WRITTEN_BY David REVOY -
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5 comments
[youtube]s_cxKNeHHeY[/youtube]
I compressed the 6h (or more) of recorded video for an illustration into a 8min timelapse. Honnestly, the artwork could have been done twice faster; but I made 'small' mistakes on the first steps of the making-of (maybe I wanted to go too fast?). Main mistakes: no consistent light direction on foreground and background + wanting to hide the special effect to the end for the tree decoration and finding midway the result is not in my taste anymore. Lessons I learnt on this one: block the keylight more seriously on the underpainting (a layer I tend to be very distracted by all the yummy colors and ambiant possibilities). All of that made me paint-over 3 or 4 times area... But the end illustration is fine, so I thought it was interesting to share the process and annotate to show the mistakes. I hope you'll like this!
Youtube link: https://youtu.be/s_cxKNeHHeY
The video might also be uploaded on the Peertube channel "Shichimi": https://peertube.touhoppai.moe/accounts/shichimi/video-channels
WRITTEN_BY David REVOY -
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6 comments
To all Pepper&Carrot readers, supporters and also to all the Free/Libre and Open Source community, here an illustration I just finished to wish you a wonderful time in this end of year. **Happy Holidays! **
While doing this illustration, I was really thinking about the best presents and magic moments; when someone share with you a secret place or a place they love. That's what I tried to reconstruct in this scene where Pepper shows to Carrot a magical fir tree lost in a dark wood of tall pine tree. The tree has a swarm of tiny fairies flying around.
WRITTEN_BY David REVOY -
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10 comments
Over the last weeks, I've been silent on my blog and on social media. Sorry about that, it was necessary for me to take this time alone. I worked on the Pepper&Carrot story, the structure of future books and episodes, digital painting techniques, tools, workflows, renderings, the future tutorials, my desk and equipment ...etc... All of this to continue my progress on future Pepper&Carrot episode 34 and tutorials. This long and time consuming process happens now not because I decided to (it would be really bad timing) but just because I have to compose right now with something new in the way my body manage my energy and motivation.
The main rule of this new thing I caught from I don't know where (probably aging, I'm approaching 40...) is simple: my energy drains now super quickly into the exploration of certain path and certain solutions. It drains me to the point it gives me headaches and sometime I even need short nap to recover.
On the bright side, it also works a bit like a reversed compass. By avoiding with trial and errors the penalties, I'm sort of guided slowly toward new solutions and perspectives. This process has been contagious to many aspect of my life and continue to spread. I estimate it started after the release of the self published book: it was probably a process put on hold during all that time.
What it will change? It's hard to tell, I don't have enough distance, we will see. Tiny specifications of my style, my character design, my storytelling patterns will just probably slowly shift to something more personal and authentic. At least, that's what I hope.
This exploration refills me with motivations and plenty of energy. This week, I reached a point in this process where I recorded new videos, made new arts I like (illustration of this blog-post) and I took back my work on episode 34. Also, the more I continue to do progress on this path, the more all the puzzle pieces fit together and the easier it is to take decisions and move on.
So thank you all for your patience in regards of the unusually long production time for the future episode, I hope you'll understand I do my best to continue with this weird and picky built-in compass. Thank you also for all the recent donations, for all the books purchased (now over 1500 books sold in total) and the one who joined recently on Patreon, Tipeee, Liberapay. Each notifications came really as a little sparkle of lights.
WRITTEN_BY David REVOY -
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13 comments
I'm inking right now the future episode 34 of Pepper&Carrot after weeks of writing/storyboarding (four rewrite...). Many main characters are back: Coriander, Saffron and Shichimi. I'll keep sharing with you my progress on the production. 🙂
WRITTEN_BY David REVOY -
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67 comments
[info]**Disclaimer: I'm not sponsored for this article.** I found this hardware myself, I paid it with my own money. I'm sharing this post because I found difficult to find trusty info about the behavior of hardware under GNU/Linux for a digital-painting professional machine.[/info]
So here is a review of the computer I received [48h ago](https://www.davidrevoy.com/article805/my-new-pc-arrived). Quick reminder: I was looking for:
- a performant workstation with a focus on 2D Computer Graphics (Krita/Inkscape/Scribus)
- Good for multi-monitor setup, video editing, a bit of Blender 3D.
- Running GNU/Linux with minimal proprietary driver (no Nvidia proprietary driver)
- No 3D gaming: this a PC for work only.
- Low budget for a workstation: 1100€ (~$1300)
So, following your [feedback](https://www.davidrevoy.com/article799/looking-for-a-new-pc) two weeks ago, I decided to build a custom one.
## Specifications:
I bought it on LDLC, a French online computer eShop with a interface to select each part and build the PC. (I wanted **to avoid Amazon at all cost**, read [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)#Controversies) and you'll get why...)
Here is what I took:
- **CPU:** AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
- **Motherboard:** Asrock B450M-Pro4
- **Ram: 4x8GB** G.Skill DDR4 @ 3200Mhz[1]
- **GPU:** Sapphire Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB
- **Case:** Bequiet! Pure Base 500
- **CPU/Fan:** Bequiet! Pure Rock 2 Black
- **PowerUnit:** Corsair RM850x 80 PLUS Gold 850 Watts.[2]
[1] Ram updated in 2022: I had only 2x8GB when I purchased. In 2022, I received another 2x8GB G.Skill, thanks to a donation.
[2] PSU updated in 2023: It was originally a "Bequiet! Pure Power 11, 600W 80+Gold" when I purchased. In 2023, I replaced it: the PSU was worn out, too much USB power required too and the CPU and GPU started to report errors.
I took it without operating system and without storage: I already had 2 x 500GB SSD from my previous PC. I also purchased two services: mounting the PC and updating the BIOS of the motherboard (I figured they would do a better work than what I could do and price was attractive). All in all it was slightly over my initial budget of 1000€ with ~1100€ (~$1300).
Changing my previous PC −a Dell Vostro with a i7-870 8x2.93Ghz CPU and a Nvidia 650GTXTi bought in 2010, 10 years of work from Sintel to all Pepper&Carrot!− was necessary and urgent: I couldn't power it anymore without disconnecting all USB. My Nvidia card started also to get badly supported by recent proprietary Nvidia driver (their driver, their choice). Also, no USB 3.0 because 2010 and I started to get crash each time I was recording and painting at same time...
## Hardware: a silent and beautiful PC
Assembly time, shipping and delivery went fine despite France being re-confined(COVID19). The unit had many protections: including inside the computer so nothing could float inside the case.
The "Bequiet! Pure Base 500" PC case is probably the best PC case I ever owned (and I owned a lot since my first PC, a 486DX in 1993). I also worked as a designer of PC case around 2005 and handled a lot of hardware in my hands at that time. All inside is painted in black, no sharp metal and many slot, holes, removable part to customise it a lot. Only **a single issue: the position of the power button**: not designed by someone ever owning a kitten. I'll have to protect it with an extra piece of plastic. (Update thanks to a comment: it's possible to deactivate the effect of the button in Plasma/KDE: System Settings > Power Management > Energy Saving > Button events handling "When power button pressed" change it to "Do nothing" ...)
[](data/images/blog/2020/new-pc-review/2020-11-07_amd-cpu-gpu_budget-pc-config_01_case.jpg)
_my young kitten curious about the PC_
[](data/images/blog/2020/new-pc-review/2020-11-07_amd-cpu-gpu_budget-pc-config_02_inside.jpg)
_an overview of the motherboard with the components_
I'm really happy by the quality of the build made by LDLC team: all done very cleanly with perfect cable management.
[](data/images/blog/2020/new-pc-review/2020-11-07_amd-cpu-gpu_budget-pc-config_03_management.jpg)
_I like the cable management_
I was happy I took this option, because I only had to take my screwdriver for mounting my two SSD. The case had two very cool slot for the drive, positioned into symmetry. With the all black rendering inside the computer; it looks so good!
[](data/images/blog/2020/new-pc-review/2020-11-07_amd-cpu-gpu_budget-pc-config_04_mountssd.jpg)
_mounting the SSD disks, easy_
[](data/images/blog/2020/new-pc-review/2020-11-07_amd-cpu-gpu_budget-pc-config_05_ssd-result.jpg)
_good design for the SSD inside this case_
Once mounted, the first run was **so silent that I thought the PC wasn't running**. That's probably because I was used of the sound of airplane from my previous PC.
[](data/images/blog/2020/new-pc-review/2020-11-07_amd-cpu-gpu_budget-pc-config_06_bios.jpg)
_Asrock UEFI_
After a brief control on the UEFI (good graphic user interface Asrock), I connected a pen drive USB with a Kubuntu 20.04 GNU/Linux system. That's the system I documented in my series [Linux for a digital-painting workstation](https://www.davidrevoy.com/index.php?tag/linux). All was directly working out-of-the-box perfectly from the live session: video, dual monitor, graphic tablet, audio. Happiness!
[](data/images/blog/2020/new-pc-review/2020-11-07_amd-cpu-gpu_budget-pc-config_07_live.jpg)
_overview of my desk_
### AMD GPU: the myth of being "easy and open-source"?
Ten years ago, AMD GPU cards for a GNU/Linux system was the worst option you could take for graphism because of bad drivers. But over the last years, many rumors spread about how easy, open-source and great the new generation was. Well, I had a very confusing experience so far on how to setup it correctly!
The [documentation](https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver) is not really easy to follow. I quickly saw that the discrete GPU card require an additional installation to work with Blender. I then went to the official Blender documentation and they advice the [ROCm driver](https://rocmdocs.amd.com) while Arch Wiki advice the [ProRender plugin](https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/radeon-prorender-downloads). The ProRender pluging being only for Blender 2.8x; I decided a bit blindly to install the ROCm. **Installing ROCm is far more complex than installing Nvidia proprietary driver** (not packaged by the distro?) and require more than 6 command lines, three reboots and require to stick to a set of distro (Ubuntu LTS is fortunately part of them). Not a big problem to me, but it worth being mentioned as it contrast a lot, imo, with the 'easy' reputation it has.
After I finished the install and switched the Kwin compositor to use OpenGL 3.1: my glitches were gone and I could play with Blender 2.90.1. I can access rendering with OpenCL on the benchmark but I can't use Cycle with the GPU (all models remain gray). On other things I noticed related to the GPU: **VLC crashes** , glconv_vaapi_x11 gl error, because of [a known bug in Mesa](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/1193). I saw it was open since a year and Mesa had over 2500 open bugs... So, I switched to use Celluloid video player, too bad; I had my habits with VLC... Another small **glitch**: the tablet configurator of Plasma can't remember the monitor where the tablet was mapped after sleep or lock (no problem with old Nvidia); I'll have to report that and workaround in the meantime using bash script and command-line xsetwacom for now...
So all in all, this first 48h with the "Sapphire Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB" I can tell the user experience is **not as promising as it was meant to be** but not dramatic or bad either. **In the end, I have good behavior** in all my 2D software with OpenGL canvas acceleration and I can continue to do my mockup with Blender Eevee. That's ok for my needs.
If you have more information about AMD GPU config and recommendation to get the best out of it, please share in the comments.
[](data/images/blog/2020/new-pc-review/2020-11-07_amd-cpu-gpu_budget-pc-config_06_blender-evee.jpg)
_Screenshot, Blender: I use 3D to sketch background in my webcomic; I paint-over them later with Krita_
## Performances:
In overall, it's really better than what I expected and I tried to list here the change I could notice:
[](data/images/blog/2020/new-pc-review/2020-11-07_amd-cpu-gpu_budget-pc-config_08_cpu.jpg)
_AMD Ryzen 7 3700x in action: 8 core, 16 threads, silent_
## Krita:
It really improved everything!
- Complex and large brushes runs smoothly on 4K documents (without Instant Preview).
- I can screen-record and paint at same time without feeling a performance slowdown.
- No glitch or micro lag with Instant Preview, I might start to use it.
- Instant refresh on color adjustement filters (eg. while moving sliders on HSV filters) No time to notice tiling.
- I can paint under 3 filter layers (Color Balance+Color Curves+Sharpen) without any slowdown.
- No more slowdown with ColorSmudge brush engine.
[](data/images/blog/2020/new-pc-review/2020-11-07_amd-cpu-gpu_budget-pc-config_09_krita.jpg)
_Krita screenshot with a page of my webcomic_
- GMIC filters (multi-threaded) now renders very fast.
- Duplicate layers, merging layers, undo happens instantly.
- Transform (Ctrl+T) are super fast to bake.
- Liquify deformation is much improved, not smooth over a square of 2K by 2K but on selection way smoother and interactive.
- Multibrush (mandala mode :P) has no slow-down.
[video]data/images/blog/2020/new-pc-review/2020-11-07_amd-cpu-gpu_budget-pc-config_10_demo.mp4[/video]
_accelerated x6 video: painting with multibrush, under three filter layers (color-balance, invert, edges detection) on a 4K document. Not specially smooth but no issues. Impressive!_
On the downside, start-up time wasn't improved so much and colorize-mask refresh too... I also might become a useless beta-tester for performances because I'll have hard time to feel issues that adds a bit of slowdown (on my previous PC, I was very sensitive to this type of changes).
## Inkscape:
Just the SVG rendering on canvas feels smoother, but this is huge.
## Pepper&Carrot renderfarm:
Rendering from scratch episode 7 "The wish" (1679 files to render, 43 langs, parrallal process: Inkscape CLI rendering, and Imagemagick rendering).
**Previous PC, Intel Core i7-870:** 23m28s
**New PC, AMD Ryzen 7 3700X:** 3m55s
## Blender Benchmark:
CPU BMW scene, 3D rendering (less is better):
**Previous PC, Intel Core i7-870:** 27m41s
**New PC, AMD Ryzen 7 3700X:** 2m38s
GPU BMW scene, 3D rendering (less is better):
**Previous PC, Nvidia GTX 650Ti(CUDA):** 9min35s
**New PC, Sapphire Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB(OpenCL):** 2m47s
[](data/images/blog/2020/new-pc-review/2020-11-07_amd-cpu-gpu_budget-pc-config_11_grease-pencil.jpg)
_Blender screenshot: a recent grease-pencil animation I made_
On the downside:
- Drawing on canvas with GreasePencil is still not smooth for me; especially on scene with many objects/frames.
- No big gain about Blender video sequence editor, playback is still slow and the frame by frame rendering too.
## Scribus:
- Scrolling books with many hi-res pictures and loading the file is faster.
- Export to PDF is faster too (I forgot to save a render time on my previous PC).
## Kdenlive:
[](data/images/blog/2020/new-pc-review/2020-11-07_amd-cpu-gpu_budget-pc-config_12_kdenlive.jpg)
_Kdenlive screenshot: while video editing one of my tutorials_
A big surprise; playback of my video editing is now WYSIWYG. 30fps for the most part and transitions/effects fall to 18fps but totally acceptable while editing.
Rendering also improved a lot, eg. my 42min long video tutorial about Color Adjustement (1080p@30fps):
**Previous PC:** 56m41s
**New PC:** 06m39s
## Other:
- **Plasma**: fading animation, windows movements and desktop effect are very smooth.
- **Dolphin file explorer**: folders with 3000 picture scrolls and render large thumbnail on the fly.
- **Nomacs image browser** displays large pictures at the speed of light!
## Conclusion
I only painted 7h with this PC, made a bit of video editing, recorded a bit; but this is already beyond what I expected for the task this PC is meant to do. I hope it will have a long life!
**The Pros:**
- Good CPU (performances).
- Silent and beautiful PC case.
- Relatively cheap combination of hardware.
- Compatible out of the box.
- Krita, Inkscape and Kdenlive performances
**The Cons:**
- the AMD GPU easy open-source myth
- Power button on the case
I hope this review/overview will help you if you have the same type of problem I had for picking a PC!
WRITTEN_BY David REVOY -
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19 comments
(Kitten not included)
I'll publish later a blog-post to describe the setup I selected and review if digital-painting/video/CGgraphics feels good with it on GNU/Linux.
In short, I'll list you the hardware I took:
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 3700X
- Motherboard: Asrock B450M-Pro4
- Ram: 2x8GB G.Skill DDR4 @ 3200Mhz
- GPU: Sapphire Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB
- Case: Bequiet! Pure Base 500
- CPU/Fan: Bequiet! Pure Rock 2 Black
- PowerUnit: Bequiet! Pure Power 11, 600W 80+Gold.
For the SSD, I have them already from my previous config. It's **not sponsored**, and I bought it on [LDLC](https://www.ldlc.com/) for ~1100€ the whole pack. For now: unboxing time and install. 🐧 I'll put on it [Kubuntu 20.04 following my guide](https://www.davidrevoy.com/article783/kubuntu-linux-20-04-for-a-digital-painting-workstation-reasons-and-install-guide). I should get back to work before the end of Afternoon. (but let's be realistic: I think I'll play painting/benchmarking/tweaking it all night long before I'm happy with it)
WRITTEN_BY David REVOY -
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5 comments
I wanted to speedpaint this evening the Spritely Family, their design feels halloweeny 🎃 to me. 🙂 https://spritelyproject.org/
(special launch offer on Pepper&Carrot books ends in 4h, 1144 books sold now! 👍)
WRITTEN_BY David REVOY -
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10 comments
**🎉1000!🎉 I'm so happy! Thank you!**
Only 24h left before 'Special Launch Offer' sale ends.
Last chance to get the comic at $16.50 instead of $20.00!
https://www.davidrevoy.com/shop
WRITTEN_BY David REVOY -
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5 comments
Curious where the $16.50 on my self-published comic goes? I drew this illustration to explain so you get an idea about the costs.
Over the last week, I received many questions about this topic. So first, be sure to understand **I'm not posting this to complain**. Why? because having this type of earning in the traditional book industry would be **a very high percent**. I remember I had only around 10 cents per books or board game on my freelancer career as an illustrator before 2015. For sure, this earning is all relative to the distribution and the amount of book sold; and that's where a big publisher with their many connections (to do adv, to propose it on the shops and spread it at the scale of a country) can successfully pays the authors. For my own communication, I have only my social media account and your reshare, and while I'm writing this: 955 books sold! 🎉 thank-you-thank-you-thank-you! In this context, you can imagine how this book project will never replace the need of receiving patronage to produce and release the episode of Pepper&Carrot. So, what I'll do with this money? I used already the earning of the first 735 books sold to renew my computer (1100€ budget). I'll detail the config I bought in a future blog-post (after I received and test it).
I hope you liked to read this part of the backstage of the project and my transparency about it!
https://www.davidrevoy.com/shop
WRITTEN_BY David REVOY -
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8 comments
777 Books sold since the release two weeks ago! Thank you! 🎉 I hope you'll get the geek joke.😇 My 'Special Launch Offer' sale ends on Saturday 31, in three days. Will it reach 1000? That would be amazing. Last chance to get them while they're cheap!
https://www.davidrevoy.com/shop
WRITTEN_BY David REVOY -
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2 comments
**Today is the release of Mobilizon! **
Discover the illustrations (and the tiny Fennec-stars mascott!) I made for the free-libre and federated tool to free events and groups. I had a great time working on it for Framasoft. I hope you'll like it! [Read the article here from Framablog (in english)](https://framablog.org/2020/10/27/mobilizon-your-events-your-groups-your-data/) with more illustrations and info.
WRITTEN_BY David REVOY -
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31 comments
🤔 What's best for a new desktop computer with GNU/Linux nowadays? I'm looking for performances (CG arts/Krita), only Free/Libre drivers and around 1K€... Hard to find trusty info... If you have advice/recommendations, please let me know. 👍
(I also asked on social medias, I'll report later what options I found attractive.)
