ENVE, or Enve is Not a Video Editor, is a new in development 2D animation software, completely free and open source. Even in this early state, Enve is remarkably capable animation tool, with a full suite of drawing tools for both vector and result art, including MyPaint brush integration.
ENVE is described as:
Enve is a new open-source 2D animation software for Linux and Windows. You can use enve to create vector animations, raster animations, and even use sound and video files. Enve was created with flexibility and expandability in mind.
The source code is available on GitHub under the GPLv3 license with binaries available for Windows and Linux. You can check out a complete review of ENVE in action in the video below.
Crocotile3D is a unique level editor that takes the traditional 2D tiled based map creation approach, but applies it in 3D. Crocotile3D is described as:
Crocotile 3D is a tile-based 3d modeling editor. Originally released back in 2015 it is the first of its kind to use 2d tiles to construct 3d scenes. In contrast to most 3d applications that are bloated and over-complicated, Crocotile 3D is a simple to use tool targeted at creating lowpoly models and scenes with pixel-art tilesets or low-res textures. Simply select tiles directly from tilesets and place them into a scene to quickly give them a third dimension. Use various tools to edit your tiles and shape your models, let your imagination go wild!
It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. There is a free trial version available on Itch.io that is limited to saving less than 100 tiles and cannot export in OBJ format. The full version is available for purchase on Steam. Crocotile is frequently updated, with the most recent release coming just a week ago.
You can see more of this unique tool in action in the video below.
Pose Animator is a free and open source implementation showcasing how you can animated an SVG avatar using either webcam driven face and bone data, or from analyzing a static image. On the GitHub repository, Pose Animator is described accordingly:
Pose Animator takes a 2D vector illustration and animates its containing curves in real-time based on the recognition result from PoseNet and FaceMesh. It borrows the idea of skeleton-based animation from computer graphics and applies it to vector characters.
This is not an officially supported Google product.
The GitHub page also includes two demos. The first one showcases using a camera to control an avatar, while the second one showcases how to accomplish the same thing with a static image. Please note there a currently a couple bugs that need to be addressed if you build this from source yourself, with the resolution details available here. I also walk through the process of building and running Pose Animator in the video below.
First launched in 2003, the open source cross platform vector graphics application Inkscape just hit the major 1.0 milestone! Inkscape is open source with the source code available on GitLab. Details of the release from the Inkscape news page:
After a little over three years in development, the team is excited to launch the long awaited Inkscape 1.0 into the world.
Built with the power of a team of volunteers, this open source vector editor represents the work of many hearts and hands from around the world, ensuring that Inkscape remains available free for everyone to download and enjoy.
A major milestone was achieved in enabling Inkscape to use a more recent version of the software used to build the editor’s user interface (namely GTK+3). Users with HiDPI (high resolution) screens can thank teamwork that took place during the 2018 Boston Hackfest for setting the updated-GTK wheels in motion.
Smoother performance & first native macOS application
This latest version is available for Linux, Windows and macOS. All macOS users will notice that this latest version is labelled as ‘preview’, which means that additional improvements are scheduled for the next versions. Overall, 1.0 delivers a smoother, higher performance experience on Linux and Windows, and a better system integration (no more XQuartz!) on macOS.
So many new bells and whistles
One of the first things users will notice is a reorganized tool box, with a more logical order. There are many new and improved Live Path Effect (LPE) features. The new searchable LPE selection dialog now features a very polished interface, descriptions and even the possibility of marking favorite LPEs. Performance improvements are most noticeable when editing node-heavy objects, using the Objects dialog, and when grouping/ungrouping.
You may encounter some challenges downloading today. I was unable to download the Win64 version, but the 32bit version worked fine. Hopefully these download issues are fixed soon. You can learn more in the video below.
What beauty or horrors await Alice in her adventures? This is the question you must answer as you create a game-ready environment to fit this theme. We have gathered concept art from Alice Asylum to inspire your work.
All entries must be created in Core, our new, free to use game and world creation platform, powered by Unreal, that gives you all the tools you need to turn your vision into reality. To learn more about Core, visit coregames.com or read “Art Directing the Multiverse” by Dan Fessler, Core’s art director.
The contest ends May 31st, 2020 and has several prizes available, including:
If you are looking for guidance on how to create art using Core, be sure to start with this tutorial for the basics. They also launched a new learning portal available here. You can learn more about the contest in the video below.
Today we are looking at TreeIt, a completely free Windows application for creating game textured and multi-LOD models in just a few seconds. TreeIt is made by Evolved Software and has the following features:
Very easy to create top quality 3D trees models.
Create any tree, not limited to just one tree type.
Edit each joint as well as break joints.
Render to image for leaf creation.
Adjustable LOD.
Exports to *.dbo *.fbx *.obj *.x .
Free.
While TreeIt ships with several textures making it easy to get started creating trees, you can also download several preconfigured trees from the tree library. Check out TreeIt in action in the video below, including a quick step by step tutorial on importing your model into the Godot game engine.
bforartists 2.0 was just released. bforartists is a fork of Blender aimed at making Blender more usable for artists, new users and indie developers with a series of changes including new keymaps, icons, workflow and completely new documentation.
Key changes over traditional Blender include:
custom key mapping
mouse only navigation (great for touch screens like the Surface)
widget manipulation with cursor off widget
keymaps can switch between BForArtists and Blender
theme has coloured icons and increased contrast
icons in menus, 2x more icons
removal of duplicate menus, if its in toolshelf, it’s not in the menu
menus for all hotkey only items (such as Text->Move Cursor)
reduced number of workspace templates
left aligned text in menus such as toolbox
lock camera to view icon
primitive toolbar in 3D viewport, customizable and dynamic to mode
bforartist targeted at beginners and indie developers, not pros
PDF manuals (WIP) with more detail, in PDFs
Learn more about the 2.0 release here. You can check out bforartists in action in the video below. The documentation is currently a WIP and is available here.
Today we are taking a look at Spaceship Generator, an open source procedural space ship creator add-on for Blender. Spaceship generator can automatically create a variety of space craft, like the ones below.
The above link is for Blender 2.7x only. Fortunately a user has created a Blender 2.8x compatible port that is available here on GitHub.
In the video below we demonstrate Spaceship Builder in action as well as showing how it can be installed and used.
Inskscape, the open source cross platform vector graphics application, just released the first release candidate on the way to a full 1.0 release. Along side the RC1 release, they also released version 0.92.5 of the stable branch.
Details of the two releases from the Inkscape news pages:
Inkscape 0.92.5
While we are working to release Inkscape 1.0 in the very near future, we have addressed some bugs in the stable 0.92 series. Most notably, an issue for Windows 10 users that prevented Inkscape from discovering fonts that have not been installed system-wide has now been fixed. Inkscape extensions written in Python will now also run with Python 3, while compatibility with the (deprecated) Python 2 is maintained.
For macOS, the 1.0 will feature the easiest installation and best macOS integration that Inkscape has ever offered. There are, however, unique issues that will require additional testing and improvement for our Apple fans.
If you run into any bugs, especially with the Release Candidate, please help us by reporting them promptly, so we can try to fix them before we release the final 1.0 version.
You can learn more about Inkscape RC 1.0 in the video below. The car SVG graphic used in the demo is available here if you want to compare performance results.
Today we are taking a look at PixaFlux, an interesting free Windows based image creation and manipulation tool capable of creating PBR textures. The entire process is node based and PixaFlux ships with an absolute ton of nodes to work with. PixaFlux isn’t really easily described and is better seen or experienced, as you can in the video below.
PixaFlux is free to download for Windows, the download link is available here.
There is plenty of documentation to get you started. There is a complete Wiki with step by step text tutorials available here. There are additionally dozens of video tutorials available here.
The best way to get started with PixaFlux though is to see it in action in this video.
