, but even that Could be overcome with time. So that's why it matters. I think that's what Why we do the things the way we do and I think that's why the whole thalio campaign was important because it demonstrated what can be done and It not only preached the power of open source, but it demonstrated it in the way it was built so thank you and If you have any questions, I'm happy to answer them and that's what some of my personal contact info if you Want to send me a question a different way go ahead. Yeah, the questions. Why did we choose unity? I alluded to it a little bit, but we had eight weeks to put this together It ended up we ended up having a little bit more time than we thought Because of some delays on the I mean if you follow the thalio product launch I think it launched in October So it we ended up having more time, but it was more a matter of comfort and a risk mitigation We just couldn't try Armory 3d. I think has a WebGL export There were some others with that solar that solar system that we did before was just created with 3js But that would have been just too time-intensive so it it was unfortunately just a compromise we had to make Any other questions? Yeah, so the question is does rehab do anything to make sure that these applications that we're using are on a sustainable footing We do donate to a lot of projects, but I Personally am involved in inkscape. I do a lot. It's been a lot of my personal time on that One of the things that I hope happens and one of the assumptions that I'm making is that Some of these tools have the perception of being kind of just tools for amateurs Tools that you know if you're just a eight year old and you want to install something great, but you know the real pros use Adobe Part of what we're trying to do is to openly demonstrate. Hey look You wouldn't have been able to tell any of that work in the beginning was done with anything other than a Professional tool and we did all that with a free and open-source software So by so doing that and doing it so openly The way we hope we can contribute the most more than pitching a few bucks into this or that project or even putting in time is to broaden that base of users and An open source thrives when it has users You have more contributors more donators better feedback better bug bug reports and so on so that's really I Think the most important thing we're doing Is that does that answer it question? Go ahead. Yeah. Yeah, so Yeah, so we transition to open source about a year and a half ago Foley Blenders Prada so the company's been around nine years and almost that entire duration. We're using blender And then piece by piece other applications made their way in and then we just made a big Strategic to shift about a year and a half ago to just open source Except you can see here. Some of the artists are using like windows I'm not gonna Give somebody crap if they want to keep using windows. Well, actually I will that's a Yeah, but fortunately most of these tools are cross-platform Any other questions? All right, thanks for coming and I'll be at the inkscape booth if you have any other questions you think of Thanks We're gonna break for half an hour. We'll be back in half an hour with Krita and gimmick as an awesome segue from Ryan. He mentioned Natron Currently it does not have a full-time maintainer or anyone to add features to it if you know any developers who know cute or Python or Want to do packaging? Definitely get in touch get in touch with us Either on their github or at pixels dot us. There's a sub forum for Natron a Lot of people who don't have the skills to code said that they would be willing to back a Patreon or a Kickstarter or donate to it. So There's maybe a little bit of money there probably not a ton and that's not the right reason to go for it But they're definitely looking for help. Thank you You