2D/3D Workstation on Linux?
polycounter lvl 15
I googled around a bit, looks like some stuff works on Linux. Just curious if anyone here uses Linux as their main OS on a workstation PC, or know's if it's possible? Not seriously considering it, but am curious.
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however, i don't think running zbrush and photoshop in a VM is really going to cut it and while there are alternatives available, i'd put priority on tools, not the flavour of the underlying OS at all times.
one issue i can see with linux though is that it is very fragmented and always evolving at a rapid pace. locking down software versions that do the job for you while adding new toys to the toolset does not look to be easy. you'd also be a bit limited in choice of linux flavour. e.g. running commercial software targeted at redhat on ubuntu does not seem straightforward at all.
getting things to run, sure. run fast/handle large files so it's up to scratch with a windows/mac version and not bump into random compatibility issue? i have my doubts.
I know you can install Mudbox on Linux, so outside of Zbrush and I guess 3ds Max (and maybe a few other tools) I can't imagine switching over would be too bad. It really depends on the tools you use - but chances are if they're used in a VFX / animation studio there's probably going to be a linux version available.
and running the OS non-officially on a bog standard PC seems like a gamble if you want stability and features working. besides the legality of things.
@fmnoor, Modo has a linux version too. But I imagine in most cases (since we're likely gamers as well as artists) there would either be some windows program or game that we cannot live without. And since no one wants to dual boot and be forced to restart every time they want to play a game, a hardware passthough might be the answer a lot of people have been looking for (or so I hope).
The idea is to have most of the tools to be opensource or free, and only buy licenses for the essential one, which offers Linux support, obviously.
Allegorithmic, are you going to support Linux? I loved using Substance Designer
But then you think "there is this application that I use often, only available on Windows", the Linux alternatives are not that much, for example, finding a decent and lightweight audio player is almost impossible, also XMPlay tracker modules playback is unbeatable even on Windows; it do works on Wine but the UI gets glitchy quite easily.
If you need simulations for VFX beyond what Blender offers, Houdini's there for that.
UE4 can be a little weird about compiling depending on your distro and distance field AO doesn't work, but Unity works pretty well, except for a few things like MSAA but for portfolios you're better off using supersampling and/or SMAA. Hopefully Unity will get good temporal antialiasing eventually. Nice thing about Unity over UE4 is that you can still define custom lighting models for nonphotorealistic stuff in a relatively straightforward way.
I wouldn't mind Marmoset Toolbag 2 for Linux and since there's an OpenGL renderer there already I think it wouldn't be too hard to port. Earthquake if you're interested in making a port happen let me know, you'll find my terms quite favorable.
As audio players go I like Clementine. Don't know if it plays tracker tracks though.
Is not that fun to format, install Linux and then having to reinstall Windows because you can't figure out something.
Otherwise, wait till ReactOS is ready ;D
Yes we are currently working hard on both Painter and Designer for Linux.
@Sonicblue, heh manjaro w/xfce is what I'm testing at the moment (have it installed on my laptop and a VM on my pc). Seems to be a good blend of simplicity and performance.
@Bek If you have window tearing problems, disable the Composition Window Manager and install Compton instead.
@JedTheKrampus Renoise demo doesn't allow to render the files (even if on Windows I can record the audio that is being played by the system), also it has to be manually configured to play every sample without interpolation, and many commands are not interpreted correctly.
Example:
Renoise
XMPlay
I have to test on an actual Linux installation if they updated the MODPlug engine (which is now a legacy version) that is being used to play modules. OpenMODPlug does play them good, but it's a Windows only application, and if I have to use a Windows application I can use XMPlay through Wine with some workarounds.
This looks like a small issue, but imagine not being able to use your standard software, and then find out you can't listen to your favourite music too.
As I said, I can get it to work on Wine, but a native support would have been better, I'm still trying various solutions that doesn't involve Wine
Anyway, I've found a nice script that adds High Pass Filter capabilities to GIMP, even though is not real time, it works very well.
Copy the .scm file in:
On Windows (the folder is hidden)
C:\Users\USERNAME\.gimp-2.8\scripts
On Linux
/home/username/.gimp-2.8/scripts
Then in GIMP, from Filters--->Script-Fu--->Refresh Scripts, it doesn't need a restard. The filter should be now visible in Filters--->Generic
At this point you can select all, copy and past back to Krita, lol.
All the VM stuff sounds a bit too complicated for my everyday use.
adobe had photoshop and a few other things running on unix in the 90's. horrible ports done with some emulation layer as i recall. do not want things like that ever again.
I can kind of understand where Adobe are coming from not wanting to port to Linux. Photoshop and the rest of CC probably straight-up don't work on case-sensitive file systems which would take quite a bit of work to rectify. Once they finally manage to get it working, they have a couple of different potential markets. First there are big VFX studios running Red Hat workstations, which are probably using Mari for texturing and matte painting and perhaps some kind of free software for concept art painting. There are of course virtually zero game studios because for the most part the engines didn't run on Linux until recently, so they won't be buying more Photoshop licenses. And finally, there are the general users, most of whom have been chugging along just fine using GIMP and Krita for whatever they needed to do, and many of whom correctly find the idea of subscription software that refuses to start if the authentication servers are down reprehensible. The vast majority of these users are probably going to either pirate Photoshop or ignore it altogether, and the second is a little more likely in my mind.
Interestingly enough there is Photoshop Touch for Android, which is technically Photoshop running on Linux albeit a little stripped down and not running on the GNU userland. So I think if there's enough adoption they should be able to put out a Photoshop release for desktop Linux too.
As for things you might miss going from Photoshop to Krita, there are several filters missing like a good high pass. However there's also a lot of ground that G'MIC in Krita as well as GIMP can cover in that regard if you're willing to work a bit more destructively (and, for that matter, use GIMP.) For example G'MIC has an inpaint filter which can be used to bleed texture seams. I recommend scaling your texture down by a factor of 2 before using it as it's quite slow. You can scale back up after it's done and put it at the bottom of the layer stack for that channel of your texture. Krita also doesn't have super advanced image processing features like content-aware patch, but it does have the basics like a clone brush which can often do an adequate job. Krita also has no heightmap to normal map filter, so you have to do that in Blender instead with a plane and a displacement modifier. (Personally I never liked the results of these filters except for Knald--I prefer to make the image tilable if necessary, adjust the image's values a bit, use it as a displacement map, and then sculpt over it a little as needed which gives much better results IMO.) Also Krita's layer style implementation is really slow so if you rely on that you're definitely better off with Photoshop right now. Basically, you will need to pop over to another program (e.g. GIMP which is specialized for image manipulation) from time to time to prepare a photosource or do some advanced filters or compositing.
There are also many features that you'll probably miss going from Krita back to Photoshop. In Krita you can export all top-level layer groups which makes it really quick to preview multi-channel texture sets as you build them up like the qSave plugin. (This never worked for me in Windows but I'm not smart enough to be able to figure out how to build Krita on Windows so I am probably not going to ever fix it.) I also prefer Krita's inherit alpha to Photoshop's clipping masks as it's a little bit more flexible. Photoshop has adjustment layers which are great, but it doesn't have filter layers so you can't e.g. nondestructively add noise or do a Gaussian blur. Photoshop also doesn't have wraparound mode or the tangent normal/flow map brush engine or reoriented normal mapping as a native blending mode or all the filters working outside of a byte color space or RGB floating-point painting over latlong skyboxes or HD index painting or the Copy Red, Green and Blue blending modes for easily and nondestructively channel packing a masks texture. Also Krita has 91 blending modes. That's about four times as many as Ps has and more than twice as many as Mari has although many of the Krita blending modes are redundant. I also greatly prefer Krita's color management and I occasionally miss being able to paint with filters in Ps--in Ps you have to make a merged duplicate that's had the filter run and then erase it, which is pretty destructive. Ps doesn't have color history as well which means you have to paint in a more heavy-handed manner and then lower the layer opacity in order to be able to get the layer color back later. I also really enjoy the popup palette and often wonder why we can't have something similar in Zbrush or Photoshop. And the brush editor and engines are the most powerful I think I've seen, bar none. You can do some pretty wacky stuff with the brush editor, like making any brush 100% sharp around the edges for pixel art purposes.
I've found Krita+3D Coat to be a ridiculously powerful combination too, especially once you get used to the tangent space normals brush engine in Krita which is a lot more straightforward to use than the heightmap painting in 3D Coat.
Actually you don't need to that in Blender, with GIMP and the help of the Normal Map plugin you get a pretty nice normal map:
Convert the Greyscale into an RGB file before doing this, otherwise you'll find the plugin locked
It comes with a 3D preview window, you can open it by pressing the appropriate button
Is it also possible to generate an heightmap from the normal map, although it introduces some artefacts, that I don't know how to get rid of
You mean this? (Photoshop)
ALT+CTRL+SHIFT+RMB
Keep the RMB down and you can leave the ALT+CTRL+SHIFT, if you want to change the HUE value, press and keep it pressed the Spacebar to lock the colour circular manipulator in position.
That normalmap plugin looks like it could be handy but I like the results I get from a displacement modifier + multires sculpting in Blender. It takes more time and situationally it is still useful to use that plugin or Awesomebump (a Crazybump knockoff that runs natively on LInux.)
Obviously not, right click does that.
Doesn't Blender have a node to generate normal maps from a picture?
Last time I tried AwesomeBump, it froze my Windows, I have to try it on Linux but since it's GPU driven I doubt it will work on a VM, at least they had the decency of making it in Qt.
than this:
The second one is the one I generated from the GIMP plugin, while the first is the one I sculpted. I did make a few mistakes in the sculpting process that I could fix with the sculpt UVs tool but the end result is definitely better on the first image, especially when the camera is further away from the mesh.
Finally here's one from Krita. I only painted one leaf but it's the cleanest-looking of them all IMO and reads the best from a distance too. If I didn't need to go to sleep I'd finish it. Spent about an hour on this one but I'm sure if you spend a long enough time doing normal maps in Krita you could get it down to 30-35 minutes.
Doing a simple conversion with Blender's bump mapping or AwesomeBump or the GIMP plugin is fine for a quick result and it can really bring out some nice details if you put it on a Combine Normal map layer and erase where the results aren't appropriate, but it's usually not the quickest way to the best possible result. It's usually better than nothing, though, that's for sure. There are only two things about doing the normals in Krita: first that it doesn't get you an AO map "for free" but in most foliage cases you want to do most of that with vertex colors anyway, and second that it's easy to make normals that are wrong, too hard, or overblown especially if you have too many combine normals layers.