What is Picture to People ?

"Picture to People" (P2P) is a huge Computer Graphics project. It was started to create new softwares able to make 2D drawing, 3D rendering, vexel drawing, text effects, photo effects, image filtering and other complex Computer Graphics operations. It has been made from scratch, including its low level Computer Graphics libraries like Maccala. Nowadays, most final features produced for this project are released as free online tools available from its official website. This blog talks about Computer Graphics, mainly concerning Picture to People development.

"Only who makes has true knowledge. Knowledge is control. True power depends on total control. Only who makes from scratch has the real power."

Thursday, May 23, 2013

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.


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