Winter Resource Roundup - The Art Squirrel

It is starting to get colder here in Britain, the last few days have been grey and foggy. It is important to keep motivated and working on projects as well as look after your health and mental well being during these darker days.

The articles here may slow down a bit for the winter as I get into some things I’ve been planning, but here are a few things I’ve noticed from my travels on the internet which might be interesting.

Womp

Womp is a website where you can create some 3D art in a fun, intuitive way. It looks like it is using SDF technology a bit similar to something like Clayxels, Magica CSG or Dreams. It is currently in Alpha state and you have to create an account to use it, but at present it looks like it is free to try.

RGBA brushes coming to PD Howler

I think this is awesome, I hoped that this would be implemented as it could allow for some (more) really cool painting brushes in PD Howler. You can see the update on the PD Howler Facebook community page. I’ll write more about it at some point.

Concept & Illustration Lite Brushes Bundle for Krita

This is a new brush set you can try from an artist who uses Krita called Pedro Pitéu.

Upscale

There is a free and open source AI image upscaler called Upscale available for Mac, Linux and Windows.

Sometimes I have used this sort of technology to resize my images for making into prints or up-scaling small images for further painting work, although the program I use is AI Photo & Art Enhancer (not as catchy but it does the job) which has a few other useful features like a denoiser which is useful for cleaning up noisy depth maps from Awesome Bump among other things. I will try this out at some point and see how it compares but I’m pretty happy with what I’m using at present.

Blender Live Paint Filter

For Blender creators who want to render objects in an interesting painterly way this filter might be of use. It is available on Alan Wyatt’s Gumroad shop here. It certainly looks convincing, some of the examples are really beautiful.

I ended up ordering a canvas print of one of the filter renders! Came out great! This can be an awesome Christmas present if you have renders you want to bring to the wall!

Thanks again to @simonxxoo for letting me use his scene!#b3d #blender #bnpr #filter #print #painting pic.twitter.com/eduQLTwK2F

– Alan Wyatt (@AlanWyatt3D) November 28, 2022

I think it is using normal maps to create the raised impasto looking brush strokes. Personally I prefer doing it the old fashioned way with my hands but this could be a useful tool to create an under painting for further paint over work on a rendered image in the context of illustration and concept art.

The creator of the add on for Blender has worked on several other shaders that create artistic effects for some time now. He has a portfolio of his 3D work on Artstation.

Tahoma2D

Tahoma2D is a free open source animation software forked from OpenToonz (which is also free and open source and what Studio Ghibli have used in their pipeline for some major works).

It had an update back in May of this year adding several new features and enhancements as well as bug fixes.

The thing I didn’t realize about these software’s was that they not only do hand drawn animation but they also let you do 2D cutout riggingmesh transformations with the Plastic tool and particle effects.

Quest for K9 Game Development News

This is a cool game development project by VideoJamesNZ a game developer from New Zealand. As a digital artist and (casual) gamer I’m interested in how computer games are made and it is great to learn about the thought processes behind them which you can do so by watching his in depth video. The music for the game is being made by LR-Artoonist.

Blade and Quill Krita Tutorials

I’m not sure if I have mentioned this channel on the blog before but it is a great resource for learning about how to use the various features in Krita. Check it out on YouTube.

New Krita Tutorials About the Brush Engine

There are some new videos on the official YouTube channel for Krita painting software about making brushes. The brush engine in Krita is fairly complex to understand so these will be useful for anyone wanting to dig into it and make their own brushes.