Dynamic Fill Layers in Krita using SeExpr

Layers are one of the core concepts of digital painting. They allow artists to control different parts of their artwork at once, for instance, color, lighting, lineart, as well as texture. A key feature of them is their ability to be resized, composited, renamed, grouped or deleted independently of the rest of the document.

Patterns and textures are also essential components of an artist’s toolbox, allowing them to represent the intricacies of a physical material. They come in two forms: bitmap textures, which are images contained in e.g. PNG or OpenEXR files, or procedural textures, which are generated on the fly using their mathematical representation.

KDE’s Krita painting suite supports using patterns and textures through two types of layers, File or Fill Layers. However, neither of them let artists create dynamically generated content: File Layers are inherently static, and Fill Layers support only color fills (like Paint Layers) or basic pattern rendering.

The goal of this project is to let artists create dynamic content through a new, scriptable Fill Layer. To this effect, I propose to integrate Disney Animation’s SeExpr expression language into Krita.