A new 3D rendering style for solid wire-frames

Now I'm improving one of my new 3D rendering engines by adding new features. It's one more set of improvements for my vector based drawing/rendering library named Maccala.

I'm doing all of this because I have great plans. In fact, I'm developing the functionalities I will need to create new graffiti text effects.

There is a new feature that is almost ready to use. I called it "clean solid wire-frame rendering". It helps to render 3D text that has just the essential lines in the thickness dimension.

It can seem to dummies it's just a trivial simplification, but it's not. It was very hard to develop because the shapes need to be drawn solid and opaque (it goes beyond the technique called "hidden lines removal"). My other solid wire-frame rendering algorithm already was very complicated and strongly based on heuristics. This "clean up" of edges invalidated most of tricks I have used before and needed a lot of other ones. It was almost a total redevelopment involving very hard work.

Below I show this new 3D rendering algorithm in practice. First you see a "normal" 3D wire-frame text and so a "cleaned" 3D wire-frames text created by using my new drawing style.

 Subscribe in a reader

Subpixel vector drawing with professional antialiasing

I have made a great improvement to Maccala's 2D vector based rendering engine.

Now the drawing library is able to render arbitrary curves with an outstanding precision, so the resulting antialiased drawings have an astonishing quality.

Maccala have already been using the rasterizing algorithm I researched and developed myself. Now I have improved it to draw even better curves with a thickness smaller than one, and there is an important things about it: this upgrade didn't take to a performance loss.

Most drawing algorithms just can't draw anything narrower than 1 pixel. When they need to do it, they just change the curve/shape color to a value closer to the background color, so the curve looks "less visible" - it's just a cheat. Inkscape, for example, make it this way (at least it made when I used to work with it).

My algorithm doesn't cheat you. It really can draw with a sub-pixel precision by using the selected color and with a very impressive antialiasing level. Sub-pixel curves made the right way seem thinner than the ones created by using the trick I explained above.

Below I show you a text normally rendered (filled) with a reasonably complex font. So you see the outline of the same text rendered with a thickness of 1 pixel. The next drawing is the same, but the curves have a thickness of 0.5. Finally, the last outline has just the tiny thickness of 0.25 pixel, but the quality is perfect.

 Subscribe in a reader

Enhance your photos online for free

I have just published a new Picture to People online software. It's a free color enhancer for photos.

It's very easy to use, fast and very handy. You just need to select the kind of color scheme you want and set the level of color improvement. Choosing a low enhancement level helps you to get a fine grain improvement.

As a plus, you can enhance the detail level of your photo, and it also has a nice increase control. You should just take care when using this option, because it can make the photo flaws more visible.

Below I show you a photo with very poor colors, and a improved one created by using our free Online Photo Color Enhancer.

 Subscribe in a reader

Faster online sketch effects for photos

I keep doing a hard work concerning the optimization of low level Picture to People libraries.

I'm a little worried about a bad collateral effect coming from these improvements: a lot of source codes become much harder to understand and maintain. Anyway, I hope the speed increase pays off this undesirable consequence.

More photo effects already got faster, including the sketch photo effects and other related ones. Bellow you can see a photo and a related detailed pencil drawing produced online. It was created by using the Realistic Pencil Sketch Photo Effect and now this one can be generated 10% faster after the optimizations I already made.

 Subscribe in a reader

Watercolor photo effect online (faster than ever)

I'm making a very hard work to optimize some Picture to Picture core libraries. I have already spend several days and nights making this very important task.

Most of P2P code is already fast, but I want to achieve a new level of high speed, so I will be able to dream about publishing new complex text and photo effects online.

This job will take some more weeks. Optimizing complex code is very tricky, and some algorithms need to be modified. Anyway, I'm already getting good results.

The Watercolor Painting Photo Effect uses several of the libraries under improvement and already is 10% faster in average. Bellow I show you a photo and a watercolor painting created by using the online software. The creation of this paint took 11% less time than before.

 Subscribe in a reader

Text effect tutorials (14)

Here there is the list of text effect tutorials that were posted last month. You can see more details by visiting the Online Text Effects Tutorials blog.

- a wintry snow text effect;
- a 3D robotic text effect;
- a stylized savage text effect;
- a 3D stainless steel text effect;

By following these tutorials you can create these awesome text effects:

Subscribe to the Text Effect Tutorials feed to know about new tutorials as soon as they are published.

 Subscribe in a reader