On November 25, the Krita developers were happy to announce the release and immediate availability for download and testing of the first Beta build of the upcoming Krita 2.9 Animation Edition open-source digital painting software.

Based on Krita 2.9, the Krita 2.9 Animation Edition is a special version of the acclaimed cross-platform digital painting application that has been designed to provide users with animation and instant preview support, implemented in the View menu. When compared with the original Krita software, the Animation Edition includes three new dockers.

The new dockers are Onion Skins, Animation, and Timeline, and, according to the Krita developers, they can be used by digital painting artists to control everything there is about their animation frames. Additionally, the new Krita Animation Edition can be used to paint enormous canvases, but you will need OpenGL 3.0 or higher.

"From the user point of view Krita didn’t change much. There are three new dockers: Animation, Timeline and Onion Skins, which let you control everything about your animation frames and one new menu item View->Instant Preview Mode (previously known as Level of Detail) allowing painting on huge canvases," said the Krita devs.

Available now for Ubuntu Linux and Windows

If you think for a second that it was easy to develop this special edition of Krita, think again, because the project's developers have spent a lot of time rewriting the software's kernel code in order for it to support background rendering processes, as well as to calculate view cache planes and animated frames when the user's computer is idle.

If you're using the Ubuntu Linux operating system, you can install the new Krita 2.9 Animation Edition software right now. All you have to do is to paste the following lines of code in the Terminal app, one by one, hitting the Enter key after each one. However, please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, not suitable for production use.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dimula73/krita
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install krita-animation-testing krita-animation-testing-dbg