* Edgar Guest

Salut à tous !

First of all, we hope 2023 ends well for you, and wish you a truly happy 2024, to you, your family and friends.

Unfortunately, it's been a few years in a row we've felt we had to express our sincere sorrow and concern about the violence too many people have to endure everywhere in the world, and 2023 wasn't different. From our mountains in France, we feel powerless and truly wish we could do more...

Apart from our local fights for the environment, inclusion and social equality and economic emancipation, we're trying to make sure everything we do through RxLaboratory respect our commitments for a better world with more equality and freedom through the emancipation from all forms of domination. Our way is through free and open source software, anti-capitalistic and non-mercantile organization; our mean is your moral and financial support. Thank you!

Thanks to your support and important changes in the beginning of 2023, it's been a exceptional year, and we've achieved more than ever.

To kick-start our work for 2024, you can donate now, or, even better, join us and become an RxLab member. Your donations are our main income and the only way we can continue to let you download and use your tools for free or name your own price for your tutorials.

Here's our 2023 report with the most important events which happened during this overwhelming year.

It's our duty to report what we've done, mainly thanks to your donations.

⬣ January

⎔ Release of the brand new Duik Ángela, the comprehensive rigging and animation toolkit for After Effects.

⎔ Release of the official and comprehensive video course about Duik Ángela and short free tutorials to help you learn it.

⎔ New Gold Membership which includes an unlimited access to all video courses and tutorials.

⬣ February

⎔ Duduf installed some of his and his friend Nicolas Liguori's artworks in the Brasserie d'Oé in Aussois, French Alps. The exhibition lasted until September.

⎔ Live stream on Youtube with Motion Café to introduce Duik Ángela; you can still watch it here. Duduf also mentionned Bluik, "Duik for Blender" at the end of the video...

⬣ March

⎔ Ramses, the Rx Asset Management System to track your production and manage your pipeline got an important update. While still in Beta, we're getting closer to a proper release...

⎔ Duduf worked on some designs for Serafin, an animated short movie directed by Ana Arce about life on the colombian volcanoes.

⬣ May

⎔ Release of Duik Ángela.1, the first major update of Duik Ángela, including many new features which couldn't make it in the initial release.

⬣ June

⎔ We adoped four gorgeous hens, Agnes, Victoria, Rozala and Doda.

⎔ We were at a protest violently repressed by the police in our valley in the Alps, against the construction of the world's longest railway tunnel between France and Italy, which is an ecological and economical nonsense.

⎔ Release of the comprehensive course about animation on tutorials.rxlab.guide. It was previously available on tuto.com but moving it to RxLab allowed us to let you choose your own price with a minimum price much lower than before. It is also included in the Gold Membership.

⬣ July

⎔ DuBlast, previewing tool for Blender, got an important update.

⎔ DuGR, layer groups for After Effects, got an important update.

⎔ At the end of July, we started testing the future new Duik Ángela.2 update, available in early access for all RxLab. Members!

⬣ August

⎔ Update of OCA, the Open Cel Animation format specifications and publication of the roadmap to future updates, along with a new OCA for Krita addon.

⬣ September

⎔ DuBlast, better playblasts for Maya was updated to v2 with lots of new options and features.

⬣ October

⎔ Duik Ángela: The Source Code, the first of our new book series, was published.

⬣ November

⎔ We were at the RADI (Rencontres animation, développement et innovation) in Angoulême, France, to publicly reveal for the first time the new DuME, Duduf Media Encoder.

⎔ During our stay in Angoulême, we hold a few conferences about color management.

⎔ The Petit Guide Pratique de la Gestion des Couleurs (Practical Guide to Color Management) was published in French. It will be available in English soon!

⎔ We also published Understanding OpenEXR Compression Methods, another small but very handy book!

⬣ December

⎔ We began testing the Beta version of the brand new DuME, the Duduf Media Encoder, with RxLab members!

⎔ The new DuME was unveiled during a live interview with Motion Café you can still watch here (in French).

Of course, throughout the whole year we've also been releasing many updates to our tools, to fix bugs as soon as they're found, and always keep improving them. We've also been teaching and holding conferences in many schools and companies. We're also always working on new animated films thanks to our participation in Rainbox Productions, some of which rely on our tools, in order to test them in the real world.

Here are a few highlights from what we're planning to do in 2024!

If you'd like to have a look at the comprehensive list, come here!

The first new tool to be released in early 2024 will be the brand new DuME, which RxLab Members can already test!

DuME is the first nodal media encoder, making it easy to adjust and add filters to any kind of stream (audio, video, subtitles...). It can also render Blender scenes and After Effects compositions, and add them in its render queue. It can manage colors using OCIO.

It handles almost any media format, and is very, very fast. It can be scripted in Python or ExtendScript and driven from a TCP socket, to make it ready to be included in any pipeline, which makes it a professional tool although very easy to use for everyone.

After a long time Beta-testing Ramses, the Rx Asset Management System to track your film production and automate your pipeline, and after having it confronted to multiple real-life productions in the first schools and studios to use it, Ramses will soon be ready for a proper v1.0 release.

It will come with add-ons for Maya, After Effects and Blender, and maybe even Houdini. Although Ramses can be used without any server, if you're a team it's better to be able to share and work on the same data. We're going to manage Ramses servers for you at a very small cost (or included in Memberships) if you don't want to go through the installation and management process of your own server.

Although we don't have the needed income to advance all our tools as quickly as we'd like, and we have to set priorities, we're not forgetting Duik for Blender, a.k.a. Bluik which will bring our experience in cut-out character rigging and animation to Blender, with nice auto-rig and animation tools...

Duik Ángela continues to evolve, and a second important update will be released to include awesome new features, which RxLab. Members can test in early access!

In 2024, we'll continue to share our knowledge with books too!

⎔ The Comprehensive Duik Ángela User Guide should be available in January!

⎔ The Practical Guide to Color Management will be available in English just a bit later...

And we're planning to publish other books listed here, but we can't say when yet...

In 2024, we'd like to continue to release tutorials. We have a list of planned tutorials, but we're curious to hear from you! Don't hesitate to tell us what you'd like to learn!

We're also always working on our three open formats for animation interchange, and allow you to easily work, export and import your animated assets in many different digital content creation apps.

In 2024, you can expect a new version of OCA, the Open Cel Animation format, the release of OCO, the Open Cut-Out format which will be used by both Duik and Bluik, and finally the Open Keyframe Animation format we're already secretly using in Duik and other future tools...

Here's the list of tools which got a brand new update since our latest newsletter.

⬣ Ramses Server v0.8.10-Beta, December 5 2023

⬣ Ramses Maya Module v0.8.32-Beta, December 22 2023

⬣ Duik Ángela v17.1.9 and v17.2.0-Alpha6, November 27, 2023

⬣ DuME v1.0.0-Beta1, December 8, 2023

RxLaboratory is not only dedicated to software development and teaching, training, helping people. Our goal is also to show that another world can be built together, without mercantilism and capitalism, where emancipation and freedom of all the people comes from equality, financial independence and mutual assistance, in a world respectful of nature.

We strongly believe that emancipation, free sharing and helping each other will make the world a better place for everyone.

Support the development of free and open source software by joining us! To thank you, all members have an early access to the shiny new tools, tutorials and other exclusive perks.

Activate your membership now!