Tuesday, May 31st, 2016 Posted by Jim Thacker

The Krita Foundation releases Krita 3.0

160531_Krita3

The Krita Foundation has released Krita 3.0, a major update to the open-source digital painting tool that improves its handling of grids and layers – and adds a complete new 2D animation toolset.

New 2D animation toolset with export to commercial applications
Funded by last year’s Kickstarter campaign, the main addition to Krita 3.0 is the new animation toolset.

It adds a standard set of 2D animation tools, including a timeline and a dedicated workspace; and support for onion skinning. The tools work in all the colour spaces and bit depths Krita supports.

Any set of images can be imported as an animated layer within a project file, automatically sorted by file name; and completed animation can be exported as a standard image sequence.

There is also the option to export layered animations in CSV format, for use with commercial animation tool TVPaint; and in SCML format for use with game sprite-creation tool Spriter.

Improved performance on large canvases and complex projects
Partly to cope with playback of animation projects, and partly as a development goal in its own right, performance has been improved on large canvases and complex project files.

The Krita Foundation’s blog post doesn’t put any figures on the speed boost, but notes that new caching and frame-dropping functionality mean that “you can always see your animation at real-time speed”.

Better workflow for layers, grids and guides
Other changes affect layers workflow, as shown in the video above, with UI and functionality changes designed to simplify the process of merging, grouping, selecting and mass-editing layers.

Document layout has also been overhauled, with the option to customise the look of grids and guides and save them as templates. The “vast majority” of Krita’s tools now support snapping to grids and guides.

There are also a range of other new tools and UI changes, which you can find in the online release notes.

Availability
Krita 3.0 is available now for most popular flavours of Linux, and for Windows 7 and above. Support for Mac OS X has also been greatly improved, with full support to follow in Krita 3.1.

The Krita Foundation is also currently running a new Kickstarter campaign for its next major release of the software – which, at time of posting, had almost hit its €30,000 funding goal with over a week to go.

Read a full list of new features in Krita 3.0 on the Krita blog

Download Krita 3.0 for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X