Inkscape 0.45 has been released. Inkscape is a vector drawing program that's quite powerful and versatile. It's also open source - in fact, one of their developers, Jon Phillips was giving demos on the Open Source Pavilion with us as Siggraph. Jon was a cool guy and I consider Inkscape to be Blender's twin sister in 2D land.
From inkscape.org:
This release brings the exciting new features developed by the Google Summer of Code 2006 participants, as well as tons of other improvements across the board. Most notably is the new Gaussian Blur feature, which allow softly and naturally blurring Inkscape objects like path, shapes, groups, text, and images. Gaussian blur enables a wide range of photorealistic effects: arbitrarily shaped shades and lights, depth of field, drop shadows, glows, etc. Also, blurred objects can be used as masks for other objects to achieve the "feathered mask" effect.
Inkscape should be part of your toolkit if you're creating textures or patterns.
Links:
26 Comments
nice blurs :)
Great, let's take a closer look :)
Yip, Inkscape is my facvorite vector drawing app.
Mine, too. But I tought Gimp was Blender's 2D-Sister ;)
well, spazz, talking about relatives: actually blender would be gimp's smaller brother who always talks about inventing a new dimension, while inkscape is their cousin who really cares about old maths, while both blender and gimp are more artistic and less accurate (though they could be, mind you).
Either way, they all rock, and i really don't know who the parents are. (anybody care to name them?)
Inkscape is fantastic - just keeps getting better and better. How do they manage this release schedule? They seeem to come out every six months...
This application seems to have gained a lot of potential during the last releases. If it *only* dropped the totally idiotic Gimp "I WILL SMASH YOUR FACE WITH 1000 WINDOWS" approach, it would even be usable efficiently.
Maybe time to look at it again anyway :)
I'm a happy user of Inkscape. I will surely have a look in this new version :-) Good job to all devellopers , It's a " must have " programs !
@Omar Abo-Namous
Well inkscapes parent is sodipodi. ;)
@Alexander Ewering
Als long as Gtk doesn't support MDI or something like that GIMP doesn't support MDI (or something like that).
But if you don't like Gtk (like myself), maybe you will like krita. It looks very promising.
@panzi
"Als long as Gtk doesn’t support MDI or something like that GIMP doesn’t support MDI (or something like that)."
Inkscape uses GTK, and has a MDI interface.
@Intrr: Photoshop on Mac seems to don't smash faces of its users...
Critic about Gimp's GUI is just an old boring troll.
Omar: "Boring old troll" is a very special compliment for me. Thanks :) The more boring and old, the better :)
Hehe, you're weird ;)
I try inkspace about once a year to see if I can stand to use it. I'm a professional Illustrator user, and it just hasn't convinced me yet, not even for personal use.
Time to give it another shot.
Quote:
This application seems to have gained a lot of potential during the last releases. If it *only* dropped the totally idiotic Gimp “I WILL SMASH YOUR FACE WITH 1000 WINDOWS†approach, it would even be usable efficiently.
As a web designer and graphics artist who uses Photoshop at work and Gimp at home ... *fanfare* my verdict is that Gimp's interface wins hands down. I constantly miss it at work, and end up feel cluttered by Photoshop's toolbars. With Gimp, I have the freedom to arrange and manipulate my windows and toolbars in a way that's very natural to the operating system. I feel constrained by Photoshop, even running it maximized.
Moreover, Photoshop has plenty of professional features that Gimp still lacks, but its layer mask features are horrendous. For that reason alone, Gimp is much more enjoyable to work with than Photoshop.
I've used blender, 3ds max, gimp, and photoshop. And all I can say is open source > comercial.
Blender is much more effective in workflow managment. Being able to morph the UI to your needs with a simple click is great, and I much more prefer a single window with "flip-flop" ability on the numberpad than 4 windows that I have to constanly cycle between.
As for the gimp I can't say enough good things about the UI. Being able to add docks and tabs and move the windows around and out of the way are just great. Photoshop just seems too cluttery for my taste.
Havn't tried inkspace yet but I'll be sure to give it a go.
I know this has been discussed to death, but I still can't understand people who are enchanted by an application that:
1) Needs 10 windows and clutters your taskbar (unless you use the grouping feature)
2) Forces you to de-iconify 10 windows when you want to switch to it (not everyone uses workspaces)
3) Forces you to re-arrange all 10 windows if you open a image with a different size or a different zoom level (and thus a different image window size)
4) Doesn't even remember the positions and sizes of the 10 windows between sessions (or did I overlook that?)
I mean, dude, it would already be an advantage if the windows at least *snapped* to each other and to the screen edge, but not even that... (and no, Windows doesn't have such features in it natively :)
@Alexander: same argument, posted twice? You *are* boring.
@Alexander: 1000 windows is just a mac thing. Put an empty desktop up and you'll be fine.
great to see inkscape's getting vecter blur but you can't change basic brightness/contrast/gamma of bitmaps (like imports of your 3d pics). will be better when a few filter effects are added. Soon I think SVG will be ditched, but its a good program anyway.
inkscape rules :) (at least for me ;))
"I try inkspace about once a year to see if I can stand to use it. I’m a professional Illustrator user, and it just hasn’t convinced me yet, not even for personal use."
i'm also a professional illustrator user and feel more or less the same way. I am impressed by the rate of progress, however, and still check in on it from time to time.
I'd be very surprised if the blur effects would RIP properly. Also, in my informal testing of the previous version, I was unable to get simple SVG (a rectangle with the default gradient fill) from Inkscape to open properly in Illustrator.
"I was unable to get simple SVG (a rectangle with the default gradient fill) from Inkscape to open properly in Illustrator."
This is most likely not an Inkscape problem but an Illustrator one since (in my experience) Illustrator doesn't handle well SVG. Still I wished Inkscape had the sophisticated layer menu Illustrator does offer.
"I try inkspace about once a year to see if I can stand to use it. I’m a professional Illustrator user, and it just hasn’t convinced me yet, not even for personal use."
I know what you mean for some stuff. However, I do have to admit that the node editing tools are actually nicer in Inkscape than in Illustrator. It's easier to modify multiple nodes at one time in Inkscape (convert to/from cusp/smooth/symmetrical)
"I was unable to get simple SVG (a rectangle with the default gradient fill) from Inkscape to open properly in Illustrator."
Unfortunately, Illustrator's ability to open SVG is somewhat lacking. It tends to export them OK (with a lot of extra overhead) but the import is shoddy. I haven't tried the EPS export in Inkscape to see how well it plays with Illustrator. The lack of spot color support in Inkscape has kept me from using it day-to-day and has kept my interaction as more of a "check on its progress periodically" level.
That said, it is good to see how it is shaping up. I can see it as a useful tool for many as it currently is.
Great! Love this app.
Im in a VERY low end machine and inkscape works like a charm.
Thanks for the news.
I'm somewhat surprised that nobody has floated the idea (here at least) that Blender be modded to support Inkscape drawings as texture maps. Would be an obvious thing to do IMHO, especially if Inkscape has a "libSVG" or something to handle drawing its markup programatically.
For its original purpose of doing 2D illustrations/layout, Inkscape still needs:
1) lots of nice noise functions
2) some more simple effects, like drop-shadows
3) multi-page support.
In all, it's great software!