Krita Warp Tool Hits Warp Speed

You can do a lot in Blender. You can make magical forests. And populate those forests with sprites and ill-behaving teenagers. And see what happens when the two meet.

Occasionally, however, Blender Studio uses programs other than Blender. Naturally, those other programs are open-source (because of course). And among the bazillions of twinkling software stars out there in the open-source-verse, few compare to Krita. Krita is a completely free painting program which you might legitimately describe as amazing, and awesome, and great… and other words meaning more or less the same thing.

But still. Even the nigh-perfect can be tweaked.

Recently, Sprite Fright Concept Artist Vivien Lulkowski came up with a list of suggestions for improving Krita’s warp tool. Can we fix the lag when zooming in? Can we add grid lines between the dots? And can we make the overall effect crisper?

So Blender's producer and COO Francesco Siddi contacted the Krita development team with a proposal: Blender Studio would sponsor a few weeks of development time, working alongside the Krita Foundation.

Dmitry Kazakov, one of Krita’s lead developers, implemented Vivien's feedback. It's a way of working that's close to Blender's heart: developer and artist in collaboration.

Here is a video recorded by Vivien, where she explains the upgraded warp tool.

Massive thanks to Dmitry and the Krita Foundation for his input.

The new warp tool is available in Krita 4.4.2.