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2 ‐ Rationale
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Dictionary Definitions from Oxford Languages · Learn more rationale /ˌraʃəˈnɑːl/ noun a set of reasons or a logical basis for a course of action or belief. "he explained the rationale behind the change"
People will question every inch of this because some have purposely alienated the discussions around it. But programmers.. you generally will know why it matters. Coders usually understand the frustration of being told they are wrong by drop-kick producers and art managers. I can assure you, you were right all along baby. MOSTLY. - Opensource means opening the lock of problems previous solved by programming, which is the common and obvious understanding for why to embrace it.
My focus is primarily the unconvinced artist. Thought it's nice to know your team has what it needs to make your life better.
Because even when you're making the programmer happy by giving them all the same shiny art tools - it's the artist who benefits. Because your programmers can build you tools to solve issue that thousands of dollars had to solve before... in seconds. Not to mention, your server guy can easily grab those art tools and run your renders and other expensive processes on their farm.
MOST of the focus will be more on how this effects the end user artist, because some artists don't programmers or the skills to code.
So this entire page is dedicated to addressing all of what my workflows offer to an artist over other solutions.
Stay with me. Your first inclination is going to be to question why Foss is such a big aspect of this.
It should not surprise any sane, rational minds who understands the nature of capitalism, to understand that there are people invested in undermining that which does not cash out up the top of the social chain. Now if you suspended your belief for a moment... and you take on this CRAZY idea of FOSS being good enough.... That's not good news for holly-wood championed VFX companies. They see this smaller company being propped up by their rivals making salary of donation alone to deliver hundreds of times more updates every month. It's a threat. They are not growing nearly as fast; close source means less people can access; less people offering code and being paid to review means less updates. They would seem to have and I believe they will continue to have vested interested in efforts to undermine and gaslight FOSS users. So with that at the back your mind and understood... that's why most people cringe when they think of Foss.
Because FOSS = Bad for being the scapegoat victim in capitalism's way. Just saying. Not against capitalism, but it's not perfect always.
Some artists are sucked into the notion that only the proprietary best is worth using. This is an illogical extreme. They tend to blow their budget on a workflow headache with too many shortcuts and UI differences before they can even practice their craft. Some artists go the opposite way and seem cult-like in their love of all things free and open source. The two fight each other like mindless orcs in the comment section... Can you blame them? they are upset that their way isn't working out... maybe so upset they cannot team up properly.
Is it then the SANE and LOGICAL thing to exist strategically between those extremes? I believe so. I believe in having free opensource software as a financial and productivity back-up, and bolstering the lesser attempts at industry standard practice; with paid software and extensions. There's a big list of things to tick that Foss cannot always handle.
Say that you struggle with the complexity of things and you're always losing track of your thought process. I give you an example: despite how I learned to sculpt anything in Blender; I tried and failed to find myself interested let alone motivated to learn all of Zbrush and Mudbox, I was actually motivated more to learn these things in Modo at the time since Modo was the closest proprietary thing I had to Blender at the time. But with Blender it was a joy and I didn't hit a lot of ceilings like I did with Modo's tools. Without the creative flow you might think you're too hopeless to get your mind around all these proprietary software, but I'm telling you there's a smarter way for less to thread the entire creative pipeline.
MOST of the software is opensource and free. Regardless, some money will need to be spent to ensure some equal footing with industry standard products.
My workflows will get you ready for an endless war against the AI tech bros by giving you true control behind the power that they weild.
The document for the following goals in the following order: Industry standard productivity, Cost efficiency, Data privacy, hardware performance optimisation, more freedom in software licensing. I make not claims that this is THE way to achieve all of that, but I can tell you I successfully rely on the workflow. I've been a pro since 2012, working in studios, freelancing and even as a high earning slot machine artist when I started introducing opensource software into my pipeline.
This new workflow is a strategically shifting guide that reflects that experience.
To somehow achieve all workflow production goals and stay competitive with other studios; I discuss the following free opensource solutions.
- I have the right to modify my OS to suit my specific studio needs.
- I prefer to spend money on the the best hardware and Linux is less picky about the hardware specs. Hardware bargains are more common.
- Why give CoPilot-like AI free reign of my intellectual property and data.
- My professional VFX work demands smarter, more cost effective use of my system resources. Scan software, and the vast amount of other background processes eat up way too much CPU and RAM. This is why Linux is preferred for about 90% of servers in VFX studios.
- Resetting critical privacy settings to protect myself against data harvesting wastes my time.
- So does Managing third party virus detection software.
- And Dealing with the general chaos that comes from automatic updates.
- I need to be present online which means I need my web services running well, and it so happens I'm not a meta user.
- Why should I pay the MS and Mac empire for something that countless more developers are working on?
- Because I OS tech like a lot of tech is used to abuse the masses when used by the few while the masses seek to improve lives.
If I could summarise: It's about freedom, data privacy, dignity and a professional level of autonomy.
https://nobaraproject.org/download-nobara/
Why Nobara over other Linux distributions?
- Ready to game, and thus to develop. Steam, Lutris, Wine and Proton pre-installed with enhanced performance out of the box.
- Works well with free stuff like Blender and paid stuff like Davinci Resolve.
- Nvidia integration: Nvidia sound cards work, hybrid graphic setups work out of the box. Proprietary drivers used to best effect. This part is way easier than most Linux distros that I've tried. The best of JACK and pipewire settings also ensure a good audio editing experience.
- In general, very simple to operate. Wacom tablets, PC games - without relying heavily on Linux wisdom. FFMPEG dependencies are also sorted, which means you won't be too limited by what video codecs you need to edit with.
- Comes with KDE which officially which for people like myself coming from windows provides customisation and operating flexibility. KDE has in my opinion the very best third party essential tools like the Dolphin file manager and Kate code and text editor.
- Has a gnome version for fans of Mac OS aesthetic and simplicity which I will not be covering officially.
- Optimised for high performance and low latency to provide more overhead and productivity to create.
I'm a game artist, a content creator, someone with an NVIDIA who needs it to just plug and play. And yet I require a secure link with corporate friendly ecosystems which requires a red-hat like fedora setup which Nobara is based on.
So Nobara it is a nice choice for people like me who work independently.
Dude. Nobody wants GIMP.
- Every university and school will avoid it like the plague just because the name is extremely inappropriate
- A software that is based on a joke-name will get a joked about instead of taken seriously.
- GIMP lacks many of the kinds of adjustment layers that Krita contains, requiring more destructive editing.
- Gimp lacks live layer cloning which requires more manual managing of multiple similar layers.
- Over reliance of outlines to define sections of UI is a maze for the eyes.
- Too much going on out of the box - I took one look at your brush kit on the right and get very bad feeling from the low quality of the brushes that are presented.
- Everything bunched in, without consistent ratio, use of space or regard for effective use of docker area.
- Gimp forces you to open each image in a separate window unless you fiddle with settings, Krita provides handy tabs for active documents.
- Photoshop has this, Krita has this, but NOT GIMP. Despite how essential it is to most people's workflows.
- Gimp only has pixel based vector tools while Krita has a whole built in svg editor.
- Also standard to Photoshop and even Procreate and of course Krita is full equipped with animation support featuring a timeline, onion skinning and plenty of playback options. Being able to bring in a video and sketch/rotoscope is a standard part of 2D animation workflow.
- Wacom, Huion, Xp-Pen etc, generally works better with Krita over GIMP.
- Krita has multi brush painting with symmetry, mirroring and multi axis brushes.
- Krita has a real time tiling mode for seamless textures allowing artists to eye the seamless transition with accuracy. It's there in GIMP, if you don't mind having to do it manually and slower.
- Krita has full editing support for 32 bit float HDR painting, OpenEXR and 16-bit+ depth editing for VFX workflows, GIMP only recently added high bit-depth, and thus is still lacking some important tools for making use of this feature.
What the Gimp devs should do is pass the project on as a fork and start integrating features into Krita. We have way too many people divided over projects when Krita is clearly leading the chase on quality and familiarity of image editing. They are very smart and talented folks but the Krita team just simply have a better vision for how art tools should be.
It’s called ‘ComfyUI’ and there are times when we have more repetitive tasks where we need more manual control of the process. Particularly when upscaling large quantities of files or doing a temporal denoise on a number of renders that are lacking denoising data. Unfortunately it does not have a straight forward app, we actually run it using chromium as an applet. And it generates a local server, which we basically just need to make unique from the one that ACLY’s addon uses to prevent conflicts. That's what you'll find in the install script.
What the ComfyUI Install Script Does Sets up folders
It creates the necessary directories to store ComfyUI and its files. Downloads and installs necessary files
It fetches ComfyUI and installs ComfyUI-Manager, which helps manage additional features. Prepares a virtual workspace
ComfyUI runs in an isolated environment to prevent conflicts with other programs. Ensures all required files are in place
It makes sure ComfyUI can find the necessary tools, such as model files. Creates a shortcut
It adds a desktop and applications menu shortcut for easy access. Launches ComfyUI when you click the shortcut
The shortcut starts the ComfyUI server and opens it in a web app window.
ACLY’s stable diffusion addon uses this as it’s backend already, which is included in my Krita install. I believe it's important to have this for exploring concepts directly in a GOOD painting app. PLUS: we may leverage this further without additional downloads.
That being said, you WILL need to ensure that you have used my Krita install script first.
I am an artist who has been impacted by the negative effects of AI being released into society. So I'm neither a Luddite or a tech bro. If you want to survive these days, you too may have to take a neutral stance. I'm still pro artist... I believe artists should arm themselves with every kind of AI poison they can get to make them feel safe enough to post online. I feel no remorse if someone poisons a massive data base from stealing work I have sweat and bled over to complete. I believe we need to support and donate our art to community driven databases instead of letting big tech get a hold of it.
However: giving up on new technology is giving up on a career in digital art. I came to face the fact in my work that this technology IS going to exist where we fight it or not. Not all AI is evil or made up of stolen IP and it's not always evil to make use of AI.
Because without our helping hands, we as artists are handicapped out of the role we love so much by proverbial technology and IP vampires.
Not all tech bros are bad... but some are totally proverbial vampires. I say, fight fire with fire.
Take my advice. Take the AI. Use it to defeat the AI tech bros and take back your role as an artist. If they are going to take everyone's work, take the power back and use it to ensure artists are always required for this kind of work.
You won't properly own the IP of what you generate with AI, but you can use it to speed through pre-production and faster turn arounds on concept art and design ideas. The exception is with SOME AI like Krita's recent sketch enhancing techniques use 'Good' AI, or in other words, AI which has not been made up of stolen art, but instead: donated works.