Swedish studio makes Krita part of its visual effects workflow

Mad Crew, a Swedish animation and visual effects studio, has chosen Calligra's digital painting application Krita as part of its visual effects workflow. According to a post on the Krita blog, Fredrik Brännbacka from Mad Crew told the developers: "We are damn happy with Krita!" The company is mostly known for TV and cinema commercials, some of which are included in the following demonstration footage.

Mad Crew's 2012 promo reel

Mad Crew says that one of the reasons why it chose Krita as its 2D digital art solution is the professional support options for the program offered by German KO GmbH. KO GmbH creates commercially supported builds of Krita, which it has named Krita Studio, for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS and Windows; Ubuntu packages are apparently in the works. Mad Crew is one of KO GmbH's first customers for these offerings.

In the blog post, the Krita developers point out that improvements the company makes to the code base ultimately benefit all of Krita's users. Additionally, the adoption by Mad Crew means that the application is being tested as part of a professional workflow that also includes the professional VRay and Maya applications and that this will mean further improvements for the code base.

Krita, from the Swedish name for crayon, is part of Calligra and, consequently, the KDE Software Collection. Krita is licensed under the GPLv2 and is designed around the creation of artwork rather than the manipulation of existing images. The application supports both bitmap and vector illustrations and eschews photography tools in favour of digital painting functions. Krita is available for download from the project's web site.

(fab)