A few years ago I was looking at the web page of a company that made a collection of fancy plug-ins for Photoshop. These were the Alien Skin plug-ins or somesuch. They had a bunch of useful snazzy special effects, and most of them could be accomplished by combining the functions of several of the then-existing GIMP plug-ins.
So I was looking at their examples, and I was saying to myself, "got it", "got it", "got it", "umm, could do it with a little hacking". I came to a very pretty effect that made an image look like if it were woven with thick ribbons. So I got off my butt and wrote the Weave script for Script-fu. I was very proud. I was also very happy that complicated effects could be whipped up quickly with a little Scheme script.
The Alien Skin plug-ins were proprietary and quite expensive; this 300-line Scheme script is free software and gratis. The Alien Skin stuff still has a prettier user interface, and Script-fu does not provide facilities for real user interfaces, but the point is that the same effect could be pulled off with the existing GIMP tools and a bit of hacking.
Metacreations' KPT plug-ins are mostly of the same kind; no wizardry involved, just a very flashy user interface. I haven't missed them with all the stuff the GIMP can do.
Still, Metacreations has some really incredible stuff that will take some heavy wizardry to duplicate as free software, in particular their 3D mesh decimation and compression stuff. It is awesome. Hopefully some highly clueful hackers and 3D junkies will write free software that does an equivalent thing.
Free software can make a big difference. I hope developers are not put off by companies releasing proprietary software for free systems. We win nothing with that kind of software. It has to be freed or replaced with something free.
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A few years ago I was looking at the web page of a company that made a collection of fancy plug-ins for Photoshop. These were the Alien Skin plug-ins or somesuch. They had a bunch of useful snazzy special effects, and most of them could be accomplished by combining the functions of several of the then-existing GIMP plug-ins.
So I was looking at their examples, and I was saying to myself, "got it", "got it", "got it", "umm, could do it with a little hacking". I came to a very pretty effect that made an image look like if it were woven with thick ribbons. So I got off my butt and wrote the Weave script for Script-fu. I was very proud. I was also very happy that complicated effects could be whipped up quickly with a little Scheme script.
The Alien Skin plug-ins were proprietary and quite expensive; this 300-line Scheme script is free software and gratis. The Alien Skin stuff still has a prettier user interface, and Script-fu does not provide facilities for real user interfaces, but the point is that the same effect could be pulled off with the existing GIMP tools and a bit of hacking.
Metacreations' KPT plug-ins are mostly of the same kind; no wizardry involved, just a very flashy user interface. I haven't missed them with all the stuff the GIMP can do.
Still, Metacreations has some really incredible stuff that will take some heavy wizardry to duplicate as free software, in particular their 3D mesh decimation and compression stuff. It is awesome. Hopefully some highly clueful hackers and 3D junkies will write free software that does an equivalent thing.
Free software can make a big difference. I hope developers are not put off by companies releasing proprietary software for free systems. We win nothing with that kind of software. It has to be freed or replaced with something free.