Image Layer Add-on Phase 3 Adds Preview and New Operations
Fabio Russo’s Image Layer add-on is allows for layer-based image editing inside Blender, similar to Photoshop and the Gimp. It is progressing slowly but steadily. He just released an update with a ton of fixes and some new features. He is still collecting donations for the next step – importing and exporting to image file formats such as XCF (Gimp).
Fabio writes:Finally after a bit ‘of time I was able to publish the third phase of the project.
This publication has undergone many delays due mainly to two transfers to Italy
and various business reasons that did not allow me to devote myself fully to the project.Now let’s talk about serious things! During this third phase have been resolved many annoying bugs, improvements have been made to functionality that was already implemented and I added some very interesting new features. The main new features are: Preview of operations applied to images and new operations color images. At the end of pages you can find the full ChangeLog.: P
Links
this is amazing work and much needed in blender. Thank you for your hand work. Where’s the donation link?
J.
one day.. blender will replace everything :P
It’s the best part of blender for me. All in one package.
Blender would be best to focus on one aspect at a time, instead of trying to be every tool for every job. With that said, I do find this development interesting, and think it’d greatly aid with texturing within Blender, if nothing else.
So many things that I try to learn in Gimp and Krita, I already know how to do in Blender. I sincerely think Blender will wind up being my Photoshop and Manga Studio alternative. Auto-perspective, non-destructive effects(modifiers, compositor), easy shapes… the various improvements to the painting features make me confident that we’ll start to see more and more people using it as a Photoshop replacement.
I’ve been finding the text function of Blender to be easier than Gimp and Krita(Gimp doesn’t agree with me in general), with the exception of font selection, especially with Linux’s non-centralized font folders(trying to go 100% open source lately). I’m on the look out for ways to improve that myself, but I wouldn’t mind if somebody else improves font selection first.
can this be loaded like any add-on or do do i need the graffic-all build.
Looks nice, through not sure about this. Blender seems to try to be a lot of things at the same time.
everyone in the blender community has different likes .different things they’d like to have in the software and being that anyone can add something, if the powers that be say its cool , and it’s done properly, then they do. just makes for a bigger and better tool for everyone.DIG IT. gonna grab this build too and check it out.wohoooo !!!!!!
Well yes. That’s the good part about open source isn’t it? Through I still like to see the ability to rotate reference images when I am modeling, I hope some day those image editing tools will help with that.
you can do that, use an empty image.
Don’t get you, I don’t see any rotate option, just move x-y/scale.
I’m guessing Max is referring to adding an empty into a 3D scene and making the type of empty be “image”(add/empty/image, go to empty’s properties & assign an image).
Lots of possibilities with that. You can even adjust transparency and tick the X-Ray option in the properties window. If it needs to follow the camera, you can parent it to the camera or any object.
Cool. Thanks. I was wondering how you add image planes easily like in Maya. Didn’t know of this one before. But I guess there are a lot of small goodies hidden inside blender.
I’m a chief proponent on the issue that Blender tries to do so many things that it never masters any one thing. With that said, I’ll argue that this feature is a relevant development that would benefit a wide number of users, particularly with texture-editing. I wouldn’t rely on this feature to do the entire texturing process, but if one can eliminate the need to constantly switch so much between 2D and 3D applications for texturing, it’s greatly welcomed. You can do the bulk of your base texturing in 3D and 2D modes in Blender and then take the textures to 2D programs for finer detail.
This is so useful. Thanks a ton, Fabio.
This needs the Blender Foundation’s official support! Heck, hire this guy full-time as a developer!
I wonder if it’ll support Photoshop layers, considering Blender now supports .psd files but uses only the composite of all layers. The site says that he does plan xcf import/export with layers, so it seems possible. If not, I could at least convert a psd file to xcf with Gimp.